The above images of people focusing on their indoor rowing effort were found on a website called “Breaking Muscle,” in an article on their website called “The 17 Commandments of Rowing-My Journey From Hate to Happiness“. The author’s first experience with rowing was unpleasant and as a result he “hated” it. But – he was trying to compete, the very first time he rowed. It would have been frustrating to a lot of people, I imagine.
My first experience at rowing was the opposite of his experience – it was very pleasant. So pleasant, that I “fell in love” with it after that first half hour experience. But I wasn’t competing, during my first experience. I was doing the opposite – because I realized that I might not be doing it right, I rowed extremely easy, trying to row so gently as to not perspire at all, just to get the feel of it. The next day, I ordered a Concept 2 rowing machine.
Today’s 5,000 meters was easy, really. I’m taking my time to the approach of an all-out effort at a 5,000 meter season best. The effort of today’s 5K raised just a little sweat, but nowhere near enough to saturate a sweatband.
Today’s 5K was done at the average pace of about 2:10 for the first 4,500 meters, then worked harder for the next 300 meters and sprinted almost all-out for the last 200 meters.
The above screenshot is from one of the youtube video recordings I watched while doing today’s rowing. It shows people having fun together, the way they used to do so before the days of internet and other modern technology. The above video is appropriately called “Oldtime Dance Party…”
Today’s main rowing was only 2.0242914979757% of all the meters rowed today. The “main” event was to sprint 200 meters from a standing start, for my contribution to RowPro Team’s entry in the c2ctc.com August 2017 challenge.
The remaining 9,680 meters was easy rowing for warmup and warm down, which I won’t bother showing in this blog post.
If the plots for HR look strange in two of the below graphs of HR with stroke rate and pace, that’s because the HR signal wasn’t showing at the start of the 200 meter sprint. It took about 9 seconds for the heart strap sensor to start transmitting HR signal.
Speaking of rowing plans – this website in the UK might be of interest to anyone who lives nearby in the UK. They also will coach and advise people who are anywhere in the world. Their contact information and prices can be found on their website at Fitness Matters Indoor Rowing. (Rowing is a more well known and popular activity in England, than in most of the US)
Today’s indoor rowing was going to be a final try, on the last day of the month, for a better time in the C2CTC July 2017 intervals challenge. But when I looked and saw how the others on the RowPro team had done and discovered that there was no point in working for a better time because it would not change my position in the team standings … unless I could do something impossibly faster… I changed today’s plans and decided to do another 5K instead, to beat yesterday’s 5K time and then enter the result into the Concept 2 World Rankings for the current (2018) season.
So far, all of the 5Ks which I’ve ranked this season have been easy. But… I’ve only done 3 and each subsequent 5K will be a little harder.
Today’s indoor rowing was done to the accompaniment of Appalachian music and Appalachian flatfoot dancing. The above screenshot is of one of the youtube videos, called “Flatfooting to “Lady of the Lake“”. It shows one of the two fiddlers and it also shows the dance floor, which is a square of plywood upon which the Lady of the Lake dances later in the video.
The music and dancing was quite good, if you like Appalachian music and dancing. I like it a lot…
The rowing session today was 5,000 meters, during which I rowed the first 4500 meters at a pace that was about the same as the overall average of yesterday’s 5K. For the last 500 meters, the pace was increased a bit. So… yes, I did do today’s 5K in less time than yesterday’s.
Happy rowing and …. if you are so inclined… happy flatfoot dancing to you.
Today was another day with musical accompaniment. The choice today was among results which came up when Appalachian Gospel was searched for on youtube. One of the groups included was the one pictured above. In the recording associated with the above screenshot, they were singing “I Can’t Even Walk“.
This was a 5K worth watching, though it wasn’t rowing. Love the focused-on-the-race looks on their faces.
Today was almost a non-rowing day, due to problems with an essential major appliance, the refrigerator. After a few hours of two-minds/one-flesh brainstorming, Diane and I decided to risk the price of a service call and call a repairman instead of giving up on the less-than-a-decade-old current model.
Then… I thought about not rowing and decided that a little bit was better than nothing and settled on doing 5K. Did it with a very slow start and gradually increasing pace until reaching 4,500 meters and then used the remaining 500 meters as a warm down. It resulted in a time that should be easy to beat tomorrow, if I want to feel good tomorrow about beating myself. 🙂
Feeling good and focusing on happiness now that their race is over.
Today for rowing accompaniment I tried youtube again. The “shuffle dancing” and its music have grown boring. Tried some other genres, then looked for a playlist of “country music”. Youtube tends to serve up the most current “country music” and what I heard on those playlists just sounded wrong. So then I searched for “country western music” and finally settled on a selection that consisted of a couple dozen or more of Hank Williams’ hit songs.
The first one on the list was a song called I Saw the Light, which is one of my decades-old favorites. It also happens to have been written by Hank Williams himself.
As for rowing, the session today was 10,867 meters divided into 18 intervals. The first and last intervals served as warmup and warm down.
Happy rowing to the music or whatever accompaniment you like.
Today was another session of going through the paces but not racing the current CTC challenge.
This time, I set up a separate session which resembled the July 2017 Cross Team Challenge and which had its rest intervals set up as “Recovery” instead of “Stop” because “recovery” causes RowPro 5 for the Mac to log, record and upload ALL the meters rowed, whereas “Stop” does not record any meters rowed during the rest intervals. I wanted “credit” for all meters rowed. 🙂
OTW rowing fiasco: The above two photos are from a British news article about the 2012 Boat Race which was spoiled and turned into a fiasco by a couple of unfortunate happenings, one of which involved a member of the Oxford Crew collapsing. In my opinion, Oxford would have won that race if those two incidents hadn’t happened, but God only knows for sure.
After my fiasco yesterday during the second attempt at the July 2017 CTC challenge, I decided to have what I think of as a “steadying session”. A steadying session is whatever I choose for that purpose but it’s main characteristics will exclude sudden sprints followed by sudden stops.
If I’ve been sprinting or working very hard for a relatively long time, I’ve found over the years that it’s best to keep moving at a moderate to easy pace immediately afterwards.
The crew member who collapsed during the 2012 Boat Race appears to be wearing an oxygen mask. You can see the entire article and the rest of the photos at THIS LINK
So today’s choice was to row 15K, do the first few K as warmup, gradually step up the pace throughout most of the rest of the distance, cap it with a bit of a sprint and then use the last 2 or 3K to warm down.
I also intended to modify the setup within RowPro 5 for the Mac, for the CTC challenge “advanced custom setup” of the variable intervals set up for the July 2017 challeng, so that the rests are Stops instead of Recovery. Because I discovered that if the rests are labeled as Recovery then RowPro 5 for the Mac not only records the distance rowed, if any, during recovery rests, but it lumps all the recovery distance in together with the grand total of distance for the active intervals, instead of separately totally active and rest distance, like the more refined and finished versions of RowPro for Windows do. For the CTC challenge, the total distance of only the active portion is needed for challenge entry… and it would be good to have a session report which displays only the distance of the active portion, for “proof” to other challenge participants.
I’ve been told that if the rest times between active intervals are labeled as “Stop” then RowPro 5 for the Mac ignores and does not add up any distance rowed during the rest times.
During today’s rowing session, I neither listened to music nor to a lecture and simply focused on the rowing with most of my mind while letting the rest of the mind wander without getting too far away.
The plan to row a single 15,000 meter session today was discarded, however, after I finished modifying the variable intervals programming within RowPro 5 for the Mac for the July 2017 CTC challenge.
Instead, I decided to slowly and easily row the new variable intervals setup, which had all the rest intervals changed from R (recovery) to S (stop), to see if it would give a total distance result of the Active intervals only, without adding the distance done while resting to the same total.
So I rowed that whole thing and found the same thing as yesterday – it added the distance rowed during the rest intervals to the total for the active intervals. I fiddled around with it a bit more and so as to avoid boring you with the details, I’ll skip the details and tell you that I discovered that once a custom interval setup in RowPro 5 for the Mac is edited and the edited version is downloaded into RowPro 5 for the Mac… the only way to be sure to get the newly edited result into RowPro 5 for the Mac is to close/shut down/exit RowPro 5 for the Mac and then again open/start/enter RowPro 5 for the Mac.
I rowed the whole, edited version again and found that it worked as someone had told me. That someone was Annette Wammen, of Denmark. She said that it would not add any distance done while the S (stop) time was counting down in the Stop intervals.
Altogether, the total distance rowed today added up to 13,832 meters.
Here are the relevant screenshots for today’s rowing:
From what I’ve learned about this book, its full of rowing-related humor. The author is not a doctor but he loves rowing.
Today I kept an appointment with a doctor, before doing any rowing. It was my first visit to him and he’s a cardiologist. I thought he’d do an ECG or even have me do a stress test, but … we just chatted. I showed him the results of the 6K piece done yesterday and he said something to the effect that if his brother was doing like I’m doing, he’d tell him to not waste his time with a treadmill test.
He didn’t do an ECG, probably because I told him that my primary doctor had done one. He did, however, request a copy of that ECG so he could look it over.
We talked about coffee also. I told him I’d stopped drinking it a few days ago and he spoke very enthusiastically about coffee and its benefits and said he thought coffee would be perfectly okay for me.
All in all, it wasn’t a day that matched expectations. I’m not sure that I want to resume drinking coffee in the amounts I had been. I’m curious how I’ll feel, if I continue without coffee for a while longer.
I tried to talk with the doctor about levels of exertion and how hard it would be okay to work at rowing. He recommended moderation without being specific and said he thought it would be okay if I raced once a week.
From my perspective and experience, that is still puzzling. I consider the doctor’s appointment today to be a wash. But since he seemed to think I’m perfectly healthy, heart sounds good etc, I decided to allow myself to work a bit harder and race as much as once a week. How long a race? Another point not discussed. But… he’s not a rower, so he wouldn’t have first hand experience of what it’s like to push yourself as hard as you think you can until the last 500 meters of any distance and then try to row even harder, using anything you have left, for the last 500 meters.
Today’s rowing plan was to do 11K and increase the effort level gradually, to gradually bring HR up into the range of 133 to 145 bpm. Heart zone training. But the heart didn’t cooperate after a little more than halfway through. It started varying disproportionately to the effort and going to zero and making a general mess of the chart during the last half, as you can see in the bottom-most chart below.
The above photo doesn’t have anything to do with chess but … there are many positions to think about on a chess board and the picture shows an interesting positional arrangement involving indoor rowing.
Today’s indoor rowing was a very easy 11,000 meters while watching two more lectures on chess. I didn’t work up a sweat, but managed to log another day’s quota of meters and burn a few calories.
The above photo also does not involve chess, but the look of focused concentration on the face of the rower is worthy of the focused concentration that might be seen on the face of a player in a chess match.
Both of the above photos were found with a search engine and they are located on a Pennsylvania school website. You can view the page with THIS LINK.
Here are the screen shots of today’s very easy indoor rowing session:
Today was another day with musical accompaniment. The choice today was among results which came up when Appalachian Gospel was searched for on youtube. One of the groups included was the one pictured above. In the recording associated with the above screenshot, they were singing “
