The ticker (my heart) seemed to want to beat at a snail’s pace during today’s time of rowing online.
Yesterday evening, I took Zyrtec with dinner. Not because I’ve been having any allergies, but because it seems to enhance staying asleep. I’d had several days in a row of waking up too early and had been accumulating excess sleep debt.
The Zyrtec worked and instead of sleeping from 4 to 6 hours, I slept almost 10 hours. All caught up on sleep, with some to spare. But I felt sluggish and slow, as an after-effect of Zyrtec, which I rarely take and therefore am not used to.
Today’s indoor rowing session was 30 minutes done online with a few other guys. My goal was the same as for the past few days: to adjust the effort throughout the session, so as to keep heart rate near the target heart rate of 130. If you read the recent blog post about choosing that HR target, you know that I used a modification of Dr. Philip Maffetone’s “The 180 Formula,” to arrive at the aerobic target of 130. Upper boundary is 140 and lower boundary is probably around 114 to 120.
When it came time to row, it seemed that I had to row with greater effort at a significantly faster pace, to raise heart rate to the 130 BPM target zone. Afterwards, I used the RowPro 5 for the Mac analysis feature, to compare today’s 30 minutes to yesterday’s. The results of the analysis are the last two screenshots below.
Finish screenshot of today’s 30 minute session.Session report of today’s 30 minute sessionRowPro graphs of today’s 30 minute sessionConcept 2 online logbook graphs of today’s 30 minute sessionRowPro analysis of today’s and yesterday’s 30 minute sessions showing their graphs superimposed. I don’t know how this is edifying, but it looks cool.Stats and what RowPro’s analysis algorithm had to say about comparison between today’s and yesterday’s 30 minute sessions.
Speaking of good improvement: The above photos are of the first and current models of the Concept 2 indoor rower. These images were found on the website of a British health facility called Fitness Matters.
Today’s main indoor rowing was a 30 minute online session done with a target heart rate. The target was the same as it had been in the 30 minute session on September 29th. But the average pace was faster by -1.4 seconds/500 meters. The session burned 8 calories more than Sept 29th to go at that faster pace. The increase in power was +3.2 watts.
I guess that’s good improvement. But since it’s from one day to the next and I’m no expert, it might not even be statistically significant. Therefore, I will “ask” RowPro. RowPro has a feature which can be used to compare two rowing sessions that are similar (either both the same distance or time duration.)
Okay, here’s what RowPro says and it doesn’t seem much more enlightening that what is in the above two paragraphs. But it is confirmation that there was improvement since two days ago.
When RowPro compares two similar sessions, it superimposes their graphs for HR and average pace, as you can see in the above screenshot which compares today’s 30 minutes to the similar session done on September 29th.RowPro says that there was an increase in both performance and also in strength. I don’t understand why, unless there is something magical-ish about Dr. Maffetone’s 180 formula … when it is used as intended. This is both surprising and encouraging.
But even if it isn’t especially enlightening, at least you saw a demonstration, immediately above this paragraph, of the kind of results you can expect when RowPro 5 for the Mac compares two similar sessions.
The heart strap I used, laying on the rail I rode. It is an “ancient” Polar heart strap without Bluetooth.
Today’s rowing was 10K followed by a 2K warmdown. The 10K was done with an effort level monitored and adjusted, to keep heart rate within the range of 120 to 140. The first 2500 meters served as a warmup by keeping the heart rate between 100 and 120 during that distance.
It was a heart rate train(ing) session. The difference between a heart rate training session and a session where you can see your heart rate but are not doing heart rate training, is simply that in a heart rate training session you adjust your effort to keep your heart rate within predetermined upper and lower boundaries.
The 10K was scheduled well in advance (well… about 3 hours in advance..) but only the lonely rowed this 10K.
In other words, nobody else signed up for it. A fairly frequent occurrence.
For entertainment, I tried a couple of videos but neither of them seemed at all suitable. And, when I thought about it, I didn’t want to watch anything or listen to any music, so I rowed in a silent room which was filled with the sounds of two fans and the rowing machine’s assorted sounds. It seemed entertaining enough, to focus on the effort level and heart rate biofeedback, for the entire 10,000 meters.
The above image was found on a page of the Cafe Press website. (It’s not a rowing website, they just sell shirts and stuff.)
Total distance rowed today was a little more than 8,000 meters. The main piece was 30 minutes, with a goal of staying as near as possible to 130 BPM. The 30 minute session was done online, but the other two guys who had signed up for it didn’t show up so I rowed it alone.
That heart rate target was chosen as a result of reading a passage in a book titled “The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing,” by Dr. Philip Maffetone. He writes extensively about heart rate training and recommends doing all workouts in what might be called the heart rate sweet spot. He doesn’t call it that. He calls it something like the “aerobic heart rate zone” and has a formula called The 180 Formula for calculating that HR zone.
I’m sure the formula works well for the people with whom he worked, who were mostly if not all probably 40 years old or younger. I’m guessing about the assumption I made in the previous sentence.
But when I applied the formula to myself, using what he calls an “honest assessment” the result is 124 BPM. That seems quite a bit too low. It’s definitely not “hard” rowing or even “medium” hard.
So I thought about it and modified it further, using my own method which doesn’t have a name. So I will pause the typing, and think about it…
Okay, I didn’t come up with a name for it. But my method is to modify Dr. Maffetone’s 180 Formula by using a value for age arrived at after using the 220 formula in reverse, to solve for an “age value” based on a person’s maximum heart rate or the best guess as to a person’s maximum heart rate.
The 220 formula assumes that a person’s maximum heart rate = 220-x, where x = a person’s age in years.
But the 220 formula is based on the assumption that a person is completely sedentary and that the person’s HRmax decreases by 1 BPM per year.
And though Dr. Maffetone uses 180 instead of 220 in his approach, he also assumes that a person’s maximum HR decreases every year, though his approach seems to assume that it decreases by LESS than 1 BPM per year.
The unknown amount of decrease in maximum HR every year seems to be the problem. I’ve read that if a person is “active” instead of sedentary during any years of life, that person’s maximum HR will not decrease during those years. So for every year during which I was “active” every day of the year, my maximum HR did not decrease that year. You can save me a lot of writing by thinking about that on your own.
So … if my maximum heart rate were, say, 180, then my “age” in years according to the 220 formula would be 220-180 = 40 years old and that would represent 40 years of non-sedentary life.
I don’t actually know what my maximum heart rate is. The highest I’ve seen it go was 191 and that was 8 or 10 years ago. The day before yesterday, when I rowed at a medium hard effort level for 30 minutes, it went as high as 176 before I slowed down during the last 20 seconds. I was not breathing hard, so I assume it would have gone higher, to somewhere above 180 but probably less than 191, if I had continued to sprint for all of the last 20 seconds… which would have resulted in me breathing hard and possibly even starting to “gasp” or “wheeze” for breath. (The reason I slowed down from a sprint two days ago and rowed at a very easy pace during those last 20 seconds is because I didn’t want to get to the point of needing to breathe really hard, etc)
So I used 180 as the HRmax value in the 220 formula when “solving for age” and then used the value of 40 instead of my chronological age of 71 in Dr. Maffetone’s 180 Formula, which resulted in a value of 130 for “maximum aerobic heart rate” target. If I had assumed and used 190 instead of 180 as my current HRmax, the Maffetone 180 formula result for me would have been 140.
I thought 130 was a safe and conservative value as the target and tried to adjust effort level to keep the HR graph as “flat” as possible near the value of 130 while being very happy to have an imperfect, wiggly, more or less horizontal line.
finish screen for 30 minute piecereport for 30 minute pieceRowPro graphs for 30 minute pieceOnline logbook graphs for 30 minute pieceOnline logbook graphs for warm down.
Today’s indoor rowing consisted of three online sessions of 30 minutes each, followed by a warm down. There was only one warm down session and it was after the third of the three 30 minute sessions. That 3rd of 3 was the only one that needed a warm down. The first two 30 minute sessions were done at a very easy pace.
Today’s title was chosen after I noticed a comment made in the online rowing chat room, by one of the other rowers. I didn’t immediately see the comment, because as soon as the session was over, I typed the words “gotta warm down immediately, bye all”, clicked “Send”, snapped a screenshot and clicked the “Finish” button to exit. I know from recent experience that when I get the heart rate up very much with a sprint of any sort, I have to keep rowing in an immediate warm down or the heart will get wacky and either start beating too fast or go into skipping mode.
So I warmed down immediately and everything has been fine with the ticker.
But later, when I looked at the screenshot that was snapped just before I clicked the Finish button to exit the online session, I noticed that another rower had noticed how I’d sprinted a bit, near the finish. His words, “monster finish john” made me feel good, so I will try to remember to thank him for it the next time we’re online in the same session.
I started the final sprint when I noticed that the countdown screen showed around “40” and my brain had forgotten that the countdown for this session was time, not meters. So I increased the pace to around 1:45 and I looked, to watch as the meters counted down to 0 but … it only counted down to something in the 30s. The rational part of my mind was off in space somewhere and the part of brain connected to what I was seeing was just in a sort of automatic mode. That same part of my brain was mildly surprised that it hadn’t counted down to zero yet and I pulled harder, increasing the pace to about 1:40 and holding it at 1:40 while staring at the countdown, to see it go to zero. It should have decreased by about 10 per stroke, but it was only decreasing by about 2 per stroke. Then the rational part of my mind came back to join the audience looking out through my eyes at the monitor and I remembered that it was a timed session, not a distance session and that what I was looking at was seconds, not meters counting down.
So I thought… I don’t want to keep pulling at 1:40 for another twenty seconds, and eased back to a warm down effort level for the last few seconds.
You can see a picture of it in the session graph.
This blog post is categorized as both boring and fun, because the easy 30 minute sessions were boring but the hard 30 minutes was fun (and mentally absorbing). It is also categorized as both easy and hard, because of those same different effort levels.
Finish screen for the 3rd of today’s three 30 minute online sessions.Report for the fastest of today’s 3 online sessions.RowPro software graph for the fastest of today’s 3 online sessions.Concept 2 online logbook graph for the fastest of today’s 3 online sessions.Warm down graphsSummary listing of all of today’s rowing results.
This image was among the top results when I searched the net for images using the terms “saturday indoor rowing”. It was attributed to a website called Iron Company Fitness but when I followed the link to that site, I couldn’t find the article that corresponded to the picture above… so I don’t know the story behind the photo. It seems to tell a story of a couple guys who did some hard rowing…
Today I spotted an online session scheduled at a time that would work out for me to join. It was a 6K and I didn’t have enough time in advance to warm up, so I just started out slowly and then picked up the pace a bit after 1,000 meters.
The other guy said he felt low energy and “blah” but he rowed quite a bit faster than I did and inspired me to row faster than I would have alone.
After today’s online 6K session, we did quite a bit of “chatting” in the chat room and then I forgot to take a screen shot of the finish view. The above screen shot is the finish view of today’s 20 minute warm down.Session report for today’s online 6KRowpro graphs for online 6KConcept 2 graphs for online 6KConcept 2 logbook graphs for the 20 minute warmdown
Today’s indoor rowing was scheduled online, one hour in advance of start time. But there was nobody else who joined in.
It was done at a leisurely pace that most younger rowers would find boring. I watched a documentary during the session, so a leisurely rowing pace was best, so as to have maximum mental focus available for the documentary.
The above photo was found on a site called WoodenBoat Forum where the subject seems to be the building of wooden boats.
Today’s activity was more indoor rowing. It was done online, in the hopes of making up for the lack of water by having some company. But I didn’t schedule it enough in advance (only 30 minutes) for anyone to notice it and join.
Other than that, it was fine and the distance was done without incident or interruption.
A youtube video was watched while rowing today’s 6K. It wasn’t particularly inspirational, but it did provide some pleasant scenery. It was a GoPro video of the 2012 Cellcom Green Bay Half Marathon.
Today’s indoor rowing was exactly 10K if the warmup and warm down were both included. The main rowing was 6K done at a target pace of 2:04. The resulting time was entered into the C2CTC website for my contribution to the RowPro Rower team’s entry in the c2ctc September 2017 challenge.
If you look very closely at the session report generated by RowPro software for today’s 6K, you may notice some impossible data for split number 9. That is a glitch in the RowPro 5 for the Mac software. The Mac version is the newest version of RowPro and because writing code for Unix is a “different world” than writing code for Microsoft Windows, the RowPro for the Mac version still has little bugs like that. It is an inconsistent bug and only shows itself very infrequently, in my experience.
For split #9 in that report, all data is correct with the exception of the two columns that show zeros and the column that shows a time for that split of 4/10 of a second. The correct time for split #9 should have been closer to about 74 seconds, like it was for the rest of the splits from split 1 through split 17.
I started increasing the pace during split 18 and did a bit faster pace from split 18 through split 20.
Today’s rowing distance was set to half marathon and was considered sufficient after 10K. It was followed by a very leisurely 3K warm down.
The reason today’s session qualifies for the category of “mentally absorbing” is because there were two paceboats and I made it a point to stay focused enough on the rowing, to stay ahead of both of them.
