Category: Medium Workout

Today I had the good fortune to again have energetic company in an online rowing session.  Jim D. and Brent R. both joined today’s 10K.  Jim D. rowed at his usual amazing pace of around 1:50 and Brent R. also rowed an energetic pace.  So I was once again inspired not to be lazy.

If I’d been alone, God only knows what pace I would have rowed but my guess is that it would have been around 2:20.  With today’s inspiring company, I started out the 10K at 2:15 for the first 1K, then increased the pace to 2:10 for another 2K.  After rowing for 3,000 meters, I increased the pace to about 2:05 and held it there for another 3K until the total distance rowed was 6,000 meters.  At the 6,000 meter point, I increased the pace to 2:00 and though I wasn’t committed to anything in particular, had a general tentative intention of holding the pace at 2:00 until the total distance rowed was 9,500 meters, then sprint for the final 500 meters.

But after 1,000 meters at a pace of about 2:00, I decided to wind it down, so I slowed to 2:05 for 1K, then 2:10 for the next 1K.  Then I did a little sprint for a couple hundred meters and then finished the remaining distance at a pace of about 2:15, so no warm down was necessary.

Happy rowing to you.

Since I did all my rowing indoors today, as usual, none of my sweat was shared with the usually-thirsty cacti in the area.

Today’s session was 10K scheduled many hours in advance online.  And it paid off, to schedule many hours in advance because one guy in England joined the session.  But he had some kind of problem, perhaps with software or with his connection, because after 100-200 meters, his rowing icon showed to be “finished” even though we still had almost 10,000 meters remaining.

So I stopped that online session and set up another 10K, so he could join that one.  But he was non-responsive in the chat room, so I assume there was some kind of connection problem.

I started out the 10K at about 2:20, then after about 1,000 meters increased the pace to about 2:15 and maintained that pace until there were 4,000 meters left.  As the distance countdown to 4,000 meters remaining, I increased the pace to about 2:00/500m and kept it there for 1,000 meters, when there were 3,000 meters remaining.

I rowed very easy for about 600 meters and then sprinted at about 1:50/500m for 400 meters until the distance counted down to 2,000 at which point I slowed down and used the last 2K as a first warm down.

After the 10K was over, I did a second warm down of 5 minutes.

Happy and problem-free rowing to you.

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.

Happy heart rate biofeedbacking to you.

 

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.

Happy heart zone targeting while rowing to you.