Today’s 10K was done at a bit more than a stroll-equivalent effort and at less than a race pace. I’m not sure if I it should be called “medium” or “medium hard” workout so I’ll toss a coin and let heads be medium and tails be medium hard.
Heads
Today’s performance of the 10K shall be called a Medium Workout.
Today’s indoor rowing was a 10K and it would have been a season best but when the distance counted down to about 8,400 meters the phone rang.
It was the “iceman,” (delivery man for the new icebox). In other words, a new refrigerator to replace the old one which wasn’t keeping things cold enough to avoid food spoilage.
It was scheduled to be delivered sometime between 3pm and 5pm. Those things usually happen later than they say but … this time the delivery guy called to say he was going to be about 40 minutes early.
So I had to stop the 10K, no warmdown, change clothes while I was still drenched in sweat and be ready for the delivery. Made it, with about one minute to spare, though I was still sweating profusely and the dry t-shirt I’d put on when changing out of the rowing clothes was already half-soaked in sweat when I answered the doorbell.
Maybe tomorrow will be another 10K. Maybe not… don’t know yet what tomorrow will bring in the way of mental motivation.
In my rush to end the unfinished 10K session and change clothes, I forgot to get a screen shot of what the RowPro “finish screen” looked like. So all there is to look at below is data and its graphs.
Buddy Holly in the foreground and The Crickets in the background.
Today’s musical accompaniment for indoor rowing included a Buddy Holly song from the 1950s. The band was called “The Crickets” and the particular song being performed when the image above was originally formed was called Peggy Sue. Buddy Holly does some interesting, innovative things with the vocals when he sings this particular song.
One of the things that impresses me the most about Buddy Holly is that he looked like a total nerd or geek (although I don’t think either of those words existed in the 1950s), but his singing and musical talent are top notch. For those of you who are too young to know anything about Buddy Holly, he was a pioneer in American popular music and he died at the very young age of 22. Cause of death: airplane crash when he was a passenger in an airplane which was flying in bad weather that required flying by instruments but the pilot was not certified as qualified for instrument flight. The photo below shows a signpost near where Buddy Holly died when the airplane crashed.
Today’s indoor rowing accompaniment to the Buddy Holly song and other 1950s music was mainly a 30 minute piece with a target pace of 2:10/500 meters. I’m taking a break from the series of 5,000 meter season bests, because I don’t want to overdo it with the 5K season best efforts. The effort level for the 5Ks has risen to the level that I should probably do no more than from one to three per week at the most recent effort level. But if the 5K pace raises very much at all, I’ll have to limit them to no more than one per week.
Today’s main rowing piece was preceded and followed by 10 minutes of warmup and down.
Warmup was 10 minutes. This was the warmup finish screen.Finish screen view for the 30 minute portion.RowPro session reportRowPro graphsThis is how the graphs are displayed in the Concept 2 online logbook.Warmdown was 10 minutes. This was the warmdown finish screen.
The Vikings of ancient history did a lot of rowing so this music selection among today’s musical accompaniment was particularly appropriate because of the name of the singing group.
Today’s indoor rowing session was another incremental increase in average pace for the 5K. Yesterday’s was done at an average pace of 2:06.5/500 meters which was a power level of about 174 Watts. Today’s 5K was done at a pace of 2:06/500 m for the first 4,500 meters and then the pace was increased a bit for the final 500 meters, to bring its average pace to 2:04.9/500m which was a power level of about 180.7 Watts. That difference in pace of less than 2 seconds/500 meters and in power of about 7 Watts more was enough of a difference that I’m categorizing today’s rowing session as “Medium” instead of “Easy”. Purely subjective, but if you look back through each of the recent, incrementally faster 5,000 meter pieces I’ve done, you can easily see that the heart rate is definitely increasing with each increase in pace for the 5K.
The rowing was fun and the music was too. I seem to have run out of Appalachian music to listen to on youtube. And some of the previous music I’d enjoyed, which included “psy trance” and “shuffle dance” “house” music… had grown repetitive and boring. So today’s choice of music was from the decade of 1950s anno Domini and the playlist included such musical hits of that era as “The Del Vikings singing Whispering Bells“. There are literally hundreds of ear-pleasing songs and melodies from that nostalgic era, so I may be listening to 1950’s music for a while.
If you are among those who have been keeping up with this blog for a while, you may have noticed that the rowing sessions that are classified as “mentally absorbing” burn more calories per hour than the ones that are classified as “boring”… It’s true. The harder you row or work at anything, the more mental focus it requires. The more mental focus required for the rowing… the more fun it becomes, in a jalepeńo-pepper-strangely-pleasant-pain sort of fashion.
5K finish screenRowPro’s session reportRowPro’s manner of graphing the session.Concept2.com’s online logbook manner of graphing the session.Warmdown finish screen.
For today’s music, I looked for 1950s Bluegrass playlists on youtube and found quite a few. They were good background music to most of the rowing, though I found myself tuning them out and sort of not hearing them when I was doing the fastest pace intervals.
The rowing was 10,845 meters divided into 18 intervals of alternating distance and time. Though the total distance rowed today was less than yesterday, more calories were burned.
The approach to the intervals was to start out with the highest effort for the 250 meter interval and then to lower the effort by slowing the pace by 5 seconds/500 meters for the next, a 500 meter interval and then by another 5 seconds for the next, a 750 meter interval and by an additional 5 seconds for the middle interval which was a 1K.
So those effort levels were about 307 watts, 265 watts, 232 watts and 207 watts for the 1,000 meter interval in the middle. Then the power increased the same way from the 1K to each following interval with power highest for the final 250 meter interval.
The graph of Pace for each of those intervals resembled a valley:
It was harder to go DOWN into that valley than to climb up out of it, because of the way the rest intervals were arranged, with the shortest rest after the first and hardest interval. It was fun.
Today’s main feature was to do an easy practice of the July 2017 CTC challenge. This is the 5th time I’ve done it this month, but only the first one counted. Second one failed. Third and fourth were experiments with the setup to find the best arrangement within RowPro 5 for the Mac’s “advanced custom setup studio.” Today was practice, which consisted of doing most of the intervals at about 1:59 to 2:00 minutes/500 meters and getting off the machine, to walk around during each of the Stop rests between intervals.
There was a 2K warmup first and then an easy 4K afterwards.
When it becomes hard to breathe, everything slow down, no matter how much coffee…
Today, for the first time, I managed to set up a variable intervals session with RowPro 5 for the Mac. It involved quite a few attempts to set it up and save the session and a couple restarts of the Mac computer. The final approach that worked was to only enter two lines of the session into the “custom row studio” and then save it, download it into the custom rows, highlight it in custom rows and edit it to add two more lines. Kept repeating that process until all 14 lines were in the custom variable interval setup. As I’ve said more than once before, RowPro 5 for the Mac is a “beta” version and still has a few problems to be ironed out.
Then I tried rowing it. I thought I’d try a different approach from the first attempt (at this c2ctc.com challenge for July 2017 ) and go slower on all the intervals except the very last one, with a target pace of 1:52 for all but the last interval. If I succeeded, it would be faster than the first attempt in which I started out too fast for the first few intervals and had to slow down more than I should have after those first few intervals.
That approach worked well until heart rate became too erratic to display. When that happens, the HR display and HR graph goes to zero. It also becomes somewhat harder to breathe. The mind was willing but the body just barely made it through the middle interval of 1,000 meters and I was feeling a bit lightheaded at the end. There was a 4 minute rest after the 1,000 meters but it wasn’t enough time and I had to give up during the next interval of 750 meters because I couldn’t maintain the target pace of 1:52 due to the fact that it was too hard to breathe.
That’s the first time that’s happened. Usually, it’s my mind that complains first, and tries to get my body to slow down. This time, my body couldn’t get enough air and my mind had to decide to quit trying to go fast.
There are still about 8 days left in the month, so maybe I’ll try again in about a week. And abstain from coffee that day.
I categorized this workout as “boring,” because it’s not fun when things don’t work like they should. A better adjective for today’s workout might be “annoying”.
How much coffee is too much?
I think the catalyst for the irregular heart rate was too much coffee. I had 5 or 6 cups of coffee this morning, instead of the usual one single cup which I’d limited myself to for a while with success.
Here are the most pertinent screen shots for today’s rowing:
Heart rate was erratic from the 6th split to the finish. When it was regular enough to display during that time, it was way too high for the moderate effort.
In fact, you can make a funny face without rowing at all!
Today’s indoor rowing consisted of 12,000 meters with a gradually increasing pace until reaching 7,000 meters, then a step up in pace to 200+ watts for 1,800 meters, a sprint for 250 meters and finally the last 3K was warm down.
While rowing, I watched an entertaining youtube video with the long and wordy title of “Popular Shuffle Dance Music Mix 2017 Best Electro Melbourne Bounce Party Shuffle…” by Dj Daniel Sky, which featured lively, energetic music and video clips of guys and girls (mostly girls) shuffle dancing. None of the video clips of people dancing are longer than about 30 seconds to one minute, so I assume it is a high energy activity that isn’t usually sustained for a very long time.
It was good music to listen to for rowing and easy on the eyes for viewing while multitasking to keep a portion of focus on rowing Watts level.
Though any music at all is often more annoying and distracting than helpful, energetic music tends to be helpful, as long as it’s not playing during the final part of a race, when I don’t want to listen to anything at all because the final race effort requires 100% of what focus I can muster.
The above photo is the indoor rowing setup for a New Zealand rower. It doesn’t have anything to do with Watts as a unit of rowing power, but the rower’s name is Carl Watts and he posted this photo for public viewing in a rowing forum under the topic of Rowing Setup – What do you have?
The title of today’s post is spelled correctly. It wasn’t supposed to be the question, “What’s Indoor Rowing?” – it’s just a focus on the units used to measure and regulate today’s rowing. The unit today, like yesterday, was Watts. You can find reading material of the driest sort on watts at this Wikipedia link . There’s a fitness testing model, using a rowing machine and watts at this ergrowing.com page . There are many web pages addressing the subject of watts as a unit of power to measure rowing effort, and you can search for more but the last one I’ll provide a link to is on this fitwerx.com page where a person who was a rower in college wonders aloud about “who has the most power, rowers or cyclists?”
Today’s plan was to row 15,000 meters and to row the first 5K at a slow enough pace so that it would last between 25 and 30 minutes which was the duration of a chess lecture I wanted to watch while warming up. After the first 5K, I increased the rowing effort to 100 watts for the 6th 1,000 meters, then 110 watts, 120 watts, etc until raising the effort to 180 watts when the distance had counted down to 2,000 meters remaining. When the distance remaining counted down to 1,000 meters, I increased effort to to a set of “power 10” strokes and then eased off to warm down for the remaining few hundred meters.
The entire workout was mentally absorbing because I was concentrating on chess during the first 5K and then concentrating on keeping rowing effort within a few watts of target level during each subsequent 1K.
Highlighting the moment on the graph where the set of 10 power strokes happened.
As mentioned yesterday, I saw a cardiologist and he was the opposite of enthusiastic at my thoughts on quitting coffee. I don’t know if he’s right on the most important and relevant points. And I’m not sure what are the most important and relevant considerations with regard to coffee consumption.
Don’t get me wrong about the cardiologist’s attitude toward coffee – he was VERY enthusiastic about thoughts on drinking coffee. He made no comment and didn’t even acknowledge when I listed the first of my reasons for considering quitting coffee, which was that caffeine causes blood vessels to constrict.
Like Diane pointed out … a lot of things can cause constriction or dilation of blood vessels. When we go outside on a very cold day, the blood vessels nearest the surface of the skin constrict the most, to help keep the most important inner parts of the body warm.
But caffeine causes all the blood vessels to constrict. Maybe its an insignificantly small amount of constriction, I don’t know and the heart doctor didn’t venture toward any relevant data or …. as I said earlier … or even acknowledge it.
So after sleeping on it I decided this morning to resume drinking coffee, but to a very diminished degree. So this morning I made coffee and had one single, precisely measured, 5 ounce cup of coffee. I savored it and made it last as long as a large mug of coffee.
Afterwards, all traces of mental fog and suggestions of an impending headache that I’d been having for the past 7 days of abstention totally vanished.
I felt like myself again! I turned that thought over in my mind and considered that I was probably more “purely” myself, without any additives…. if I could recover from the lack of additives, namely coffee and all its population of exotic molecules.
Then the thought came, probably from the science fiction area of my mind which formed during my teenage years of visiting the library and checking out many sci-fi books… the thought that perhaps coffee is more than a mere beverage. Perhaps it is an alien substance that takes over a person’s mind and thereby snatches his body.
If coffee is a body snatcher, it certainly tastes better than I would have imagined body snatchers to taste.
TODAY’S INDOOR ROWING – yes, I did do some indoor rowing today. Decided to do a version of the same 11K as yesterday, to see if my heart would go whacky again and lose its rhythm in an unprofessional, amateur heart manner.
The plan was to start out the first 1,000 meters at about 90 watts effort and then increase the effort by about 10 watts every subsequent 1,000 meters.
The heart rate started out by being bashful and not revealing itself. Which is what happens when its too erratic for the heart strap detector to make sense of it. After a few hundred meters it revealed itself in the 80’s. Then vanished. Then returned, etc.
While it was doing that, I could feel it skipping or whatever it would be best to call it when it is not acting perfect and either doing extra beats or lacking beats when it should have them. It felt like a klutzy, awkward heart. But it sounds best and everyone probably knows what it means if I say it was skipping. Skipping a beat here, skipping a beat there, etc.
While it was doing that, I realized that I was also thinking about Diane. Then I started to wonder if that was the reason my heart was skipping. Sometimes Diane makes my heart skip… her smile, her voice… looking at a photo of her and having memories come flooding into my mind from years ago… doing that can make my heart skip.
Then I started thinking about making the title of this blog post something like, Diane Makes My Heart Skip.
And I was going to do that, exploring thinking about her some more and paying attention the the skipping of my heart and looking for correlations between the thoughts I had and the skipping heart… but after about 1,000 meters, it settled down and skipped only once more, somewhere around 3,000 meters.
From 3,000 meters on, it was steady and reacted perfectly as the wattage was increased every 1,000 meters.
I continued to increase wattage by 10 watts every 1K, until reaching the final 1,000 meters and then I picked up the pace quite a bit and did 10 “power strokes” and used the remaining few hundred meters as a warm down.
After the heart steadied, I had the thoughts about how I felt “like myself again!” with the help of only one small cup of coffee… and the idea of coffee being an alien body snatcher came to mind.
I thought about other things too, but those weren’t thoughts of any note for a blog post. Rowing, like walking, has an influence to stimulate thoughts.
