The heart was much more well-behaved in today’s warmdown, than in yesterday’s. Today, it purred along at around 100 BPM while I was rowing with more effort than during yesterday’s warmdown when it wouldn’t drop below 140 BPM.
Yesterday, the heart’s little brain got confused and wouldn’t slow down. Today, the same kind of rowing session was done, but at a significantly slower pace and the heart behaved itself.
Instead of aiming for yesterday’s original target pace of 2:00/500m or faster. today’s pace was targeted at just a bit faster than 2:10/500m. Not as much fun as something faster than 2:00, but a lot more fun than yesterday’s stuck-in-high BPM problem.
You might guess that the above is a view of the finish screen of today’s rowing session. But it’s not. Its a view of the finish screen of today’s warm down. The problem that happened today is discernible if you can zoom in on the heart rate graph – HR wouldn’t slow down, no matter how easy I went during the second half of today’s rowing session or during the warm down…. it stayed above 140.
Today’s indoor rowing session was supposed to be fun but it turned out not to be and I think the reason it was spoiled was because I skipped doing a thorough warmup.
The session was setup to be two intervals of 15 minutes each, according to the requirement for this month’s challenge on the c2ctc.com website. The rules are: “Row two unrestricted reps of 15 minutes with 3 minutes rest between each rep. Start each 15 minute row from a standing start. No rolling starts. Record the distance rowed for the slowest of your 15 minute rows. So you can’t do one easy and one hard. You need best effort for both. ”
The problem that happened was that after the 3 minutes rest, heart rate wouldn’t slow down and remained above 140. Another contributing factor in addition to me not having warmed up sufficiently might be that after the first 15 minutes, I totally stopped rowing, got off the erg and walked around the house for most of the 3 minutes rest time. The heart is supposed to have its very own little brain and I probably should have kept rowing at an easy pace, to avoid confusing that little brain.
So… the results for today’s session won’t be entered on c2ctc.com. I can get a faster result for the slowest 15 minutes of the two, if I do them both again but slower and thereby don’t confuse the heart’s brain into doing a repeat of what it did today. You can see what it did today, graphically, on the graphs among today’s screenshots.
Finish screen view of today’s two 15 minute intervals. Notice that HR didn’t slow down even though the second of the two intervals was extremely slow.Report for today’s two 15 minute intervals.RowPro graphs for today’s two 15 minute intervals. The vertical red lines are occurred when HR became too irregular for the heart strap to measure it.Concept 2 online logbook chart for today’s two 15 minute intervals.
Today’s indoor rowing session was another 10K done at an average pace of 2:18/500 meters. But this time, there were 8 intervals thrown in the mix. It was a nice change of pace and felt a lot more invigorating, than the recent 10Ks done at 2:20 to 2:18 pace.
Today’s indoor rowing session was a 10K done with the goal of 133 Watts average while rowing a constant pace. That power level of 133 Watts translates to about 2 minutes 18 seconds per 500 meters – which sounds familiar…
There have been no bothersome heart irregularities following yesterday’s 2K time trial fail and today there was only one single blip of irregularity, which can be seen where there’s a vertical line in the HR graphs.
Today I decided at the last minute to do the Indoor Rowers League challenge for the month of February. So … it wasn’t literally at the last minute, but was literally on the last day for which results could be entered.
I wanted to avoid stirring up another bout of irregular heartbeat, which the doctors have been referring to as atrial fibrillation. So I started out with a 3K warmup. Before doing the 3K warmup, I did a 1K warmup warmup.
Before doing the actual 2K time trial, I did another 2K at what seemed like a reasonable warmup pace.
For the 2K TT itself, I thought it would be reasonable, barring any irregularities from the ticker, to pace it at between 1:52 and 1:53. So I started out at 1:49 and it felt good. But anything, no matter how fast the pace, ALWAYS feels good right at the start … so I slowed to 1:53 and maintained an average of between 1:52 and 1:53 for the first 1,000 meters.
At about 900 meters, it started to feel like I had bit off more than I could chew and that I wouldn’t be able to maintain that pace for the last half. I didn’t like the idea of rowing slower than 1:53 for a 2K, so I just gave up and slowed way down.
One hundred meters passed at the super slow pace and I watched the average pace slow from 1:52 point something, to 1:55 point something. Another hundred meters passed and the average pace got nearer to 2:00. After about 300 meters passed, the average pace became slower than 2:00/500 meters and I decided I couldn’t allow it to be slower than 2:00/500 meters, so I picked up the pace to around 1:57 and rowed at that pace until the remaining distance counted down to around 250 meters. Then, I gave a bit more effort and rowed faster for the final 250 meters, consoling myself by finishing in less than 8 minutes total for the 2K.
There was some GOOD NEWS, as far as I was concerned: Heartbeat only went irregular one time. I could feel it as it happened and then the HR display confirmed it by going blank. But it only lasted a few seconds. That one occurrence was during the final warm down and think it was because I may have been slowing down a bit too much, too soon. So I picked up the pace a bit and slowed down more gradually. It has behaved itself since then.
The 3K warmup was uploaded to YouTube as a screen recording and is available at the following link: “Indoor Rowing 3K Warmup 02282018“.
Yesterday there was no rowing done here. Today was a 10K done once again at the average pace of 2:18/500m. This one had a lower average heart rate than the previous one which was done on February 25th.
Average heart rate two days ago on the 25th was 123 BPM and average heart rate today was 116 BPM which is a 7 BPM reduction. So that’s good, but I don’t know why the difference. Maybe there was less stress, by the time the rowing was done this afternoon.
Today’s indoor rowing session was another 10K in a sequence of 10Ks being done to explore the correlation of effort level and average heart rate. First, I did a 10K with a heart rate target of 110 BPM from start to finish. HR was virtually a constant 110 BPM from start to finish, but in order to do that, the pace had to start out faster and then slow down from start to finish, to maintain 110 BPM HR. The average pace for that 10K was about 2:26.
Next, a 10K with a target of 2:20/500m average pace, to see what heart rate would do. Pace was maintained at 2:20 from start to finish and HR started out below 110 and finished above 110, to average about 109.9 BPM.
Next, a 10K at an average pace of 2:19/500m. Average HR for that session was about 115 BPM which is about 5 BPM increase for that increase in pace.
Today, 10K at an average of 2:18. Average HR today was quite a bit higher than expected, based on the results of yesterday compared to the day before yesterday. Instead of average HR increasing another 5 BPM, it increased by about 8 BPM, to about 123 BPM.
I haven’t decided what to try tomorrow. But one happy result so far is that there have been no incidents of irregular heartbeat at these very low effort levels. So I might hang out in this region for a while and see what happens with some more tweaking of pace or with the same pace and see if HR slows down at that pace.
Today’s indoor rowing was another 10K. It was done with the goal of an average pace -1 second/500 meters faster than yesterday’s pace, to see what effect that small change had on average heart rate. Result: Today’s average HR was 115.4 BPM which was about 5 BPM higher than yesterday’s 109.9 BPM average. The increase in calories was a total of 3 for the entire session. The difference in Watts was also 3 more average Watts than yesterday’s.
As the title implies, today’s indoor rowing session was 10K with a target pace of 2 minutes 20 seconds per 500 meters. After the session was finished, I downloaded a CSV file of the session from the Concept 2 online logbook and had a spreadsheet compute the average heart rate for all the recorded heartbeats. It came out to be an average of about 109.7 BPM. It was interesting to me, because yesterday’s 10K was done with the goal of keeping HR as near as possible to 110 throughout the session and the comparison of results, comparing yesterday’s bottom line to today’s, weren’t what I expected.
Stats summary for today’s 10K. A calorie rate of 683 per hour is much more than I would have expected at heart rate of 110.
Today’s indoor rowing session was inspired by an indoor rowing acquaintance who said he is going to try rowing ordinary daily sessions at a target HR rate of 110 BPM. The inspiration was also related to what a cardiologist, Dr. Joel Kahn, wrote on pages 175-176 of the hardback copy of his book, “The Whole Heart Solution,” where he referred to studies which showed that endurance athletes who push themselves too hard, for too much of the time, have higher rates of death from heart attack than even couch potatoes.
Based on the results of the studies he mentions, Dr. Kahn recommends that endurance athletes spend most of their time running “like a turtle.” So I suppose that would apply to rowing also. Relish the hard rowing occasionally but avoid over-indulging in hard, high heart-rate rowing.
Inspiration for today’s title was partly because I ate lunch immediately before doing today’s 10K. It was a small lunch – just two slices of toast with peanut butter and unsweetened dill relish (instead of sugary jelly). Inspiration was also because I remembered David Churbuck’s comment to the post of March 24th, 2017 when he mentioned the risk of eating a meal immediately before rowing, if the rowing would be hard, competitive rowing. He has a unique blog called Churbuck.com which relates to many things, including rowing.
At any rate… today’s rowing session for me was neither competitive nor hard. But it was fun and mentally absorbing, because of the constant focus on keeping HR as near as possible to the target.
