Category: Mentally absorbing workout

Today’s main indoor rowing was a 20 minute session which was recorded as a screen recording, with sound.

On YouTube it is titled “Indoor Rowing 20 Minutes and Twelve 30 second intervals“.  You can find it by searching YouTube for that title or by clicking the link in the previous sentence. Note: This video will eventually be deleted from YouTube, when I can replace it with something that has not had its sound track muted and mutilated by YouTube (see note regarding the YouTube problem, below)

NOTE REGARDING VIDEO POSTED TO YOUTUBE DECEMBER 31: (20 minute session mentioned above): after posting it to YouTube, I noticed that it had been tagged as “containing copyrighted material” which turned out to be some of the music that was playing over the speakers in the room.  YouTube said that because of that, there would be Ads placed on the video and the advertising profits from the videos thus being monetized would go to whoever had claimed copyright rights.  So I used YouTube’s tools to “remove” the copyrighted tracks.  After taking a long time to re-process and “edit” the video, YouTube announced that it hadn’t been able to remove the song and gave the option of leaving it as is and having ads displayed, or muting the song.  So… rather than have ads plastered over it while someone is trying to watch it during their rowing, I chose the “mute” option. The worst case is that there will be blank areas of audio.  In the future, I will only have sounds playing from the speakers that are not copyrighted!

ADDITIONAL NOTE REGARDING THIS VIDEO WHICH WAS POSTED TO YOUTUBE: After YouTube “edited” the sound track of the video, the sound track was ruined and the relevant signals (interval timer beeps) are either removed or re-positioned.  So … I will put other videos up to replace these, when I can.  After those videos are up, I will delete these videos from YouTube.  Once that is done, I will also delete the links to them.  It has been educational, to learn about how the music industry is listening to the sound tracks of all videos posted in public places on the internet and making copyright claims so that they have the right (and so that they are the only ones who have the right) to “monetize” the video by placing whatever advertisements they like on the video. Screen recordings of indoor rowing sessions aren’t nearly as helpful or relevant if the actual sounds, including the signals from any interval timer used, are audible.

On the sound track, there are a few words from me at the beginning and three words from me at the end.  In between, there is the screen recording view of the RowPro display during the rowing session.  I used an early model Gymboss interval timer, for the purpose of including intervals within the 20 minute session, sort of Tabata-style but more restrained on my part.

You don’t have to restrain yourself during the intervals, though, and can go full, all-out Tabata if you like. 🙂

There were twelve 30 second intervals during the 20 minutes.  The first interval began a little more than a minute after the actual rowing started and if you play the YouTube recording, you can hear the beginning of that interval and each of the 12 intervals announced with a five second beep-beep-beep-beep-beep.  Five beeps at the beginning and five more at the end of each 30 second interval. There is one minute for active rest between each of the 30 second intervals.

If you’re wondering what the word “irregularities” in today’s title is referring to, it was nothing to do with irregularities that are supposedly cured with laxatives – it was irregularities of the heart.   I may perhaps have gotten a little bit carried a way when I threw most of my restraint and caution to the wind during the 12th and last interval today. Maybe that was a mistake, I don’t know, but at any rate… the heart threw a bit of a “tissy fit” (or would it be “hissy fit”?) – and became so irregular that I could feel it and the HR display went blank, about 25 seconds before the end of the session.  It seems to have returned to normal, but maybe I should have a heart-to-heart talk with it and see if I can find out what’s bugging it.  Did it want to row harder?  Did it want to row longer?  There are other possibilities, of course, but – if it wants to row harder or longer, I’d be happy to oblige.  (Humor.)

Seriously, today’s rowing time was way too short, but I’m keeping it short until next year.  Next year will begin tomorrow and then I will start working on the Concept 2 challenges for January 2018, which for me will be the Virtual Team Challenge and the January Revolution “Big Burn”.  You can read about each of them, if you’re interested, on the page that will open if you click the blue link in the previous sentence.

There was a little more rowing done today than the 20 minute session recorded and uploaded to YouTube.  The first time I started rowing, RowPro 5 for the Mac crashed after about 5 minutes.  It didn’t exactly crash during the rowing, but the avatar of me rowing and the boat movement froze.  All the data continued to be displayed, but I stopped the session because when the top half of the RowPro screen froze, that ruined the recording for YouTube.  I’m not bothering to included data for that in today’s blog, nor for the 5 minute warm down session I did after today’s main piece of rowing.

Here’s the stuff relating to today’s main 20 minute session:

Happy rowing to you.

Today’s indoor rowing session was limited to 30 minutes.  But the time involved was quite a bit longer than a half hour, because I tried to use a GoPro camera to record the session.  It is the earliest/oldest model of GoPro that I could find, for the sake of getting the cheapest one. So the time above and beyond the 30 minutes for today’s rowing session was spent with learning how to use it, trying it a little bit and then setting it up.  Also, I typed a “script,” of what to day at the beginning of the recording.

I have a hunch that the GoPro video I was trying to make wouldn’t have been very usable for the intended purpose.

My intended purpose in making a video recording of an indoor rowing session is so that anyone else who has access to the internet and does indoor rowing – might find it useful as something to “row along with” during one or more of their rowing sessions.

For such a video to be useful to row along with, I think it needs to clearly show the screen for the rowing session.  If they can see the screen and what was happening moment by moment, then someone else who watches the video can set up their rowing session for a relevant (though not necessarily same) time or distance and they can “row along,” in a fashion similar to what people find helpful for inspiration when they row online with other people.

So what I did was: set up the GoPro video camera on a tripod and position it as near as possible to the two monitors that I watch while rowing.  One of the monitors displays RowPro 5 for the Mac and the other monitor is a small TV connected to an Apple TV which is usually used for displaying YouTube videos.

Before the 30 minute rowing session was finished, the GoPro camera quit recording.  At least- it lost its connection to my iPhone.  It looked like the battery died.  I guess you get what you pay for, and if you want a GoPro camera that will record for 30 minutes or more, maybe you need one of the later, more expensive ones.  But I will try it again, because its also possible that the battery just needs to be conditioned.  If its a lithium battery, they need to be fully charged and then discharged three times, to be conditioned enough to last an optimal amount of time.

Here’s the stuff on the rowing I did today:

Happy rowing to you.