Today’s indoor rowing session was another 10,000 meter piece. It was done at a gradually increasing and mostly easy effort, with the main exception to “easy” being a single kinda hard 500 meter sprint.
The rowing session was done online but it was a solo session. Mental focus on rowing effort was maintained throughout. Time flew by.
Happy rowing to you.
The above cartoon was found on the Condé Nast website as one of the results for images when I searched for “rowing” and “sleep”. I thought it was particularly appropriate after the especially good night’s sleep I had last night, which was greatly helped by yesterday’s rowing. After yesterday’s inspired-by-lively-company half-marathon, I felt extremely relaxed and slept about 30 minutes longer than average and very soundly last night.
For that reason (good sleep), I’d like to row fast and hard or even race every single day, but there is a real danger of over-training if a person does too much too hard and I don’t know what my own boundaries are. So I lean toward taking it easy, most of the time. If you’ve never heard of the over-training syndrome, it is something you should read about and take special care to avoid. Rowing is ethereal but over-training syndrome is dismally earthbound and can drag a person down, down down. I’d rather stay “up,” so I try to avoid over training.
When in doubt, row easier during long rowing sessions and be moderate with the amount of racing you allow yourself. Racing is fun and the “pain” is like the pain of jalapeño peppers. It goes away and gives you an emotional boost and desire to do it again. A person can overdo it with jalapeño peppers and also with exercise and racing, but in moderate and reasonable amounts, they can both be positive, healthy addictions.
Today’s rowing was a recovery session, 8,000 meters, with a couple intervals and sprints in the mix.
Happy rowing and peaceful sleeping to you.
Today’s rowing session was scheduled about a day in advance and there were two other guys who signed up and rowed. They could row a lot faster than me, so they took turns with one of them pacing even with me while the other one would sprint ahead and then slow down to let us catch up. It was a great session as far as I was concerned and I made a season-best time in the half marathon.
A few hours after today’s rowing session, while Diane and I were having dinner, I noticed that some of the muscles in my upper body, arms and even my hands felt a bit sore. It was a pleasant soreness, not a painful feeling. It must have been because of the higher than usual amount of effort I’d allowed myself to exert during today’s half-marathon. (See the caption below the screenshot at the top of this page, for a description of how it went.)
Happy rowing to you.
Today’s indoor rowing session was scheduled a day in advance. It was another half-marathon and two (TWO!!!) other rowers signed up for the session. Only one of them showed up though. The guy who showed up was located in Oklahoma. I told him that I’d pace him/row alongside him, if he didn’t row too fast. He didn’t row too fast, but he did row a bit slower than the range of paces I’d anticipated and so… after about one or two kilometers, I decided to pick up the pace, so I’d be finished with the session before dinner time.
It was just as well, that I didn’t row at his pace because he had some kind of connection problem before half the distance was completed and I rowed most of the distance alone anyway.
Happy rowing to you.
Today’s rowing session was a half-marathon scheduled online about 24 hours in advance. The most popular online rowing sessions seem to be those that are 30 minutes or up to 10,000 meters. A half marathon seems to be much less popular.
I titled today’s online rowing session as “I will finish if you will”. By the time it was scheduled to begin, nobody else had joined it. Like I said, the half marathon isn’t one of the more popular distance for online rowing. Just check the Oarbits site for yourself, on a daily basis, to confirm that assertion. (After you go to the Oarbits web page, click the Schedule tab or the Results tab, to look at the collection of times and distance rowed online.) One of the most popular online rowing sessions seems to be 30 minutes.
If you look closely at the first two screenshots above, you might notice that RowPro 5 for the Mac is doing something very weird with the characters of the Canada rower’s name. Apparently it can’t handle some of the letter accents used by those who spell their names in other than standard American/English/British spelling. Hopefully, this WordPress blog thing can handle them. The other rower spelled his name André Doré, according to the way it is displayed in Oarbits results as you can see in the screenshot immediately below this paragraph:
I’ve never rowed with him before, to my best recollection but it would be nice to row with him again because he not only rowed 18,000 meters with me, but we kept apace with each other the entire time and he finished the entire half-marathon. So today’s rowing session, in contrast to yesterday’s, was a finished symphony. Good company.
Happy rowing to you.
Today’s main rowing session was 6,344 meters out of a total of 21,126 meters. The 6,344 meters was for the Indoor Rowers League’s November 2017 competition. The distance of 6,344 meters was chosen in honor of the experience, book and website of mountaineer and author Joe Simpson, who had the experience which led to the book whose cover is pictured immediately above this paragraph.
I did five rowing pieces today: A warmup, 30 minutes online with 4 other guys, 10 minutes easy, 6,344 meters at semi-race pace, a warm down and finally a 4,000 meter supplemental distance just for the sake of adding more meters to today’s total.
Happy rowing to you.
The above photo shows the dusty top of our current hot water heater. It looks easier to work with than some of the water heaters I saw in some of the youtube videos watched yesterday. Tomorrow’s pre-rowing warmup might consist of disconnecting and removing the current water heater which has developed a leak, and replacing it with a new one of the same capacity. I say it might be tomorrow’s warmup, because some of the guys who made youtube videos of their work to remove and replace hot water heaters…. made the remark that they worked up a sweat in the process.
Today’s rowing consisted of 10,000 meters which was done about the same as yesterday with the exception that I used a lower stroke rate for the early few thousand meters and when I reached 7,000 meters I went from 185 Watts to a moderate sprint of around 230-250 Watts briefly, so as to quickly get the heart rate up to the goal of 158 BPM. Once HR topped 158, I immediately slowed to a tapering warm down for the remaining approximately 3,700 meters.
Happy rowing to you.
Today I didn’t take any fish oil supplement, on the suspicion that it was related to the occasional arrhythmia and that correlation was reinforced when there was no arrhythmia today. So I decided to stop taking fish oil and switch to a plant-based substitute instead. Walnuts and chia seeds are a couple sources of the necessary Omega-3 oils.
But as today’s title indicates, the water heater didn’t work as well as my heart because it (water heater) started leaking.
So I got a replacement water heater from Home Depot. I saved the $79 I was told that its delivery would cost if the Home Depot contracted installer delivered it, by taking it home and delivering it myself. I asked the Home Depot employee if I could also save some money on the installation by disposing of the old water heater myself instead of having the installer haul it away. He said that when I talked with the Home Depot contractor about the installation, the amount it would cost to haul away the old one would be mentioned and could be negotiated.
While I was talking with the Home Depot employee about the water heater installation, another customer overheard me asking about the Home Depot installation contractors and he decided to chime in to the conversation by saying “I’m 80 years old and I’ve NEVER had a good experience with contractors! All I’ve ever gotten from contractors is s**t, s**t, s**t! I’ve never met a contractor who was any good or gave me anything but s**t!”
I didn’t know if he was talking about contractors in general or Home Depot contractors in particular, so I just replied by telling him that I was an optimist and I hoped to meet a good one. He just looked at me without saying anything further.
After getting home, I talked with a representative of the Home Depot contractor (Delta Mechanical) that does installation and I was told that it would cost $787.91 to install the water heater, including delivery of new one and disposal of old one.
I told him I’d already delivered the new one myself, so I could save the $79 delivery fee and said that I could also haul away the old one myself. Then I asked how much both of those done-it-myself tasks would reduce the installation cost.
He replied that delivery and disposal were “free” and the cost to install it would be the same price of $787.91!! There was no negotiation. They were going to charge me for all the work, even if they didn’t have to do it all!
That contractor-quoted price to remove and replace a water heater was far too expensive for something that would take from 30 minutes to an hour, so I decided against having the Home Depot contractors do the work.
If I’d known the phone number of that 80 year-old man in Home Depot who used the rather profane language about contractors, I would have called him next and told him I was now inclined to agree with his opinion and his choice of adjectives.
But I didn’t know his phone number, so I thought about calling other plumbers. Before I could call anyone else, I had an idea to look on YouTube. So I navigated the internet to YouTube and made a pleasant discovery. It was well worth looking.
There happen to be a multitude of videos on the subject of removal & replacement of water heaters. After watching a few of those videos, the decision was made to DIY. The videos were made by many different guys, ranging from experienced professional plumbers, to professional handymen and ordinary Do-It-Yourselfers, to even people who were doing it for the first time ever.
Today’s rowing was 10K. I started out the same as yesterday but starting with the third 2,000 meters of the session, I took a slightly less rapid approach to increasing power than yesterday’s plan.
I started at 105 Watts for the first 2,000 meters, just like yesterday. Then, 145 Watts for the next 2,000 meters, which was also the same as yesterday. But at the start of the 3rd 2K, (during which yesterday’s arrhythmia had happened, I only increased the power by an additional 20 Watts instead of 40 Watts, raising the effort to 165 Watts and stayed there for 1,000 meters until increasing another 20 Watts, to 185 Watts. Everything worked smoothly without even a hiccup from the heart up to that point, so after finishing the third 2K at 185 Watts, I increased the power by another 20 Watts, to 205 Watts.
Heart rate finally eased up to the target of 158 BPM after I’d rowed a total of about 7,000 meters. For the remaining distance, I rowed easy to warm down.
Happy rowing to you.
Supposedly, the heart has its own brain or perhaps “brain”. If the heart has a brain, I don’t know how to talk with it. It’s probably just as well, because we might get into an argument and make things worse.
Today’s indoor rowing plan was originally to do 10,000 meters. That part was done. But the plan was also to raise the overall effort level a bit, without exceeding zone 2 of the 5 heart rate zones mentioned yesterday. Specifically, I was going to row the first 2K at about 105 Watts, the second 2K at about 145 Watts, the third 2K at about 185 Watts and the fourth 2K at 225 Watts or until heart rate reached the magic number of 158 BPM which is the top end of my personal heart rate zone 2 of 5. After reaching 158, I was going to do a gradually tapering warm down for the remaining distance of the 10K.
But I just barely got into the third 2K, at somewhere between 145 Watts and 185 Watts, when the allegedly brainy heart started beating to a different drummer, getting irregular and going too fast too soon. I tried adjusting the effort level to bring it back to where it should be based on recent sessions, but it just went faster and reached 158 when I was rowing easy.
So, when there were about 3,000 meters remaining, I got off the rowing machine, got a drink of water, walked around a bit and basically didn’t do any rowing for about 15 minutes. It seemed to return to normal, so I finished the last 3,000 meters at a very easy pace, so as to not stir it up any more.
Will try another 10K tomorrow.
Happy rowing and heart co-habitation to you.
Today’s indoor rowing was a modification of yesterday’s. The distance was still 10,000 meters. The approach was to start at about 85 watts for the first 1,000 meters and increase the power by about 20 watts each subsequent 1,000 meters until heart rate reached 158, then shift to warming down for the remaining distance. The same, but different.
The same but different happy rowing to you.