Today’s indoor rowing was 10K that had been scheduled online, about an hour in advance of start time. I was hoping for company, because I didn’t feel like rowing. Nobody joined, so I rowed in a lackadaisical manner, while watching a couple videos.
There was no goal or HR target, except to finish the 10K, which was done, hooray.
Happy and more inspired rowing to you.
Today’s indoor rowing session was 30 minutes done online with a guy who was located in Thailand. Just before the session started, he typed “Row for fun :)”. A third guy, who was located in Ireland, had signed up but he didn’t show so it was just the two of us to share the fun.
My goal was to aim for a heart rate target of about 130, while watching a video documentary. So if the graph of my effort looks a bit unfocused, you are right because I was trying to read all the captions on the documentary.
Happy and fun rowing to you.
Today’s indoor rowing was all done online in the virtual company of other rowers. With the exception of the warmup session which was done online but alone.
The other rowers were located around the world, from the US and across the Atlantic ocean in Europe, all the way to the one of the most distant places in the world from the US, in New Zealand.
Because there were so many rowing sessions done today, I’m only going to include a summary listing of all of them, followed by a screenshot of the Concept 2 online logbook graph for each of them.
There were only two goals for today’s rowing: to log at least 10,000 meters and to keep heart rate at or below about 130 BPM. The first goal was accomplished 100% and the second goal was accomplished about 99%.
Happy rowing and socializing to you.
Yesterday evening, I took Zyrtec with dinner. Not because I’ve been having any allergies, but because it seems to enhance staying asleep. I’d had several days in a row of waking up too early and had been accumulating excess sleep debt.
The Zyrtec worked and instead of sleeping from 4 to 6 hours, I slept almost 10 hours. All caught up on sleep, with some to spare. But I felt sluggish and slow, as an after-effect of Zyrtec, which I rarely take and therefore am not used to.
Today’s indoor rowing session was 30 minutes done online with a few other guys. My goal was the same as for the past few days: to adjust the effort throughout the session, so as to keep heart rate near the target heart rate of 130. If you read the recent blog post about choosing that HR target, you know that I used a modification of Dr. Philip Maffetone’s “The 180 Formula,” to arrive at the aerobic target of 130. Upper boundary is 140 and lower boundary is probably around 114 to 120.
When it came time to row, it seemed that I had to row with greater effort at a significantly faster pace, to raise heart rate to the 130 BPM target zone. Afterwards, I used the RowPro 5 for the Mac analysis feature, to compare today’s 30 minutes to yesterday’s. The results of the analysis are the last two screenshots below.
Happy rowing to you, at whatever heart rate.
Today’s main indoor rowing was a 30 minute online session done with a target heart rate. The target was the same as it had been in the 30 minute session on September 29th. But the average pace was faster by -1.4 seconds/500 meters. The session burned 8 calories more than Sept 29th to go at that faster pace. The increase in power was +3.2 watts.
I guess that’s good improvement. But since it’s from one day to the next and I’m no expert, it might not even be statistically significant. Therefore, I will “ask” RowPro. RowPro has a feature which can be used to compare two rowing sessions that are similar (either both the same distance or time duration.)
Okay, here’s what RowPro says and it doesn’t seem much more enlightening that what is in the above two paragraphs. But it is confirmation that there was improvement since two days ago.
But even if it isn’t especially enlightening, at least you saw a demonstration, immediately above this paragraph, of the kind of results you can expect when RowPro 5 for the Mac compares two similar sessions.
Happy rowing and pleasant surprises in session comparisons, 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.
Today’s indoor rowing goal was to simply act upon the resolution to do more than 10K. First, there was a 10 minute warmup, followed by 30 minutes online with two others and finished with a 4K warm down.
All totaled, the distance rowed amounted to around 12K.
Happy accomplishment of rowing resolutions to you.
Today’s indoor rowing consisted of three online sessions of 30 minutes each, followed by a warm down. There was only one warm down session and it was after the third of the three 30 minute sessions. That 3rd of 3 was the only one that needed a warm down. The first two 30 minute sessions were done at a very easy pace.
Today’s title was chosen after I noticed a comment made in the online rowing chat room, by one of the other rowers. I didn’t immediately see the comment, because as soon as the session was over, I typed the words “gotta warm down immediately, bye all”, clicked “Send”, snapped a screenshot and clicked the “Finish” button to exit. I know from recent experience that when I get the heart rate up very much with a sprint of any sort, I have to keep rowing in an immediate warm down or the heart will get wacky and either start beating too fast or go into skipping mode.
So I warmed down immediately and everything has been fine with the ticker.
But later, when I looked at the screenshot that was snapped just before I clicked the Finish button to exit the online session, I noticed that another rower had noticed how I’d sprinted a bit, near the finish. His words, “monster finish john” made me feel good, so I will try to remember to thank him for it the next time we’re online in the same session.
I started the final sprint when I noticed that the countdown screen showed around “40” and my brain had forgotten that the countdown for this session was time, not meters. So I increased the pace to around 1:45 and I looked, to watch as the meters counted down to 0 but … it only counted down to something in the 30s. The rational part of my mind was off in space somewhere and the part of brain connected to what I was seeing was just in a sort of automatic mode. That same part of my brain was mildly surprised that it hadn’t counted down to zero yet and I pulled harder, increasing the pace to about 1:40 and holding it at 1:40 while staring at the countdown, to see it go to zero. It should have decreased by about 10 per stroke, but it was only decreasing by about 2 per stroke. Then the rational part of my mind came back to join the audience looking out through my eyes at the monitor and I remembered that it was a timed session, not a distance session and that what I was looking at was seconds, not meters counting down.
So I thought… I don’t want to keep pulling at 1:40 for another twenty seconds, and eased back to a warm down effort level for the last few seconds.
You can see a picture of it in the session graph.
This blog post is categorized as both boring and fun, because the easy 30 minute sessions were boring but the hard 30 minutes was fun (and mentally absorbing). It is also categorized as both easy and hard, because of those same different effort levels.
Happy, easy/hard and boring/fun rowing to you.
Today’s rowing should have been interesting and requiring a degree of mental focus, but instead it was boring and got almost no mental focus. It was a 10,000 meter distance that was scheduled online almost 3 hours before start time. But nobody who rows online noticed it or was able to join it at the scheduled time.
So I rowed it alone. Rowing alone doesn’t have to be boring, but other things on my mind, plus the subject matter of a documentary I chose to view while rowing… all seemed to have a summary effect of suppressing enjoyment of the rowing.
On the positive side, the distance was accomplished and heart rate was elevated slightly for almost an hour, which is a health benefit.
Happy, interesting rowing to you.