Today’s indoor rowing was like yesterday’s, only better because unlike yesterday, today the horse was calm.
It consisted of three 5K sessions which were recorded and uploaded to YouTube as screen recordings.
They can be found on YouTube at the following links: “Indoor Rowing 5K 1st of 3 on 0121018“, “Indoor Rowing 5K 2nd of 3 on 01212018” and “Indoor Rowing 5K 3rd of 3 on 01212018“.
Happy and peaceful rowing to you.
Sometimes I think of my heart as being like a horse. Having a mind of its own and relatively simple minded, but it wants to get along with me as well as it can.
Today the horse was wild and crazy or agitated. A possible reason for its agitated behavior might be because of a chemical unbalance due to having taken a dose of a supplement called “NOS”.
The bottle was a gift to me, years ago, and is supposed to help produce a natural and helpful amount of Nitric Oxide. I haven’t taken any for quite a while and had forgotten about it until I spotted it on a shelf today and decided to take a dose to see if it would help me to row faster while not seeming to work any harder.
After taking the NOS, heart rate went crazy irregular and its rate went way too high. It hadn’t bothered me that way before. I looked at the expiration date on the bottle and it was sometime in 2010. Did it change into something else, in the years since 2010?
I couldn’t undo the fact that I’d swallowed them about 45 minutes earlier, so I tried some rowing as therapy to calm the horse.
Three short sessions had more appeal than one longer session so I rowed three 5Ks. The first 5000 meters didn’t seem to help (see the graphs or watch the video for proof that it was still agitated during the first 5K). Neither did the second one (see the graphs or watch the video for proof that it was still agitated during the second 5K).
But somewhere early in the third 5K – after about 1200 meters- the horse finally calmed down and returned to its normal regular and steady behavior with a normal BPM. It still seemed to be a bit agitated, because it seemed to speed up a bit too quickly when I would increase the effort level and when I GREATLY decreased effort level, it didn’t seem to slow as much as it normally would, but it felt quiet and calm in my chest instead of feeling “fluttery” and “agitated” like it had felt before and so it was almost “perfect” and resulted in a perfect line graph with no vertical lines disrupting it.
Third time was the charm, for calming the horse.
In the graphs below which show vertical lines in the heart rate graph, those vertical lines happened each time heart rate was too irregular for a reading to be calculated and displayed. You can clearly see that the vertical lines disappeared from the heart rate graphs during the last 3800 meters of the third 5K session.
The three 5K sessions were recorded and uploaded to YouTube as screen recordings and will be active either late tonight or early tomorrow at these links: “Indoor Rowing 5K 1 of 3“, “Indoor rowing 5K 2 of 3” and “Indoor Rowing 5K 3 of 3“.
Happy rowing to you and your calm horse.
Today’s indoor rowing started out with an arbitrary goal of rowing until I’d burned 1,000 calories. But by the time about 3/4 of the goal was reached, I decided to quit rowing for the day.
Today’s rowing session was set up as a half marathon, but with the intention of stopping early (after 1,000 calories, as mentioned above).
Happy rowing to you.
Today’s indoor rowing was a half marathon with 1 minute intervals every 5 minutes. It was interrupted with a phone call and hampered by lack of enthusiasm or one of its near relatives.
But it was done. And it was ethereal. 🙂
And it was even uploaded to YouTube as a screen recording called “Indoor Rowing Half Marathon at 114 Watts or 2min28sec/500 meters” though the link probably won’t be active until sometime early tomorrow due to the slow upload rate.
Happy rowing to you.
Today’s indoor rowing was 14K with intervals, interruptions, daydreaming and RowPro software glitches.
The interval setup was 14×200 meters with active rest of 800 meters after each interval. Before the 14K session began, there was 750 meters of warm up. After the 14K session started, there were several interruptions where I had to either row one-handed or stop, so I could respond to text messages. Two or three times during the session, RowPro partially froze with the area that displayed effort as either Watts, Calories per hour, pace etc remaining unchanged for a while. The rest of the software seemed to continue to function. Once, when it was time to row the 9th interval, I was daydreaming and totally didn’t notice it until it was too late.
Other than that, everything went okay. Especially the heart – it remained 99% regular and was in the right BPM range for all the variations in effort.
Happy rowing to you.
Today’s indoor rowing session was another for which the main goal was to burn a lot of calories for a Concept 2 challenge. The particular challenge is in a group of challenges, the entire set of which is called “January Revolutions.” A person can only choose to work toward ONE of the challenges among the all the choices. My choice was The Big Burn, whose goal is to burn at least 20,000 calories while rowing during January 2018.
Yesterday and the day before, the distance rowed was a standard half marathon (21097 meters) each day. That worked well so I did something similar today and set up a RowPro custom session with 17 intervals of 30 seconds each, following each interval followed by 1,241 meters of rest.
However, my heart was not cooperating. It seems logical that if a heart is not cooperating, it must be doing some antonym of the word “cooperating.” The word which seems most appropriate is “attacking”. Therefore today’s title: “Rowing Through A Heart Attack”
I don’t blame my heart because I think the catalyst for its non-cooperation was a can of sardines because the last time I had a can of sardines, I also experienced very noticeable heart irregularities later that same day. It seems to be something to do with fish oil and I noted the correlation in this blog in the blog post written on November 18, 2017, when I mentioned returning fish oil to the store.
So today was a spontaneous, though not deliberately planned experiment to see if the same thing would happen after eating sardines. It was similar, but worse.
I had a can of sardines for lunch, along with some corn chips. (Fish and chips.) Everything seemed okay until about 2,856 meters into today’s rowing session, when my heart rate increased even though pace had decreased. Heart rate remained high and irregular, with the heart rate display appearing and disappearing throughout the remainder of the rowing session. I took several breaks and drank an extra amount of water, in hopes of diluting the fish oil effect, but the abnormal behavior remained throughout the session.
Unlike Chris George (see photo at top of this blog post) I did not “power” through it. Maybe I should have? Instead, I took it very easy and barely increased the effort during the half minute intervals. I varied the pace a bit, trying to fish for the right amount of effort but the heart didn’t cooperate at any of the effort levels I tried.
Hopefully, it will return to normal by tomorrow.
Heartfelt hopes and wishes for you to have happy rowing.
Since I took five junk-food loaded days off from indoor rowing, I’m still playing catch-up and therefore rowed another half marathon today. It was another 1200+ calories toward the Big Burn challenge which is one of several that Concept 2 has to choose from during this month of January 2018.
The half marathon was done with a target pace of about 2:22 and included 16 intervals of about 30 seconds each.
A recording of the session is called “Indoor Rowing Half Marathon with 16 Intervals” and is in the process of uploading to YouTube. If you click on that link for the video today, it won’t be active yet because it will not be done uploading before I go to bed tonight and probably won’t be “active” until sometime tomorrow (January 16, 2018)
Happy rowing to you.
So I went for five days without any rowing, due to lack of a rowing machine while traveling. And during those five days, all routines were disrupted. Too much sitting. Daily junk food, including 5 large bags of very salty potato chips. Coffee all day, instead of only in the mornings.
Perhaps as a result, my heart started acting weird and getting irregular again, in the last hours of the 5th day.
So today I did a half marathon, for the purpose of helping the heart to flush itself out and return to normal. That’s the working theory, at least. It seemed to work because heart rate was irregular before the HM started and was not regular enough for the heart strap to be able to display it. After rowing for less than 200 meters at a very easy pace, heart rate became regular enough to be measured and displayed, but was about 130, which was way too high for the effort. When its acting normally, it will start out 20 or 30 BPM slower at that effort – somewhere a little above 100. But as I kept rowing, it settled down and acted more and more normally. It’s feeling and acting normal now, after the half marathon.
The HM was done at an easy pace, with intervals starting about every 1,241 meters. The intervals were varied paces and lasted from about 30 seconds to around a minute each. Most of them were about 30 seconds.
The half marathon rowing session is posted to YouTube and is called “Indoor Rowing Recalibrating Heart With A Half Marathon”
Happy half marathon rowing to you.
Today was the first day with any rowing since January 8th. There wasn’t enough time for a normal session, but fifteen minutes was better than nothing.
Today’s rowing session was also recorded and posted to YouTube with the title “Indoor Rowing 15 Minute Quick Session”
I did a few intervals during the 15 minutes, with the last interval starting with 4 minutes remaining in the session, and tapering down all the way to the finish.
Happy and hopefully longer rowing sessions for you.
Yes, today was another day without rowing. My body doesn’t feel the same but it hasn’t killed me, so that’s good.
Happy and plentiful rowing to you.