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.
