Patience is a virtue. The part of my mind that likes coffee the most is not patient. As I changed into workout clothes, it tried to strike a bargain to delay the start of the workout for the sake of making a pot of coffee so that coffee would be ready already afterwards.
As if simply making a pot of coffee was all it wanted. After coffee was made, it would want just a little sip, etc., and it would try to arrange for something else with the ultimate objective of avoiding doing any workout whatsoever.
Tabling its suggestion of making a cup of coffee, I sidestepped whatever other suggestions for further delay it had in its subliminal mind.
I was inspired to go directly to the workout this morning because heart rate had been irregular and too high since sometime between 8 and 9 PM last night.
Eating a tiny bit later than usual late-ish evening eating might have had something to do with it. At least that was a speculation that crossed my mind this afternoon when I listened to part of a talk given by a doctor whose specialty includes special attention to the microbiomes in the human body and when he mentioned that they all have their own circadian rhythms.
Not that there couldn’t be other reasons for my heart to have been persistently irregular and too fast since yesterday evening, but that reason sounded as good as any of the other unproved possibilities.
Clinging to the hope that if I changed into workout clothes and “just did it” there would be a repeat of the sudden return to normal as had happened during the rowing workout of September 2nd, I started without further delay. The SkiErg session was first. Two hundred Calories was burned on the SkiErg but heart rate remained too high and fluttery-feeling, irregular from start to finish.
Easy-going, slow skiing was done for most of the SkiErg session with the exception of three tiny increases of pace near the end. But on September 2nd, the heart had remained stubbornly irregular during all the time on the SkiErg also.
So I held out hope that heart behavior would return to normal during the rowing session and set up RowPro for 10,000 meters. As a rowing “companion” and additional motivation I used another monitor to play a YouTube video of a 10,000 meter session I’d rowed in 2018. That session had been done at an average pace of about 2:20/500 meters, which was slower than I wanted to row today. Its name on YouTube is Indoor Rowing 10K constant pace 04302018 .
My rowing goal was to stay ahead of the 10K on the YouTube video by rowing a pace averaging at least 2:15/500 meters. The pace goal was satisfied but heart did not return to normal behavior. Bad heart!
Heart behavior did eventually return to normal rate and regular rhythm but not until after I had breakfast and coffee. Go figure.
Should I have listened to the wily subconscious voice when it tried to delay and divert me? I believe I made the right choice because its delays and other subterfuge would have probably led to doing a workout late in the afternoon, if at all.
Happy rowing to you!