After watching more interviews of Meredith and Sami (the married couple mentioned yesterday who have the website fatchancerow.org ) I got a little inspired by what Sami said about how much time they each spent rowing daily and how many calories the daily rowing required.
He said that the effort expended by each of them in rowing every day for about 18 hours was the equivalent to the energy expended to run two marathons daily. He expanded on it to say that his calorie requirement daily for the 45 days of rowing was about 7,000 calories.
That got me to thinking about things like how rowing marathons in the past which burned 3,000+ calories in a little over 3 hours. Two of them at the same effort as one of those would be 6+ hours for a total of more than 6,000 and less than 7,000 calories.
But… I could row at a much slower pace than those 3+ hour marathons, to burn 7,000 calories in 18 hours.
So today I pre-set RowPro for the maximum distance it would allow for one continuous set distance: 50,000 meters. (I wanted to set it for 100,000 meters, but RowPro’s programmers seem to believe that nobody should do more than 50K in one session on the erg.) The goal was totally controlled by me and it was to do that 50K at an easy pace, no matter how slow and to get off the erg, walk around and take breaks whenever the fancy struck me.
50,000 meters is about 8K more than a marathon. I wanted to see what it felt like and consider the possibility of perhaps sometime in the not too distant future trying the experience of rowing on the Concept 2 erg for 18 hours during a 24 hour period as a way to get a tiny, tiny effort-focused sample of some of the experience Meredith and Sami had every day for 45 days.
I felt okay afterward. No pains today like there have been when I’ve done a marathon with an effort that would elevate heart rate. But even though it was a longer distance than a marathon, because I did it at such an easy pace, it burned about 500 to 700 calories less than when I’ve done a marathon at a pace that was “pushing it”.
The calories per hour rate for today’s 50K amounted to about 383 calories/hour. If that average pace was done for 18 hours, it would total up to about 6900 calories. So… today’s 50K with its breaks included was done at about the effort needed to row the Concept 2 and burn 7,000 calories in 18 hours. It’s something to think about and I may be crazy enough to try it sometime.
Happy trails.