Today’s session almost didn’t happen. The training plan called for a “Hard Distance” of at least 5K today. I set the alarm clock to wake me in time for a moderately early morning wake-up. But sleep had been cut short the night before and I was up late with a rare long session of happy long-distance chatter, so I didn’t get to bed until a couple hours after normal bedtime.
When the alarm went off this morning, I reached out from under the blankets, turned it off and went back to sleep. It was 10 a.m. before I finally roused out of bed. Everything was discombobulated by the late morning start.
So for most of the day, I thought I’d either skip rowing or do an extra day’s worth of recovery rowing. But by late afternoon, everything seemed more or less recombobulated, so I decided to do the shortest hard distance allowed in the training plan, a 5K.
The target pace for the 5K was 1:56.1, which would match the average pace of the next guy ahead of me in the 5K rankings. The plan was to row at 1:56.1 until the last 500 meters and then pick up the pace enough to move up one spot in the 5K rankings.
But when I set up the 5K in RowPro 5 for the Mac (Beta), I discovered that pace boats can only be programmed for paces in whole numbers of seconds. I wanted a pace boat to row against, so I set up a pace boat with its pace to be 1:56 and ended up rowing the first 4,500 meters a little faster than the initial plan of 1:56.1.
The first 2,000 to 3,000 meters felt good and I had to restrain myself from rowing faster than 1:56. The pace boat helped with the restraint. After about 3,000 meters I began to feel a wee little bit of mental resistance, as though part of my mind was starting to say, “hey! this is getting a bit hard, don’t you think? You wanna call it off, maybe, and try again another day?”
But it was just a whisper-y voice, which I gently warned away from the main area of the mind, while focusing on things like how low the distance would count down to by the time the song currently playing ended and the next song began. I guessed that by that time, the distance would count down to between 1,100 and 1,200 meters. I focused on that.
I play the same music playlist for every hard rowing session and that one particular song is played many times in the playlist and is slightly less than 4 minutes long, so I had a pretty good idea of how far I could row at any given pace for its duration. The very last note ended and the next song began as the distance counted down from 1,201 to 1,200 meters. Close enough.
The last 1,200 meters took less time than the next song, because I was able to increase the pace a bit. I didn’t push too hard and avoided fading before the end. The result was a new SB and a one-place move up in the 5K rankings.
Before the 5K, there was a 15 minute warm up and another 15 minutes afterwards for warming down.
Happy trails to you.