Ethereal Rowing

Today was the designated Pete Plan rest day.  I originally intended to fully comply and do no rowing whatsoever. But I noticed two online sessions scheduled, each only 10 minutes’ duration.  The person who scheduled them was an unfamiliar name, Annabel F.

Nobody else had joined yet.  So I decided to join those sessions and keep her company rather than leave her the lonely possibility of rowing solo, which might cause her to change her mind, cancel the sessions and miss out having the online RowPro experience.

Between the time I joined and  scheduled start time, others joined.  Two more women and three more guys. They were all in Europe, except for one besides me who was in the US.  So Annabel had more than enough company and I modified my decision to keep her company by rowing the same pace and instead decided I’d only match her pace if she was in very last place by a wide margin and otherwise I would row very slow and make sure that I was in last place by a wide margin behind everyone else. This is a rest day, after all and technically I wasn’t supposed to do any rowing whatsoever.

Annabel was indeed new, to not only online rowing but also to indoor rowing itself.  She said she’d only been rowing for a few months.

What happened in both 10 minute sessions was that another of the three women in the session kept pace with the newbie and I watched a documentary film and made sure nobody other than me finished in last place.  Did the same thing in the following session.

The only glitch while rowing was that during the first session HR went irregular and PM3 HR display was blank for the first 8 splits.  It shows as 85 for those first 8 splits on the session report, but I think that’s because the HR logging algorithm in RowPro 5 for the Mac just uses any valid HR it manages to pick up and then until it gets the next valid HR it keeps it as the “end HR” for each split, no matter how much time has passed between the two HR readings.

During the 9th split of the first 10 minutes the PM3 finally stopped being blank and displayed HR but it was way too high, at around 130 BPM.  It gradually settled down, split by split, until it was finally acting normally again in the 18th of 30 splits for that first 10 minutes.

During the second 10 minute piece, HR was totally normal.  The glitch may have been related to drinking several cups of strong, black coffee just before rowing.  It is nothing unusual because I’ve seen that happen once in a while for a long time.  More than a decade.  And I’ve noticed coffee is one of the things that can trigger it. But I like coffee and… silly as it may sound … it just doesn’t seem like real coffee without caffeine.

Happy trails to you…

Today’s Pete Plan rowing was a recovery session after yesterday’s hard distance. It was 15,000 meters done offline.  No warmup.  Easy music playing.  First priority was a HR zone target of 60% to 75% HRmax.  Second priority was to try for a rating of 22.  There was no target pace… I wasn’t going to try to control the pace today but hoped it would be within the range of no faster than 2:11 and no slower than 2:25.  Drag factor 135.  Straps were not tightened at all.  No warm down.

Looking at the pace graph afterwards, it is a lot less volatile than for the same session two days ago.  Might be in large part because today I wore a sweatband and moved the towel out of reach so I wouldn’t be tempted to take one hand off the handle while reaching for a towel and mopping sweat.

Happy trails to you.

Today was Pete Plan day for hard distance. The chosen distance was 6K.  Before making the choice I looked at ranked sessions and 6K was one of the softer ones.  The one in this season’s rankings was a pace of 2:01.7, which seemed way too wide a spread from the recent 5K pace of 1:56 point something. So I chose 6K and a target pace of 1:59.

Just like with the recent 5K, HR was below LTHR the entire distance so obviously I was a lazybones. But there’s no prize for embracing pain. The most recent time I determined my LTHR was April of this year and the method of measuring it is mentioned in this-> blog post <- which is at the previous location of this blog. LTHR is one of the things that is printed on a paper stuck to the bottom of the PM3, as you can see in the photo below.

Other stuff:  There was a 2500m warmup, drag factor was 135 and there was a 2500m warm down. I wore a sweatband so wouldn’t need to reach for the towel on nearby chair but absentmindedly reached for it 4 or 5 times anyway during the last half, when I could feel sweat tickling down through my beard. Music during warm up & warm down:  Of Monsters and Men, shuffled, albums “Beneath The Skin” and “My Head Is An Animal”. The words don’t make sense, like most verses written for the sake of music, but I like the voices and music for slow and/or unfocused rowing.  Icelandic. Music during the 6K: a special, custom playlist of female vocalists-with-no-name singing fast-rhythm versions of various songs.

Happy trails to you.

Today’s plan was to do the first 3 intervals at the pace of my season best 10K, 2:01.7 and then do the last one a lot faster. DF was 135.  No warmup.  Five minutes plus another 2,500 meters warm down.

The resulting average pace for all four 2Ks was 1:59.5 and that will be the target pace for the first three intervals in this session, next cycle.

Happy trails to you.

Today’s session was scheduled online, more than two hours in advance, but nobody else joined this time. It was a steady-state 15K recovery session.  The target pace was supposed to be 2:11 with a target rating of 22.  But I forgot about the targets until somewhere between 500 and 1,000 meters.

I adjusted the rating to focus on 22 SPM but something was not cooperating.  I had a hard time keeping the rating at 22 and an even harder time keeping the pace at 2:11.  So for more than the first half of the 15K, I just struggled and wrestled with keeping the rating as near as possible to 22 and let the pace be what it would be.  I think the longest string of strokes which were each 22 was eight, before the rating varied above or below 22.

Drag factor was 123 – I usually had been keeping it at about 135, so maybe that was part of the problem.

Happy trails to you.

Today’s Pete Plan rowing session was a speed pyramid.  The first 4 intervals up through the 1,000 meter were done with a pace target of 1:56.5.  The following 750m, 500m and final 250m were each done at a faster pace than the previous interval.  The rest after each interval was an amount of time equal to 90 seconds times the interval distance’s multiple of 250.

The average pace for all 7 intervals was 1:54.6 and that will be used as the pace target for the first 4 of these intervals in three weeks, when this speed pyramid is repeated.

Happy trails to you.

Today was supposed to be a Pete Plan scheduled day of rest from rowing.  So I rested.  But I also logged some rowing meters, so as to make one last day’s contribution to the team’s results for this year’s Fall Team Challenge.

I refrained from rowing by exercising extreme restraint on the C2.

It takes a LOT MORE TIME to row any particular number of meters if a person is resting, than if the person is not resting.

The session was set up as 15K, with a target heart rate just 20 to 30 BPM above resting heart rate.  The DF was set as low as it would go, which turned out to be 63. I watched a movie and the rowing meters were accomplished by holding the handle on the C2 while moving back and forth sort of absent-mindedly on the rail.

This did not count as a workout, since my heart would have had a higher rate if I’d been strolling with Diane in the park. It was about the same rate as if I’d been strolling alone in the park.  (My heart beats faster if I stroll with Diane, because of the effect she has on me.)

Happy trails to you.

Today’s Pete Plan session was done online in the company of two other rowers, located in Denmark and Germany.

The plan for today was  a steady distance of from 8 to 15K.  I chose 15.

Rating limits were to be from 22 to 25. I aimed for 22.

DF is always rower’s choice. Today it was 135.

The pace was supposed to be at least 10 seconds slower than endurance interval sessions and so I targeted a pace of 2:11.

Pete Plan doesn’t say anything about HR zone, but I targeted HR anywhere between at least 60% to no more than 75% HRmax. The highest it reached was 73%.

Happy trails to you.

Today’s rowing session in the Pete Plan was supposed to be any distance of at least 5K or more done at a “hard” effort level.  The only guidelines I’ve found that Pete provides for the “hard distance” are guidelines which give you a lot of room for interpretation, which makes sense because everyone is different and the Pete Plan is not a personalized plan.

Pete’s guidelines for hard distance are “Hard distance doesn’t have to mean flat out every week, just that you can go faster than the steady days and over the 25spm limit.” If you visit that link, you’ll find those words about 1/3 from the top of the web page, under the paragraph with the subtitle of “Distance / endurance work:”

So… today’s choice of what to do was a 5K.  The target pace I chose was 1:57.6/500m.  The reason I chose that target pace is because I recently did a 5K at that pace and it was comfortable without getting into any painful exertion, so I thought it should be perfectly ok to target that pace again and then sprint a little faster during the last few hundred meters.  It worked out well and was pleasantly invigorating.

If anyone who is experienced in serious, competitive rowing notices and bristles at or objects to the words “comfortable”  and “pleasant(ly)” in this context, I should explain that I’ve never reached for the truly competitive experience of “embracing the pain.”  I’ll leave that to those who are trying to squeeze every last drop out of the tank during world championship races etc and be content to enjoy watching them race, when possible and trying to imagine what they are putting themselves through.

There was a 2K warm up finished about 5 minutes before the 5K and a 3K warm down, for a total of 10K today.

What else?  Oh yes – DF was 135.

Happy trails to you.