Ethereal Rowing

There was a baseball game scheduled at the time I wanted to row today, so I did a half marathon of rowing and watched the game instead of doing less rowing and running afterward.

And it was just as well that I skipped the running, because we had extended rainfall to the accompaniment of generous amounts of thunder.  There was a lot more rain today than yesterday and I would have been soaking wet.  Which would have been okay except for the part involving getting the running shoes soaking wet.

The half marathon was done at an easy pace.

Happy trails.

Today after rowing I went running.  As soon as I stepped out the front door the sky started to thunder and there were a few sprinkles of rain.

I started running and the sprinkles became more frequent,  with a bit more thunder.  It turned into a very light rain, enough to completely wet the surface of the street. But it was a bluff and the rain and thunder stopped.

For the few minutes it lasted, it was very nice.

Today’s rowing was an easy 9,500 meters.

Happy trails.

Today was a day without rowing. Or jogging.

Happy trails.

Diane said that monsoons are forecast to start in a week or less. So I decided to supplement today’s rowing with a half hour run, before the current dry heat is replaced with clouds and rain.

The rowing was done first and it served as a good warmup before going jogging.

Happy trails.

Today is the first day of summer but there was no special rowing event as there was yesterday for summer solstice. The only indoor rowing challenge Concept2 has scheduled for summer is one in August called The Dog Days of Summer.  Maybe I’ll find a doggy picture for the top of the blog post on that day.  But until then, I’ll continue featuring a horsey picture at the top, because Diane likes horses so much that her favorite thing to watch is a TV series that has horses in every episode.

Today’s rowing session was a very easy-does-it 9,500 meter piece.

Happy trails.

 

Today is the longest day of the year and Concept2.com had a rowing challenge for this day, called the Solstice Challenge.

So that was the reason for choosing 21,000 meters for today’s rowing session.

Happy trails.

Today’s rowing session was 9500 meters with eyes shut while maintaining a constant, easy, good-feeling effort level.

Time can seem to drag if rowing at an easy, non-racing pace and watching the distance count down to zero.  But time seems to fly by if I shut my eyes and count strokes until I reach the total of what it should be for 1,000 meters, then open my eyes to check progress, then do the same thing for the next 1,000 meters.

Happy trails.

Before deciding what to do in the way of rowing today, I looked on the Oarbits app and saw a scheduled session named “40 min easy,” with the description that it would be at 75% HR max.

Everyone’s HR max is different and so everyone’s 75% is also different.  The “Easy” part is what I liked because I wasn’t ready yet for another 10K race.  I wasn’t going to pay  attention to keeping HR at 75% HR max, which would be around 143.  I was just going to do the EASY part. So I joined the digital river session.

I started out very easy for about the first half until I felt warmed up and then picked up the pace a little bit. As you can see from the results below, each person’s definition of an easy 40 minute row was different:

Averaging heart rate for each of the 20 splits gives an average of about 126 bpm which is lower than my 75% HR max.  But it felt 100% easy.

Here’s the session report for today:

Happy trails.

 

Today’s session was 12K easy, while watching an episode of Star Trek.

Happy Trails.

Today’s session was 15,000 meters at very easy effort level. Maintaining aerobic base, burning calories…

Happy trails.