While rowing today, I watched a documentary of the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge, which is a tough rowing race of about 3,000 miles. This is not an image from that race, but it has something in common with what I saw of the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge documentary – stormy ocean.
Today’s rowing started out to be a timed 30 minute session with a target pace of 2:04 or better, for the sake of ranking it among Concept 2 World Rankings for this season.
But the first attempt was interrupted after about 5 minutes.
The second attempt was also interrupted, almost immediately.
For the third start of a 3o minute session, I decided to watch a video instead and take it easy instead of trying for a fast 30 minutes. So I watched a youtube documentary of the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge, which also refers to itself as “The world’s toughest row.” Many competitors had to drop out and many of them capsized at least once and had other problems during the race which lasted for about 6 weeks.
It’s just as well that I didn’t make the third start a hard row for the purpose of ranking … because RowPro kinda crashed. Semi-crashed. The program itself kept running, but for some reason it was unable to save the data. So all I could do was make a manual log entry to Concept 2. Such an entry, if entered among the world rankings, is classified as not verified.
Finish screen for today’s session, at the end of which RowPro announced that it had semi-crashed and was unable to save the session.Total rowing distance today was 7,203 meters.
Yesterday’s breakfast of black coffee, toast and protein drink during a break from yesterday’s 6 hour rowing took more time than today’s 30 minute online session.
Today I slept in. Consequently, I rose a couple hours later than the previous two days. So I decided to skip the 50K session today rather than start it so late in the morning and instead did a 30 minute online session.
After rowing for most of six hours today, the afterglow seemed to closely resemble the feeling one has after doing a day’s worth of manual labor.
The inspiration from the website fatchancerow.org continued today, so I did about the same thing as yesterday – another 50K on the erg. And likewise as yesterday, I took several breaks during those 50,000 meters. The longest break was for making coffee and having a protein drink & toast for breakfast.
The feeling afterward was the same as yesterday. Nothing “extreme” like I would feel after doing a marathon of 42,195 meters at a much faster pace. Instead, the feeling afterward was as though I’d spent a day doing manual labor such as working in a field, chopping firewood for 6 hours, loading or unloading a boxcar with sacks of cement, etc. A feeling of oxymoronic pleasant soreness.
Diane would perhaps simply call it “moronic,” since she has expressed her opinion that she thinks I’m crazy, to want to row for that many hours in a day. But she only expressed that opinion regarding my craziness when I told her that ideally, someday, I’d like to try rowing on the erg for 18 hours in one day, like Meredith and Sami did each and every day for 45 days.
Diane thinks I’m crazy, to want to try rowing 18 hours a day for even one day.
I don’t think one day of that is crazy, but everyone is entitled to their opinion.
I couldn’t find an appropriate image of Fat Chance Row to use, but did find this inspiring painting of two people riding a boat in a stormy sea.
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.
A website well worth visiting. The above is a screen shot of part of their home page. They rowed about 18 hours a day for 45 days and tell about it on their website.
Today’s rowing session was about an hour. The goal was to do the preset distance of 13,500 meters and to keep heart rate in the painted-on-screen target zone … except when taking a break. It was primarily a do-the-distance session.
While rowing, I watched a few youtube videos featuring interviews with one or the other of the two people pictured above. Their website is called fatchancerow.org and it focuses on their amazing journey, unsupported, rowing as a team across 2,750 miles of Pacific Ocean.
Each of them spent about 18 hours daily rowing. They each had 6 hours off to sleep, eat, etc. They tell about it on their website and in interviews they each did which are featured on youtube.
What I did today was about 1/18th of what each of them did during their trip.
What Meredith and Sami (listed in alphabetical order) did was inspiring… especially considering that they left their divorce papers, which they took along in a water-proof bag just in case, untouched during and since the trip.
I wonder what it would be like…. to row on the Concept 2 for 18 hours for just one single day? The wheels of thought are turning…
