Ethereal Rowing – Page 28

Persistence Pays Off

Or was it the salad?

First impression from today’s first few minutes on the SkiErg were slight amazement. Heart rate remained low, even though I was starting out faster than the two previous sessions (Sept 2nd and Sept 4th) when heart rate was irregular and also insisted on being way too high for the pace / effort level.

Not sure if I should believe that it would continue normally, I watched it closely with every stroke. The heart can be tricky and deceptive, you know. But it continued to behave well on the SkiErg. In fact, it behaved very well and its average rate was less than 100 BPM during the first 100 Calories. During the second 100 Calories I added 5 intervals of 10 Calories each and heart behavior remained very good. The overall effort for today’s SkiErg session was RPE Level 2.

Once the SkiErg session was over, I wondered if the heart’s good behavior would continue through the rowing session. RowPro was set to 10,000 meters and I decided to row a bit faster than either of the previous two 10K rowing sessions to put the heart to a little test.

The results were about as good as I could have hoped for. Heart rate disappeared momentarily, nine times during the session. But I didn’t feel any fluttery feeling of irregular heart beat. The rowing session was done at RPE Level 4. For a bit more more motivation during the rowing session, I played the screen recording of a 10K session done in July 2018. It had been done at a pace of 2:17.5 and I prodded myself to stay ahead of it. It’s link is Indoor Rowing 10K 07062018 .

Eager to attribute today’s heart behavior to some cause, however illogical that is, I first decided that today’s good heart behavior was due to persisting in doing workouts during the previous sessions, even though the heart had acted cantankerously irregular and its rate was much too high during those two sessions.

But then I remembered something said by the doctor who had talked about microbiomes and the diet and how some of our most beneficial microbiomes thrive on an abundance of fiber in our food. They actually digest it and get nourishment for their little microbiome bodies from fiber in our food.

So it’s equally if not more likely that today’s good heart behavior is attributable largely to the gigantic salad which was the main course for last night’s dinner. To paraphrase something the doctor said about how fruits and vegetables are so amazingly good for us: It’s almost as if they are designed to be beneficial to us.

Heart strangeness was notable for its absence.

Finish screen for today’s 10K rowing session.

RowPro report for today’s 10K rowing session.

RowPro graphs for today’s 10K rowing session.

Concept 2 online logbook chart for today’s 10K rowing session.

Happy rowing to you!

Coffee Lover Sidestepped

Patience is a virtue. The part of my mind that likes coffee the most is not patient. As I changed into workout clothes, it tried to strike a bargain to delay the start of the workout for the sake of making a pot of coffee so that coffee would be ready already afterwards.

As if simply making a pot of coffee was all it wanted. After coffee was made, it would want just a little sip, etc., and it would try to arrange for something else with the ultimate objective of avoiding doing any workout whatsoever.

Tabling its suggestion of making a cup of coffee, I sidestepped whatever other suggestions for further delay it had in its subliminal mind.

I was inspired to go directly to the workout this morning because heart rate had been irregular and too high since sometime between 8 and 9 PM last night.

Eating a tiny bit later than usual late-ish evening eating might have had something to do with it. At least that was a speculation that crossed my mind this afternoon when I listened to part of a talk given by a doctor whose specialty includes special attention to the microbiomes in the human body and when he mentioned that they all have their own circadian rhythms.

Not that there couldn’t be other reasons for my heart to have been persistently irregular and too fast since yesterday evening, but that reason sounded as good as any of the other unproved possibilities.

Clinging to the hope that if I changed into workout clothes and “just did it” there would be a repeat of the sudden return to normal as had happened during the rowing workout of September 2nd, I started without further delay. The SkiErg session was first. Two hundred Calories was burned on the SkiErg but heart rate remained too high and fluttery-feeling, irregular from start to finish.

Easy-going, slow skiing was done for most of the SkiErg session with the exception of three tiny increases of pace near the end. But on September 2nd, the heart had remained stubbornly irregular during all the time on the SkiErg also.

So I held out hope that heart behavior would return to normal during the rowing session and set up RowPro for 10,000 meters. As a rowing “companion” and additional motivation I used another monitor to play a YouTube video of a 10,000 meter session I’d rowed in 2018. That session had been done at an average pace of about 2:20/500 meters, which was slower than I wanted to row today. Its name on YouTube is Indoor Rowing 10K constant pace 04302018 .

My rowing goal was to stay ahead of the 10K on the YouTube video by rowing a pace averaging at least 2:15/500 meters. The pace goal was satisfied but heart did not return to normal behavior. Bad heart!

Heart behavior did eventually return to normal rate and regular rhythm but not until after I had breakfast and coffee. Go figure.

Should I have listened to the wily subconscious voice when it tried to delay and divert me? I believe I made the right choice because its delays and other subterfuge would have probably led to doing a workout late in the afternoon, if at all.

Chart and data for today’s SkiErg session.

RowPro graph for today’s 10K rowing session.

Happy rowing to you!

Coffee Compromise

It would be nice if coffee could be counted among medical expenses.

Java is best in the morning, but experience tends to indicate that it’s better to do a daily workout first.

One reason (and probably the main one) it’s better to do the workout first is because the time it takes to consume morning coffee can stretch out to a long time and usually includes food. I can row on a full stomach but prefer otherwise.

Eagerness to immediately commence today’s workout was hampered by a desire for coffee before too much more time passed in the morning. A compromise was reached, which involved a reduction of total workout time.

The first session was on the SkiErg and the compromise was to ski only 200 Calories instead of 250. The other session was on the rowing machine. The rowing machine compromise was to limit the distance to 5,000 meters instead of 10,000.

The first half of the SkiErg countdown was done at a leisurely warm up pace. The second 100 Calories of the SkiErg session included intervals to make it a bit more fascinating.

For the 5K rowing session, I did something similar to yesterday and played a YouTube rowing video to race against. The video was titled Indoor Rowing 5K and 5K and WarmDown 04112018. It consisted of two 5Ks and a warmdown as the title implies. I raced against the first of the two 5Ks, because it was the slowest and would be easy to beat. Lazy John!

But even though I chose the slowest of the two 5Ks to race against, I wasn’t too awfully lazy about it and finished about 1,000 meters ahead of it. Hurray for John! 🙂

The SkiErg session was first today. You can easily spot the intervals which were done during the last 100 Calories.

Concept 2 online logbook chart for today’s 5K rowing.

Happy rowing to you!

Enlightninged Workout

If you were wearing a heart strap and it momentarily became electrified, it might feel like a tiny, lightning bolt.

If you are one of those people who are observant and knowledgeable about the correct spelling of words, you might have a problem with the first word in today’s title.

Nice of you to notice and I compliment you on your observational powers if you saw and concluded that the word was either misspelled and/or that there is no such word.

Some people, however, have poetic licenses. I am one of those people who is poetically licensed and today I exercised that license to make up a word. It is a combination of the words enlightened and lightning.

Perchance you recall from yesterday’s blog post that I had heart annoyances yesterday throughout all three installments of yesterday’s SkiErg workout and during the rowing workout until I’d rowed 4,001 meters.

In addition to what I reported yesterday as happening at about 4,001 meters and 18 minutes 24 seconds into the rowing session (“…heart rate suddenly became normal and dropped down into a normal, totally appropriate range for the effort level….”) there was something else. It felt like an electric shock across my chest beneath the area where the heart strap was worn.

Reluctance which amounted to total absence of its mention yesterday was because I just didn’t know what to think of it. But after sleeping on it and turning it over in my mind, I’ve concluded that it is in the same category of some other non-explainable things which have happened to me.

A medical/physiological explanation could be assigned to it, of course.

The trite (in my opinion) term with which it might be labeled and simultaneously explained would be the ominous term “chest pain.” But it wasn’t painful at all. It felt electric, definitely. And perhaps if it lingered a while instead of being so very brief, it might have been classified as pain. But it was very brief and although it felt very electric, like some mild electric shocks I experienced many decades ago when as a boy I deliberately put my fingers into sockets meant to hold the ends of fluorescent light bulbs, to see what it felt like – the electric sensation in my chest yesterday sort of tickled, which is not exactly how I’d describe the self-induced electric shocks I experienced as a boy.

I put the sensation, along with the eventual outcome of all of yesterday’s wrestling match of trying to do the workout and shake off heart rate irregularity, into a category that includes an incident once upon a time decades ago when a radio turned on without human intervention and the voice on the radio spoke a message consisting of three brief sentences which I was primed and ready to hear.

Objectively and plainly speaking, I have opted to classify it as a miracle that the heart irregularity suddenly just stopped and the “electric shock” as a symptom of whatever transpired with that miracle inside my chest.

Naive I may be, but that’s how I’m taking it and filing it away in my memories.

At any rate and no matter what you or anyone else chooses to opine or believe about it, the totality of yesterday’s experience was fresh in my mind this morning and was more than enough motivation to get me to the ergs and start today’s workout without any undue delay. I have been struggling with motivation for workouts recently so I was “primed and ready” for motivation from the ethereal realm today.

The totality of today’s workout consisted of two sessions. The first session was 250 Calories on the SkiErg. At the start of the SkiErg session, I wondered if I could remain focused enough to count every stroke so that my stroke count would agree with what the monitor reported after the results were uploaded to the Concept 2 logbook. I counted 593 strokes. After downloading the CSV file for the session, examination showed the final stroke count was 593. Hurray for John’s brain! It remained focused for 24 minutes and 45.8 seconds!

The second session today was 10,000 meters rowing. To turn the rowing session into a sort of friendly “race,” I played a YouTube video of a moderate 10K rowing session and made it my goal to finish about 500 meters ahead of that 10K screen recording. The particular YouTube indoor rowing screen recording I watched while rowing was Indoor Rowing 10K 07122018. Though I watched it for the sake of the “race,” I muted it for the sake of keeping the noise down to normal levels of only the actual live sounds in the room.

The first 150 Calories of the session was very leisurely. The last 100 Calories included a few intervals.

The number for the final stroke count of today’s SkiErg session can be seen in the bottom left corner of this screenshot of the last part of the CSV file for the session.

Concept 2 online logbook chart & data for today’s 10K rowing session.

Happy rowing to you!

Fourth Time Was The Charm

Today I experienced a little amelioration. Isaiah 53:6 speaks of the best amelioration of all.

At around 3 AM this morning after I woke and then returned to bed, heart rate became irregular.

Mostly it was annoying but it happens so often that I didn’t lose any sleep over it.

Early in mid morning I started doing the daily workout by setting the SkiErg for a 250 Calorie countdown.

Leisure skiing should have resulted in a low heart rate of around 100 BPM but it was still irregular and heart rate immediately went much higher than normal for that low effort level.

Instead of skiing for the entire 250 Calories, I quit after 50 Calories and took a break for water and 80 mg of aspirin.

Ordinarily, if there is such as thing as ordinary with irregular heartbeat, it has been my experience that it is inclined to become regular after taking an aspirin.

Returning to the SkiErg after waiting more than 30 minutes for the aspirin to circulate, I set up a session to count down 200 Calories, which was the remainder of the original 250 Calorie session.

After skiing for 100 Calories, heart rate was still irregular and much too high for the effort level so I cut the session short and took another break for more aspirin and water.

Taking that much time to do so few Calories on the SkiErg is very unusual. After another 30 minutes to allow the second 80 mg dose of aspirin to enter the system, I returned to the SkiErg and setup a session for the last remaining 100 Calories.

Even though I started out easy in the third installment of the SkiErg session, heart rate continued to be irregular and too high. So I increased the pace a bit to see if perhaps going a bit faster would nudge the heart into normal behavior. But it remained irregular and too high for the effort from start to finish of the third piece of the total time on the SkiErg.

Determined to do a total daily workout of 250 Calories on the SkiErg and 10,000 meters on the rowing machine, I kept my workout clothes on and took a long break before going to the rowing machine.

During that long break I had a substantial breakfast and about 12 ounces of home-brewed Starbucks coffee. By the time I was about half way through the coffee, more than four hours had passed since I’d taken the last portion of aspirin. So I took some more aspirin with a bowl of cereal and followed it with the remainder of the coffee.

The rowing session would be the 4th workout session of the day. When the 10,000 meter rowing session started, heart rate was still irregular and too high. Heart rate got as high as 192 BPM. There are two screenshots, below, which illustrate that heart rate reached 192 during the rowing session. There were two separate heart rate monitors worn during the session. One was on the chest and the other on the wrist. Each of them recorded high heart rate before heart rate behavior was ameliorated, but the Apple Watch shows that heart rate went even higher than 192 and reached as high as 202 BPM. I wouldn’t have known it, without the chest strap or the Apple Watch on the wrist. It just felt a bit fluttery, with no other symptoms.

I wasn’t rowing especially easy, but wasn’t rowing hard either. It was probably RPE Level 1 or Level 2 at the very most. Breathing easy, but rowing at a sufficient level to have a nice little bit of sweat.

After 4,001 meters of rowing, which took about 18 minutes and 24 seconds, heart rate suddenly became normal and dropped down into a normal, totally appropriate range for the effort level. It remained regular and at a normal rate for the remaining 5,999 meters of the rowing session.

Happy endings are nice. 🙂

Report for today’s 10,000 meter rowing session.

RowPro graphs for today’s 10,000 meter rowing session.

Concept 2 logbook chart for today’s 10,000 meter rowing session.

The point highlighted on the Concept 2 chart shows where heart rate reached 192 according to the signal from the Polar chest mounted heart strap.

Screen shot of the rowing session heart rate graph from the 2nd heart rate detector, a wrist-mounted smart watch.

Happy rowing to you!

Drifting Below 170

This morning’s weigh-in was slightly less than 170 lbs.

Weighing oneself is a weighty subject, so I’ll weigh in with that topic right off the bat to get it out of the way.

Again this morning, as is my usual custom, I stepped on the scales.

For the ninth day in a row, the scales registered within a fraction of a pound of 170.

That seems to be an indication of stability, weight-wise.

In other matters such as daily workout or lack thereof: some working out was done today.

Not much was done in the way of working out, but there was enough to work up a few drops of sweat. The first part of today’s workout was 250 Calories on the SkiErg.

Going from the SkiErg to the rowing machine, I decided to make that session brief due to the majority of thoughts voting for coffee sooner rather than later.

The rowing session was at a faster pace than yesterday’s 10K but it was only one-tenth the distance and nothing to get “het up” about. In other words, there was no trace of trembling afterwards like there had been after yesterday’s 10K rowing.

Charts and data for today’s SkiErg session.

Finish screen for today’s short rowing session.

Concept 2 logbook view of today’s short rowing session.

Happy rowing to you.

Hovering Above 170

The morning weigh-in has become a daily speculation of how low will the weight go?

For a few weeks now, my weight seems to have been trending downward. It has dipped below 170 lbs several times in the recent few weeks.

Losing weight isn’t something I’m trying to do.

On the other hand, I’m not trying to gain weight either.

A little weight loss is perfectly okay, as long as it is loss of fat.

The reason it is perfectly okay to lose weight if it is fat loss is because it’s extremely easy to gain it back. But as I said, I’m not trying to lose or gain weight.

It (the downward trend in weight) is probably happening because lately I’ve been avoiding two things which will add weight very quickly.

Namely, alcohol and sugar. Coffee is always black, unsweetened. I try also to avoid artificial sweeteners which, sadly, stimulate the body to produce insulin because the body “thinks” sugar has been consumed. Insulin is one of the main things in the body’s process for fat storage.

Gabbing about weight changes, fat, etc isn’t the purpose of this blog. The “About” page, if you haven’t yet visited it, addresses its purpose.

It’s about time to say something about today’s workout. So here it is. The workout started with 200 Calories on the SkiErg. The activity of burning those 200 Calories included a few moderate intervals. After the SkiErg session was over, I moved my sitter to the rowing machine. (Would the sitter be called a stander, while a person is standing to use the SkiErg?)

On the rowing machine the goal was set to a distance of 10,000 meters. It was done at a moderate pace which turned out to be 2:12.8 / 500 meters. No intervals, no racing. But after it was finished, my hands were trembling ever so slightly as if I’d been racing.

Perhaps a 10K pace of 2:12.8 is enough to get a person a little bit “het up”?

Chart and data for today’s 200 C SkiErg session.

Happy rowing to you!

Only The Spider Worked Out

This morning’s weight was 169.2 lbs. This isn’t an actual picture of this morning’s scale reading. The scale I use is digital.

Sliding down the slope of daily weight, I reached about 169 lbs this morning. I haven’t been trying to lose weight. In fact, yesterday I tried to eat more than usual, to help keep my weight above 170.

Perhaps I was dehydrated. Perhaps it is something to do with avoiding sugar more than ever for the past few months.

In any case, I’m not sure if it is good, bad or indifferent that my pants are more inclined to fall down lately and my weight is dropping to or below the vicinity of 170 lbs. (That’s 77.11 kilograms, for those of you who are metric-minded.)

Dieting is not part of my life but I’m very gradually losing weight anyway. As long as my doctor doesn’t worry about it, I won’t fret. But it was enough of a surprise this morning that I was persuaded to take a day off from working out.

Easily persuaded, I was, by one of those lazy little voices inside my head.

Remember the spider I mentioned in yesterday’s blog post? It was on the piano yesterday. I captured it in a jar yesterday morning and released it outside yesterday afternoon.

Well there was a spider that looked just like it in the garage this afternoon. Of course it might not have been the same spider but it definitely bore an uncanny resemblance. So I captured it in a jar and took it out of the garage and a lot further away from the house before releasing it. Photographs below show that furry little 8-legged creature before and after he was turned loose from the jar this afternoon. The spider got a workout, climbing around in the jar and then running at top speed across the ground after it was released from the jar. It kept running until it found a shadowy hole and then it disappeared inside the hole.

Released from the jar, the spider was a bit of a blur as it ran across the sandy desert.

In order to get these photos of the spider running, I had to take a video with my phone and then take screenshots of the video.

The spider is a bit blurry, but the red arrow points to where he is as he is running to the entrance of a nice hole.

The arrows point to where the spider is, just before he disappears completely from sight into the hole.

Happy rowing to you!

Endorphin Rush Runs Down But Not Out

Some people get an endorphin rush from doing things like this. I prefer a tamer approach via the Concept 2 ergs. (For photo credits, see the note at the end of this post)

Hints of the early light of dawn were glowing through the window blinds when I woke this morning. The hint of a glimmer of pre-sunrise glow didn’t cause me to wake.

A finger of a more mundane reason flicked the wake-up switch in my brain. Let’s name it a call of nature. Definitely mundane.

Precisely a few minutes later, I returned to bed with hope of getting another 90 minutes of sleep.

Precisely less than ten minutes after returning to bed, I was wide awake after thinking about the day and realizing that I had some chauffeuring to do in a few hours. The chauffeuring appointment would limit or eliminate the possibility of a morning workout was another realization.

Yen for sleep vanished as I checked the mental dashboard and realized everything would remain in balance if I got out of bed immediately and began the day’s workout right away.

So that’s what I did. Almost. I went directly to the SkiErg right away. But I was thirsty and my water bottle was empty. So I detoured to the water cooler. Filling the water bottle emptied the water cooler. So I went to the garage to get five jugs of purified water. Then I noticed a spider. So I went to get the vacuum cleaner and dispose of the spider. Before turning on the vacuum cleaner, I realized I could save the spider’s life by capturing it in a jar. So I did that. Then turned back to refilling the water cooler. After refilling the cooler I finally went to the SkiErg and set it for 250 Calories. 250 Calories was okay yesterday, so I thought I’d try it again today.

The SkiErg session started slowly and sleepily in spite of the fact that I was wide awake. For the first 150 Calories on the SkiErg, it seemed luxuriously enjoyable to keep the stroke exaggeratedly slow, with each stroke’s drive time lasting about a second or even longer than a second.

The SkiErg pace very gradually quickened during those first 150 Calories. Once the remaining Calories counted down to 100, it felt like the most natural and logical thing to do to indulge in some moderate intervals of 10 calories per interval. So that’s what I did and there was a satisfying harvest of endorphins.

The SkiErg session whetted my appetite for labor-derived endorphins, so I set the rowing machine up for a 10,000 meter piece. On the other monitor, I played a screen recording of the 10,000 meter session I’d rowed and uploaded to YouTube on December 27, 2017. It is one of the more popular of the screen recordings I’ve uploaded to YouTube for people to row along with and has been viewed 254 times so far. I’m guessing it is popular because it includes 8 intervals and intervals make most rowing sessions a lot more interesting.

So I got a natural emotional lift and boost to the spirits so to speak from this morning’s workout. I’ve been enjoying it all day, until late in the day/early evening when I heard some extremely weird news from a close relative who shall not be named here. It was borderline insanity type of news and it had the opposite effect of this morning’s workout. It put a heavy damper on my spirits. A black cloud. But I’m in the process of dealing with it and shooing the black cloud away because black clouds are pollution of the worst sort and I prefer joy and light.

Screenshots of today’s workouts follow. If you look at them closely, the spikes in the heart rate graphs during the rowing session can be disregarded because HR seemed to be normal and that kind of thing – if it happens on the rowing machine but not on the SkiErg and the heart is otherwise behaving normally with regard to rate range – I attribute to the more analog heart rate signal on the rowing machine. (The SkiErg uses a more digital blue tooth signal instead of an analog signal for transmitting heart rate and on any given day, the SkiErg has far fewer, if any heart rate spikes.)

SkiErg chart and data. Notice there are NO spikes in the heart rate graph for the SkiErg session which used a blue tooth heart strap transmitter.

Happy rowing to you!

Photo credit: by Masa Sakano and found on his site on Flikr.

Laziness Creeping Up

Cats and laziness have something in common. Perhaps they have more than one thing in common, but the particular thing I have in mind at the moment is they are both highly skilled at creeping.

Right away this morning following getting out of bed after sleeping in late, I changed into workout clothes and began a 250 Calorie session on the SkiErg

Each of you in the multitude of those who have been following this blog closely know that my recent usual SkiErg session is 200 Calories, not 250.

Enjoying a bit of a mental boost from doing an “extra” 50 Calories on the SkiErg today, I simultaneously thought of moving from SkiErg session done to starting a 10,000 meter rowing session and coffee. But not in that order. I wanted coffee more than I wanted to sit on the rowing machine for 10,000 meters.

Perhaps laziness had been stalking me, because almost immediately after the thoughts of rowing 10,000 meters and having coffee afterwards began doing a dance in my mind, there came the question of who was leading the dance. Rowing or coffee? Coffee or rowing?

Yelping with joy, laziness crept in to offer a solution to the non-problem. Its suggestion was that instead of rowing 10,000 meters today, I shorten the rowing session by whatever distance would be the equivalent of the extra 50 Calories that had been burned on the SkiErg! Brilliant! I thought it was my own idea and so I immediately calculated that if about 700 meters were subtracted from 10,000, the result would be enough for the two sessions to add up to yesterday’s total of 805 Calories on both machines.

I should have known better. The clue that I was being influenced by creeping laziness instead of my own rational thought was that when the 9,300 meter rowing session started, the thoughts also occurred that since it was a shorter distance than yesterday’s 10K, I could row at a slower pace.

The result was that I came up more than 30 Calories short of the goal of 805 Calories total. So I rowed another 700 meters, to bring the total calories up to yesterday’s. Yesterday’s, plus four more calories. And a lot more total time than yesterday’s 10K. Laziness snickered at its joke on me.

Moral of the story: the feline cat of laziness leads away from felicity of results.

Finish screen for today’s slow 9,300 meter rowing session.

Report for today’s slow 9,300 meter rowing session.

RowPro graphs for today’s slow 9,300 meter rowing session.

Report for the 700 meter rowing piece which had to be added to bring today’s Calorie total up to as much as yesterday’s.

Happy rowing to you!