Today’s indoor rowing was a half marathon with 1 minute intervals every 5 minutes. It was interrupted with a phone call and hampered by lack of enthusiasm or one of its near relatives.
Today’s indoor rowing was 14K with intervals, interruptions, daydreaming and RowPro software glitches.
The interval setup was 14×200 meters with active rest of 800 meters after each interval. Before the 14K session began, there was 750 meters of warm up. After the 14K session started, there were several interruptions where I had to either row one-handed or stop, so I could respond to text messages. Two or three times during the session, RowPro partially froze with the area that displayed effort as either Watts, Calories per hour, pace etc remaining unchanged for a while. The rest of the software seemed to continue to function. Once, when it was time to row the 9th interval, I was daydreaming and totally didn’t notice it until it was too late.
Other than that, everything went okay. Especially the heart – it remained 99% regular and was in the right BPM range for all the variations in effort.
Report for today’s 14K.RowPro graphs for today’s 14K.Concept 2 online logbook chart for today’s 14K.
The above image with its amusing message was found on a web page of a British rowing website called rowperfect. The article (Chris George, champion rower with endless determination) doesn’t say whether the man pictured actually had a heart attack and rowed through it, but that is the implication. I think its an admirable attitude for a competitive rower.
Today’s indoor rowing session was another for which the main goal was to burn a lot of calories for a Concept 2 challenge. The particular challenge is in a group of challenges, the entire set of which is called “January Revolutions.” A person can only choose to work toward ONE of the challenges among the all the choices. My choice was The Big Burn,  whose goal is to burn at least 20,000 calories while rowing during January 2018.
Yesterday and the day before, the distance rowed was a standard half marathon (21097 meters) each day. That worked well so I did something similar today and set up a RowPro custom session with 17 intervals of 30 seconds each, following each interval followed by 1,241 meters of rest.
However, my heart was not cooperating. It seems logical that if a heart is not cooperating, it must be doing some antonym of the word “cooperating.” The word which seems most appropriate is “attacking”. Therefore today’s title: “Rowing Through A Heart Attack”
I don’t blame my heart because I think the catalyst for its non-cooperation was a can of sardines because the last time I had a can of sardines, I also experienced very noticeable heart irregularities later that same day.  It seems to be something to do with fish oil and I noted the correlation in this blog in the blog post written on November 18, 2017, when I mentioned returning fish oil to the store.
So today was a spontaneous, though not deliberately planned experiment to see if the same thing would happen after eating sardines. It was similar, but worse.
I had a can of sardines for lunch, along with some corn chips. (Fish and chips.) Everything seemed okay until about 2,856 meters into today’s rowing session, when my heart rate increased even though pace had decreased. Heart rate remained high and irregular, with the heart rate display appearing and disappearing throughout the remainder of the rowing session. I took several breaks and drank an extra amount of water, in hopes of diluting the fish oil effect, but the abnormal behavior remained throughout the session.
Unlike Chris George (see photo at top of this blog post) I did not “power” through it. Maybe I should have? Instead, I took it very easy and barely increased the effort during the half minute intervals. I varied the pace a bit, trying to fish for the right amount of effort but the heart didn’t cooperate at any of the effort levels I tried.
Hopefully, it will return to normal by tomorrow.
Finish screen for today’s seventeen intervals.Report for today’s calorie-loaded session.RowPro graphs for today’s session. The many places where the heart rate graph is a vertical line is where heart rate was so irregular that the heart strap couldn’t read it and the heart rate display went blank.Concept 2 online logbook chart for today’s rowing session.
Heartfelt hopes and wishes for you to have happy rowing.
Finish screen for today’s half marathon with 16 intervals. As you might guess from looking at the two graphs, the last few meters after the last split was used as warm down.
Since I took five junk-food loaded days off from indoor rowing, I’m still playing catch-up and therefore rowed another half marathon today. It was another 1200+ calories toward the Big Burn challenge which is one of several that Concept 2 has to choose from during this month of January 2018.
The half marathon was done with a target pace of about 2:22 and included 16 intervals of about 30 seconds each.
A recording of the session is called “Indoor Rowing Half Marathon with 16 Intervals” and is in the process of uploading to YouTube. If you click on that link for the video today, it won’t be active yet because it will not be done uploading before I go to bed tonight and probably won’t be “active” until sometime tomorrow (January 16, 2018)
RowPro report for today’s half marathon.RowPro graphs for today’s half marathon.Concept 2 online logbook chart for today’s half marathon.
The potato chips I ate had ruffles, but otherwise looked like these.
So I went for five days without any rowing, due to lack of a rowing machine while traveling. And during those five days, all routines were disrupted. Too much sitting. Daily junk food, including 5 large bags of very salty potato chips. Coffee all day, instead of only in the mornings.
Perhaps as a result, my heart started acting weird and getting irregular again, in the last hours of the 5th day.
So today I did a half marathon, for the purpose of helping the heart to flush itself out and return to normal. That’s the working theory, at least. It seemed to work because heart rate was irregular before the HM started and was not regular enough for the heart strap to be able to display it. After rowing for less than 200 meters at a very easy pace, heart rate became regular enough to be measured and displayed, but was about 130, which was way too high for the effort. When its acting normally, it will start out 20 or 30 BPM slower at that effort – somewhere a little above 100. But as I kept rowing, it settled down and acted more and more normally. It’s feeling and acting normal now, after the half marathon.
The background sounds for today’s half marathon recording posted on YouTube include a fan, the rowing machine, and instrumental from this album by the artist 2Bough.
The HM was done at an easy pace, with intervals starting about every 1,241 meters. The intervals were varied paces and lasted from about 30 seconds to around a minute each. Most of them were about 30 seconds.
Today was the first day with any rowing since January 8th. There wasn’t enough time for a normal session, but fifteen minutes was better than nothing.
I did a few intervals during the 15 minutes, with the last interval starting with 4 minutes remaining in the session, and tapering down all the way to the finish.
Finish screen for today’s 15 minutes.RowPro report for today’s 15 minutes.RowPro graphs for today’s 15 minutes.Concept 2 online logbook chart for today’s 15 minutes.
Happy and hopefully longer rowing sessions for you.
Today is another risky day without rowing, but it looks like I will survive it. Will let you know tomorrow.
This mug would really be excellent for anyone who gets a significant amount of their endorphins from rowing. I found it on the British website called Supermug .
While looking for an appropriate image relating to a day without rowing, this was one of the top results. Its from a British website called Supermug. They sell mugs, including this one but curiously – they don’t mention what the capacity is, for this mug, on the page that I visited. I was wondering, since it is called a “super”mug – how much it holds.
I missed doing any rowing today, because of other activities. On the bright side – it didn’t kill me.