Today was another day with musical accompaniment. The choice today was among results which came up when Appalachian Gospel was searched for on youtube. One of the groups included was the one pictured above. In the recording associated with the above screenshot, they were singing “I Can’t Even Walk“.
This was a 5K worth watching, though it wasn’t rowing. Love the focused-on-the-race looks on their faces.
Today was almost a non-rowing day, due to problems with an essential major appliance, the refrigerator. After a few hours of two-minds/one-flesh brainstorming, Diane and I decided to risk the price of a service call and call a repairman instead of giving up on the less-than-a-decade-old current model.
Then… I thought about not rowing and decided that a little bit was better than nothing and settled on doing 5K. Did it with a very slow start and gradually increasing pace until reaching 4,500 meters and then used the remaining 500 meters as a warm down. It resulted in a time that should be easy to beat tomorrow, if I want to feel good tomorrow about beating myself. 🙂
Feeling good and focusing on happiness now that their race is over.
For today’s music, I looked for 1950s Bluegrass playlists on youtube and found quite a few. They were good background music to most of the rowing, though I found myself tuning them out and sort of not hearing them when I was doing the fastest pace intervals.
The rowing was 10,845 meters divided into 18 intervals of alternating distance and time. Though the total distance rowed today was less than yesterday, more calories were burned.
The approach to the intervals was to start out with the highest effort for the 250 meter interval and then to lower the effort by slowing the pace by 5 seconds/500 meters for the next, a 500 meter interval and then by another 5 seconds for the next, a 750 meter interval and by an additional 5 seconds for the middle interval which was a 1K.
So those effort levels were about 307 watts, 265 watts, 232 watts and 207 watts for the 1,000 meter interval in the middle. Then the power increased the same way from the 1K to each following interval with power highest for the final 250 meter interval.
The graph of Pace for each of those intervals resembled a valley:
It was harder to go DOWN into that valley than to climb up out of it, because of the way the rest intervals were arranged, with the shortest rest after the first and hardest interval. It was fun.
Today for rowing accompaniment I tried youtube again. The “shuffle dancing” and its music have grown boring. Tried some other genres, then looked for a playlist of “country music”. Youtube tends to serve up the most current “country music” and what I heard on those playlists just sounded wrong. So then I searched for “country western music” and finally settled on a selection that consisted of a couple dozen or more of Hank Williams’ hit songs.
The first one on the list was a song called I Saw the Light, which is one of my decades-old favorites. It also happens to have been written by Hank Williams himself.
As for rowing, the session today was 10,867 meters divided into 18 intervals. The first and last intervals served as warmup and warm down.
Happy rowing to the music or whatever accompaniment you like.
Today was another session of going through the paces but not racing the current CTC challenge.
This time, I set up a separate session which resembled the July 2017 Cross Team Challenge and which had its rest intervals set up as “Recovery” instead of “Stop” because “recovery” causes RowPro 5 for the Mac to log, record and upload ALL the meters rowed, whereas “Stop” does not record any meters rowed during the rest intervals. I wanted “credit” for all meters rowed. 🙂
Today’s main feature was to do an easy practice of the July 2017 CTC challenge. This is the 5th time I’ve done it this month, but only the first one counted. Second one failed. Third and fourth were experiments with the setup to find the best arrangement within RowPro 5 for the Mac’s “advanced custom setup studio.” Today was practice, which consisted of doing most of the intervals at about 1:59 to 2:00 minutes/500 meters and getting off the machine, to walk around during each of the Stop rests between intervals.
There was a 2K warmup first and then an easy 4K afterwards.
OTW rowing fiasco: The above two photos are from a British news article about the 2012 Boat Race which was spoiled and turned into a fiasco by a couple of unfortunate happenings, one of which involved a member of the Oxford Crew collapsing. In my opinion, Oxford would have won that race if those two incidents hadn’t happened, but God only knows for sure.
After my fiasco yesterday during the second attempt at the July 2017 CTC challenge, I decided to have what I think of as a “steadying session”. A steadying session is whatever I choose for that purpose but it’s main characteristics will exclude sudden sprints followed by sudden stops.
If I’ve been sprinting or working very hard for a relatively long time, I’ve found over the years that it’s best to keep moving at a moderate to easy pace immediately afterwards.
The crew member who collapsed during the 2012 Boat Race appears to be wearing an oxygen mask. You can see the entire article and the rest of the photos at THIS LINK
So today’s choice was to row 15K, do the first few K as warmup, gradually step up the pace throughout most of the rest of the distance, cap it with a bit of a sprint and then use the last 2 or 3K to warm down.
I also intended to modify the setup within RowPro 5 for the Mac, for the CTC challenge “advanced custom setup” of the variable intervals set up for the July 2017 challeng, so that the rests are Stops instead of Recovery. Because I discovered that if the rests are labeled as Recovery then RowPro 5 for the Mac not only records the distance rowed, if any, during recovery rests, but it lumps all the recovery distance in together with the grand total of distance for the active intervals, instead of separately totally active and rest distance, like the more refined and finished versions of RowPro for Windows do. For the CTC challenge, the total distance of only the active portion is needed for challenge entry… and it would be good to have a session report which displays only the distance of the active portion, for “proof” to other challenge participants.
I’ve been told that if the rest times between active intervals are labeled as “Stop” then RowPro 5 for the Mac ignores and does not add up any distance rowed during the rest times.
During today’s rowing session, I neither listened to music nor to a lecture and simply focused on the rowing with most of my mind while letting the rest of the mind wander without getting too far away.
The plan to row a single 15,000 meter session today was discarded, however, after I finished modifying the variable intervals programming within RowPro 5 for the Mac for the July 2017 CTC challenge.
Instead, I decided to slowly and easily row the new variable intervals setup, which had all the rest intervals changed from R (recovery) to S (stop), to see if it would give a total distance result of the Active intervals only, without adding the distance done while resting to the same total.
So I rowed that whole thing and found the same thing as yesterday – it added the distance rowed during the rest intervals to the total for the active intervals. I fiddled around with it a bit more and so as to avoid boring you with the details, I’ll skip the details and tell you that I discovered that once a custom interval setup in RowPro 5 for the Mac is edited and the edited version is downloaded into RowPro 5 for the Mac… the only way to be sure to get the newly edited result into RowPro 5 for the Mac is to close/shut down/exit RowPro 5 for the Mac and then again open/start/enter RowPro 5 for the Mac.
I rowed the whole, edited version again and found that it worked as someone had told me. That someone was Annette Wammen, of Denmark. She said that it would not add any distance done while the S (stop) time was counting down in the Stop intervals.
Altogether, the total distance rowed today added up to 13,832 meters.
Here are the relevant screenshots for today’s rowing:
When it becomes hard to breathe, everything slow down, no matter how much coffee…
Today, for the first time, I managed to set up a variable intervals session with RowPro 5 for the Mac. It involved quite a few attempts to set it up and save the session and a couple restarts of the Mac computer. The final approach that worked was to only enter two lines of the session into the “custom row studio” and then save it, download it into the custom rows, highlight it in custom rows and edit it to add two more lines. Kept repeating that process until all 14 lines were in the custom variable interval setup. As I’ve said more than once before, RowPro 5 for the Mac is a “beta” version and still has a few problems to be ironed out.
Then I tried rowing it. I thought I’d try a different approach from the first attempt (at this c2ctc.com challenge for July 2017 ) and go slower on all the intervals except the very last one, with a target pace of 1:52 for all but the last interval. If I succeeded, it would be faster than the first attempt in which I started out too fast for the first few intervals and had to slow down more than I should have after those first few intervals.
That approach worked well until heart rate became too erratic to display. When that happens, the HR display and HR graph goes to zero. It also becomes somewhat harder to breathe. The mind was willing but the body just barely made it through the middle interval of 1,000 meters and I was feeling a bit lightheaded at the end. There was a 4 minute rest after the 1,000 meters but it wasn’t enough time and I had to give up during the next interval of 750 meters because I couldn’t maintain the target pace of 1:52 due to the fact that it was too hard to breathe.
That’s the first time that’s happened. Usually, it’s my mind that complains first, and tries to get my body to slow down. This time, my body couldn’t get enough air and my mind had to decide to quit trying to go fast.
There are still about 8 days left in the month, so maybe I’ll try again in about a week. And abstain from coffee that day.
I categorized this workout as “boring,” because it’s not fun when things don’t work like they should. A better adjective for today’s workout might be “annoying”.
How much coffee is too much?
I think the catalyst for the irregular heart rate was too much coffee. I had 5 or 6 cups of coffee this morning, instead of the usual one single cup which I’d limited myself to for a while with success.
Here are the most pertinent screen shots for today’s rowing:
Heart rate was erratic from the 6th split to the finish. When it was regular enough to display during that time, it was way too high for the moderate effort.
In fact, you can make a funny face without rowing at all!
Today’s indoor rowing consisted of 12,000 meters with a gradually increasing pace until reaching 7,000 meters, then a step up in pace to 200+ watts for 1,800 meters, a sprint for 250 meters and finally the last 3K was warm down.
While rowing, I watched an entertaining youtube video with the long and wordy title of “Popular Shuffle Dance Music Mix 2017 Best Electro Melbourne Bounce Party Shuffle…” by Dj Daniel Sky, which featured lively, energetic music and video clips of guys and girls (mostly girls) shuffle dancing. None of the video clips of people dancing are longer than about 30 seconds to one minute, so I assume it is a high energy activity that isn’t usually sustained for a very long time.
It was good music to listen to for rowing and easy on the eyes for viewing while multitasking to keep a portion of focus on rowing Watts level.
Though any music at all is often more annoying and distracting than helpful, energetic music tends to be helpful, as long as it’s not playing during the final part of a race, when I don’t want to listen to anything at all because the final race effort requires 100% of what focus I can muster.
For part of the time during today’s rowing, I felt like I was rowing as hard as the young fellow in the above photo appears to be working. That image was found somewhere on a British website called the Newham Recorder, in relation to a rowing event for charity which was done in 2014.
The rowing session today was an interval session arranged to fit the specification of the July 2017 challenge on the c2ctc.com website.
The specifications were: ”
Row the following intervals pyramid (with 1 min rest for each 250m rowed):
Row 250 metres, rest for 1 minute
Row 500m, rest for 2 minutes
Row 750m, 3 minutes rest
Row 1000m, rest 4 mins
Row 750m, 3 minutes rest
Row 500m, rest for 2 minutes
Row 250m and finish
Standing start for the opening 250m. Other six can be rolling starts.
There are no other restrictions.
Record your total time for 4000 metres of rowing. ”
It was fun. I made the final rest after the final 250 meters a longer one, so it served as a warm down.
The above photo is the indoor rowing setup for a New Zealand rower. It doesn’t have anything to do with Watts as a unit of rowing power, but the rower’s name is Carl Watts and he posted this photo for public viewing in a rowing forum under the topic of Rowing Setup – What do you have?
The title of today’s post is spelled correctly. It wasn’t supposed to be the question, “What’s Indoor Rowing?” – it’s just a focus on the units used to measure and regulate today’s rowing. The unit today, like yesterday, was Watts. You can find reading material of the driest sort on watts at this Wikipedia link . There’s a fitness testing model, using a rowing machine and watts at this ergrowing.com page . There are many web pages addressing the subject of watts as a unit of power to measure rowing effort, and you can search for more but the last one I’ll provide a link to is on this fitwerx.com page where a person who was a rower in college wonders aloud about “who has the most power, rowers or cyclists?”
Today’s plan was to row 15,000 meters and to row the first 5K at a slow enough pace so that it would last between 25 and 30 minutes which was the duration of a chess lecture I wanted to watch while warming up. After the first 5K, I increased the rowing effort to 100 watts for the 6th 1,000 meters, then 110 watts, 120 watts, etc until raising the effort to 180 watts when the distance had counted down to 2,000 meters remaining. When the distance remaining counted down to 1,000 meters, I increased effort to to a set of “power 10” strokes and then eased off to warm down for the remaining few hundred meters.
The entire workout was mentally absorbing because I was concentrating on chess during the first 5K and then concentrating on keeping rowing effort within a few watts of target level during each subsequent 1K.
Highlighting the moment on the graph where the set of 10 power strokes happened.
Today was another day with musical accompaniment. The choice today was among results which came up when Appalachian Gospel was searched for on youtube. One of the groups included was the one pictured above. In the recording associated with the above screenshot, they were singing “I Can’t Even Walk“.
