Today is the day I’ve been looking forward to for the past seven days. It was another chance to aim for improvement in the 10K, on the Pete Plan “Hard Distance” day.
The session was scheduled online and three others joined in. One of them was in the US, another was in Germany and the third was in England. The guy in the US wanted to help encourage me by pacing alongside.
It was a very easy pace for him though it was a nice hard pace for me at that distance. The other two could have rowed the 10K a lot faster also, but they decided to have an easy day also and they too rowed right alongside for the whole distance. It was a mental boost, to have them there and another reason to keep going, so they wouldn’t be disappointed to see a HD.
I knew I’d have company so I went with the most conservative plan that I could think of for the 10K. The goal was to finish with an average pace faster than 1:59.3, so the plan was: Row the first 9,500 meters at a constant average pace of 1:59.3 and then go faster during the final 500 meters. And – if I felt okay when the remaining distance counted down to 1,000 meters, to slightly pick up the pace, from 1:59.3, to about 1:59 with 1,000 meters to go.
The plan worked well and I was breathing easy until the last 500 meters when I had to start breathing faster. There was still enough energy left that I was able to sprint the very last 100 meters, to finish breathing very hard during the last 5 or 10 strokes.
Immediately afterwards, I had to get off the rower and use the bathroom, due to the influence of having drank perhaps a little too much coffee before the 10K. So I typed, “be right back” instead of joining in the afterwards chat right away. When I returned, I saw that they were speculating if I left to “make a bathroom check” so I typed, “Yes, I had to make a bathroom check.” One of them then typed, “I hope you didn’t have to vomit.” To which I replied, “No, I had to deal with an excess of coffee. 🙂 ”
To repeat myself: It was really nice, to have their company.
Before the 10K there was a 15 minute warmup and a 10 minute warm down afterwards. Straps were loose for most of the session but near the end of the 10K I reached down and pulled each of the footstraps to cinch them up snug for the final sprint. DF was 135.
Happy trails to you.