The damp area on the towel is about a pint of sweat lost during today’s SkiErg 5K session.
Today’s main erg workout was the shortest of two. It was a 5K done as a time trial on the SkiErg. To intercept the sweat, there is an old towel covering the SkiErg platform. In the photo above, you can see the damp area where the towel caught the rain of perspiration.
After the 5K SkiErg, I did 30 minutes on the rowing machine. The rowing session was done as a series of eight 2 minute work/1 minute rest intervals. Though I worked harder on the rowing machine, my legs did most of the work and the rowing wasn’t enough effort on the legs, to cause much sweat at all. Just a few scattered droplets near the end of the 30 minutes rowing, instead of a rainstorm as happened with the shorter SkiErg session.
Chart and some data for today’s 5K time trial on the SkiErg.
The above photo shows a view of the back of my wind-swept head when I was standing on the bow of a whale watching catamaran recently. That photo is a screenshot taken from a video of the whale-watching. That video is on YouTube at this link: Gray Whales Rub Against Boat (Seen From UNDERWATER VIEWING PODS)
The whale watching was enjoyable, but it would have been a lot more fun if we had been rowing instead of just idly standing and sitting on the boat.
Today’s EliteHRV readiness score indicated that it was okay to row a lot of meters at virtually any pace.Last night’s 7 hours 15 minutes of sleep contributed to this morning’s good HRV readiness reading.
Today’s rowing consisted of 8 sessions. If you count the warm ups and warm downs as sessions unto themselves, it consisted of a total of twelve pieces. Here is a listing of today’s rowing (see image below):
A screen recording was made of only one of the sessions, a 500 meter piece plus its warmup/down. That screen recording can be found on YouTube at this location: Indoor Rowing 500 meters with warmup/down 01022019
The various sessions were mostly easy, with an RPE rating of 2 or 3, with the exception of the above screen-recorded 500 meter piece, which was done at an RPE level of what felt like 9.
A picture of last night’s insomnia. Heart rate is plotted with red dots which are heart rate samples once about every 10 minutes. Heart rate is not plotted for the period when I was awake with insomnia.
Last night, I had a few hours of insomnia. One result was that I didn’t get back to sleep until about 05:00 a.m. This morning was a day when it was necessary to rise early, to take care of a weekly, early morning chore.
I always set at least 3 wake-up alarms, in case there is a malfunction with one or two of them. The first one sounded and I reached up from deep under the surface of an ocean of sleep and shut it off. Same with the second one and I was slightly more awake, but lay back down and closed my eyes to drift back to sleep. It took the third alarm, to get me up out of bed, but I felt awful.
So after completing the chore, I considered whether to go back to bed or stay up. I went back to bed, but despite being very tired, could not go back to sleep. So I got up, and took the daily EliteHRV Morning Readiness reading. It was the worst reading I’ve seen yet. A fruit of a bad night’s sleep? I rowed briskly yesterday, but neither terribly hard nor long..
Today’s EliteHRV Readiness reading after a three-alarm wake-up.
Whatever the reason, I limited myself to only easy, leisurely rowing today. The main rowing session was 10,000 meters at a low heart rate pace.
Two days after doing a half marathon, EliteHRV calculated that I had the best Morning Readiness score since starting to use the app!
One fruit of the Dec 15th half marathon is displayed in the screenshot above, which shows the best Morning Readiness reading I’ve had so far since using EliteHRV. It came two days later and I think it is one result of the half marathon effort.
A second fruit was improved sleep. The above chart shows last night’s sleeping heart rate. Though it seemed to me like it was good sleep, you can’t tell much of anything about the quality of sleep from that chart. But – this morning I received a notification and “inquiry” from my sleep logging app about my sleep the prior night, immediately following the half marathon. (see screenshot below)
Its analysis reports that sleep quality for the previous day’s sleep period (the night immediately following the half marathon) was “higher than is typical” and it presented a couple dozen possible reasons, asking me to check off “all that apply” to that improved sleep quality, so as to contribute to its cause-and-effect analysis. The only one I checked was exercise, because the half marathon was the only thing out of the ordinary, since it’s 21,097 meters had been about 5 times my average daily volume so far this season and about double my recent several weeks’ daily volume.
“The sleep of a labouring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much…” Ecclesiastes 5:12
Since today’s EliteHRV “Morning Readiness” reading said it was okay to train harder today, I decided to do another 10,000+ meters, arranged as a 10 minute warmup, a 6,000 meter piece at a target pace of 2:06/500 meters and a 10 minute warm down.
Today’s heart rate variability reading was the surprise you see in the above screenshot. Last night’s sleep was interrupted with insomnia but the total time sleeping was adequate. (see screenshot below)
A bout of insomnia interrupted last night’s sleep between 2 and 4 a.m.
Assuming the analysis and advice of EliteHRV was correct, I chose to do a recovery 10K. “Recovery” is relative and subjective, but a pace of 2:20 seemed like a good compromise, pending what the HRV result will be tomorrow.
So the 10K was done at a target average pace of 2:20 and an “Easter egg,” as a computer programmer might call it, was inserted when the distance counted down to 1,150 meters remaining.
Finish screen view of the half marathon portion of today’s rowing.
Sleep was good and more than adequate last night (see image below) almost 8 hours…
But the EliteHRV morning readiness score still refused to climb out of the “sympathetic” zone or higher than 7. (see image below)
So, I concluded that it may be as good as its going to get(?) and decided to be happy with 7. Its a good number.
Today’s indoor rowing session was a half marathon with a simple plan. The plan was to aim for and maintain an average pace of 2:14.4/500m until the distance counted down to 500 meters remaining. When there were 500 meters remaining, the hope was to row faster to the finish line, depending on how I felt by then.
I felt okay, so somewhere during the final 500 meters, I decided to pick up the pace enough to aim for an overall average pace of 2:14.0.
There was a 750 meter warmup before the HM and a 1K warm down afterwards.
Happily, the heart behaved itself and wasn’t a spoilsport today.
For those of you who pay attention to the blog post categories: I’m going to stop using the categories of Easy Workout, Medium Workout, Medium Hard Workout and Hard Workout. Instead of those four categories, I’ll use one of 10 categories of RPE, which stands for Rate of Perceived Exertion. Today’s session is categorized as Rate of Perceived Exertion 3 (refer to chart below). Because I was breathing easy (not “breathing heavily”) during 98.5% of today’s half marathon, it is categorized as RPE 3.
Today’s score is the same as yesterday’s, though I got more sleep and HR is one BPM lower, so perhaps sleep and HR aren’t influencers of the score.
Because today’s EliteHRV reading is the same as yesterday’s, I won’t row a half marathon today and will choose a shorter distance than half marathon and an easy pace. The hope is, that I’ll eventually have an HRV morning readiness score that reads somewhere in the green, like it does this morning, but also in the “Parasympathetic” zone. However… I don’t know yet if that is either desirable or necessary.
Last night’s sleep seemed slightly better quality and definitely was longer than the previous night’s.
So the decision is: Today I will row 10,000 meters again at the same target of steady, average pace of 2 minutes 15 seconds per 500 meters. But first I’d like some coffee…
The rowing is done and it went almost as hoped, with two exceptions: (1) Heart rate was a little higher than expected for the amount of rest (no rowing yesterday) and sleep (7 1/2 hours last night). Perhaps I need more than an average of 7 hours sleep per night?? (2) There were a few skipped heartbeats and two instances where Afib lasted a few seconds, during each of which the heart rate display went to zero on RowPro software display.
The coffee was very good. Ground from fresh beans, full-strength caffeine level (instead of the “half-caff” variety I’d been having which had 50% of normal caffeine).
So anyway… those two un-hoped for things were the only less than desirable observations during the rowing session. Other than that, everything was fine. Could it be that the higher caffeine level of today’s delicious coffee was what led to slightly higher heart rate than the same 10K rowed two days ago?
The thing I have in common today with the girls in the lovely painting above, is that I am skipping. They seem to be skipping rope and I am skipping a day of rowing.
After a bit of philosophical, preoccupied procrastination this morning I decided to skip both coffee and also rowing and return to bed.
One factor in today’s decision to skip rowing was that the HRV score this morning was about the same as yesterday and I’d like it to improve.
As you can see in the redundantly captioned screenshot above, the EliteHRV Morning Readiness wasn’t improved from yesterday.
Sleep may have been a factor in the lack of improvement in today’s HRV score compared to yesterday’s. Sleep wasn’t bad last night, but it could have been a lot better.
I’m considering making up for the lack of rowing meters today, by rowing a half marathon tomorrow.
