Today was the happily anticipated Fitness Matters 5K online race day! But since most people who entered the races are in Europe, most people were in the 10:00 GMT heat. That was 3:00 am local time and not my first choice of times.
I joined the 22:00 GMT heat, which was in the afternoon at 3:00 pm local time.
If you added up all the people in both Europe and the US who joined the races, there weren’t very many. Probably not even a dozen, all totalled, between both heats of the 5K and the 500 m. But this was the first year for the Fitness Matters Devon ONLINE race in addition to their annual venue race and there wasn’t much publicity in advance. In fact, there was no publicity for it whatsoever that I saw on the Concept 2 website. Which might explain why not many people in the US who use the C2 website knew about it.
The only reason I learned about these races is because I frequently look at descriptions of scheduled online rowing sessions on the Oarbits area of the Digital Rowing site and noticed mention in one of the descriptions. That mention included a URL on the Fitness Matters website, where I went to sign up.
There was only one other US rower that I saw who participated, Annabel M.. But she participated in the 500 meter race, not the 5K. And like me, she was the ONLY one in the 22:00 GMT heat she joined.
The race was fun, disregarding the fact that it was rather LONELY, to make an understatement, compared to most races.
The good news is that I came in first place. The bad news is, I finished in absolute last place. So Jesus’ words, “… the last shall be first and the first last…” also applies to a person in a race with only one participant.
Just before the race began I started some music and it was fairly good company to take my mind off the 14 empty lanes in the race.
My race plan was based on my memory of what the fastest recent 5K I had previously rowed this season had felt like. It felt good. No strain, no pain and ample sweat. So, though that 5K was done in a time of 19:53 and I’ve done it faster … I decided to just aim for a time of 19:50 and thereby get a season best time.
I resorted to the Concept 2 Pace Calculator to find what pace I’d need to row, to finish the 5K in 19:50 and it came out to a pace of 1:59/500m.
So from the start, I intended to aim for an average pace of 1:59/500m and then perhaps push harder in the last 500 meters.
I got off to a bit of a slow start because I always seem to be slower off the start, without the voice loudly saying “ROW” even though I was staring at the PM screen looking for the word ROW. But when ROW appears, it is like my mind hesitates and says, “wait.. wait for the voice!” When the voice was working, I always avoided a false start, which is a bit of an anathema in races, by only pulling at the sound of the voice.
In the first 200 meters, my instantaneous pace went up as high as somewhere between 1:45 and 1:50 but I eased that down immediately and tried to settle in at 1:59. But 1:59 just felt too easy, so I thought I’d aim for 1:58 instead and that’s what I did for pretty much the entire distance, with the exception that in the early part of the 5K it seemed that it was taking too long for the displayed average pace to get down to 1:58, so I picked up the pace to 1:55 for a bit until the displayed average pace looked more the way I liked it, and then brought the effort back to hold a pace of about 1:58.
I waited until the last 500 meters and then experimented to pick up the pace to as much of a sprint as I thought I could maintain for 500 meters without needing to back off on the effort.
All in all it was a lot of fun. It was also comfortable and I think I could do it quite a bit faster without inflicting much pain. But I’d rather try to find my best pace by approaching it from the slow side than from the too-fast side because starting out too fast and then having to back way off is a big disappointment, race or no race.
Here are the screens, reports and charts:
Happy trails to you.