You don’t have to work hard and inflict any pain or discomfort on yourself, to benefit from running or rowing. As the title says, there are benefits to rowing long and slow. For the 25+ years before I took up rowing, I would run long and slow every day there was opportunity. I never did any running in a race.
When I switched from running to rowing, I discovered that all the long, slow running I’d done had built a good aerobic base and I could row faster than anticipated without any previous rowing experience.
But the most important thing was that the long, slow running gave great health benefits. I’ve never had high blood pressure, like far too many people my age have to take medication for. Long, slow running (or rowing) is really great for building up the capillaries and giving your blood a lot more space to flow through.
Today’s session was 30 minutes online in the company of a rower in Denmark and a rower in England.
The other two guys rowed fast and seemed to have a sort of race which was interesting to watch. For a while it looked like a race, then not a race, then it seemed to be a race again. I could have been misinterpreting it of course, and they might not have even been paying attention to each other’s paces and their separation from each other. It was fun and interesting to watch.
As for me, I rowed very slow and with a low stroke rate for the first 10 minutes. Then did 10 power strokes every 5 minutes until that had repeated 4 times and used the last five minutes for a slow warm down.
Happy trails to you.