Today and for the past two days, daily distance & effort has been low. That’s because I’m meditating on what was mentioned in a recent post- seriously considering the experiment of spending 18 hours rowing in one 24 hour period. Rowing slowly is appropriate to those thoughts of slow-rowing for such a long time.
In that same post I also reported that Diane offered her thoughtful opinion, “You’re crazy!” .. to want to do such a thing. Not too long ago, I would have agreed with Diane and said something similar about it being crazy. But now… after trying it for six hours a day for a couple of days, I think that 18 hours might possibly be an intensely exceptional ethereal rowing experience.
After reading about what Meredith and Sami did and after watching their interviews and talks which I found on youtube, in which they talked and answered questions about their 45 days of ocean rowing… I had many epiphanic ..or would it be epiphany-esque? – thoughts relating to what they did, in light of my past 12 years experience using the indoor rowing machine.
My first reaction to hearing that they each rowed for 18 hours and sometimes longer during each 24 hour period, was “That’s impossible!” But then I thought about everything else he said and it made sense and I thought instead, “That’s possible!”
I’ve done several marathons on the Concept 2 indoor rowing machine. My best marathon effort was far from being any kind of a record. It was done as a race and finished in a little more than 3 hours.
I know that nobody, no matter how fast they can row a marathon and no matter what their age, health and fitness, could row for 18 hours a day at the pace at which I’d rowed a marathon in about 3 hours and keep it up for 45 days straight.
So logic told me that they must have been rowing at a much gentler effort in order to continue rowing at that pace 18 hours a day for 45 days. They were kind of like human versions of sea turtles, with the top of their shell upside down in the ocean and their legs up in the air, pushing the oars to keep their shell “swimming” with each oar stroke.
One thing Sami said which proved that they had rowed at a gentler pace than the fastest pace at which I’d ever rowed a marathon was: he burned about 7,000 calories every 18 hours. He compared the energy he needed for each 18 hours to being the equivalent energy expenditure of running two marathons. Of course, a world-class athlete can run a marathon in less than 3 hours and therefore two of those marathons would take less than 6 hours and possibly less than 5 hours.
So the energy per hour that he expended while ocean-rowing for 45 days was quite a bit less than the energy per hour he would expend while running a marathon.
When I rowed my fastest marathon it was about 3 hours and 3 minutes and it burned 2,572 calories. If I had rowed faster, I would have burned more calories. For someone like Sami who’s a world-class triathlete, he would probably burn about 3,500 calories running a marathon race. Two such marathons would, indeed, add up to 7,000 calories. But that is too fast a pace to sustain for 18 hours. The longer the time, the slower the pace must be.
My average calories per hour for my fastest marathon was about 840 calories/hour. Do the math: if anyone could maintain that pace for 18 hours of indoor rowing, that person would burn over 15,000 calories every 18 hours. Eating 15,000 calories of food to refuel every 18 hours would be quite a chore in itself.
Sami said that to eat 7,000 calories every 18 hours, was to eat a LOT of food. But the volume of food he had to eat was kept to an efficient minimum because of the fact that his diet was formulated to give him about 75% to 85% of his calories from FAT, which takes up very little space compared to anything else people can eat for caloric intake.
This led me to conclude that his daily calorie expenditure while rowing was about 390 calories/hour. Using that information and experimenting on the Concept 2 rowing machine by selecting the calorie display and adjusting effort for a readout of 390 calories per hour in order to see what the matching would be resulted in a pace of about 3 minutes 57seconds per 500 meters.
That would result in about 7,595 meters per hour, which is ordinarily a very slow pace for most men or women to row on the Concept 2 for 60 minutes (see the Concept 2 Pace Calculator image below)
In fact, 3:57/500 meters is a pace that even Diane is comfortable at for almost any distance she has rowed.
But for anyone – the longer the duration, the more any level of effort no matter how small manifests itself in the form of physical sensations and mental experience.
Which leads to the next thoughts recalling my experience to date with indoor rowing.
I find myself wondering … what would it feel like?
Today’s rowing:
Happy trails.