This week, it has been tough to get into any kind of a routine.  My two sons are in the final stages of moving out into apartments in Cambridge, and so the house is in a state of chaos.  They also keep radically different hours than I do, going to bed around the time I usually get up.  At any rate, I stayed up way too late again last night.  I’m glad I did because it was good to spend a bit more time with them before they disappear into grad school.

But it meant that I faced a choice.  Get up at my normal time and try to do a tough workout on too little sleep, or sleep in and try to grab a similar workout on the erg at work.  I opted for the latter.

I was scheduled for a waterfall workout on the water (3K/2.5K/2K on 5′ rest), and my first thought was to just do that on the erg.  That flowed pretty naturally into the idea of changing it to the time that it would take me to do those distances on the water (roughly 13.5′, 11.25′, 9′).  When I did that and realized that this months Cross Team Challenge is 3 x 9′ on 3′ rest, I opted for that.  It’s been tough enough to find a time to do the CTC, and to have a CTC that looks like a great threshold workout fall on threshold workout day when I’m stuck on an erg anyway.  It seemed like an opportunity too good to pass up.

I started with a 9 minute warmup.  Basically rowed at 2:00 pace with 4 power bursts.

As always, the challenge is pacing.  I’m not doing enough erg sessions to know where I am, but my default for these long interval sessions is about 1:50, so I went with that.  It felt pretty good in interval number 1, and I ended up a second faster than target.  Then the shorter rests started to catch up with me.  Second interval was tough and I ended up around 1:49.7, and I was pretty much toast at the end of it.  I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to hold onto the pace in the third interval, so I started out aiming at 1:51, then had to slow down to 1:52, then 1:53.  In the 7th minute, I was looking at 1:55s, which honestly wasn’t that much faster than my warmup!  I sped up a bit in the last minute and finished with a 1:53.3 avg.  Overall, this gave me a 1:50.6 avg for the whole workout, a total of 7323 meters for the challenge and (for now) a seat in Free Spirits Boat 1.

I think that I should be able to improve on this if I do it again.  I might be able to sneak below 1:50 if I am not on slides, not erging in socks, and more careful in the first rep.

Looking at the heart rates, I pushed it pretty hard.  I finished the third interval with my HR at my maximum, 185.  I haven’t seen that in a workout for a while.  Nice to know I can still go there.  I just wish I was going faster when I did!

It was a pretty taxing workout.  Over 9 minutes “in the red” and another 14 minutes above my Anaerobic Threshold.  I think tomorrow I will have to careful to keep it below 155.

In terms of results, here are the stats.  You can see the huge drop off in the third interval.

Now I am off to the airport for a quick trip to San Diego.  I will be in the fitness center for the next 2 mornings.  Then hopefully on Friday, I will do a long row exploring the HOCR course.