Month: September 2015

More of the same: 3 x 30′ fitness center Tri-athlon

Leave a comment

A little cooler in the fitness center, but still very moist.  I started out thinking I would do another 2 hours, but I got bored and stopped after 90 minutes.

Plan:

  1. 30′ Incline Treadmill (15% grade was the max setting, and around 5.5km/h fast walking pace)
  2. 30′ Elliptical (two hill profile)
  3. 30′ recumbent stationary bike (easy interval profile)

Screen Shot 2015-09-03 at 7.44.14 AM

Today is my last day in Taiwan.  I take a cab to the airport at 7:30.  I think I will try to do another 90 minutes before I check out.  This week won’t have helped my rowing at all, but I hope it will help a bit with my endurance.

The trip home will take about 24 hours or so, arriving Friday night.  I hope to do a long row on the HOCR course on Saturday.

Wednesday: The Formosa sweatfest – 2 hours of aerobic tedium

1 Comment

I have figured it out.  They seem to turn the AC on in the fitness center around 7am.  Before that, it is warm and incredibly steamy.  After they turn it on, it seems to take about 30 minutes to make much headway in reducing the humidity.  Since I hit the gym around 5:15AM, I did most of the workout in the fetid, steamy soup.

Plan:

  1. 60′ Elliptical
  2. 60′ Stationary bike
  3. HR cap at 155

Screen Shot 2015-09-02 at 7.44.39 AM

Reasonably happy with that.  It was a looong, boring session, but I think I got the intensity about right.  When I finished on the bike, I discovered I had mad a huge sweat puddle under it almost 2 meters in diameter.  It took two towels to clean it all up.  I wanted to get a picture of it, but the lighting was wrong to really see the extent of the flood.

Tomorrow:  4×30′ on four different machines.  HR cap at 155.

Doing the Hsinchu Hshuffle: 90′ of aerobic tedium

2 Comments

After Saturday’s disaster, I got on a plane Sunday morning and arrived at my hotel in Hsinchu 27 hours after I left my house in Massachusetts.  I managed to get some sleep on the flight across the pacific, but I felt a bit worn down.

I took an Ambien and got a good solid 6 hours of sleep, and woke up a minute before my alarm this morning.  I put on my workout clothes and headed down to the fitness center.  It was warm and very humid.  I was in for a sweat fest

Plan:

  1. 30′ bike
  2. 30′ treadmill
  3. 30′ elliptical

On the bike I setup for a “two hill” profile.  That was hard at the end and boring in the middle, but it elicited the desired HR response.  I moved over to an elliptical and tried in vain to get it set up.  The touch screen was very reluctant to acknowledge my touches.  I finally gave up on that and went over to the recumbent bikes and started up there.  Then I saw a treadmill open up over my shoulder and I lunged for it.  The treadmill had the same touch screen issues, but I was finally able to get it to a 1% grade and 5 mph for a gentle 30′ jog.  No issues there.

After that I went over and selected a different elliptical which also had a wonky touch screen, but I was finally able to get it set to the right level and time and set off on a 30 minute tour around the world.  This was basically a few minute long intervals with a few smaller “hills” and some flats.  Easy peasy and darn boring.

But the intent was to work on aerobic base, and this did the trick.  I ended up sweating so much that my shoes were making that squish-sqish noise while I did my ellipitcal thing.  When I got back to my room, I noticed that I had lines of suds trailing down my legs where the sweat had gotten stirred in with some residual laundry detergent.  Did I mention it was humid?

Screen Shot 2015-09-01 at 1.25.09 PM

Tomorrow:  I think I will do a 2 x 60′  (bike and elliptical).  More aerobic base work.