Very little sleep last night.  Felt awful this morning.  Let myself start slow in the L4.

After I finished my hour, I transitioned over to start doing a variation of the Peak Power Training from Ed McNeely.  The session that Ed describes it to do 10 second sprints all out with 1 minute rests, and when your peak power in a sprint falls more than 10% below your best power, then you take a 5 minute rest and resume the 10 sec sprint and 1 minute rest sets with the same stoppage rule.

It’s been a while since I did my peak power test, and when I did it, it was on slides, so I didn’t have a stable baseline to measure my 10% drop from.   As hard as I tried today, I could not break through 700W for my peak power, but on slides in November, I was above 750W on a few strokes.

It was challenge to setup the 10 second sprints, since the shortest interval time you can program on a PM is 20 seconds.  I eventually did it as a “just row” with 10 second sprints and 50 second rests.  Next time I will set it up as 1:10 intervals.

I was also not seeing much in the way of a declining output power over the intervals, so I guess I was not trying hard enough.  I was also getting much better at them as I went along.  I got my first stroke power from around 180 to above 250, and felt a lot smoother in the later reps.  I’ll push the envelope more next time.

If nothing else, it was fun.  Laying down 15 sprints with peak splits faster than 1:25 was a nice change from grinding out long hard intervals.

Tomorrow:  A classic, the 4 x 1000 / 5′ rest.  I will start this conservatively at 1:45 pace and see how things go.