I arrived home from Denver around 1AM, so I slept in to 7:30 instead of getting up to workout. By the end of the day, I was a nervous wreck. Lot’s of work tension these days. So, I decided to do a quick 30 minute session to just calm myself down a little.
The session was 5 x 6′ L4 sequences (on slides)
2′ @ 22, 2′ @ 20, 2′ @ 18 at just under 10W x stroke rate, so 170W at r18, 190W at r20 and 210W at r22.
Everything was going fine until I was starting the 4th interval, when the batteries in the PM5 died in dramatic fashion. By dramatic fashion, I mean that entirely theatrically. It died and came back to life at least 3 times. Each time it totally reset the session. Ultimately with around 8 minutes to go, it died entirely and I was rowing completely blind. As you can see from the HR plot, I seem to need the feedback because my HR went through the roof as I pushed harder and harder while counting strokes to try to hit the rate.
I really needed this workout. I felt much more relaxed afterwards.
Quantified Rowing 
I have been wondering about PM5 batteries with the wireless and all. This was your home erg?
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This was the PM5 at work which I installed about 4 or 5 months ago. This erg does not see heavy use, maybe 2 hours a day, with me being one of the hours. I think the battery life is less than ideal, but not a really big deal. I bet I’ll change the ones at home twice a year. A better solution would be a lithium battery that is charged by the flywheel, but I imagine that that would be a fair bit more expensive.
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How did you measure the time when the PM5 died? How did Painsled handle the event?
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I connect my heart rate monitor to my iphone and use wahoo fitness. I have it set up with an audible alert of my heart rate once every minute. This harks back to the days when I didn’t have a HR display on the erg at work, and I wanted to row to a HR cap. Anyway, I still have it setup that way and I always start my workouts on an even minute, so after the PM5 died, I had the announcements once per minute to keep time. I continued to change rate on every two minutes from the announcements too.
There was no evidence of any session at all on my phone in painsled after the PM5 died. I suspect that there is a temp file hiding there somewhere, but it’s not in the log on the phone.
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