I got home around 11pm and got to bed around 1AM.  There was no way that I was getting up at 5:15 to go rowing.  I did pack my rowing stuff in case I was able to sneak out and go for a row in the afternoon.  It turns that I did.

I was not in the mood for the planned 6 x 750.  I still felt pretty worn down from all the plane flights and jet lag.  Also, I had not been in a boat since the previous Sunday.  Even that didn’t entirely count since it was my chubby boat.  So, I thought it would be a good idea to work on technique.  I went to my go session for working on balance and technique

• 2′ square blade rowing
• 2′ alternating square and normal
• 2′ normal
• Rate target: 18 to 20
• Pace target: none
• HR cap:  < 150  (hopefully a lot under 150 for most of it)

It was beautiful out today.  Around 80F, but with a nice breeze from the ENE around 5mph, with gusts higher.

It was a really nice outing.  Nice and easy.  It’s hard to concentrate for that long, but I had stretches where I felt like my rowing was fluid and natural.  I also had periods where it was just wobbly and awful.

The XGPS160 was acting up badly today.  It froze and I cycled power four times.  Each time, the symptoms were identical.  The pace and distance would stop updating.  I would power it off, power it back on, it would start talking to the iphone again and everything worked fine.

It was also navigating horribly.  Here’s the map of the whole outing.

Some of the lines look a little jagged.  When you zoom in it gets much more apparent that the position it is reporting has a lot of uncertainty to it.

The first map is the leftmost third.  The jaggy line is the beginning of the row.  Look at the sudden jumps in the position.  Further over, notice that the position is just wrong.  It has me rowing through the penisula.

The second picture also has navigation errors showing me rowing into the north bank of the river coming out of the s-turn.  I assure you, I did not.

The third picture is the Moody street basin and you can see the weird results by the bridge.  Also, the lines down the canal are wrong.  The good water is very narrow and I tend to follow it quite consistently, the lines are all over the place.

At this point, I think I am going to be leaving the XGPS160 in my kit bag until I hear something back from the vendor.  With this much error in the position and the impact it has on the instantaneous pace display, which is jumping all over the place, it’s worse than the much slower updates of the internal GPS of the iphone.

Tomorrow:  The promised 6×750.