Stayed up too late, and decided to sleep instead of heading to the lake.  I’ll row tomorrow instead.  Got up around 9:30 and hopped on the erg.

After yesterday’s very long row, I decided to only do 60 minutes today.  I also decided to stick with a stroke sequence and let my HR do what ever it wanted to do.

I did the following sequence: 2′ @ 16, 2′ @ 17, 2′ @ 18, 2′ @ 19, 2′ @ 20

Power was 10W * stroke rate (so 16spm = 160W)

One interesting thing in the charts is the drive length.  As usual, you can see my drive length increasing over the first 10 minutes.  I think it is cool how it becomes more erratic as I get tired.  I like all the data that you can get out of painsled.

Started off feeling great.  But I kind of hit the wall in the last 20 minutes.  HR was a lot higher.  I’ve decided to try to do my LIT endurance workouts in a fasted state.  I think the research is pretty clear that it helps keep you metabolizing fats to a higher intensity than if you have eaten recently.  The thing that I am trying to work out now is intensity.

I have the feeling that if I had limited to high end of this workout to 190W, I probably would have maintained a lower heart rate.  It might be better to go back to a constant power level for these workouts.  My suspicion is that there is a fair amount of hysteresis in the crossover between fat and CHO metabolism.  Once you flip the switch to start burning glycogen, that you have to go way down in intensity to flip the switch back to fat.  I think that where I am now, that going above 180W I am flipping the switch.

For now, if I have to do any steady state on the erg, I think I will start doing lactate testing again, and stick to constant power.  Pity.  It is very boring.  But I want to get some unequivocal data on where my base fitness is right now.