Weather:  Sunny, cool (60f), a bit of wind from the West, about 5-10mph.  This was a mostly cross wind, but a little bit to the bow when rowing north, at least I’d like to think so.

Plan:

• Warmup
• Practice Starts
• 1000m Race Simulation
• recovery
• 1000m Hard Interval
• Cool down

I guess I’m OK with how things went.  I was hoping for faster times, but with the cross wind and chop, I was having some trouble rowing long.  It was a bit tippy at the catch.  The pace variations were mostly caused by gusts.  Especially the big drop off about 3/4 of the way in to the second 1000m.  In terms of effort, the first one was all out.  The second one, I started out a a bit lower stroke rate, and when things seemed to be going OK, I started pushing harder.

But the main point of today was to dig deep, experience the pain, and carry on.  From that perspective, this was a very good session.  It hurt like hell, but I eased up just a little and carried on.  I have a good idea of what I can do in the race.  target pace is right around 2:00 for the first 500m, and then go for broke in the second half.

While I was doing the 1ks, I noticed that the speedcoach was reading a bit faster than Crewnerd.  I had not recalibrated after reattaching the impeller, and I think it was giving me a couple of seconds on the pace that I was not earning.  So, after I got to top of the lake, I did one final 1K, this time trying to keep the rate around a 26 to do a speedcoach calibration.  To do this, I set up a 1000m piece on Crewnerd, and put the Speedcoach in to calibration mode.  You start them both up, and then you push stop on the speedcoach right when Crewnerd hits zero.  The cal factor ended up being 0.971.  My old cal factor was 0.983.  The change takes away about 1.5 seconds of pace.  Whew.  I feared it was more.

This afternoon, my wife and I are heading off to Cape Cod to celebrate July 4th out in Provincetown.  Tomorrow will be a rest day.  Tuesday, I will do an easy erg session in the afternoon.