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.
Quantified Rowing 
The calibration 1k wasn’t much slower than your other two at 3-4spm less. Maybe try putting more power down at a lower rate and see if you’re faster than when rating up. Sometimes increasing the rate does little but make you tired faster as you’re pi$$ing off the boat more.
FWIW my cal. factor is 0.975. Pretty close.
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The wind helped me a bit in the last 1k. But I agree that holding the rate below 30 is probably the most efficient way to go.
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Very interesting how the second 1k was almost as fast as the first one, despite losing pace in a wind gust and a lower overall stroke rate. In terms of graph color the second one seemed a harder one, but that is of course deceptive. In the first one you were already trying to push through the lactate burst while your heart rate was still low. I bet your second 1k was more on the aerobic engine.
Your warming up was already long enough, but I wonder if you might experience with a longer warming up. On race day, I usually go for a short run with some sprints, some skipping and hopping and some stretching an hour before the race start time.
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I had that one gust in the second 1k, but the whole second half of the first one was done with a really significant cross chop. I think that slowed me down a fair amount.
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