I was out late on Tuesday night for a work related dinner, so I decided to sleep in on Wednesday instead of rowing in the morning.  When I got home, I had a little time, so I decided  to give the August CTC a try.  This one is a sprinter’s dream.

I started with a 2K warmup, including some 10 stroke blasts.

Then I took a bit of time, got some water and setup the challenge as a variable interval workout.  I separated each piece with 5 minutes of rest, starting with the longest and going shorter in each successive piece.  In the rests, I did about 3 minutes of this paddling, and the last 2 minutes, I toweled off, grabbed a drink of water and let the flywheel come to a complete stop.

It was a fun session. It was challenge to get the start right and I didn’t get it right on the 300 and 200 and was staring at a very slow AVG split that took a while to get down to where I wanted it.  The 400 and the 100 were much better.  I knew I needed to rate up to make this work, but I haven’t practiced at high rates at all, so that felt a bit weird.

Despite those excuses, I had a blast doing it.  The 5 minute rests were plenty long and the pieces were short enough that I felt like I could go all out.

I used ergdata for the session.  This was sync’ed to the concept2 site, and then I exported the CSV data and massaged it with excel.

I like the power chart.  It makes me happy to see over 600W, even if it’s only for about 10 strokes.  The rate chart shows how my rate was tending to trail off during the pieces.  The pace chart is at the bottom.

I was using the wahoo tckr which let me hook up to the PM5 with ANT+ and to my phone with BTLE.  I used my phone to record HR through the warmup, the whole CTC session and a 2K cooldown.  This was done using the wahoo fitness app, and exported as a CSV file and analyzed with Excel to get time in HR zone data.

The sprint times were  plugged into the little online calculator and that spit out 5:50.6, which puts me currently in 91st place.  Looking at the names and times in the list, I really should be aiming at 10 to 15 seconds faster, but that seems like a lot of work!  So I think I stick with this score.