Weather:  Awesome.  Sunrise is at 6:33am, so when we launched at 5:40 it was still very dark.  The eastern sky was just starting to lighten up.  No wind.  Clear skies.  Flat water.

In the race last weekend, one of our week points was maintaining speed and technique during the big sweeping turns.  Today’s workout was designed to try to practice that.  In the south end of the lake, there are a set of small islands and the lake is much wider.  I looked at it compared the turn radius that you need to hold for the big turn on the charles before the Eliot Bridge.  The inset in the map below is the Eliot turn.  The rest of the map is the south end of Lake Quinsigamond at exactly the same scale.  By doing a figure 8 around the little island on the eastern side of the lake, it is a similar turn to two Eliot Bridge turns in opposite directions.  If you start and finish at the small island to the north, it’s about 2000m.

Plan:

• 4 x 2000m
• 3′ to 5′ rest
• spm: 24-28
• pace: faster than 2:20
• technique:  try to avoid digging too deep.  Clean up finishes.  work on maintaining speed in the turn.

It turned out to be a very hard workout!  I’m not sure about Joe, but it nearly killed me.  I was a bit lightheaded and woozy for a while after we landed.

Here’s the whole thing on a map.  The boathouse is on the top, and we warmed up going down lake to the little island next to the google maps red “pin”.  Then there are four loops around the islands.  Then a cool down going back up to the boathouse.

Here is a zoom of each of the four loops.

As we went along, Joe got more and more comfortable with the best line around the small island.  The biggest difference was from rep number 2 to rep number 3.  In Reps 1 and two we lost a ton of boat speed at the apex of the turn.  You can see the divot in the pace plot.  In rep #1, the pace was killed around the 3000m point, and we slowed all the way to a 2:42 pace.  We only got back our boat speed in the last 400m or so.  In rep #2, we still lost speed at the apex of the curve, and the pace dropped to 2:33, but we managed to get back on track sooner.  In rep #3, the pace never got worse than 2:27 and we held boat speed through the whole back half of the turn.  By the fourth rep, I was toast.  I rated lower and rowed like crap.

The piece splits back that up.  Rep #2 had a furious sprint at the end at 30 spm, but was still slower overall than the third rep.

|Start|Dist_|Time_|_Pace__|_SPM__|avg HR|DPS_|Remarks
|00010|01990|10:45|02:42.1| 17.7 | 131 |10.5|warmup
|02000|01999|09:39|02:24.8| 26.6 | 162 |07.8|rep #1
|03999|00251|03:28|06:54.3| 18.1 | 126 |04.0|rest
|04250|02000|09:13|02:18.3| 28.1 | 166 |07.7|rep #2
|06250|00500|06:04|06:04.0| 13.9 | 129 |06.0|rest
|06750|01928|08:51|02:17.7| 27.2 | 170 |08.0|rep #3
|08678|00341|04:27|06:31.5| 26.2 | 130 |02.9|rest
|09019|02001|09:47|02:26.7| 26.0 | 168 |07.9|Rep #4
|11020|02171|13:56|03:12.5| 20.7 | 146 |07.5|cool down
|Start|Dist_|Time_|_Pace__|_SPM__|avg HR|DPS_|Remarks
|00000|01990|10:45|02:42.1| 17.7 | 131 |10.5|warmup
|00000|07928|37:30|02:21.9| 26.9 | 166 |07.9|main set
|00000|01092|13:59|06:24.2| 18.8 | 129 |04.1|rests
|00000|02171|13:56|03:12.5| 20.7 | 146 |07.5|cool down

I’d call that about 38′ of HIT and 37′ of LIT.

Tomorrow:  75′ steady state in my single down in Newton.