Sunday:  It was a lovely day down on the cape.  I did some maintenance around the house, including replacing some shingles that were blown off the roof by a wind storm and digging out some sand that built up around the basement entrance.  We hung out until late in the afternoon and I never got a chance to do a training session.  No great loss.

Monday:  Today is the 31st, so it was my last chance to post an entry for the October Cross Team Challenge.

As usual during the OTW season, I go into these challenges not having a good idea about pacing.  My all time best 10K was in December of 2013.  I was in fantastic shape at that point and was knocking off most of my middle distance PBs.  Right now, my training has been focused on middle distance work for the head racing season, but I wasn’t sure how well that would translate to the erg.

I decided to try go out at a 1:52 pace and see how things went.

If you have been reading my training journal, you can probably suspect what a 1:52 target means in practice.  It means I went out around 1:50-1:51.

The way I do these middle distance pieces is to count strokes for each 1000m.  At the start, I was doing about 94 strokes per 1000m.  In this piece, I started to struggle a bit around 5000m and started to ease up on the pace.  The worst was at 2500m to go.  I saw a few 1:53s and 1:54s on the monitor.  I would push a bit, then ease up, then push again.  Once I got to 1500m left, I felt pretty sure I was going to make it, and I started to push harder and got 1:52s and 1:51s back on the screen.  With 500m to go, I started counting down strokes and rating up.

I am delighted with the result.  37:08.1, a 1:51.4 pace.  I ranked it on the C2 site and it’s 18th (97th percentile).  For the CTC results, I’m in at 77th place and the 4th place for Free Spirits.

I did a quick 1K warmup before and a 2k cool down after.

Tomorrow:  4 x 20′ L4