It was beautiful out today.  Clear skies and sunny.  Upper 30s at the start, rising to around 45F by the time we finished.  A light wind from the north was a gentle tail wind heading downlake and a head wind heading up lake.  Enough to effect the pace a bit, but not enough to stir up any chop.  I can’t imagine a better day for rowing.

I was in my single and Joe, Heri, Leanne and Pam were in the quad.  I had a simple training plan.

• Stay with the quad.

All I really wanted to do was row, and I was enjoying the company.  They were going easy sometimes and then doing some power pieces. I just try to match pace with them.  We headed downlake first, at a reasonably hard steady state pace for me.  Then a bit easier heading up lake, although with the head wind, it felt almost as hard.

After the narrows, I could hear when Joe would call for a 10 or a 20 and I would increase the pressure to stay even with them.  We took a brief break just north of the Route 9 bridge, and then continued to the north end of the lake.  From the QRA boathouse, the quad picked up the rate and I matched to them.

We took another break and started to head home.  Joe said that they were going to take it easy until 2/3 of the way home, and then do a hard 500m piece.  Rowing downlake, I got a bit ahead of them and then slowed to a paddle around the start of the 500.  I saw them take up the rate and I waited until they were about a length behind me and I did the same.  Because they were at speed and I was still accelerating, they pulled a little bit ahead of me by the time I was about 20 strokes into it.  I pushed up the rate and I started to claw them back so we were even at 40 strokes.  We finished around stroke 55 for me, and I was maybe a quarter length up on them.  It was fun doing it side by side like that.

Then an easy paddle back to the dock.  After we landed, I took off my rigger and packed my boat into the back of the boathouse for the winter.  😦

Workout Summary - media/20161119-152227-79032o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|11996|68:58.0|02:52.5|000.0|20.0|145.4|171.0|08.7
W-|10100|48:19.0|02:23.6|000.0|20.5|151.6|171.0|10.2
R-|01896|20:39.0|05:26.7|000.0|18.0|125.8|171.0|06.1
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
02|03300|15:18.7|02:19.2|000.0|20.4|153.2|167.0|10.6
03|03300|16:26.5|02:29.5|000.0|19.4|151.4|163.0|10.3
04|02000|09:29.1|02:22.3|000.0|21.7|155.2|170.0|09.7
05|01000|05:01.1|02:30.6|000.0|18.7|137.7|142.0|10.6
06|00500|02:04.6|02:04.6|000.0|28.1|159.4|171.0|08.6

I did some quick analysis of the row. Looking at pace versus stroke rate.  These two plots show tail wind and head wind difference.  Tail wind is on the left.  Head wind is on the right.

Finally, here is a view of the last 500m piece.  You can see my rate and pace increasing at the beginning.

Tomorrow:  L3 half marathon.  Aiming to do a bit better than the 1:23:33 from last week.