Well, that was quite unsatisfying.

I spent a fair amount of yesterday regretting doing the CTC.  My knee was stiff and painful.  I took some Ibuprofen before bed, but it was still not all together happy with me this morning.

But, I wanted to find out if I could erg without hurting my knee more.  So, I thought that I would try to do a slow half marathon

Plan:

• Half Marathon
• 3/4 slide (using the bandaid to mark max compression
• Target power 180W
• HR cap: 155
• No rate restriction, just try to figure out how to row efficiently with the short slide.

I had a glitch with the PM5/Painsled and only got data for the first 53 minutes, but fortunately, I had my HR backup going. 😉

Here’s the partial painsled data

Workout Summary - media/20161201-154018-sled_2016-12-01T07-13-18ZEST.strokes.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|12458|53:30.0|02:08.8|170.2|18.0|139.5|148.0|13.0
W-|12225|51:30.0|02:06.4|172.9|18.0|140.0|148.0|13.2
R-|00235|02:00.0|04:14.9|068.4|18.3|124.3|148.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|04803|20:00.0|02:04.9|178.7|18.2|135.6|147.0|13.2
02|04716|20:00.0|02:07.2|169.6|17.6|142.4|148.0|13.4
03|02706|11:30.0|02:07.5|168.8|18.2|143.4|148.0|12.9

I was curious about how the shorter stroke affected how much force I needed to put into the handle.  These two plots illustrate the difference.  The one on the right is a HM before my injury about 2 weeks ago.  The one on the left is from today.  So, my drive length is about 9 cm shorter (6.3%).  The peak force was 11.9% higher (193.2 vs 172.6).  And this resulted in a average power that was more than 20 watts lower.

For me, this was a very valuable illustration of how important length is to delivering power.  The good news is that my knee held up well and is pretty much pain free right now.  I guess I need to be satisfied with the idea of going slow until my knee is better.

Tomorrow:  Dr’s appt in the morning.  I might have time for a short workout during the day.