Well, if I wanted to test how far my sprint fitness has declined, this would be a good way to do it.  Also, it would be a good way to see how well my knee works for full pressure rowing.

I figured that it would be a stretch to do this session with an average pace of 1:45.  To try to make myself a little less obsessive about the pace, I did the challenge with the watts screen up.  1:45 is just about 300W, but somehow, I figured I would do a better job backing off if I wasn’t looking at the pace sliding away.

I set up the session as a simple time interval session.  I used the first 4 minutes as a warmup with 4 power 10s close to my target pace.  Then 3 minutes of paddling.  I let the flywheel stop completely before the first interval to stay legal.

The plan was to try to hold 10W per stroke, but I found that I was having trouble getting my rating up above 28, even with the power above 300W.  I just went with it, but it sure felt like hard work.  I finished the first interval 303 watts (1:44.6).  I felt pretty toasted, but I recovered pretty well in the rest period.

I figured I should probably back off the 300w target a bit, but I set out in the second interval at 300W, but I needed to back off a bit in the second half and I ended up at 297W (1:45.6).  This one really stung and I was desperately counting down the strokes to the end.

For the third interval, I targeted 280W and I hoped that would be enough slack.  This one started pretty well, but I sure felt it in the last minute.  I beat the 280w, but just barely with 283W (1:47.3).

The last interval was going to be very difficult.  I decided to back off some more to 260W and see how it went.  I really wanted to just make it through without putting the handle down.  I did, 262W (1:50.0).

I did a progressive cool down, and then paddled enough meters to tick over 10km.

The summary graph shows that I was pushing this one close to the edge.  My max recorded HR is 185 and I matched that the last interval.

This workout shows how using power is a better way to manage intensity for hard workouts.  HR lags power in shorter intervals, so here, you can see that I was pushing anaerobic power levels for about 14 minutes, which was the whole workout execpt for when I faded in the middle of the last interval.  By HR, it only shows 6:38.

This workout provides a good example of how the stroke based statistics of rowsandall can have errors that have a pretty big impact on shorter intervals.  I parsed the workout data to select just the 4 work intervals, and the summary data from there was.

Workout Summary - media/20170108-2130110o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|08888|40:00.0|02:15.0|193.6|24.5|157.2|185.0|09.1
W-|04476|16:00.0|01:47.2|286.4|27.1|169.8|184.0|10.3
R-|05529|32:00.0|02:53.6|129.4|22.5|149.1|184.0|06.2
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00004|00:00.0|00:00.0|152.6|00.0|75.0|75.0|00.0
01|01146|04:00.0|01:44.8|302.8|27.3|165.1|176.0|10.5 - +2m
02|01130|04:00.0|01:46.2|297.0|27.2|169.7|181.0|10.4 - -6m
03|01113|04:00.0|01:47.8|283.3|27.5|171.9|184.0|10.1 - -5m
04|01084|04:00.0|01:50.7|262.5|26.4|172.4|184.0|10.3 - -6m

This is close enough for analysis purposes, and to provide a good definition of work and rest strokes, but for challenges, you definitely want to use the PM directly.

Tomorrow:  10 min warmup, 40 min steady state, 10 min cool down