When you write it in shorthand, it doesn’t look that bad, but it is a whole lot of rowing.  90 minutes of rowing, 60 minutes of it at a little bit above my endurance pace, and 30 minutes of it a lot faster than my endurance pace.

This was a monster of a workout.  The EF marathon plan does not feature the acute pain of the Pete Plan, but it is designed to put you into chronic oxygen debt and elevated lactate levels for VERY LONG PERIODS OF TIME.

The way I was thinking about this workout is this:

• The first 30 minutes at MP is basically like doing the first 30  minutes of a marathon
• The second 30 minutes at 10KP is faster than marathon pace to build up a really good oxygen debt and lactate load, that gets delivered to the last 30 minutes
• The last 30 minutes at MP is like the last 30 minutes of a marathon.  You are rowing at a comfortable pace, but you have a big debt that you can’t pay off.  (That’s as fun as it sounds)

I did the 20 minute flavor of this workout before, and the extra 10 minutes at 10KP is brutal!

I had a hangup with the PM5 and Painsled.  I think it was related to using ANT+ for HR data.  It froze up on me about 8 minutes into the first mp interval, so I stopped at 10 minutes, reset the PM, and programmed a 20’/30’/30′ variable interval session.  There wasn’t much to look at for the first 10 minutes anyway.  I aimed at 185W, I did 187W.

Here is the rest of the session from painsled.

I was never seriously considering quitting, but boy that middle 30 minutes lasted forever.I decided to ignore the HR cap, basically because I’m a prideful idiot.

I looked a bunch of metrics.  Some of them are interesting (at least to me).

• Drive length is consistent across time and stroke rates
• peak force declined between the first 30 minutes and the last 30 minutes as I rated up to try to deal with the fatigue
• Drive energy is basically work per stroke (of SPI).  This shows how I was a shadow of my former self in the last 30 minutes.
• I thought the stroke rhythm was interesting.  My drive to recovery  ratio was smaller in the first 30 minutes and consistent between the 10KP and final MP segments.  Another indication of how my rowing changes when I am really tired.
• Then a few plots versus stroke rate.  I find it interesting how different the first mp section is from the last mp section in these.

The fact that I had the hangup gave me an interesting opportunity to compare this workout to the 3 x 20′ version that I did 2 weeks ago.

Remember the first 10 minutes of today’s workout is missing.

The power was identical in the first and second intervals.  In the third interval of the prior workout, I felt so fresh, I upped the power.  Stroke rate was higher today, and I was trying to do that.  HR is interesting.  The first interval shows that my HR after 10 minutes today was much lower than 10 minutes into the first piece last time, but by the end of that piece it was a bit higher.  You can see the effect of that extra effort in the second interval.  My HR bumped up faster, and kept climbing.  Last week, it plateaued around 165 or so, today, it just kept on going.

Tomorrow:  2 x 30′ sub-MP, HR limit at 150