This has turned out to be a pretty nice day.

My ride to the airport was smooth, well, except for the part where I discovered that I was short of money to pay the driver and had to run inside the terminal to an ATM to fix that little problem.

My flight from Taiwan to Macau was delightfully short and very comfortable.  Customs was a breeze, and the shuttle to the hotel was easy to find and extremely well air conditioned.  I’ve never been to Macau before.   If it wasn’t for the humidity, I would swear that I am in Las Vegas.  The hotels and casinos are nearly indistinguishable!  I am staying at the Sheraton, which boast of having 4000 rooms.  I can tell you that 4000 is a lot of rooms in a hotel.  The front desk had about 40 clerks working and the queue was quite long.  Luckily, I’m a member of the sheraton frequent guest program and they had a nice, special check in desk for us away from the hoi poloi 😉

I went to my room and this was the view from my window.

Basically what the brochure promised.  I settled in, did some work, and around 3:30 I decided to check out the fitness center.

My plan was to do an easy workout to see if my stomach would give me troubles.

It took me about 10 minutes to walk to the fitness center.  (Did I mention that it’s a large hotel?)  Lo and behold, what did I see?

Yep, a brand new Model E rowing machine complete with a PM5 monitor.  Alas, I couldn’t get the monitor to link up with my phone, but still, two ergs in one trip.  I felt extremely lucky!

I settled in for an L4 session.

• 2 x 30′ / 2′ rest
• 10′ sections
• rate / power targets
  • 16 / 155
  • 18 / 175
  • 20 / 195
  • 22 / 215
• rate plan

I was hoping that this would be a reasonably easy workout and for the most part it was.  My stomach was a bit grumbly in the middle of the first 30 minutes, but settled down.  My hr climbed a bit higher than I was hoping it would as the workout wore on, but nothing weird.  All in all, a very pleasant session.

So, the stroke rate for the first 30 minutes should have been 17.2 and the second 30′ should have been 17.6, so that’s OK.  The power target for the first 30 minutes was 167W and the second was 171W, so I was 3W ahead of m=plan.

Now it’s about 5:30 and I’m trying  to figure out what to do tonight.  I guess find some dinner and do some more work.

Tomorrow:  Sticking with the WP theme, I think I will do a very tame L2 workout.

5×1500/5′ rest

At my best I could do this workout at a 1:45 pace.  In general, I’m closer to 1:50.  Since I’m just restarting, far from home and not in the mood to try to hard, I’m going to do it at 1:55 with a faster last.