I got home at 2:15am on Saturday morning.  It was pure bliss getting back into my own bed.  I slept like a log.  I was stunned to see it was 11am when I finally woke up.

I spent the day just puttering around the house.  I did some grocery shopping and laundry.  I didn’t feel like training, so I didn’t. I got to bed around midnight.  Even though I didn’t feel that sleepy, I fell asleep quickly and slept until 5.  I woke up and I knew instantly that I was done sleeping.  I tried to sleep a bit more, but a thought crept into my head.  If I’m awake anyway, maybe I should head out to Worcester and go rowing.  This seemed like a much better thing to do than to toss and turn in bed not sleeping.

So, I did.  I got up, put my name on the sign up list, got my stuff together and headed out to Quinsigamond.  When I got there, I was delighted to see Joe and Bob.  Bob suggested we take out the Wintech.  I thought that was a great idea.  I haven’t been in a boat since July 16th.  A nice stable double sounded perfect.  I could let him steer and I could just focus on trying to remember how to row.

It came back quickly.

I didn’t have much of a plan.  I ultimately decided that I should do some kind of an approximation of the L3 workout that was scheduled for Yesterday.  But mostly, I was just really enjoying the feeling of being in the boat.  The feeling of connection.  The sound of the bubbles running along the hull.

We headed south and I fell into a groove at around 23 SPM.  I just went with it.  We had a bit of a tail wind and the pace was generally between 2:10 and 2:15.  I was working pretty hard, and by the sound of Bob’s breathing, he was working pretty hard too.  We got waked a couple of times by waterskiing boats, but generally it was just a nice hard row all the way down lake.

We turned to go north, and I suggested we take it down a bit and do some easy rate ladders.  This plan didn’t last all that long though.  As we were coming out of the cove at the south end of the lake, we saw the quad from our club going the other way, so we looped around the little island and followed them back into the cove.

We stopped and chatted for a few minutes and then we both started up again.  Bob said he would feel ore comfortable ahead of them than behind them, and the rest, as they say, is history.  I brought the rate back up to about a 24 and decided that we would “do the lake”.  This is a nice 5+km piece.  Basically a perfect head race distance.

Now I didn’t push it as hard as a full on head race simulation, but I wanted it to be a good threshold L3 training piece.  Now the wind was ahead of us and it was building.  We launched at about 7:10 and we would have started up lake around 7:40.

The row was close to uneventful.  One or two wakings, but generally we just clicked along.  The wind got a bit gusty once we were north of the Rt 9 bridge, but the water was flat.  Bob asked for a hard twenty at the end, and then tacked on another 10 for fun.  We were both puffing hard by the time we finished.

Then we turned around and took it easy almost all the way back.  Bob asked for 50 hard strokes at the end.  It was a good way to finish.

Today made it easy to remember why I really like this sport.  Pushing hard is easy on a crisp, sunny morning like today.

Tomorrow:  Schedule calls for a rest day, but I did that yesterday.  I think I will try to do an L4 OTW in Newton.