When my alarm went off at 5:15 this morning, I felt very tired.  I walked downstairs, thought about it for a minute, and then went back to bed for another 2 hours.  I got up at 7:30 and felt much better.

As I drove to work, the weather was fine, but a bit windy.  It would have been perfectly rowable, but I was glad to get the additional sleep.

My new plan was to do the workout at the end of the day on the erg.  Because I have missed just about a full month of serious training, both technique and fitness need attention.  Today I wanted to focus on fitness.

I haven’t done this workout since 9/16/2016, just over a year ago.  This winter and spring, I was using the Eddie Fletcher Marathon training plan and haven’t been doing the normal interval work at all.

I point out all of that basically to say that I had very low expectations, and I didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew.  So, I decided to pick a conservative pace target.

The Plan:

• 4 x 2000 / 5′ rest
• pace target: 1:55 or faster
• rate target:  1st: 24, 2nd 25, 3rd 26, 4th: no target
• HR limits: none
• Technique:  Focus on keeping my knees together at Head race stroke rates

        Workout Summary - media/20170921-2215550o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|13292|63:15.0|02:22.8|189.4|23.2|152.6|179.0|09.1
W-|10000|38:14.0|01:54.7|232.6|24.4|159.1|179.0|10.8
R-|03295|25:01.0|03:48.0|074.7|20.0|136.8|179.0|03.8
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|02000|07:55.7|01:58.9|209.5|22.0|138.6|157.0|11.4
01|02000|07:36.8|01:54.2|234.6|23.9|158.0|169.0|11.0
02|02000|07:36.7|01:54.2|236.9|24.6|163.1|174.0|10.7
03|02000|07:29.9|01:52.5|246.0|26.0|167.7|179.0|10.2
04|02000|07:35.0|01:53.8|237.5|25.4|169.4|179.0|10.4

That was hard work.  I managed an average pace of 1:53.7.  Under “normal” circumstances, I would consider this a massive fail.  But given that I am coming back from an injury layoff, and going by the HRs, I was working very hard.  Mostly I was really happy about sticking with it in the later reps and I walked a bit taller walking away from the erg.

Tomorrow:  OTW steady state.  Focus on technique.