With my work schedule and stress I am finding that I have no appetite for intense erg sessions.  When I go to the gym, I really want to just relax and space out doing some endurance training.

I found myself in the gym a bit earlier than usual, around 6:30, so I decided to do 80 minutes today.  I decided to start harder and get easier as I went along, but I got tired faster than the intensity dropped so my heart rate ended up higher than I was hoping to see, especially in the last 20 minutes.

On slides.  18spm –> 170 ….21spm –> 200W

I arrived home from Denver around 1AM, so I slept in to 7:30 instead of getting up to workout.  By the end of the day, I was a nervous wreck.  Lot’s of work tension these days.  So, I decided to do a quick 30 minute session to just calm myself down a little.

The session was 5 x 6′ L4 sequences (on slides)

2′ @ 22, 2′ @ 20, 2′ @ 18 at just under 10W x stroke rate, so 170W at r18, 190W at r20 and 210W at r22.

Everything was going fine until I was starting the 4th interval, when the batteries in the PM5 died in dramatic fashion.  By dramatic fashion, I mean that entirely theatrically.  It died and came back to life at least 3 times.  Each time it totally reset the session.  Ultimately with around 8 minutes to go, it died entirely and I was rowing completely blind.  As you can see from the HR plot, I seem to need the feedback because my HR went through the roof as I pushed harder and harder while counting strokes to try to hit the rate.

I really needed this workout.  I felt much more relaxed afterwards.

It feels good to have a couple of days back in my normal routine.  Today I did another low intensity endurance session.  I started very tame (18 SPM, 170W).  On slides.  The next 20 minutes I alternated 18 and 20 SPM.  Then for the last 20 minutes I added some 22 and 24 SPM bits.  HR was disappointingly high throughout, but at least I’m on the erg.

Tomorrow:  OTW on Quinsigamond.

Sunday:  Red Eye to munich, arrived in the afternoon.  Straight into meetings.  No training

Monday:  Breakfast with customer, then prep meetings, then big customer meeting.  No training

Tuesday:  Unable to sleep Monday night due to jet lag.  Up at 4:30 to get to airport for flight home.  Arrived home at 1:30PM local time, straight to work.  Meetings until 6pm.  No Training

Wednesday:  Appointment for home inspection for place that we are buying on Cape Code first thing in the morning, then straight to work and meetings until 6pm.  No Training

Thursday:  Finally, a morning when I can train!  Up at 5:15, into the gym at 7.  Plan was to do an L4 session on slides and maintain a HR cap at the top of my UT1 zone.  I expected that my fitness would be negatively impacted by the lack of training.  The session fulfilled those expectations.  I needed to slow down continually to keep my HR from going way above the top of the UT1 zone.

One interesting feature in the graph is in the last 20 minute piece, I decided to consciously work on increasing my drive length.  I really reached at the catch and exaggerated my layback.  This was from about 10 minutes to 15 minutes in the piece.  No magic speed from it, but it is good to see the change reflected in the data because I was working on a changing the stroke.

Same basic idea tomorrow morning.  I might tack on a little bit of power training at the end just to make it a little more interesting.  I’m basically just trying to keep plugging away as much as I can when can squeeze in the training.  The plan is pretty much out the window without a boat, I don’t really have a good objective to shoot for.