Late night in the fitness center

October 14, 2017Leave a comment

Wednesday: No time to work out in the morning. I was finally able to get to the gym very late Wednesday night, actually just into Thursday morning.

20 minutes treadmill (15% grade, 3.3 mph)
20 minutes elliptical (level 17, hill profile)
20 minutes stationary bike (level 16, random profile)

All were slightly harder than the day before, my HR response was correspondingly a bit higher too.

Thursday: I finished around 1:15am, then made a couple of calls. I got to be at about 2:30am and needed to get up at 4:30am. I had a 7:25am departure from Munich to Lyon. So, walk to the ostbanhof train station, catch the 5:24am train to the airport, arrive at around 6:00. Plenty of time.

I slept a bit on the flight from Munich to Lyon, and a bit more in the 90 minute cab ride from Lyon to Grenoble. Then I had an internal meeting, business lunch, two customer meetings, and a business dinner. I got back to my room around 10:15pm and immediately crashed.

Friday: My alarm was set for 5:30. We were out on the road to Milan by 6:00. We got to Milan around 10:30, and straight to a customer meeting at 11. This wrapped up after 12. Then a lunch with my colleagues, and straight to the airport. My flight was at 3:50pm to London, and then 6:50 departure to Boston. I landed around 8:30 local time, was home by 9:30 and in bed by 10:30. I slept for nearly 11 hours.

Not the way I wanted to spend the last real prep week before the HOCR, but needs must.

Fitness Center Triathlon

October 10, 2017Leave a comment

Last night I flew from Boston to Stuttgart via Amsterdam, arriving at 9:15AM. I got maybe 3 hours of fitful sleep on the plane.

I had a meeting from 11-12 and the lunch with the customer. Then we drove back to Munich, well I rode and Martin drove. I fell asleep in the car for about an hour of the trip. Honestly, it was better sleep than what I got on the plane.

Back in Munich, I hung out at our office for an hour or so and caught up on emails. Then I walked to my hotel, which has a small but serviceable fitness center. I put on my workout clothes and headed down.

The plan was to do 60 to 80 minutes of low intensity aerobic work. And that’s what I did.

20′ treadmill death march: 15% grade, 3.2 mph
30′ elliptical trainer, random profile avg level 16/25
30′ stationary bike, hill profile, avg level 15
HR limit: 150

I was happy with the nice low HR, and especially that my HR was dropping fast with lower loads. Not exactly what I want to be doing 12 days before the HOCR, but you do what you need to do.

Tomorrow: Morning workout, then meetings all day. Probably something a bit more challenging and shorter than this. Maybe treadmill intervals.

Thursday: 2 x 30’/2′ – easy fitness center session

June 29, 2017Leave a comment

The plan called for:

2 x 30′ / 3′

MP or slower

75.0%

(140)

Today, I started with 30 minutes on the treadmill at maximum incline (15%). I adjusted the speed to slowly get me into the UT2 zone and keep me there.

Then I moved over to the stationary bike and did the same thing. I fiddled with the resistance to keep my HR right around the boundary between UT2 and UT1.

Now I am at the airport in Incheon waiting for my flight. I fly to Dallas, and then connect to Boston, getting in at 11pm local time.

I will try to squeeze in a short row, either open water, or on the erg on Friday, but we have house guests so I’m not sure if it will happen.

Long, slow burn in the fitness center

April 26, 2017Leave a comment

Still in Seoul. At the JW Marriott (the fitness center with the mechanical horsey, but no rower)

I had time to kill this morning. I woke up around 5:30AM, and I didn’t need to leave for the airport until 10:30. So, I did some email, did a crossword, surfed the web, and around 7, I decided to head to the gym.

The plan for today

4 x 20′ endurance
20 minutes max incline treadmill
20 minutes flat incline treadmill jog
20 minutes elliptical (intervals, level 15)
20 minutes stationary bike (rolling hills, level 8)

Holy hell it was boring.

Now I’m at the airport waiting to get on my flight. I’m connecting through Hong Kong and getting back to Boston around 10:30PM. Ugh.

I just sync’ed up StravastiX. I’m certainly not putting a challenging load on myself these days. I think I need to ramp up the volume AND the intensity if I want to make much progress. It says that my fitness is improving, but I think it is deceived by the fact that I only started logging after my return from my knee operation. It had my fitness starting from zero, but it was actually pretty good prior to my layoff. I bet that I would be hovering versus slowing improving if that was the case. I think I need to get a good 6 months of activity recorded before I really trust the trends.

It’s almost time to restart the marathon plan. Except this time on the water!

Sunday: Fitness Center Triathlon 3 x 20′

February 19, 2017February 22, 2017Leave a comment

I didn’t want to put too much stress on my knees, so I hit the fitness center at the hotel on Sunday morning. The goal was a low impact, easy workout.

20 minutes treadmill (15% grade, 3mph)

20 minutes elliptical (random program, level 15)

20 minutes stationary bike (random program, level 15)

Maybe too easy.

Sunday: Fitness Center 2 x 30′ easy

February 5, 2017February 5, 2017Leave a comment

Saturday was a travel day. No Training.

In Korea. At the Sheraton. A really beautiful hotel.

Plan for today was to just work out the kinks from the flight and get adjusted to my new time zone.

30 minutes inclined march (15% grade, 3mph)

30 minutes stationary bike (rolling hills, level 14 of 25)

Heart rate cap at 150. I ended up up lower than that.

Tomorrow: I will try to do a version of the 5kp,mp step down workout.

4 x 15′ / 4′ rest
6′ at 5KP / 9′ at MP

I think I will try to do this on a treadmill with 15% grade. The 6′ at 4.5mph and the 9′ at 3mph. I will see how my HR responds to that and adjust so that the 6′ blocks are pushing HRs in the high 160s by the end and the 9′ blocks bring it down into the low 150s.

Thursday: 2×30′ fitness center

January 26, 2017January 27, 2017Leave a comment

Wednesday: First teleconference at 7am. Then another at 8. Then off to the airport to fly to LAX, then more meetings and dinner with the team from our facility there. No time to train.

Thursday: It was going to be another long day. First teleconference at 6am, which lasted until 8. I had a bit of time before I needed to drive to San Diego, so I went to the hotel gym. This session was more about stress management than training. I just wanted to do something.

I did 30 minutes on the stationary bike (rollings hills, level 15). Then 30 minutes on the elliptical trainer (rolling hills, level 15). It turns out that rolling hills are easier on the elliptical.

After that, I showered, hopped in my car and drove down to San Diego. Straight in to a prep meeting for 3 hours, then a meeting with our customer from 6pm until 8:30. That left me just enough time to drive to the airport and catch the redeye home. Well not quite home, I am now in Charlotte waiting for my connection and writing a journal entry.

After I get home, I think I’ll take a nap, and maybe do an easy erg session.

Wednesday:2 x 30′ spin

December 21, 20164 Comments

I feel like I’m falling apart. Maybe it’s psychosomatic. My knee is clicking away, over the past few weeks I’ve been bothered by some kind of a pinched nerve in my neck that hurts when I try to twist my head around (like to back up a car), and when I sleep. My most recent complaint is my lower back. I must have tweaked it when I did my “bumps” workout. It was a little sore yesterday morning and I ignored it and rowed anyway. Big mistake. The rest of the day, I had a constant lower back ache, and if I twisted or leaned wrong, I’d get a sharper jolt of pain.

Anyway, it hurt enough that I had trouble sleeping. Rolling over was pretty painful. And I have a lot on my mind. So, I felt pretty lousy at 5:15 this morning when I got up.

I decided that rowing was a bad idea. So, it would be the tedium of the stationary bike this morning.

The plan:

2 x 30′
a couple minutes of stretching between
easy pace: UT2 / UT1

The first 30 minutes, I just set the machine to manual and pedaled at level 14. The second 30 minutes, I did “rolling hills”, which was less scenic than the name implied.

Mission accomplished.

Tomorrow: Knee Surgery. Guess we’ll call that a rest day.

Wednesday: 60′ of fitness center purgatory

December 14, 20161 Comment

I really shouldn’t complain…but I will anyway.

I finished up my last meeting today around 4 and was dropped off at the Movenpick hotel at the Stuttgart airport. I thought it would be a great thing to go work out. I had noticed when I checked in that the fitness center had a Model D rower, and I was itching to do some long slow meters.

So, I suit myself up, put on some nice podcasts, sit down on the rower, adjust the foot height, and pull on the chain. It was bad. Really bad. The clutch was going on the erg, so it would lurch and grind on the pull. I thought it might calm down over a few pulls, but no, it was entirely unusable.

If there had been no erg, I would have contentedly toddle over to the bike and just gotten going, but my shuffle to the bike after failing on the erg was quite depressing. I hopped on the bike and watched the minutes pass glacially toward 30. At 30 minutes, I had had more than enough pedalling, so I moved over to the treadmill. Here I cranked up the incline all the way to 15% and walked briskly (at 5km/h) for another 30 minutes.

By this point, I was tired, sweaty and bored, so I decided to call it a day.

Tomorrow morning I have a 7:10am flight out of Stuttgart through London back home to Boston. It will be good to get back to a working erg!

Friday: Temptation

December 9, 2016Leave a comment

So, I don’t really know what to think about how things are going with my knee. There is no doubt that the MRI showed an damaged area of the meniscus cartilage, but right now, it is hurting a lot less. I still get clicking and I am treating it very carefully, but I am worrying about whether getting it scoped is the right thing to do.

The thing is that I would not be able to row well the way it is now. I would be constantly worried that I would over compress and lock it up in the boat. This would be painful at least and could be potentially dangerous, if it was as bad as when it happened in Vermont (or numerous times the following couple of weeks).

Anyway, this morning, the plan was for a 60 minute endurance session. I was originally planning to just do another boring ride on the stationary bike. I started there, and did 30 minutes that way, and I got really bored. My knee also felt perfectly fine.

Hmmm. Maybe I could do a little erging. Either it would go OK, or at least I’d be more certain about the procedure.

So, I toddled over to the erg. I put down a bandaid on the rail to give myself a reminder to not compress too far. I dialed up 10km on the PM5 and started rowing.

At first I was very tentative about stroke length, and the time off the erg was definitely having an effect. But over the first 10 minutes I got more comfortable and confident and lengthened my stroke a bit. I’m still not squeezing hard into full compression at the catch, but I was going an inch or so past the bandaid. As this happened I was able to bring the rate down a bit too.

The HR response was pretty poor for such a slow piece, but it was great to get back on the erg and my knee is showing no ill effects afterward.

Workout Summary - media/20161209-181650-sled_2016-12-09T07-29-45ZEST.strokes.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|10000|41:28.0|02:04.4|181.4|19.0|151.2|160.0|12.7
W-|10000|41:28.0|02:04.4|181.2|19.0|151.5|160.0|12.7
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|160.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|01000|04:05.0|02:02.5|185.0|20.0|137.1|146.0|12.2
02|01000|04:05.5|02:02.8|189.1|19.9|148.8|152.0|12.3
03|01000|04:07.3|02:03.6|185.2|19.5|150.5|152.0|12.4
04|01000|04:07.3|02:03.6|185.5|19.2|151.4|153.0|12.6
05|01000|04:10.1|02:05.1|178.8|18.9|152.6|154.0|12.7
06|01000|04:11.0|02:05.5|176.9|18.7|152.7|154.0|12.8
07|01000|04:10.4|02:05.2|178.3|18.9|153.3|155.0|12.7
08|01000|04:10.1|02:05.0|179.1|19.1|154.7|157.0|12.6
09|01000|04:10.5|02:05.3|178.0|18.2|155.5|157.0|13.2
10|01000|04:11.2|02:05.6|176.6|17.2|157.6|160.0|13.9