I wanted to keep up my momentum, so instead of shortening the session, I got up extra early, so I could do the full hour, and still get to my 8am meeting on time.
The session was a carbon copy of yesterday’s. Constant 20 spm, constant power, around 184W. On slides. HR was a little bit higher today, but only marginally. In terms of RPE, it was exactly the same.
Tomorrow: A bit of spice. A short interval session. 8 x 500.
The objective was an easy session. Stay in UT2 and UT1 HR bands.
I decided to just stick to r20 and around 180W (on slides) and see what happened with my HR. I hit the top of the UT1 band with about a minute to go in the session.
It was, all in all, very relaxed.
Tomorrow: Shorter session. I have an 8am meeting. Probably a 10K (UT1) or something.
At home. Static erg.
Nothing fancy, just trying to maintain some endurance. Trying to keep the session basically in UT2 and UT1.
Tomorrow: More of the same, but on slides.
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.
Monday morning: My flight was cancelled, and I rebooked on a later flight to San Diego, arriving there right around dinner time. No training.
Tuesday: hit the tiny gym in the Courtyard Marriott. 30 minutes on the elliptical, and then 30 minutes on the treadmill set to max incline and a fast walk.
Wednesday: I was originally going to fly straight from California to Germany, but I changed plans and took the red eye home, then a full day on the phone in meetings. No Training
Thursday: Working from home and shuffling my wife to a doctor’s appt. I finally found some time for a workout in the evening.
I was lacking in creativity, so I just stole Sander’s session from earlier in the week, an L4 with alternating r18 and r20 segments.
Easy.
Friday: Back to routine. Up at 5:15, into the gym at 7. Still getting used to rowing on slides. Started with a alternating 18/20, then let that slide up to 19/21. This was pushing my HR a bit too much, so I backed off in the second 20 minutes to 180W at r20. Even this was a bit to much for me. So I backed off to r18 and about 170W for the last 30 minutes. I guess you could say that this session was just “shoveling it”.
One interesting thing (at least to me) is to look at the drive length. In my session last night on a static erg, my drive length was around 1.46m. Today on slides, it settle in around 1.42m. As far as I can tell, I am getting just about the same amount of compression at the catch, but I row with less layback on slides than I do on a static erg. Not sure what to make of that, it’s just an interesting data point. Another interesting data point, peak force was higher on slides, even though the average was about the same. Some of this might be due to the difference in drag factor (126 yesterday, 117 today). I really like painsled. Having this data to mull over is great.
Tomorrow: On the water in the morning, and flying off to Germany in the evening.
I am concerned about the elevated heart rates that I’ve been seeing and I decided that I am pushing my endurance sessions too hard. I need to accept that with the lower training volume and with my training gap from having the head cold, that my training power needs to be lower.
Today was an exercise in patience. 80 minutes at 18 SPM and 180W. Keep it nice and simple, and make sure that my HR stayed low throughout the session.
Mission accomplished.
Now I am at the airport on my way out to San Diego. Rest day today. Tomorrow, a session at a Crossfit box near my hotel.
Things are hectic right now. I haven’t had a spare minute over the past week so just a quick recap.
Saturday: A lovely (but cold), first on the water row for the season. I was in a double with Angela. Angela a a wonderful, happy woman who was in my learn to row class, I guess it must be 5 years ago. (I just checked and it was Spring of 2011, so it has been 5 years!)
She has gone to Craftsbury a couple times and she seems to enjoy working on technique, so that’s what we did. We were trying to stay with 2 quads that we filled with a mixture of new and experienced rowers, and a launch. The water is still brutally cold and for safety we wanted to all stay within hailing distance of each other. We did tons of pause drills, we cut the cake. We took turns rowing by ourselves (good power practice!). We were quite well set in the boat by the middle of the outing so we did some starts, which were slow, but reasonably well synchronized. All together we did about 10K of rowing over about 80 minutes or so. For some reason, I was having trouble getting RIM or Crewnerd to work for me on Saturday, but the exported TCX from RIM seems to be reasonably intact, so I could plunk that into Google Earth.
After the row, I rushed home and my wife and I drove down to Cape Cod to look at a vacation house we are thinking of buying. I started feeling a bit under the weather on the way down, and by the time we were on our way back, I was sure that I coming down with something. I even fell asleep in the car (she was driving!) for a while on the return ride.
The good news is that we loved the place that we looked at and we bought it. It’s right on the water, and I guess that means that I am now in the market for a good used open water boat!
The bad news is that I went downhill fast. By bedtime I had a fully fledged head cold.
Sunday: Sick. No training.
Monday: Early morning flight to San Francisco. Still sick. No training.
Tuesday: Feeling a little better, but still congested and a bit wobbly. No Training. On the red eye home from San Francisco.
Wednesday: Busy day, including a late dinner with customers. No Training.
Thursday: Basically done with the cold. Still a bit congested, but otherwise fine. Decided to not get up at 5:15 to do a morning workout. I think when recovering from an illness, sleep is more important than exercise. Toward the end of the day, I had a time window open so I could sneak down to the gym.
In an effort to distract myself from how much my fitness has declined from the illness and layoff, I put the erg on slides. It’s OTW season, I should really be working on slides as much as I can anyway. I had a bit of a struggle with the slides. They seem to be binding a bit at one end (near the catch), so I can get into this cycle of hitting the front stops, breaking free and rowing some weird strokes to get things back centered.
I did 30 minutes. I was fine through the first 15, but my stamina was shot. My HR went up and stayed up even when I backed off the power. On slides, I am about 10W lower than static for equivalent effort, so 170W at r18, 190W at r20, etc.
Friday: Back to the routine! Up at 5:15. Into the gym around 7. I was going to do a 3 x 20′ session, but I was rudely interrupted by the sticky slides after about 10 minutes, so I stopped and tightened up the shock cords a bit and that seemed to help a bit. But still if you just push the rower to the catch, it will hang there and not return to the neutral position.
First bit.
It took about 2 minutes to do the adjustments then I started again. I decided to just do 4′ at 18, and 1′ at 22. I then let myself go to r19 for the slow bits. It was still a bit too intense for my diminished capacity. So, I rowed the second 20 minute piece as an easy 160W at a constant r19. Even that was pushing the upper end of the UT1 band.
Friday PM: I had a very frustrating day. Lot’s of challenges to overcome and “opportunities” to confront. By the time 5PM rolled around, I decided that I needed a little bit of stress relief. So I headed back to the gym to do another 30 minutes. This one was just 30 minutes at r19 and 180W. I felt like I was finally getting some rhythm on slides.
Saturday: Slept in late. Still trying to bank as much sleep as I can. Then I brought my boat to it’s home on the Charles in Newton. I didn’t have the time or inclination to go for a row though because it was rainy and I had a lot of errands to do. I had largely finished these tasks by around 5pm, and then settled in for a 3 x 20’/1′ rest session. This one on a my static erg at home.
This started fine, but again, after about 20 minutes or so, my stamina failed me and my HR started to creep up beyond the UT1 limits. I made each successive 20′ piece easier, but still, I was unable to get my HR back under control.
And that brings us to today. My plan for today is an afternoon 4 x 20′ session at very low intensity. Basically a 150 BPM cap.
Tomorrow: Back on the road again. Back to San Diego for Monday and Tuesday, then to Munich for Thursday and Friday. I am staying over in Munich for the weekend for another meeting on Monday. Then I fly home on Tuesday. It will be interesting to see how well I can get training worked into that!
Needless to say, I will have to rethink the training plan.
slept a lot on Sunday, and
Last night I went to bed a bit before 11, and then woke up for good around 1:45. I tossed and turned for 2 hours and then gave up. got up and did some reading until it was time to go to work. I felt worn down and tired, but not at all sleepy. I’m working through a fair amount of stress right now, so it’s not surprising. It is, however, annoying.
So, I had plenty of time for a long session this morning, but, as it turns out, I didn’t have the energy. I plugged through the first 20 minutes, but I just sort of gave up the will to row in the middle of the second 20 minute piece. I sat around for a minute or so, trying to decide what to do, and then restarted at a light paddle and just sort of coasted through the last 12 minutes of that chunk.
I wasn’t sure if I should quick or continue after that, but I decided to give it a go. I elected to invent a new L4 stroke sequence, which I shall hence forth call the “Dash of Spice”. It is 1 minute at 21 SPM (and 210W), and then 4 minutes at 18 spm (180W). I did 4 sets of that and it was the right choice for this morning. I could hold the 180W sections with a nice stable HR, and the 1 minute sections at 210W were a good way to break up the piece.
I consider it a session well rescued.
Tomorrow: I think another 3 x 20′. Saturday will likely be my first OTW outing of the season. Probably in a quad. I’ll try to convince my boat mates that a session that is half technical and half 30″ on / 60″ off is a good way to open up the season.
Tough rowing today. Felt quite tired. HR was correspondingly high. I didn’t measure lactate, but it would have been too high if I did.
Later today, I will try to start some strength training. I will probably do some work to estimate 1RM for a few major exercises (Back squat, Front Squat, Strict press, bench press, power clean, dead lift, good mornings). I will not go to failure on these, but use the method of getting to a weight where you can do less than 10 reps and then use the formula
to figure out an estimate for what my 1RM would be.
Tomorrow morning: Long Intervals : 5 x 1500 / 5′ rest, target pace 1:50
Quantified Rowing 