Entries closed! Watching the last minute scramble to seat boats was fun. 🙂 My chart is decorated with highlighter and scribbles. I ended with four entries Thursday, three Friday and Saturday, and two Sunday. Five weeks and counting!
Tuesday steady state at home.
Recovery week closes with a positive spin. Sunday to Friday, a decent week.
Sunday I rowed, keeping my focus on leg drive. Rather than trying too hard to get my bathtub to behave like a rocket, I aimed for efficient, strong pieces. At one point I had her down at a 2:09 for ten strokes at a 26. Seems decent.
Monday, morning kettlebells followed by another solid indoor row. The core work was four five-minute pieces, so I made each piece represent one of my Thursday FISA races. All sub 2- minute spilts, and pretty consistent on the time even if slightly slower over each one.
Wednesday back to the shorter, nasty anaerobic stuff. The first piece I rowed blind, on cals, and it was horrible, but after that I switched to watts. Another solid go.
Tuesday and Thursday were the longer, steady state pieces, and for this week I let go of monitoring performance metrics.
Today the core work involved high stroke rating, in the 40s range. It’s like doing a bunch of start sequences over and over and over. These little 30-second blitzes felt stupidly good. As in, I reached the ninth piece and wondered why my legs weren’t burning with more lactic build up.
I decided to row as high and hard as I could for 500 meters to find that “break point,” where your physiological systems start to switch from anaerobic to aerobic. In rowing this wall hits hard, usually around 250-300 meters. On my little test, my legs were just starting to burn at 500. I probably had another 100 meters before the hammer. That’s a good feeling.
Some other little self-discoveries I made:
- I realized I’ve been holding my breath at the start of you name it: water workouts, rowing pieces, starting sequences, weightlifting reps. That might be why I had such a struggle rowing in the previous week. Probably not the wisest thing. I’ve been working on this.
- I might have to scratch my A1x. If I don’t, a race plan is starting to come together. Even though my chances to win are slim, I’m not sharing! But it’ll be a risky strategy.
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- Fix one problem, find another.
I must keep reminding myself I can row harder than I think, to not accept complacency, to push into the pain cave.
- My body’s adapted to the high weights I set at the beginning of the month. Multiple reps, no problem. Hooray! More weight Monday!
- Video shows I’ve cut down overreaching but now might be under compressing? Compensating the wrong way, I guess. Alas, technique work never ends.
Hard training resumes! One last big push to FISA.
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