For a few months, the rowing took a back seat.
There were good reasons. Life, work, family — and the small matter of spending most of the summer building what has now become the Great Hall. 😆
The BigShed is finally standing, the tools are mostly where they belong, and crucially there's now enough floor space to do something I've been meaning to do properly for years.
Use the slides.
I've actually owned a set of Concept2 slides for a long time. They've followed me around through various versions of the rowing setup, but other than a handful of attempts they've spent most of their life sitting unused.
Partly because they need space.
And partly because rowing on them immediately exposes things that a fixed erg politely lets you get away with.
I'm not, and never have been, a technically trained on-water rower. Most of what I know has been learned through millions of metres on an indoor rowing machine. Over the years I've become reasonably effective at moving the handle from one end of a Concept2 to the other, but effective and technically good aren't necessarily the same thing.
Now I've finally got the room to leave the slides set up and actually work at them.
So the longship has come out of dry dock.
Not launched at full sail. Not heading immediately into battle. Just eased back down the timbers and into the water, trying to find a smoother way of moving.
And that's really the purpose of these sessions.
I'm not using the slides because I expect some magical free speed. I'm using them because they force me to think about timing, sequencing and rhythm.
On a fixed erg, I move backwards and forwards.
On slides, most of that mass should stay relatively still while the machine moves underneath me.
Rush the recovery and the erg disappears towards the front.
Throw myself at the catch and I hit the stops.
Try to muscle the stroke rather than sequence it properly and the whole thing starts moving around underneath me.
There's nowhere near as much room to hide.
The first few sessions have therefore been less about pace and more about figuring out how to make the machine behave.
Or, more accurately, figuring out how I need to behave so the machine doesn't complain.
Forty minutes around r20 initially. Then gradually moving towards r22 as the timing started to feel a little less alien.
There have been a few distractions along the way.
The PM5 monitor arm decided it no longer fancied remaining upright, slowly drooping towards my knees during a couple of sessions and requiring regular intervention.
That's now fixed.
My Garmin HRM 200 has also developed an entertaining habit of deciding that, halfway through a reasonably hard row, my heart rate has suddenly dropped from the 140s to something resembling a Sunday afternoon nap.
Bluetooth was suspected.
So I tried ANT+.
It did exactly the same thing.
Garmin have now agreed to replace the monitor, which means until the new one arrives some of the heart-rate graphs need to be filed under creative writing.
Today's session was therefore deliberately simple:
40 minutes.
Rate 22.
Around 2:05 pace.
HR ceiling roughly 146 bpm.
And one other instruction:
Don't turn the opening ten minutes into a completely different workout.
That lesson came from the previous r22 attempt, when apparently "around 2:05" translated in my head to 2:00–2:01.
It felt great.
Until it didn't.
By the final ten minutes the heart rate was heading upwards while the pace was going in the opposite direction.
Today was better.
The opening five minutes were 2:05.9, followed by 2:05.4.
No rush.
No chasing numbers.
Then, as the rhythm settled, the pace began to come down by itself.
The final numbers:
40:00
9,643 metres
2:04.4 / 500m
22 spm
880 strokes
Drag factor 134
There was another fairly spectacular HR dropout later in the row, which makes the recorded average of 129 bpm meaningless, but before the signal vanished the progression looked sensible — 127, 133, 137 and eventually around the 146 ceiling.
More importantly, the rowing itself stayed together.
The rate stayed at 22.
The pace didn't collapse.
And for forty minutes I was increasingly moving with the slides rather than fighting against them.
That's the bit I'm interested in.
I've spent a lot of years worrying about splits, metres, heart rate, drag factor and stroke rate.
Maybe spending some time on something that punishes bad movement isn't such a bad idea.
The bigger sessions will come again. Faster 30r20 pieces. 1k and 2k work. Longer endurance rows. Eventually another 100km.
But that's further out to sea.
For now, after a few months in dry dock building the Great Hall, the ship is back in the water.
And perhaps, after all these years, I can make the bloke holding the oar a little better at rowing it.
Sliding back into a training rhythm.
