Final HM in the Crazy Bear challenge - Seasons Best (just)

Well firstly like to say a big thank you to Stuart Thorpe who came up with the idea of the Crazy Bear challenge which is to row (or ski) 30 half marathons in the 45 days leading up to xmas and also to David Plumb who's been key in organising it and all those who participated in the challenge whether they completed 1 or where called Jen who is currently on 60 or something daft - I just checked and she is on 62... in total 64 people signed up to it and at this moment 950 half marathons have been completed which is over 20 million meters rowed!

So yesterday I took the day off from a HM (and did the ctc instead) so that left me with today to get the 30th one done - I wanted to finish with a bang (after all that's why I'm called Beowulf) so I targeted a aggressive start which I hoped would see me close to (what was - more on that later) the current season best HM 40-49h which was set at 1h33m44.9s (1:44.8) by Tony Larkman with a drop back plan off my own Irish 40-49H record of 1:14:49.0 (1:46.3) and at 7am that's what I did. The first 5 minutes my mind and body went into a slight panic (maybe I should do a warm up...) but controlled that, unfortunately my gym shorts and my "undercarriage" where not getting along and no matter how much I wiggled and pulled around I just could not get the "landing gear" situated in a position that wasn't going to cause discomfort - this messing about went on for nearly 20 minutes and added into that was the Heart Rate pickup dropping I basically got so pissed of I dumped the handle (you can see this in the Garmin IQ detail below)

But it was the last day for the challenge and I wanted to finish it for more reasons than are obvious to the eye. So I picked up the handle and got on with the job at that point it was all about finishing the HM nothing more. Dropped the rate to 20 spm and just went for the grind. I've also been having slight wrist pain (right wrist) and certain skin issues on my backside (ie lack of it as I've grated a few patches off) so really not feeling the love for the erg. At about half way though I felt like I was getting into a good groove, undercarriage was nicely in place and legs felt strong so the new plan was to up the rate and see what happened. It turned out that I beat my seasons best by .7 seconds as Beowulf drove home the final 500m averaging around 1:30 split lol.

About half a hour before writing this I spotted Olaf Tufte broke the WR for the 40-49H half marathon at 1:40.7 average r25 1:10:49.0 - still I beat him over the final 97m ... lol