Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Latest Rowing

Missed my Monday workout due to a lot of back pain. Decided to try today anyway and pushed for a 5000m row- I’m concentrating on this for a bit of endurance and the 2000m to develop a bit of power and improve my VO2 max. I thought that I might as well try and get the hard session over for the week!

My last 5000m row brought my time down to 22 minutes and 13 seconds. I was quite please with that and I paced myself well, something I’m still getting used to on the Concept 2. Today’s row went well- much better than expected- and I was able to tolerate the pain in my back well enough to get my time down to 21 minutes and 55 seconds. One of the big advantages of the Concept 2 is the pace boat option on the computer- you can race against your own previous sessions and it’s a fantastic way to keep you motivated to constantly improve. Getting beaten by myself is not an option and the last 100m or so are usually a mad sprint to keep the nose of my virtual boat ahead of my previous session!

Rowing is a great form of exercise and I’ve noticed recently that most of my fat loss (I don’t really keep track of my weight, just how I look) has come in the wake of the 5000m rows. 2000m is a good distance for improving basic fitness as it’s an all out effort the whole time, but for losing weight 5000m seems to be the key. Next up is a 7000m row and then- maybe sometime in September- 10,000m.

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