A “fast” 3km – need to go faster

Romana had planned her training at 4pm and the idea was to row a 3km at 6km pace and I would give the girls a bit of competition.

First the Junior 18yr old in the single would start, followed a minute later by daughter Lenka (15) and her rowing partner Laura (16) in the double, followed another minute later by me. Romana would be on the launch.

The water was mirror flat and there was only a slight headwind breeze on the 3km.

I measured the distance with CrewNerd’s “course” feature, as a test. I want to use that next week at the race. You can see the start and finish as defined in CrewNerd (the red and green areas in the Google earth shot):

I passed the girls in the double after 1500m, and almost immediately after that I passed Pavlina in the single.

I finished first, the 2x second, and Pavlina last. Lenka and Laura had rowed at full speed and were pretty exhausted.

I was not entirely happy. There were sequences where I had a good 29spm rhythm and boat speed was ok, but there were other parts where my stroke rate dropped. Looking at the HR curves, I think next week I should be more in the red. On the other hand, my fastest 6km was in 26:18 in the fall, and I guess today I would have had a very good chance to beat it (ref. this blog blog.php?u=11066&b=116410 ).

|Dist_|Time_|_Pace__|_SPM___|avg HR|max HR|DPS |Remarks
|02635|15:53|03:00.8| 17.1 | 121 | 158 |09.7|Warming up
|00113|07:15|32:04.8| 18.1 | 114 | 147 |00.9|waiting
|02955|12:48|02:09.9| 27.5 | 176 | 180 |08.4|3km
|04982|31:31|03:09.8| 19.2 | 139 | 163 |08.2|cooling down

The spreadsheet didn’t let me select the full 2993m that CrewNerd tells me I did. :S
According to CrewNerd I rowed 2993m in 12:56, a 2:09.6 pace, at 28.0spm (31 max).