Sunday: One Minute and Steady State

There almost wasn’t time to train today, but I managed. First, we had to drive home from visiting my mother-in-law. Then I had to do some garden work, and I fixed the flat tire on my bike.

Today I had planned for Steady State and the One Minute Test. I started with a 10 minute warming up.

I did the test a bit different than last year. Instead of ramping up the power a few seconds before the start of the minute (in a 1 minute interval with 1 minute rest), I just programmed a fixed time piece of 60 seconds. The reason is that I wanted to get a ranking piece out of this row. This may have skewed the results slightly.

The important parameters to measure are

• Peak Power: 586W. The range for Masters Rowers is apparantly 625W to 769W. So I am definitely low on this one.
• Average Power: 490W, which exactly hits the bottom of the range.
• Time to drop off 10% after reaching peak power: 13.47 seconds. The norm is >20 seconds
• Time to drop off 35% after reaching peak power: > 55 seconds. The norm is > 40 seconds.
• Total drop-off: 29% for me. The norm is < 35%.

So I am weak but I keep up the power. Point made for doing strength training this winter. I was wondering about the effectiveness of my strength sessions, and if I shouldn’t be better off replacing the strength session with a steady state or recovery row. 

Compared to February, it’s not a bad result. A higher peak and a higher average, albeit only by 4W. Actually, I am pretty happy with the result.

Then a 10k steady state.  I had a few brief pauses for drinking and a few 10 stroke sets to test the pace for the 10k CTC row that I plan for next week.