Power at 17spm

Today’s workout was another interesting one:

5x(6x15strokes on / 10 strokes off)/5 minutes rest. Drag 145. Stroke rate 17spm

My Masters team mates warned that this is a “very heavy” workout. So after another long day at work, I went down to my erg cave. Tired, but curious.

I did a 1500m light warming up without any fast strokes. Then set the drag to 145 and started a “Just Row”.

After the first interval I took a piece of paper and wrote down a row of numbers 1 to 5 and another row of numbers 1 to 6. Then I took two coins and placed one on the 1 in the top row and the other one next to the 1 on the bottom row.

After each 15 strokes “on”, I moved the bottom coin to the next number.

The only way for me to count the number of intervals and sets. Counting to 15 and 10 was hard enough.

Here are some stroke stats:

Pace-wise, I paddled the 10 strokes at a very light pace, and the “on” strokes got down to 1:54, but usually were between 1:56 and 1:58. It took about 10 strokes in each set to get below 2:00 pace.

It wasn’t very hard, and I was surprised how fast the first 10km passed. Perhaps I was doing something wrong? Perhaps I should pull harder?

Doing the flex charts I made an interesting discovery. The average/peak force was unusually high for me. Normally it is around 0.56 or 0.57. Today it was significantly higher at 0.62. Most of the following plots are made on rowsandall.com by selecting only the strokes below 18spm:

Not sure about this workout. Let’s see. Either I did it wrong, or I wake up tomorrow with a 10% increase in leg strength.