An expensive shirt?

In the morning, Romana, Robin and I visited the Sport Life fair in Brno. At the stand of Gogen, a manufacturer of headsets who sponsors Ondrej Synek, there were Concept2 ergs and there was a challenge, for men to row under a 500m under 1:45 and for women to row under 2:00. If you made it you won a T-shirt. Romana and I sat down (in jeans) and Romca rowed a 1:50 and I did 1:32, which brought us to the top of the rankings and we got our shirts.

Not sure it was a good idea. I still had to do a steady state row afterwards, and of course we hadn’t done any warming up or anything.

I bought new hiking shoes and we got Robin a new winter coat. Then we headed to the rowing club, picking up Martin “Turkey” Krocil on the way.

The workout was easy. A 2×25 minute steady state with mild rate ladders (19-20-21-20-19 for the first and 19-20-21-22-21 for the second interval). It all went nicely. It was good to row next to each other. We rowed in sync, and time goes faster and I find myself pulling better scores when in company.

With five minutes to go I suddenly felt a sharp pain in the right side of my lower back. I stopped for a few strokes, then tried to pick it up again, but the pain was too … painful. I guess I am going to take a few days of forced rest. I wonder if the 500m effort without warming up triggered this? The other thing was that in our rowing club erg room, there is a distinct draft over the back when you erg with the window open and the ventilation on.

So it will be a forced rest day tomorrow, perhaps swimming on Tuesday, and then we’ll see. Dang.

Well, I may be exaggerating this. I rarely have any sports injuries, so when something like this happens I tend to dramatize.