Dec 8 2017
Job’s tidings
Tough day at work. Some bad news that sucked the last bit of energy out of me. I had a two hour gap between lunch and a call with a colleague in Washington, so I drove home through the rain and sat on the erg.
I had optimistically planned a sprinterval workout and decided to do it. There was definitely a HD risk, but I feared that swapping this one for a steady state session would be a recipe for boredom, frustration, which also would lead to the undesired HD.
So I decided to do a 3km warming up and then the workout, doing at least 15 intervals but aiming for 20. I dialed up the following sufficiently dark and monotonous sound track on SoundCloud. Dark and monotonous but I like to row to it:
I decided to row the intervals at 2k PB speed and focus on technique. That turned out to be a good choice. I was focusing on pulling a relaxed, gentle stroke at 29 SPM, sitting in a strong position from half way the recovery, then just sliding towards the catch, and hang on the handle during the first half of the leg drive. When I do this correctly, it feels like I get 2 splits for free. (Which reminds me of Ranger, the infamous erg blogger back in the days of Concept2.co.uk.)
Every fifth interval is supposed to be a max out, just to make sure that I was doing the others in a controlled way.
First fifteen intervals went by without any incidents, and then it was just a question of hanging on, and emptying the tank in interval #20. Followed by a 2km cooling down.
A quick shower and on to my calls. An unexpectedly good training. Made my day.
Jan 13 2019
Sprints getting longer at shorter rest
Sunday session with the Masters group. We were a smaller core of the bigger group today. Romana was in Prague at the second round of the Czech Indoor Rowing Cup, with Lenka and Dominik, and some of the other Masters also couldn’t come. So it was Martin, Lubka and myself.
The session was one invented by our coach and it is tough.
First a 15 minute warming up:

Then on to the main thing:
Rowsandall.com’s interval editor came in very handy here. It allowed me to simply program the monitor as 8 minute work, 5 minute rest, and then edit the intervals on the site after the workout is uploaded. The alternative is either to use a lengthy process to program varying intervals, or to row it as three short interval sessions and reprogram the monitor in between.
In Rowsandall.com’s interval shorthand, the session is:
This is the resulting breakdown in intervals:
I am always impressed when it works. After all, I know who hacked it together. The resulting workout summary is as follows:
The first series was eight nice twelve stroke sprints at a luxuriously long 40 seconds rest. The second series was somewhere between 16 and 17 strokes and the end of the rest period started to come a bit too early to my taste. The last series was a never ending list of 22 to 23 stroke sprinting with a few strokes in between to catch your breath. Martin was going through the same pain on the erg next to me. I found it interesting how Martin rowed a few seconds of split faster in the first two series, but in the last one he had trouble following my splits. At least, that is what I think from a few quick glances in the heat of the training.
We ended with 20 minutes of chatting while riding the spinning bikes.
By sanderroosendaal • rowing • 0 • Tags: concept2, ergometer, OTE, rowing, sprintervals, training