weight control

This is a tricky week. In the last week before an important head race, I want to taper. However, I will be competing in the Open LW category, so I need to maintain weight. My current weight is oscillating between 71kg and 72kg and I need to make sure I weigh in at 72.5 in rowing clothes on Saturday around lunch time.

My Sunday evening weight is usually a bit higher than my Friday evening weight. It tells something about the quality of the canteen food at work compared to what my wife or I prepare at home. Anyway, I need to maintain a level of easy, steady state kilometers per day or be very disciplined in my eating. I try the middle road. Be slightly disciplined, and row.

A difficult moment today around 3pm when I was reviewing and approving project proposals before they are submitted. I ate a twix bar.

I felt that chocolate bar in my stomach for hours.

The original plan was to row OTW and do 10 to 12 km of technique, with a few bursts at race pace. I wanted to use the RIM app and use the stroke analysis. Unfortunately, we had thunderstorms and heavy wind and the lake was unrowable.

I was uninspired and tired in the evening but I dragged myself down to my basement and started RowPro. RowPro prepared me with a nice surprise, a welcome screen and a first-user tutorial. All my data had disappeared. I was able to load a January backup of my logbook (there was a today’s version but that was corrupted) but at least I hadn’t lost my collection of custom rows.

To overcome my tiredness and uninspiredness,  and because I wanted to do “a few bursts at race pace”, I decided to do a nice sequence of 10 stroke bursts followed by light rowing, shortening the distance between bursts by 200m after each burst, until I would have two bursts after each other, then starting to lengthen again. I miss 100m somewhere. Also, I am now going to play with some math equations to see how I can make this entirely symmetric.

The 10km passed very fast in this way.

Looking forward to Saturday’s race. For those who are registered on Indoor Sport Services, here’s last year’s blog: http://indoorsportservices.co.uk/forum/blog.php?u=11066&b=114285