[note: links at the end of the post, for enhanced readability] I was thinking about some of the various changes I’ve made in my life over the last couple of years, and it occurred to me that one of the most successful efforts I’ve made to turn around an aspect of my life was getting out of debt, using...
If you’ve read my blog before, you may well have noticed that it’s been a while since I posted. And you might have guessed that it was because I wasn’t really living up to what I was writing about. If you guessed that, you’d have been right. But as with many good things, time, prayer, and some discipline...
As Hamlet famously notes: When sorrows come, they come not single spies, But in battalions. So, too, with temptations, particularly when faced with adversity. It’s interesting to me that, when things are going well, everything seems to be easier. I get up early, I exercise as I should, I get more accomplished...
After several weeks with a chest cold that kept me off the rower, I’ve finally managed to get two consecutive days of early rising and rowing in, and it’s nice to be back (or at least on my way back) to my routine. I figured probably not much good in posting while I was sick, because who really needs to listen to me moan about not being able to exercise. I do have some observations about the experience that I’ll post soon, but for the moment I just wanted to briefly celebrate my return to rowing, and also another cool milestone.
As of yesterday, I passed a quarter of a million meters rowed since I started rowing in February. All told, I’ve rowed 257,957 meters since I started, which works out to approximately 160 miles. It just blows my mind to realize that I’ve been able to do that much in just a few short months, and notwithstanding both time out for illness and travel time.
As regular readers might have figured out by the quiet on the blog recently, things aren’t super-rosy in 0 Dark 30-land. While I got a decent start on my workouts on my recent trip to Los Angeles, a combination of lack of sleep (there’s never enough of that on the road) and the inability to get access to the equipment I prefer to use (a lame excuse, but it’s hard to get motivated for a stationary bike or stairstepper) meant that I missed more workouts than I made while in L.A.
And unfortunately, I picked up a cold while in L.A., complete with nasty cough and chest congestion. I’ll spare you the gory details, but that’s effectively prevented me from working out on my rower since I got back, though I did finally manage a couple of games with my softball team last night, which I may yet regret.
Managed to get up earlier and down to the gym before 6am, but still too busy for me to grab one of the handful of ellipticals, so I ended up on a stairmaster instead. What I wouldn’t give for my rower right now. Tacked on some upper body weight training to compensate, but just not the same. Still, feels...
The advantage of a workout plan that increases intensity or duration over time is that your body is pushed to grow in strength and endurance. What’s interesting is that while our body can often surprise us with its capacity for growth, our minds tend to lag behind and make assumptions about our capacity that can make the increased intensity/duration somewhat daunting.
I found myself facing this phenomenon this morning, when my Week 5 workout of The Pete Plan Beginner Training moved to 7000 meters for the main workout piece. Only 500m more than last week, but for some reason, 7000 meters was a mental barrier that I just wasn’t feeling confident about. Probably didn’t help that I missed a couple of workouts last week, which left me feeling a little behind (though Pete’s Beginner Training includes 3 core sessions and 2 optional sessions, so I still got the basic workout in…I just typically do the optional sessions as well).
The Concept 2 online logbook is seasonal, with seasons running from May-April, and as of this morning, we started the 2010 season. I’m very much looking forward to seeing how my stats rack up in starting at the beginning of a new season. One cool benefit is that I was the first person to log a four-minute piece, so for the time being I’m #1 in the rankings for that piece.
Took a couple of days off this week, which was probably a good thing. I’ve probably been pushing myself too hard again. I’m really eager to make progress, but sometimes you have to recognize that you can only progress so fast, and pushing harder than that can actually slow you down. Again, just need to remind myself that I didn’t get out of shape overnight, and I’m not going to get super-fit overnight, either.
So, perhaps that title is a bit of an oversimplification. But I’m feeling pleased with myself for having logged over 200,000 meters rowed as of this morning, just over two months after bringing home my first rower.
The reality is that I was well on my way before I got into rowing, so I can’t really credit the rowing specifically with my getting fit. But I will say that rowing provides a degree of challenge that I just did not experience when using the NordicTrack, or just working out on the weight machine.
I also think that for a professional geek and gadget-head like myself, the combination of solid data tracking ability, plus an online community to share notes with, rank yourself with, and more, gives me all the more reason to stay connected and keep pressing myself for better performance.
This morning I had my first rowing workout after installing some upgrades on my Model C. I added a PM3 performance monitor, which was the big upgrade, along with a framelock safety upgrade, and a new heart rate monitor that’s integrated with the PM3.
One of the cool things that the PM3 offers over previous monitors is a larger LCD screen that can display information in a more flexible fashion. So you can view performance information in larger text, view more information at once, play a simple fish game, etc., all with the same screen. Seems almost quaint in comparison with what you can do with a cell phone these days, but for athletic equipment, it’s pretty cool, and definitely better than what I had.
One of the display modes available allows you to pre-program a pace boat that you can race against. So for example, I set up a four minute warm-up, and set the pace boat to a pace of 1:59/500m, and was able to beat that pace by nearly 3 seconds. If you’re competitive like me, this is a definite motivator, since you don’t want to lose to a pace boat. You can also use the ReRow feature to row a previous workout setup and even set the pace boat to your previous split by split pace. Great way to keep yourself moving forward with your workouts.
The PM3 also introduces a removable smartcard (they call it a LogCard) that you can use to store custom workouts, and workout stats for up to 5 rowers. The cool thing about this is that if you have a smartcard reader (I happen to have one for work), you can simply install the Concept 2 LogCard reader software on your PC, and use it to easily upload your workouts to the Concept 2 online logbook, or export to a spreadsheet. This alone will save me 10-15 minutes of data entry per day, in addition to alleviating the need to write down my stats and carry a notebook up to my PC.