Whoa, one of the gods of the single scull, Xeno Mueller, gold medalist in the 1996 Olympic games is in the comments of my erg blogging post.
I actually met him, for about a minute, at the boathouse at Newport Beach, California when I was rowing out of there in the winter of 2003-2004. He runs an erg training service out of a Costa Mesa storefront and is an inspiration to a lot of indoor rowers.
His blog is here.
I just blew $16.50 on a chicken caesar, a bag of trail mix, and a bottle of water … and left them under the bench when I boarded this packed-to-the-gills, foodless flight to Vegas. I have negative seat-room.
Rowers are obsessive counters. From strokes per minute to the breakdown of the four-component stroke (catch, drive, finish, recover), a lot of rowers spend most of their mental effort counting through the agony. Combine that with the PM II monitor on the Concept2 erg, and a typical workout becomes a major exercise in Distance=Rate x Time.
Today I stepped up the first week’s average training distance of 5K to 6K. The focus for me now is weight loss (I don’t have a scale, so I can’t express my current fatitude). Weight loss is a function of time as a low heart rate. Low heart rate means the body goes after fat for fuel. Therefore, I need to work up to 45 to 60 minute pieces. Going for speed and trying to set records over shorter distance comes later in the training cycle.
The good news is after 8 days I can maintain a sub 2:00 split, coming down 5 seconds in a week. Anything over 2:00 is a grandmotherly pace for me. I know I’m in shape when I can cruise at a sub 1:55 pace.
Yesterday broke the back of winter (knock on wood), so I put the boat battery on the trickle charger, bought six gallons of high-test, hitched the trailer to the car, put on my waders, and launched the Tashmoo with crossed fingers. Fisher and I paddled it out to Bob Jensen’s mooring barge, tied up, and got ready to crank the motor over for the first time since November.
First try and we were in business! A Churbuck first! I let the motor idle for five minutes, varying the throttle to clean out the carburetors, then off we went for a fast blast at full throttle through a few acres of crackling skim ice in the cove. A full-speed boat jaunt in early March is an excellent demonstration of the concept of wind chill.
We tied up to the town dock and walked to the house to rouse the rest of the family into putting on boots, locating the camera, and donning windbreakers.
We circumperambulated Dead Neck. The dogs had fun and everyone got a little tanned. Home for the extra hour of daylight, dog baths, a fast dinner, then a trip to the movies for “The 300” (which was gory and over the top).
Whereabouts this week:
3.12 – Cotuit-Vegas
3.13 – Vegas, Community 2.0 conference
3.14 – Vegas-Cotuit
3.15-18 – Cotuit
BuzzLogic — the pretty awesome blog tracking/mapping/influence measurement tool that was started by my buddy Mitch Ratcliffe — has some great press in the current issue of Fortune (most admired companies). I’d like to link it, but I can’t find it on fortune.com. Your’s truly is mentioned — thanks to Krista Summitt for pointing that out.
The company is bringing its product out of beta soon. We’ve been testers for over a year, and have used it to help identify customers with problems. The Fortune article recounts the first effort in our so-called Proactive Support program when I used BL to identify that Rick Klau at Feedburner had a dead ThinkPad. We fixed him. He thanked us. The rest is history.
It is very weird and almost traitorous to see my name in Fortune after 13 years at the other business magazine that begins with F…O…R…
Today is the sixth row since getting back on the erg following 120 days of recovery from a trashed sacroilliac performed while sculling in early November. Easy-does-it is the rule for the first week — with the usual sore shoulder and back muscles as my body gets back into the unique cycle of rowing.
Yesterday was a rest day — NYC and travel — so coming off the rest I was a lot faster and set my personal best for the week, 20 minutes, 20 seconds for the 5,000 meter segment, averaging 2:01 minutes per 500 meter split. Not bad for week one, and a four second split improvement from my 2:05 on day one. Keep in mind that in full shape I am generally cruising in the 1:45-1:55 range (think of splits as the basis “mile per hour” measure in indoor rowing.
I do a 500 meter warm up at a very easy pace, loosening up for the most part. The 5,000 is when I turn on the iPod and crank at a loping 24 stroke per minute pace, focusing on length, a long recovery (the return part of the stroke) and a solid drive, taking great pains to focus on posture and back alignment. I program the RowPro to keep me in a 25 spm band, and a 150 heart beat per minute band, that generally sees me peak around 170-180 bpm during the final sprint.
Feels good to be back on the wheel of pain.
The Daily Erg – Rowing Science
Rowing Blogs – Weekend Reading Anyone?
“Technorati … lists 168 blogs with rowing as one of their topics! Of course not many of those have rowing as their main topic. Here are a few of the blogs that I have had the pleasure of reading over the past six months or so. If you have a chance please take a look at the work of other rowing bloggers”
Rowing Science has a list of rowing blogs I need to check out.
Okay — no erg today for me as I am in NYC and not staying at a hotel with an ergometer. Concept2 used to provide an “erg-finder” database, but it’s always a pain to locate, and I need to del.icio.us the location. I did get a ping from Jeff Wagner at ergscores.com offering to help me with a WordPress plug-in to send my scores to his service: “If you get those scores into ErgScores.com we’ll develop a WordPress plug-in to make you Erg Blogging a lot easier.”
Jeff — I’d be into it. WordPress is the center of my online life these days.
The plan for the forthcoming week of erg is to let my neck and shoulder muscles recover from week one, then get back on it on Saturday with another 5,000 meter piece (5K is a good piece as it lines up with the regular testing interval used by coaches of 20 minutes, and is a close approximation of a head race, ie The Head of the Charles. It’s long enough to hurt, but short enough not to be boring.).
The plan is to build up from 5K to 30 minutes to 10k to 60 minute at a low (18-22 stroke per minute ((SPM)) pace and a low heart-rate, say 120 beats per minute (bpm) or less so I can start burning fat. A tedious month of that, mixed in with on-the-water rowing commencing the weekend after next on my annual return to the water date of St. Patrick’s Day, and I may be able to consider some mid-spring racing at Narragansett Boat Club or the Charles.
Location Context « Cheaper than therapy
“Location is one of the most basic yet important discoveries man has ever strived to make.”
Benjamin Lipman makes a strong case for why GPS-enabled electronics represent the next phase of consumer electronics. I agree, having regrets over getting the non-GPS BlackBerry Pearl, and having used the Garmin StreetPilot C330 that Ben advocates (and gave to me as a gift) last weekend to explore the Westport, Mass. area — an adventure that would have been impossible without the device.
Location-aware applications could be huge, with initial impact and experiments coming from “friend-finder” models, as well as “what’s your Twenty, Big-Buddy” questions, as Ben points out: “where r u?”
Jason Calacanis is “fat-blogging” — chronicling his diet.
Debt bloggers talk about how they are reducing their credit card debt.
I’m thinking of “erg blogging” — a combination of a fat-blog and a training-blog to chronicle my attempt to get into mega-shape on the rowing machine and single scull. Following three months of crippling back pain brought on by a bad row in early November, I am back on the erg, doing about 6,000 meters a day, using my Lenovo x60s ThinkPad and RowPro 2.0 software to log my stats (speed, splits, calories, heart rate, etc.) and uploading them to the online rankings hosted by the erg’s manufacturer, Concept2.
Given that erging is about the worst thing in the world — total mechanical self-flagellation — and that most reasonable people would regard an erg as a modern torture device, I am sure erg-blogging will have all the drama of listening to someone talk about their weight.
Anyway, what got me on the erg topic was a couple random things.
First, Concept2 has a great user video contest going on. The finalists can be viewed here. This will give you a sense of how weird rowers are.
Second, I missed the recent CRASH-B Sprints, the world indoor rowing championships, but my best-buddy, Doctor D. did not. The goal of an erg-blog will be to place in the top ten in the 2008 CRASH-B’s. My personal best is a 6′ 28″
So, I don’t know what an erg-blog will do every day. For instance.
I erged this morning before taking the train to NYC. I try to erg six days a week, with one day for muscle recovery. Since I won’t get home until tomorrow night, I will consider Friday to be my rest day.
I erged for 5000 meters and finished in about 20 minutes, 30 seconds. A terrible time, but this is the fifth straight day of erging and I have a bad sacroilliac to be careful about. I should be doing 5,000 meters in, oh, 18.30.
I listened to my iPod —
I dunno, erg blogging, could be a non-starter, could be a public humiliation. I will need to confess all sins of fatness to make it work. Time to drag out a scale and tell the tale of the Toledo.