If you are a little lightweight like me, just row at 32 spm for everything, as I did when I first took up rowing, using your effectiveness, your stroking power, to vary the effort, as the distance varies.
If you get maximally efficient at doing this, you should be able to row a FM @ 32 spm, as I did when I first took up rowing, by just lightening up 4 SPI; a HM, by lightening up 3 SPI; a 10K, by lightening up 2 SPI; and a 5K, by lightening up 1 SPI. Then, when you race a 2K, draw on all of your effectiveness and row well, for a lightweight, at 13 SPI.
So the task in distance rowing for a lightweight, the task in learning how to be maximally efficient, if you remain purist about it, and keep it in a proper training sequence _after_ you learn to be effective (13 SPI), is this:
FM 9 SPI @ 32 spm (1:46)
HM 10 SPI @ 32 spm (1:43)
10K 11 SPI @ 32 spm (1:40)
5K 12 SPI @ 32 spm (1:37)
2K 13 SPI @ 32 spm (1:34)
This is what I will now try to do in my distance rowing.
These distances and times are right on my targets and follow the well-known formula for the best lightweights of "double to d, add 3."
I suspect that this is what people like Rod Freed did in their training, but because they never did their proper work on effectiveness first, their achievement, while massively impressive for longer distances, never translated to the 2K.
That is, I suspect that Freed rowed a HM at 32 spm and 9 SPI; a 10K at 32 spm and 10 SPI; and a 5K at 32 spm and 11 SPI.
But he had no way to row 2K at 32 spm and 12 SPI, much less 13 SPI.
He didn't have the stroking power.
BTW, one of the best ways of training yourself to do this purist work on efficiency, is just to have 32 spm playing in your head all day long, with muscle memory adding the kinaesthetic imagery associated with the rowing stroke.
This takes no effort at all, because you are only thinking/imagining, rather than rowing, but the timing, sequencing, leveraging, motion, rhythmicity, etc., in this thinking/imaging are all there, and the more you do it, the more automatic/unconscious the performance gets.
Then when you are actually rowing, the mental discipline you need is all in place.
All you need to do is just add various amounts of effectiveness (9 SPI at the bottom of the range, 13 SPI at the top of the range), like so many eggs added to the batter, and the cake appears, in whatever shape and flavor you would like for the moment.
One of the very odd consequences of this kind of training, I think, is this:
Those who grew up paddling a canoe, as I did for the first 20 years of my life, have a lifetime of experience about how to be maximally efficient when rowing.
It is not at all an accident, I think, that Paul Flack could row a great marathon, without even working at it very hard.
Paul was a national team C2 paddler for a decade.
At the moment, Jamie Pfeiffer also seems to do this sort of rowing: high rate, long distance, light stroke (e.g., 60min @ 30 spm and 1:48 pace, 9 SPI.
To be maximally efficient in rowing, paddle.
And off you will go--effortlessly, like the wind.
ranger
P.S. Could you imagine NavHaz training like this?
But there's the problem.
Nav _doesn't_ train like this because he is massively inefficient, and doesn't care. In his training, to try to get better, he just parades his strengths and avoids his weaknesses. He works of effectiveness in everything he does, and just lets efficiency slide. As a result, as he ages, he just gets worse and worse.
