Just saying hi!

[Pendolino]

In saying that, I've not been following the BPP day by day - a week of the Pete Plan translates to roughly 2 weeks in real life for me... I wonder if this is because I'm listening to my body telling me to rest for longer on account of me 'pushing it'.

On a positive note, I've just pulled two intervals of 2500 m each at a pace of 2:04, with a 2 minute rest in between. I know this is still 'slow' compared to a seasoned rower, but it made me think that if I can knock that pace down to 2:00 (in due time, of course!) and tie those two intervals together into a SS session, there's my 20 minute 5k row! It's things like that that motivate me, always chasing the light on the horizon I guess!

Having said that, it killed me

There's definitely a fine line between pushing enough and too much. You need to break out of your comfort zone to make progress, and that will entail training when you're possibly telling yourself you're too tired, but that comes with practice.

If you're taking two weeks to complete one week of the BPP, assuming you've got the available time, my suspicion is you're either going too hard do you can't recover properly or you need to go harder as your convincing yourself it's not possible.

I always suggest chasing the question mark rather than the exclamation point, and that way you find solutions and results that you didn't know were possible.

Don't worry about how fast or slow your time is compared to anyone else except yourself. It's easier said than done, but it's really important you focus on your abilities and your results alone.

The second one sounds like me - I've possibly not got the experience to be confident in increasing the frequency yet. Naturally, shift work has an effect too, but I promised to never make that an excuse

I'm going to take your advice and focus on maintaining pace on the SS rows whilst using the intervals to truly exhaust myself. I've just pulled a 7000 m and couldn't help but shave another second off, however! I do think this is working for me though, and I'm prepared for the point when I'm no longer able to increase pace AND distance every week. I'm just finding this helpful to locate my comfortable maximum, though. I'm definitely getting close to it, now.

Really appreciate the advice as always, this forum is worth its weight in gold already!