Excessive drop off?

[Wilbury]

I'm not very competitive, but have decided cut back on the long rows in favor of more intense pieces. I recently rowed a 40:17.1 10.5K for a 1:55.1 pace. Shortly after that, I did a one hour piece totaling 15,232, a 1:58.1 pace. Is that too great a drop off timewise in the one hour piece? If so, what training should I do to be able to "finish strong." Thanks in advance.

[NavigationHazard]

Cheers, it's really hard to judge one piece against another unless you have some idea of the rating and its constance. 10,500m done at (say) a constant 24 strokes/minute is going to be a different beast than 1 hour done (by way of example) as 2 minutes @ 32 alternated with 2 minutes of paddle @ 14 strokes/minute.

Having said that... the dropoff doesn't strike me as excessive. You must think it might be or you wouldn't be asking. That in turn implies you think you could do better. Why not give it a shot and see? The worst that can happen is that you learn a bit about your limits right now. And you just might surprise yourself ....

[Godfried]

Some people use "Paul's Law".

Double the distance , add 5 seconds to the pace , see an overview.

With 10,5k at 1:55.1 you are around 10k between 1:54.6 and 1:55.6
And with 60min at 1:58.1 you are one column to the right of that.

So according to "Paul's Law" you are doing ok.

EDIT: And see NavigationHazard.

[Carl Watts]

There is a good pace predictor here...

http://www.freespiritsrowing.com/conten ... -predictor

Seems to work pretty well, although as already mentioned you would need to entre rows of similar intensity, i.e your PB rows.

I have done quite the opposite in that I have switched from shorter rows to longer rows as I found I was getting worse with too many high intensity short rows. Now rowing longer pace & HR controlled 60minutes at a time for 4 or 5 times a week, I guess the big thing for me has been to learn to separate the "Training" from the "Racing". PB "Racing" rows will be about one per month so it doesn't interfere drastically with my regular training.

I guess you have to try it and see what works for you.

[ArmandoChavezUNC]

Personally I never like those predictors or laws or anything, because they never work for me. But IMHO the dropoff is a little bigger than it should be, but nothing major. My 60:00 min PB (1:52.0) and my 10k PB (1:49.3 - 36:26.0). So for about a 23 minute difference my split drops by 2.7 seconds. That being said everyone is different and it all depends on what you concentrate your training on, but like I said it seems a little bit of a bigger dropoff that it should be.

[El Caballo]

"Paul's Law", as mentioned, uses a "doubling factor" of 5. This is supposedly (according to Paul Smith) a good balance between strength and endurance for rowing a 2k race. Based on your two distances and times, your "doubling factor" is 5.72 (maybe a bit high, but not unreasonable). If you haven't rowed a lot of 1 hour or longer workouts, the high "doubling factor" is just a result of rowing a distance (1 hour) that is beyond what you are used to rowing. Row some more 1 hour workouts--and preferably longer to make 1 hour seem easy--and your endurance would improve and your "doubling factor" would drop to a lower value. If you have been rowing a lot of longer workouts, then maybe you are more genetically built to excel at short distances that favor strength more than endurance.

The pace prediction calculator Carl links to on the Free Spirit Rowing web site is equivalent to prediction formula 4 on my spreadsheet.