n1lul wrote:Hi all,
Completed in the Mid-Atlantic Erg Sprints yesterday. Very cool experience. Got a Personal Best by 8 seconds in the 2k, but did not break the magic (to me) 7:00 mark. I did come in 6th in the 500m sprint (masters division), which I am very happy with. I was spent for the rest of the day.
Wow, great going! You have 7:18.6 as your PB online, so I guess around 7:10-7:11. Doing the races really focus you to train, do the tough work.
Here's the dirty little secret of going sub-7: 2K is long enough to be already considered an endurance race, so you have to build a wide endurance base.
There's 2 kinds of rowing "base work" (unlike by running, cycling, etc.). One is "heart & lungs work" - let's say, an hour of rowing keeping your heart rate at about 65-70 of your maximum. (Note: Unlike "long & steady" in running - which has a strong component to strengthen joints, and if you increase speed too much, you can injure yourself - in rowing, "long & steady" gets faster and faster, as your heart adjusts.) If you don't have a heart rate monitor, figure that your "perceived exertion" should be about a 13 on a scale of 1 - 20.
The other is "stroke work" - usually about 40 minutes (besides warm-ups and cool-downs) where you concentrate on form, efficiency, pacing, meters-per-stroke. When you see workouts like "18/20/22/20/18 at +10/8/6/8/10", they want you to do 8 minutes 5 times - the first at 18 strokes per minute at 10sec higher than your 2k time (let's say 7:10 is 1:47.5 per 500m "split", so you want to average 1:57.5), the next set to move to 20 strokes per minute at +8 (in the example, 1:55.5), etc. This "base work" hits your body very differently - you're doing a faster, more powerful stroke followed by a longer recovery. In a way, it's an anaerobic second of work followed by 2 or 3 seconds of recovery to get back into aerobic territory. Yes, this is more important on the water, where if your rythm is off, you mess up the whole boat. But, this is also important for erging - you get to concentrate on the parts of your stroke. You can spend some time working on "turning" your hands at the catch faster, time on pushing with your heels first, with sitting and rowing with good posture, with breathing evenly, with keeping shoulders relaxed, with keeping elbows up, with moving your arms out quickly after a stroke, with not leaning back too far on a stroke, etc.
Weight work and speed work are almost secondary - they can knock 10 seconds off your 2K time, but they can't knock 30 seconds off, as base work can. In many sports (in rowing, not as much), coaches keep speedwork for the last 3-4 weeks of training before the race.
But, efficiency and stamina are still the 2 biggest factors in your race times.
