Pete Plan Group - Startup Aug 20th thru 22nd

[mdpfirrman]

Glenn, glad you're back. I didn't want to send you a message yesterday as I knew you were upset. You're one of most in shape guys I virtually know of!

Henry made a great point. The PP is all about pushing, pushing. A good taper does amazing things after beating / stressing your body out this much. You're very close. If the worst thing in life too is that you never achieve a sub 7 (which I think you will), you have a blessed life...

[Slacker]

Glenn: Hang in there, the times will come (just maybe not as soon as you wanted). You guys got hyper focused on this barrier and are suffering a little because of it. I don't comment much towards the guys doing the PP because as a newb all the work you guys are pumping out are a bit mind boggling to me. It is easy to recognize the hard work that has already been put in to get there.

Tim: Good job on the intervals. Several seconds faster than the time before AND the grouping was pretty consistent.

I'll keep putting my work in and gain some fitness and health for it (eventually a couple decent times is just icing).

BPP 9.3 8000m
36:15.4 @2:15.9 r20

[aussieluke]

Another day off today. Think it is going to take me two weeks to complete week 5 of the cycle - lots of unexpected things happening this week. Got a family member visiting, got time off work, and a few other things going on.

What are you guys doing when life gets in the way? Do the days in the order of the plan just with extra rest days? Or miss out some sessions and just do the level 1 and 2 workouts?

[JohnAd]

PP 3.3.3 Waterfall
Previous 1:52.3 r25
Target 1:51.8
1:51.5 r26
1:51.1 r26
1:50.4 r27
Avg 1:51.1 r27

Once the first rep was done and I got a bit under my target I went after my best for this session from 2012 and got it, perhaps not ideal tapering but nice to get confidence that I'm as fast as I've ever been, just a 0.1 to take off the 5x1500 and I'm there. Last 2k was fairly well executed to my neg split plan and I managed a decent sprint at the end which is more like it.

Power ratios:
Waterfall vs 4x1k 84%
4x2k vs pyramid 81%
5x1.5k vs 8x500 81%

[john_n]

John_n writes:

Good going, Mike. Anyone other than a bad ass would have HD'd when struggling for oxygen. A dude endued with fortitude is not easily subdued.

"Badass" sounds like Cincinnati to me. I'm interested in "endued." I would have expected the more common "imbued." Endued is a word used by academcs and clerics. You by any chance a teacher or preacher, John?

Hi Jack,

Your vocabulary and penchant for puns and new words like “ergtriculation” has had me wondering about your background too. So anything you care to share would add color to the air.

If there’s a jackarabit dictionary, I’d guess that ergtriculation is matriculation from BPP to PP or to one of the PP variants such as what Paul is doing with PP5K. At any rate, the appearance of that word was highly entertaining in context.

As for me, I’m neither a preacher (though to say I believe in God is a sizable understatement). Neither am I an academic. My profession for more than 4 decades after discharge from the military was strictly as a blue-collar worker. Before the military, I was a college drop-out who thought 4 years in the Marines would be a good thing to do while taking a break from college. After military discharge, I was already married and had several children and so I matriculated directly from military to blue collar jobs that would support a family.

I confess, I keep both a rhyme-finder and a dictionary handy on the computer desktop. I've always liked poetry. And I confess that I resorted to a rhyme-finder for something to rhyme with "dude" and couldn’t resist using ALL those words. “Endued” was unfamiliar to me, so I resorted to the dictionary for that particular one before deciding to include it in the collection.

However, one of my children has done several years of teaching high school and another is now a PhD teaching chemistry so they qualify as academics. When one of them was in high school, she won a National Merit Scholarship. When one of my co-workers noticed mention of her National Merit Scholarship achievement in the local newspaper, he spoke to me about it in a congratulatory manner and added, “Your wife must be very smart!”

But now, this moment.. without further delay, its time for a 15K. And then afterwards I need to figure a way to keep my wordiness at bay. Maybe the best approach to participate daily in this forum area and avoid indulging my propensity to be a windbag would be for me to aim to make only one post daily, with it including multiple addresses/congratulations/comments to others in the PP forum thread like I’ve seen you and others do at times with your messages that list several lines of
@personA
@personB
@personC etc.
..with each of those lines addressing the respective person who’s made a new post since the previous time I logged in. I want to avoid wearing out my welcome and/or burning out due to excessive forum activity.

You’re all a bunch of great guys and each of you have a life story that would make a great novel or biography. One of the clues about each of you that confirms the previous sentence is, that you each row and wrestle with rowing and ponder and discuss how much or how little to do and how to do it. Rowing is an ancient and perhaps even somewhat sacred activity because ... because.... because of something I'm thinking about in history that would take too much time to write about now. But any of you can think about it. While you row.

[JohnAd]

What are you guys doing when life gets in the way? Do the days in the order of the plan just with extra rest days? Or miss out some sessions and just do the level 1 and 2 workouts?

I struggle to do 6 days a week but have been doing at least 4 days so far I drop drop SS first or replace hard distance with a test as required but keep the L1 and L2 stuff.

[G-dub]

Smokin waterfall JAD! Keep going! No limits yet.

[G-dub]

Luke, it sort of depends on how it falls for me. I've had a couple of times where there was too many days of distractions in a week and just chalked it up as a quasi rest week. If it's just a day I think I would probably shift around the hard days to accommodate it. But I also hate to change the days of the week I do the hard days cause that fouls up the next week! So after all that, I think more often than not I stick with the program as it's laid out and just miss what I miss. Not sure that helps.

[mdpfirrman]

Nice work John A! That's impressive to beat a four year old time (your best)! And to have more left at the end, even better...

John N - Very interesting stuff. Although I have a few degrees, I've always thought education is what you make of it for yourself. My Dad was a very successful businessman with a 9th grade education. In many ways, a very smart man. In a day and age where reading (I call it reading loosely) is mostly internet sites and Facebook, it's nice to see someone that still values the written word.

SS day for me. Felt good 2:14.1 pace over 55 minutes (mostly holding back). Probably exceeded UT2 once or twice but overall controlled.

Luke - it depends on what you want to work on most. I think your power is there personally and I remember you wanting to work on aerobic too. Just getting in any work is great. You could do a long row with less intervals -- if I was going to miss a couple of days, I'd probably go that route. Less intervals (along with a long W/U and C/D) but at a faster pace. That way you're getting some speed work and also some SS work too.

[gooseflight]

What are you guys doing when life gets in the way? Do the days in the order of the plan just with extra rest days? Or miss out some sessions and just do the level 1 and 2 workouts?

That's what I used to do. Keep the days in order and sort of carry on as if nothing had happened.

(When you think about it, a training "week" is an artificial temporal construct anyway. Although it's good practice not to miss two days in a row.)

Depends on where your head is. I learned over time to just go with the flow. Unless you are very single [bloody] minded there are some things you can do nothing about. When all is said and done, you aren't going to lose anything over a few days.

When time was short I always used to bang out a quick 10 x 1 min on/off. Or just do those 150 press ups to stay in the zone

[G-dub]

Good point Goose. I thought about a 9 day schedule rather than 7 day but felt guilty about it from a purity standpoint. It would have a hard day followed by two easy days and one rest day. I think when I come back, I will give this a go as a way to manage accumulated stress and to also have a more flexible week.

SI / SD / SD or Rest / EI / SD / SD or Rest / HD / SD or Rest / SD. One of those SD or Rest days as complete rest.

[Pie Man]

Great waterfall JohnAd very impressive.

Glad to see you are keeping at it Glenn a nine day week sounds like a good idea.

I rarely get to do all six days either through life getting in the way or slight niggles causing me to swap hard sessions to steady state. Tonight was a an example of that. Did my warm up but just felt a niggle with my thigh so did a 10k SS at 2:10 av hr 127, instead the waterfall. There again as I haven't managed to complete a waterfall yet so I may of been slightly relieved to delay it tell tomorrow.

[Litewait]

BPP 9.3 8000m DF107

36:35.6 8,000m 2:17.2 135 764 23
7:20.7 1,600m 2:17.7 134 761 23
7:20.7 3,200m 2:17.7 134 761 23
7:22.3 4,800m 2:18.2 133 757 23
7:22.3 6,400m 2:18.2 133 757 24
7:09.6 8,000m 2:14.2 145 798 25

Legs sore from yesterday's interval. Probably could have pushed it a bit more, but kept UT2 so I didn't chance HD.

@JohnA - great job, in awe how you pros can grind out a pattern like that.

[jackarabit]

Preparation for our upcoming family reunion is taking up a good deal of time this week. My SIL flew in to help my wife so now I have two bosses. Meant to take Tues rest day and then 4x1k today but didn't happen. Hoping to do both interval sessions in 3.3--the 4x1 tomorrow for certain. Did the hard distance and one recovery out of sequence last wkend and may get in one additional SS piece. Three epicycles is enuf for me. Favorable prognoses to the walking wounded and good fortune to the sound of body (and mind).

[john_n]

@lindsayh Lindsay - If your months of training for BIRC didn’t have at least one monkey wrench like the recent one to foul the gears, that would be the surprising thing. It doesn’t change my vote of confidence at all, for how you’ll do in Boston. In the book I recently finished, “The Kiwi Pair,” about the two New Zealand rowers who won a long string of gold medals - there were mishaps in training including one time when one of them was in a bike crash and injured a collar bone or one of the bones in the area in the upper region of his shoulder. He elected to not have surgery so that he wouldn’t have to take so much time off from training. In one of the color photos in the book, you can see the skin above that shoulder protruding up by an inch or so where the bone was out of whack or broken (I’m no medical professional so forgive my horrible lack of precise terminology and specificity ). They went on to win the next event after that. They also had some back problems, too, but that was unrelated to the bike crash… and the back problems set things back a bit but they still went on to win. I suspect that a big factor which kept them from backsliding when they had to forego regular training for a few days or longer was all the long-distance days they put in, day after day after week after week etc during one of the earlier periods of their training. Anyway - as you said to Glenn - “hang in there”

@G-Dub Glenn - To paraphrase what more than one famous baseball player has said: In order to hit home runs, you have to experience a lot of strike-outs in the process. If and when you feel burnt-out, a very long and very slow row with the damper set ridiculously low on one can seem like laughably nothing but it can be a soothing tonic for the body and mind.

@Slacker Ben- “a couple decent times is just icing” - good point of view for good balance.

@aussieluke Luke - it depends on how life gets in the way. There have been times when I’ve only been able to use the C2 for 5 minutes or so due to lack of time for it. There was one period of several months, after my dad passed away, when I couldn’t bring myself to do any rowing at all though I had plenty of time for it. There have been other circumstances which greatly interfered with my enthusiasm for doing any rowing. They were each storms and hindrances in the journey. The people who row across an ocean have them, on their journeys and they can’t escape them. Likewise, we can’t escape our storms and hindrances… we have to mentally row through them until they are behind us. You’ve got both work and family to juggle and you’re a hero to do that. Any rowing you can get done per the Pete Plan or just rowing any distance at any leisurely pace is above and beyond your call of duty and icing on the cake for your health.

@JohnAd John- vicariously highly enjoyable waterfall experience! I can almost hear the roar of the water… but it sounds like a C2 rower.

@mdpfirrman Mike - Your dad was a self-educated man and one of the men, the list of which includes many who are famous and the rest who deserve to be. My wife and children have been and are the material for much of what has been most worthwhile in my continuing education.

@gooseflight Roy- great advice about time/temporal construct and what you said about “…where your head is…”

@Pie Man Piers- juggling is a sport of controlled chaos and you’ve learned to combine juggling with training sessions. Jujitsu-like, if I correctly remember that jujitsu is a technique where an adversary’s momentum or inertia is used against him. So it might be said that you have a jujitsu adaptation of PP.

@Litewait Tim- your sore legs which some refer to as DOMS is generally a good and desirable sign.

@jackarabit Jack - Surrounded by women this week! It could be far worse.

My Cycle 1 Week 1 Day 4 session today:
No warmup
SS 15K
targets in order of priority from highest to lowest
1. HR 60%-75% max
2. rating 22
3. Pace anything = or slower than about 2:11
strapless but with shoes, not barefoot.
DF 135
1K warm down

Now… I’ll make another attempt to insert an image. This time, I’m using a site called “Imgur,” which hosts images for free, like flikr and others do. A youtube video explained how. It seems that if I just put the images up onto a hosting site on my own, like I tried to do yesterday, the forum software can’t glean what size the images are supposed to be. But Imgur and other sites compute and convey the image size to the forum software in a way that it can understand.



That worked!! I write a blog post daily about what I did or did not do in the way of rowing, so that any of my kids who want to check can look at the blog and see if I’m still alive and rowing. It's part of my daily incentive to get off my butt and row, to have something to put in my blog every day. The web address for today’s blog post is at http://etherealrowing.com/pete-plan-cyc ... overy-15k/

Keep on keeping on and trying to figure out how to keep on when Murphy’s Law gets in the way.