I’ve been following this forum for a few years, with the occasional post and query. I've gained a great deal of value from following the advice and learnings from the wealth of experience residing on these pages - so I thought my story might be somewhat valuable for others who set out to achieve this particular goal.
I first heard about the ‘7 minute 2km’ benchmark in 2020 via a Tim Ferriss podcast with Hugh Jackman - which is a pretty great episode actually - and well worth a listen.
https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/
This piqued my interest (who doesn’t want to look like Wolverine?!) so I put the goal on my general list, and even went so far as to purchase a Concept2. However - I got distracted with other pursuits for a few years before deciding in June of last year (2023) to take the goal seriously and give it a proper crack.
It’d be fair to say that I don’t have the natural build for a rower. I’m 5’7” on a good day, in my mid 30’s, and when I started applying myself last year I was right at 195lb after 4 years of consistent weightlifting. I’ve always loved sport and being active, but never performed at a high level.
For additional context - I was in decent physical shape going in and probably as strong as I'd ever been - my maximum single rep lifts in that June/July timeline were deadlift 415lb, back squat 360lb, bench 275lb. I’d recently climbed Mt Shasta in Northern CA (14000+ ft), I’d been going on relatively regular bike rides, and doing a lot of kayaking. I genuinely thought that I’d be able to put in 2-3months of solid training, tick the box and put it behind me.
Needless to say, it didn’t quite work out that way! I’m constantly shocked by posts either on Reddit or on this forum where people state that they ‘just gave a 2k a shot on a whim and hit sub 7’. Either those folks are being disingenuous, they’re seriously athletic or I’m woefully inadequate as an athlete, but that certainly wasn’t my experience. My first attempt back in June was 7.50.9, and it was awful - I got a pretty rude awakening to my true fitness levels right then and there.
My training was based on the Pete Plan. First day of real training was 6/19/23 - where I rowed 5000m. I averaged around 30km a week the first few weeks as I built up to be able to finish the full PP workouts, and it took me until the end of August to get to a point where I could complete 15000m steady state rows.
My first shot at each of the core PP sessions are shown below:
8x500m / 3.30r 1.51.4
Speed Pyramid 1.48.9
4x1000m / 5r 1.52.3
Waterfall 1.59.4
4x2000m / 5r 1.57.5
5x1500m / 5r 1.57.3
Although I was a bit erratic with training through September and October (work, travel, plus the minor life event of getting married!), I hit a new level of consistency in November - where I started hitting 60km training weeks regularly. Throughout all this, I was still seeing decent improvement cycle over cycle on the PP, maybe 0.5-0.75 second improvements in 500m splits on the core sessions. Every now and then I’d blow up on one of them (usually the middle distance sessions) and beat myself up, but I’d always make sure to finish the meters even if it was at a reduced pace.
I won’t lie, even with the improvements it was still kind of demoralizing with how slow it was going, and the goal always seemed a long way off. I had to continually keep reminding myself to trust the process and just keep chipping away week over week, and even if I had a few bad days here and there, as long as I stuck at it things should eventually work out.
In early December, I had a few additional weeks of travel but managed to find an OrangeTheory and pumped in as much rowing as possible to keep up the momentum. From mid December onwards, consistency has been excellent and I really haven’t missed a session - 6 days a week of PP, hitting all the core sessions flat out and then using 15000m sessions for the 'steady state' at around 2.05-2.10 splits.
To show where my most recent PP splits are:
8x500m / 3.30r 1.41.0
Speed Pyramid 1.42.0
4x1000m / 5r 1.46.5
Waterfall 1.52.8
4x2000m / 5r 1.52.2
5x1500m / 5r 1.52.1
Going into last week, I wasn’t really planning on time trialing but I have upcoming travel plans and figured I should see where I was sitting since my last trial in early December where I hit 7.09. I’d taken Sunday off, then felt beat up on Monday so took it off as well, and managed to get a solid 10hr sleep in that night so woke up on Tuesday feeling good. I was initially intending to taper through the week and trial on Thursday, but figured I couldn’t get much better prep, so decided early afternoon that I’d take it on.
I utilized the Eddie Fletcher 2k warm up plan (https://rowingmachineking.com/wp-conten ... Warmup.pdf), stretched out, put Eminem and DMX on repeat on the headphones and set off.
Honestly, I think it went just about perfectly for my current abilities and fitness level. I went out strong with 8-10 hard strokes at sub 1.40 then settled into a 1.46 rhythm at right around 30s/m. As I imagine everyone does, I went through a fairly dark place between 1400m and 600m - the (probably standard) queries of ‘maybe todays just not my day’ and ‘why does this even matter’… but as I neared the 600m mark and the screen was still bouncing between 6.59-7.01 as the estimated finish I realized this was going to my best shot to putting this self inflicted torture to bed.
Honestly the last 400m is a blur - the vision was going, the legs were screaming, my form was probably all jacked up - all the usual time trial delights that no doubt many of you have experienced a whole lot more intensely than I.
And then, it’s done. 6.59.0. Goal achieved, tick the box, cloud nine.
—
My key learnings:
- 1) Consistency was the key. As soon as I started putting in regular 60km weeks and not missing any sessions, the rate of improvement rapidly escalated. That seems absurdly obvious in hindsight, but when you’re going from such a low cardio base, it was easy to make excuses and think that a 30-40km week was enough. As everyone likes to repeat (at least on reddit)... do more steady state!
2) The entire process was a fantastic learning experience - doing something that doesn’t come naturally to me and required a bit of grit has benefits far beyond fitness.. and the simple commitment of just putting my head down and putting in the work was a wonderful reminder of what needs to be done to achieve anything worthwhile.
3) Without testing out other plans for efficacy, it’s hard to tell if the PP was the best for my situation, but it's simplicity certainly appealed. As I was starting out, the Wolverine Plan seemed a little overwhelming (even though after I actually took the time to read it properly and gained some experience it’s really quite easy to understand).
4) The mental challenge of always having to push harder while using a continuous program was interesting - I’d get nervous and slightly on edge before one of the core sessions as I knew the pain was rapidly approaching. I don’t honestly know if I could keep that up long term, it must get really mentally taxing.
5) I rapidly learnt that most folk have no context at all for rowing - so if you're doing it purely to impress others, I can tell you now that you won't win a whole lot of accolades! Every now and then someone would mention how they blitzed a 6.45 on a water rower at OrangeTheory once upon a time so they totally got the pain I was going through, and I'd have to bite my tongue...
6) On the flip side of that point, as I've learned from this forum, going sub 7 isn't that impressive a time... although I still personally think us shorties should get a tiny bit of special consideration on that point!
Now... time for a marathon...?
