“In the winter of 1650, I was going into the city of Chiaochuan from the Little Harbor, accompanied by a boy carrying a big load of books, tied with a cord and strengthened with a few pieces of board. It was toward sunset and the country was covered with haze. We were about a mile from the city. “Will we be in time to get into the city before the gates are closed?” I asked the ferryman. “You will if you go slowly. But if you run, you will miss it,” replied the ferryman, casting a look at the boy. But we walked as fast as possible. About halfway, the boy fell down. The cord broke and the books fell on the ground. The boy sat crying. By the time we had retied the package and reached the city gate, it was already closed. I thought of that ferryman. He had wisdom.” - Chou Yung (1619-1679)
Anecdotally, I had something similar happen to me. Someone was critiquing my rowing form at the gym. I was doing ~28 strokes per minute and my pace was about 2:05m per 500m.
"Explode when you push, but slow your overall pace to 20 strokes per minute. Take time to breathe and rest on the way back in."
After finding the new cadence, my pace was now 1:55m per 500m. A 30% reduction in stroke rate improved my pace by 8%.
out of curiosity, what do your sets normally look like? I generally just do a 500m sprint before moving onto other workouts, but I’m pretty spent and need to recoup for a while afterwards. Do you have recommendations for building up endurance?
I am new to rowing. However rowing is primarily a legs activity. You should only minimally be using your arms.
Slow down. A good pace is 2min/500m. Any faster and you will feel spent.
You can do intervals to build endurance: 30s fast work/90-120s slow and repeat 5 or more times. If that’s too much try 15s/60-90s. Build up from there.
Thanks for the advice. I normally tackle it as 5x10 pulls where each set is ~100m. My legs are always wobbly afterwards. I think switching between slow/fast is a good idea and I’ll try it out. I feel like I always dread doing intervals and I just try to get it over with as fast as possible haha. Bad habit of mine
2000m is the standard for benchmarking yourself. Legs/back/arms are three distinct movements - when you are done pushing with your legs and they are fully extended you should still be upright, then lean back, then arms. The arms should just be dead weight used as a hook for the oar up until the last part of the drive. Engaging them throughout will tire you faster. Reverse the order on the way back to the catch.
If you're feeling particularly motivated - bring a bucket ;)
I'm an ex-rower in my 40s and my usual cardio workout these days is 10km at about a 2:05 pace. Lately I've been watching Breaking Bad episodes during each workout, it's about the right length and a nice distraction!
Sometimes I do a 5k at about 1:55 instead. Between that and weight training, trying to build back my endurance before doing 2k sprints again. Maybe I'll get back on the water next year.
> I'm an ex-rower in my 40s and my usual cardio workout these days is 10km at about a 2:05 pace.
What? Assuming that you are talking about running, the current world record for 10K is 26:24 for men [0] and 29:38 for women [0]. It makes you quite a bit faster. Am I missing something?
