The last four days have featured some of the worst weather I have seen here in VT. It was the miserable combination of cold, rain, and wind which made rowing less enjoyable, and well, just about everything else less enjoyable as well! I woke up with the sunrise this morning at about 5.30, looked outside, and it was gorgeous. Most closely resembled the Shire. I think it is still pretty chilly but it at least looks much better. That alone is enough to put a little hop in my step this morning!
Training has been rolling along with a greater emphasis right now on building my base fitness back up from racing for a couple weeks. From the outside looking in it wouldn't seem like any of us have lost any fitness by racing. But that would be untrue. While the nature of the workouts we do in a peak leading into a race allow us to access our top end speed, it almost always comes at a cost of your base aerobic fitness. Volume goes down, intensity goes up, and when not trained, the aerobic system decreases its efficiency remarkably fast! So its important to time things correctly. The aerobic base is what helps an athlete be able to repeat an effort time and time again, like in a week of racing. It allows you to recover quickly and seamlessly from an all out effort. That is why we spend so much time training at very low intensities. We are continuously trying to improve our ability to repeat max efforts.
So it's been a lot of 75' easy rows, trying to find speed at low intensity.
Hopefully I will feel better this week but my body definitely felt a little sluggish last week.
We had the pleasure of meeting rowing legend John Biglow this past week. He came up to coach the sculling camps but ended up coming out and watching one of our workouts. He won bronze in the M1x at the 1982 World Championships. He is by no means a massive man. Atypical of the giants I think of racing in the single today. I found video of him racing in the '82 world champs and it looked familiar. He is rowing smooth, but he is also just putting a ton of energy into the boat. Using his bodyweight really well. John Biglow, Tiff Wood, Andy Sudduth. Those seem like good guys to emulate. The defining characteristic of that era of sculler seems to be the grit in which they raced with.
Needless to say, it was awesome having him out at practice.
A little less than three weeks until I leave to race in Europe for a month. World Cup 2 is in about 3 and a half weeks.
Always looking for more run, more power, more speed.
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