Sums to 1,000m

Tuesday evening:  For me, Tuesday night practices are often hard to make.  My husband has a long commute, and he generally works late hours.  To all the normal people in the world, asking him to come home early every Tuesday so that I can row probably sounds a little ridiculous.  Imagine this, "Excuse me, boss.  I have to leave early today to keep my insane wife happy so that she can row and I can watch the Princess."  To rowers, this sounds pretty reasonable.  In college, rowers learn quickly that unless you sleep through your alarm, are taking an exam, or have a life emergency, you just do not miss practice.  You do everything humanly possible to make practice. 

In a post-college life with work, family, babies, you do everything reasonably possible to make practice.  Vacations, work training sessions, work travel, taxes, family obligations can get in the way and sometimes, you just have to skip practice.  I try really hard to make practice, even if it means pinching my husband's arm, just a little bit.  When I do have to miss practice though, I am haunted by this quote, "Somewhere in the world someone is training when you are not. When you race them, they will win."

This evening, we had 1 eight and 1 double out on the water.  The Bay Blades had 1 quad and 1 single.  The Bay Blades' quad joined us for our workout.  The workout was:

1.  1x1000m race piece with start, settle, sprint
2.  2x500m race pieces with start and settle
3.  4x250m race pieces; first two pieces had start and settle; last two had sprint.

I call this workout, "anything and everything that sums to 1,000m."  I rowed starboard again, but this time in five seat.  As I noted before, my starboard side rowing needs a bit of work, especially if we are doing starts and going at 38spm.  On starboard, my catches feel rougher and sometimes, I cannot feather fast enough so my blade is not fully feathered, coming out of bow.  Pretty ugly rowing.  At the end of practice today, I was afraid to look at our three and four seat, in case I was just wildly splashing water everywhere. 

The 1,000m piece got off to a rough start and about 250 meters into the piece, we had to paddle to avoid colliding with the quad.  The first 500m piece was also interrupted by another near-collision with the quad.  The second 500m piece had a clean start and felt the best of all the pieces.  The 250m pieces were too short to really remember much (I plead memory loss). 

My frustration with the workout today was with the set of the boat.  Typically as the rate gets higher, the boat is easier to set because there is less time on the recovery.  The boat is the most set on the drive, when your blades are in the water.  Not having a set boat at higher rates can be very detrimental to the speed of the boat.  Oars dragging on the water can slow the boat down a bit, but I think the most harmful result of an unset boat is not being able to get the blades in at the catch, especially at higher rates when catches are supposedly to be quick and light.  As a rower, the frustration comes from having all this energy and effort that you want to put into your stroke, but because of the set, you are not able to put in 100%.