Sunday 9 November 2008

any tips on how to make rowing interesting?

Still having a good run of activity for the 365challenge - 5 days in the last 7 in the gym - so the distances are building up towards my targets. I hope to cross the half-way point in my Channel swim this week. Wave if you spot me out there!

And while the rowing kilometres are growing slowly (75 Km down, but still 271 Km to go), I am finding this the hardest part of the challenge. I'm trying different approaches to this task - 3.5 or 5 Km in one straight row; interval training with 30 seconds fast, 30 seconds recovery, up to 3 Km; 2 Km hard graft, followed by a slow 1 Km, then having a cycling break followed by another 2 Km burst. Variations on a theme, just trying to keep the interest going. But I have a long way to go still, so if there is anyone out there who can give me some creative ideas for how to keep going with the rowing, I'd love to hear them!

Other than this, I spent part of today writing my presentation for Cancer Research UK (CRUK), getting the PowerPoint presentation in order so that I can really present the 365challenge at its very best to the people who have the potential to take it to the next level and beyond ... watch this space.

2 comments:

  1. I recite the 7 "I am" meditations from Frederich Rittelmeyer's book, Meditation. If it is a short row of 45 minutes, I alow 5 minutes to each mediation, it is an hour and a half, I alow 10 minutes to each one. The final mediation takes three breathing cycles to recite, so I alow 15 minutes or 30 minutes depending upon the length of the row. I find that this helps me hold a constant pace, it takes my mind off of the time, it allows me to focus on the breath as I mentally recite them with the recovery stroke. I am very calm mentally afterwards too.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wow ... I'll have to Google this and see what it might do for me! If it can make 45 minutes feel like a "short row", it must be amazing. And developing meditation skills can only be a good thing, though I suspect that it will take some time. But, hey, I've got plenty of that left on the rowing maching with this challenge!

    Thanks for the tip, whoever you are, and great to know there are others out there dipping into my blog-world.
    Colin

    ReplyDelete