Want To Work Towards Longer Rows On The Rower

One thing I have been wanting to do is work up to rowing a half marathon again this winter. It has been a while. I was planning on it in 2024, but I got very sick, and that stuck with me for a bit, then other things came up.

All summer long I have been itching to sit down on the Concept2, though, and just get some longer pieces in. WODs are great, and I will continue doing them along with my lifting, but there can be something entirely different about getting into a longer row. A variety in your workout regime is never a bad thing either!

This morning I sat down and did a 5k. That isn’t really long yet, but it’s longer than the 500 or 1000 meters in normal WODs typically.

One thing I will have to do, and I will learn again from previous experience, is to feel the pacing and effort I am putting in. Normal people can glance at the monitor’s screen, but for me, that doesn’t work. Today I felt like I did pretty well with that. I finished the 5k after ramping things up for the last bit and felt like I could have kept going. I want to take that time to get the callus back in my hands for one thing before I do that.

One good side effect of these longer rows is it will clean up my technique. That has become garbage over the past couple of years as my brain has reverted a bit back to the CrossFit way, which is inefficient. When the rows get longer, your body finds efficiency because it doesn’t want to work poorly.

I noticed this morning after I was done that the stroke rate is actually slowing down a bit. Hopefully that continues, and it doesn’t take too long for me to get back to around 20.

I don’t overly blame my early CrossFit coaches for teaching poor rowing form. It is just what they saw Froning and such do, and they are good, so they must be right. Over time even those big guys learned to do it properly. It was purely the way CrossFit did it back in those days.

Don’t even get me started on being taught to bump the bar doing cleans and stuff. That just happens if you’re doing it right.

I am fortunate in the fact that I like to learn and keep improving. That keeps me going more than PRs, I think. There is always room for tweaks and improvements!

Music today was Abnormality.