I normally do longer, steady state rows, but I thought I should mix it up a bit, so decided last week to do 4 x 4 minutes sprints with about 3 minutes rest in between. After a nice long warm up, it was time to go. The first one went okay at a 2:25 split, as did the second one at 2.27, but then the wheels came off. The third was at a 2:42 and the final one at 2:38. I can cruise faster than that. We have minimal current and the wind was not too bad, so I cannot blame those. Furthermore, I was just going up and down the cut, so the splits should be comparable. There was a power boat that came by for the third, so that did slow me down a fair bit. On the upside, the starts went better than normal; trying really hard not to hold on too tight during those and it seems to help.
I am cleaning dropping off on both stroke rate and speed as the sprint go on.
The stroke characteristics look relatively similar, although the strokes take slightly longer for the later sprints as expected given the lower stroke rate and hence longer recovery.
Finally, the overall metrics.
I plan on doing these once a week as possible, partly for conditioning and partly to highlight problems with my stroke that tend to only show up when I am pushing the pace harder.
