Long week comes to an end.

Done!  5 erg tests completed. It was a tough week to get through but it is such a great feeling to be done.  I think I felt the pressure of work and training add up the most in this past week, and this is probably why I became so incredibly tired over the week-end…sleeping a lot more than usual and trying to conserve my energy by staying home and resting (sleeping) once I was back from an AMAZING trip to NiagaraJ.

I was reminded of a couple of really important things this week:

-          Warming up and warming down before/after a workout is very important (for example, a warm up can include some general cycling/erging/running, with some bursts of power movements and dynamic movements like squat jumps, carioca, inch warm and more)

-          Core strength is fundamental to proper technique (for various sports!).  I noticed this about myself and also had teammates tell me how terrible I looked when I erged:S  As I got tired, my body started to collapse and I wasn’t breathing efficiently or using my legs as well as I could.  So that’s why I’m excited to get started with this next phase of training.  No more weak core!

-          It is so incredibly hard to do a test on your own.  The mind is so powerful and if it’s not ready to do well, then it can get in the way of what your body wants to do, or CAN do! Having a teammate there to help keep rhythm with and remind you that yes “you can do this” goes a long way!

Today I did the 60 minute erg test at a stroke rate 22. I added the image of my results here (my results should be better) because it shows how much the mind and body can disagree, ha!

As you can see, I clearly went out to hard.  I started at a 2:00-2:01 split, when in fact this is my goal for the end of this year, not for now.  Because I went out harder than I should have, I started to struggle after only 20 minutes.  About 40 minutes into the test, I was ready to quit, and I did slow down significantly (I think I came to a short stop), but I kept going because my two amazing teammates (Kathleen and Claire) were both there with me pushing through the same pain and trying to get through this test.  I pushed my monitor back at this point so that the increasing numbers I was seeing in front of me were gone, and instead I could focus on feeling each stroke and rhythm with my teammates.  It helped a lot and surprisingly I was able to hold a better split without the monitor (reminded me again of the Death Crawl video). With pain and struggle comes grunting - something I’ve become well known for, haha.  For the entire second half, one of my teammates and I sounded like tennis players…grunting with passion and making funny faces.  I know I tend to scrunch my face so I’m working on relaxing those muscles. It’s not a time you try and look pretty, that’s for sure.

So the next race to prepare for is the Canadian Indoor Rowing Championships in February.  This afternoon I met with my coach Stani and strength conditioning coach Rory to prepare.  Training for that shall begin tomorrow (after another long sleep)…welcome back to routineJ