Hosting MaxDev

So, MaxDev came to play. I had to leave for a departmental curry (and very nice it was too) so we only had about 45 minutes to muck around.

Poor Max. I spent the first 20 minutes tearing his techinque apart. (sorry Max) He took it all in good part and took 9 seconds out of his low pull. Though I reckon most of that was down to his not realising that the low pull starts with a moving fly wheel. We worked hard on him reducing his slide and not over compressing (which he was doing massively). Putting his feet much higher in the foot rests helped a good deal. Max is impressively flexible and having his feet at normal height let his knees go about 20 degrees beyond vertical. I am afraid that Max will now go even more mental on the nonathlon challenge (if that is possible). Sorry everyone involved in that.

After seeing Max tear up his low pull I was inspired to have a pop at 1,000m. I have blown that several times recently, but was feeling excited by having a friend to play with and knew that it would help me along to have Max on my shoulder. I did a BIRC-esque warm up. i.e. too short, too rushed and let rip with a 1,000m effort. My aim was to go sub 3:10. So the plan was to get to 500m at 1:35 slip a little for the next 300m but then, with a banshee finish pull under the 3:10. Max was ace. He let me go at it but as he saw the split slip started calling for more. This helped. With 150 to go I was averaging 1:35.3 I think (it is a bit of a blur) but he egged me home. I was splitting at 1:32 ish at the end and hit 3:10.0 exactly. Ugh! If I had gone for home at 160m I would have made a sub 3:10. Ah well. I was pretty pleased to get my second Channin PB. I don't like hitting him when it is down though and I am confident that whilst his 2,000m is in range, his 5,000m is going to take a LOT of getting.

Looking at my stroke data for the 1k I again find my heart rate dropping in the sprint for the finish! My last 17 strokes (23 seconds and 120m) were lower heart rate than the 182 max I achieved. Not sure what is going on there!

No rowing tonight. A long day that ended with open evening. I was VERY pleased to get 28 year 10s on the rowing machine at school through lunch though. Very pleased. The ultimate dream is to take a team of year 10s to BIRC 2007.

Metres (yesterday): 2,752