Phew! 6,000m PB by 0.1 seconds :)

I could not let yesterday's disappointment go. This is not the first time that I have returned to a PB attempt after 24 hours and done much better. Maybe I need that disappointment to spur me on. Either way I hung on to a 6,000m PB as part of the CTC challenge today.

I used my previous 6,000m CTC row and my current PB from 6th December as pace boats. It was an interesting race. I had no idea to what plan I had rowed in my PB at in December, but new the CTC piece was pretty even splits. I also changed the colour and blades of my boat since I get bored of always racing clones of me.

Again my lack of observation skills let me down. Despite looking at the pace boat splits 15 seconds before I was convinced that the target split was 1:48.1. I therefore went off a little quickly. I lived under this misapprehension for some time and by 2,000m had pulled out a length on my "competitors". But my previous PB must have involved a big push at 2,000m because by 2,500m I was only a length up and and at half way I was behind. Impressive form from my robotic self. To be behind was pretty demoralising but I hung on in there, thinking that I would still beat my old CTC time and if I was close with a minute to go I may have hope on the sprint finish.

Then to my amazement my old self had a nightmare in the 5th 1000m and I found myself ahead by one foot at 5,500m. The end of the race is a bit of a blur, but I know that I was behind at one point. Not being allowed to up the rate was a bit of a problem but I gutted it out and scraped home. I am sad enough to have run the race through on the RowPro and those last few metres were pretty hairy. (Note to RowPro developers - it is a bit dull watching the whole race just to see the last 500m, and I nearly missed it! Any chance of fast forward/rewind?). The picture below shows the finishing line, you can just see the bow of my previous CTC attempt and my old PB is in the orange shorts. I got the rate almost spot on. Three strokes more over the 6,000m (1 stroke each 7 minutes) than that demanded by an exact 24 stroke rate.

I was pretty tired at the end but it was nice to get the first PB of the season. I had a very long warm down for me. I did my usual 2,000m @ 2:30 but found that after this my heart rate was still above 130bpm so I carried on for another 1,000m or so.

m	Time (s)	Split	HR
1500	5:26.3	1:48.8	173
3000	10:55.7	1:49.8	176
4500	16:25.0	1:49.7	181
6000	21:49.1	1:48.0	190

Metres today: 11,395