Day 18

Ten days to go in this year's Concept 2 Holiday Challenge. I've got 55,505m left of the 200,000m in the challenge. As of right now 286 people have completed the challenge (but most have kept rowing anyway), another 2149 people are over 100,000m, and who knows how many are still working towards that goal. One guy has rowed over 950,000m. Now that's crazy! I row that much in a year, never mind 18 days. A total of nearly 692 million meters have been rowed by everybody participating.

Speaking of crazy... a close friend of mine (who mentioned the challenge to me this November after I had decided NOT to do it, and got me thinking about it again) ran into some familiar issues with determination crossing the line into insanity. Nah, that's never happened to me...

She emailed me to say "I hurt my knee. I can't bend it, I can hardly bear weight on it, it's swollen. And I have a cold. What should I do? Keep rowing?" She had rowed 9,500m, about 45 minutes, on it the night before. I laughed in true understanding and kinship. Then I ordered her to find some ice and to stop rowing. I almost ended my C2HC in solidarity. But for some reason I couldn't quite bring myself to do that. I did spend a lot of time thinking about why I participate as I rowed the next few days...

I keep learning and adjusting my workouts trying to meet my personal goal of completing the C2HC in a sane and balanced way. After discovering that open ended rows led to me pushing longer and farther than I intended, I switched to timed rows. The downfall of that strategy was that I then pushed to see how many meters I could squeeze into the predetermined time. And ended up exhausted. Which is not consistent with sanity or balance. So I tried set distance pieces, and found that I would push to see how fast I could finish them...

I have settled on having my heart-rate be my primary guide, and then each row I choose one method to measure my workout. Some days I'm not sure if I want to row 6,000 or 9,000 meters, so an open-ended row is best. Other days I have only 35 minutes, so a timed row is perfect. But no matter what I pick, I earn bonus points (in my head) for keeping my heart-rate below various targets. This seems to be working wonderfully.

What I'm really doing is learning to listen to my body. When I don't feel so good, I do a short easier row, or *gasp* take a day off. Maybe, just maybe, I'll get good at this balance thing.