Rowing Progress – May 2023
I’m writing this post well after the fact as I want to start recording and blogging about my fitness progress. Going from a relatively lardass lump to a lean machine. Hopefully lol. My primary focus is on overall fitness, although I’ll be dipping into the food/nutrition side of things once I’ve got that part sorted.
May was a pretty poor month for me, and not the best start to the rowing season. Low motivation and distractions meant I didn’t do as much as I wanted. I still struggled with food/eating issues, as well as an increasing caffeine addiction owing to a lack of ADHD medication.
My fingers continued to be an issue, but I did pick up in efforts after I’d got some tape to wrap my affected fingers. It’ll slow the callousing that’s needed, but has eliminated the blistering that would happen. Longer term I’m looking to get some good rowing gloves (these ones) as they would be better for my sweaty sausages when I’m doing my longer rows working towards those bigger goals. I won’t be able to get these until July though, but I got plenty of tape to use until then.
Still, I managed to get some sessions done but only manage 7 days on the machine out of the entire month.
OVERALL SUMMARY
| Total Metres | 46,508 | Season Total | 46,508 |
| Total Time | 4:02’42” | Season Time* | 4:02’42” |
* Season runs from 1st May to 30th April.
MONTHLY HIGHLIGHTS
My highlight of the month was the 5,000m row that smashed my previous effort in this category.
Performance wise it was fairly consistent effort – I seem to gravitate to a stroke per minute of around 24-26 on average, and my heart rate wasn’t at the absolute maximum (I’ve managed around 175bpm on max effort, but that’s more a sprint thing).
NEXT MONTH’S GOAL(S)
In June I hope to do some other ranked rows – namely the lower end ones. Key ones are the 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 (again) and maybe a 10,000. I’ve got logs of each of these so I can see if my overall performance continues to improve, which I think it will.
Next month will be a lot more intense, I’m better focused on doing more workouts, along with sorting my food intake out slowly. Not that my food intake is bad per se, but it could be a lot better. I’ve got some oral surgery to contend with soon, so that’s a huge mitigating factor I’ll need to consider.