On a Roll

I ended May with a club outing of sixteen miles which put my total mileage for the month to just over 100 miles. Five of my outings, including the one above, have been over ten miles and each one has been relatively easy. The harder ones have been the (now) short ones of five miles between NewHaw and Pyrford where I have used the Bungee on each occasion. That thing is a real drag, but although it slowed me down at first I'm gradually getting back to the times I was doing without it in place before.

I've also managed a couple of jogs after the five mile paddles which were slow, but that's a work in progress at the moment. What is helping rather more is the Ergo sessions which are averaging out at one a week for now. I took the first couple of sessions fairly easy to get used to the idea. At first the reps were quite short at only two minutes each. At the moment I've worked up to 4 x 8mins with two minutes rest, followed by 4 x 4mins with interval two minutes rest. I realise this isn't any big deal at the moment but I'm working up to the sort of intervals recommended in Brian Greenaway's book where he advocates interval work load of between thirty minutes to an hour. My session gives a total of 48 minutes work. There's still scope to cut the rest time to the recommended one minute between reps.

What's been lacking in my paddling up to now is the ability to keep going for a sustained period. Keeping going on the Ergo while only having to concentrate on stroke and style seems to be helping quite a bit when it's transferred to the boat on the water. The last paddle of sixteen miles was a lot easier than I thought it would be and I was still going quite strongly when I entered new territory at fourteen miles. What is also pleasing is that the Garmin shows that I was topping 5 mph quite regularly. My best mile occurred last week at 12:48 so there's still a long way to go to get under twelve minutes.