Upping the Pace

With Banbury being the last Hasler of the season it's back to winter training (or lay-off if you're that way inclined) until my own club's Hasler in May 2018. For those who would suffer withdrawal symptoms there is still the club Hare &Hounds, and the Waterside and the Thameside series of races in January/February. For the real head-bangers there is of course the DW in April. For us lesser mortals, entertaining the thought that they might give one of those a try, it's back to the intermittent training schedule interspaced with injury while trying to achieve that nirvana of faultless progress through the water.

If only!  The three sessions that I've 'enjoyed' since  Banbury have all been like the curate's egg, good in parts, but mostly bad. On the last day of October I simply took a social paddle with two other club members and used it as a non pressured session practicing the essentials of the stroke while I also measured the actual length of the H&H course. Working on the Catch produced some worthwhile moments as occasionally, very occasionally, it all comes together and the boat picks up speed and fairly zips across the water. These moments are rare and short lived, but have to be savoured like a fine wine.

Back to reality... plugging my way through the water and trying to extend the distance between breaks. Back to using the Gymboss set at four minutes effort with two minutes rest. It's difficult to keep to the schedule when in a group so I tend to prefer going out by myself and keeping to the schedule I've set myself. The last two sessions went a little better but I'd limited them to the H&H course of about 4.5 miles. 

As I mentioned before my stroke rate lags well behind everyone else's and I'm getting in about 15% less strokes per minute than the competition. I'm pretty sure I know why, which is my longer stroke behind the waist before removing the paddle from the water. It's inefficient and drags the life out of the stroke, and it also takes a lot more time to complete each stroke. Despite hours trying to rectify this it's a problem that always reoccurs when I loose concentration or get tired. Consequently, for the final session I tried out a new toy I've bought in recently. 

It's a metronome. Initially I bought a rather cheap and nasty one. It's only meant for use by musicians in a dry and warm studio to set the tempo they want, but a few runners have claimed it to be useful on a run. But it did the job and by setting the beep it produced I was soon able to find that the number of strokes I was comfortable with was only 58 per minute. By upping the tempo first to 60, then to 65 I found that was quite a hard work out just trying to keep up with the beat. Unfortunately the thing wasn't waterproof and after a couple of quarter mile efforts the poor thing was reduced to an intermittent squawk. Turning it off and back on finished it off and it died. As it happens after a day drying out it came back on again and presently seems to be working okay in the dry.

The photo above is of a different and more expensive one, bought to replace the original. That's been working fine even though it's been got thoroughly wetted down and hasn't yet missed a beat.