Churbuck.com

Muzak, also known as Elevator Music, has always been a great joke. Hearing a Steely Dan tune like “Do It Again” while leafing through a six-month old issue of Field & Stream at the dentist is its own special circle of hell, especially when the mind starts getting infected and singing along silently to the bowdlerized tune (“Back, Jack, Do it Again ….”). And many a great movie has used elevator music to great comic effect. My favorite being Dawn of the Dead (yes, it’s Zombie week at Churbuck.com).

Muzak, at least the true commercial version, is supposed to have a specific effect on the listener. According to the Wikipedia:

“Elevator music is typically set to a very simple melody, so that it can be unobtrusively looped back to the beginning. In a mall or shopping center, elevator music of a specific type has been found to have a psychological effect: slower, more relaxed music tends to make people slow down and browse longer.”

Which brings me to my constant musing about the effect that background music has on certain behaviors. I’ve written in the past* about the way that certain music can improve my ergometer results while other songs effectively kill it. This isn’t your usual athletic lockeroom get-psyched cliche music.  I’m not referring to Eye of the Tiger or House of Pain’s Jump Around. That Rocky soundtrack stuff isn’t what gets my 500 meter splits down an additional two seconds. Indeed, there is some academic research that confirms that some music can improve aerobic results but I’m too lazy at the moment to hunt it down.

When I tended bar it was a given that loud music drove alcohol consumption higher.  At some point in the evening the manager would always step in back, find the big volume control, and crank it when the joint was good and buzzed. Of course the din made it impossible to hear some desperate dipsomaniac shout an order over the heads of her fellow patrons for a pina colada, a peach daiquiri and a sloe gin fizz shortly after midnight on a Saturday night when the only thing that would keep the bar out of the weeds was sloshing wine into glasses and pulling drafts out of the taps. “What?! What?!” we’d shout, handing over a napkin and a pencil with a shrug and the implied suggestion to write it down. Obviously loud music made it difficult to conduct a conversation and all that shouting of “WHAT?” led to a subtle anxiety that could only be slaked by another drink and another drink after that.

Silent restaurants are spooky. I suppose a low volume soundtrack gives one the illusion of being in a sound bubble where one’s conversation can’t be overheard by the next table.

When I was writing unpublished novels and short stories in great earnest during college, I found I could only enter that special creative zone if there was music playing. Loud music. Something about writing to rock and roll got me into a typing groove. I can read fiction with soft music in the background — jazz, etc. — but can’t concentrate on academic level stuff if there are lyrics involved — the word absorption gets mixed up.

My big revelation, and this goes to the post’s headline, is my re-discovery of the Ambient genre and how perfectly it suits a day of concentration. In the mid-70s, when I was a college student, I had two roommates with very eccentric tastes in avant garde music. I’m talking stuff by Morton Subotnick, Sun Ra, Stomu Yamashta and most memorably, Brian Eno, in particular his Ambient 1: Music for Airports. For some reason, ambient is way back on my personal playlist these days.

I think of Eno as the father of ambient music — he’s a genius at elevating background noise from elevators and waiting rooms to high art. Another godfather of ambient has to be Vangelis, particularly his soundtrack for Blade Runner:

So, it’s strange as I age that my taste is music is not the chestnuts from my youth; one more rendition of Freebird or Green Grass and High Tides Forever and I’ll lose it. What’s surprising me is how my tastes have swung to utterly obscure musicians I would never have encountered were it not for the random intelligence behind Last.fm. So, with that said, here’s some names that deserve to be checked out. This is great music to plug into in the background when you’ve got other things to do.

• Aphex Twin

• Eskmo ( a favorite video)

• Lorn

• Boards of Canada (note the YouTube comment, “The Ultimate Homework-Doing Music”)

• Carbon Based Lifeforms

• Loscil

• Stendeck

• Totakeke

• Monolake

• Robot Koch

*: My erg playlist, from 2006 pretty much is holding firm. Suggestions always welcome as “erg playlist” seems to be a top search term driving people to this blog.

1. Scum of the Earth: Rob Zombie
2. Who Was in My Room Last Night: The Butthole Surfers
3. Jesus Built my Hot Rod: Ministry
4. Ain’t my Bitch: Metallica
5. Rusty Cage: Soundgarden
6. Sex Type Thing: Stone Temple Pilots
7. New World Order: Ministry
8. Hey Man, Nice Shot: Filter
9. My Own Summer – Deftones
10. Astro-Creep: White Zombie
11. Them Bones: Alice in Chains
12. Time Bomb: Godsmack
13. Blizzards, Buzzards, Bastards: Scissorfight
14. Du Hast: Rammstein
15. God Save the Queen: Sex Pistols
16. You Think I’m Not Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire, Queens of the New Stone Age
17. Jump Around: House of Pain
18. Liberate: Slipknot
19. She Sells Sanctuary: The Cult
20. California Uber Alles: The Dead Kennedys

A year ago I could barely raise my right arm over my head due to a partial tear in my rotator cuff suffered one icy day when I slipped and fell on my ass while filling the bird feeders. A trip to the surgeon, a claustrophobic half hour in the MRI machine desperately fighting the urge to squeeze the claustrophobia panic bulb, and next thing I knew I was scheduled for surgery and what veterans of the procedure said was a nasty multiple-month recovery involving sleeping upright in a chair and being incapable of performing a certain unmentionable act of ablution.

I decided to cancel the operation and fix the issue myself. I think I’ve done it. How exactly, I can’t say, but for the most part it’s been a lot of work focused on shoulder strength, stretching, and some quasi yoga poses. A piece in today’s New York Times by Jane Brody confirms what I learned myself over the past eight months: you can fix yourself with some simple moves. A basic yoga stretch promoted by a New York physiatrist, Dr. Loren Feldman, has helped other rotator cuff sufferers avoid the knife (or scope).

I’ve gone through physical therapy for various muscular-skeletal ailments over the years, stretching rubber bands and lifting light weights, but nothing has done more to help me fix my messed up body more than Kelly Starrett’s Mobility Work Out of the Day, or M-WOD blog. Starrett is the owner of San Francisco CrossFit and a guru to CrossFitters for his simple message that “every human being should be able to perform basic maintenance on themselves. If you have a lacrosse ball, a foam roller, some pylometric bands and the will, his daily video posting will unmess your joints and muscles in no time. His first work out of the day, posted a year ago, is humbling and very, very primal — sit in a squatting position like an Afghani villager in the dust for ten minutes. Try it. I made two minutes the first time.

I just read Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Body,  an interesting exercise in one man’s obsession with understanding his physiology and improving it without wasting hours of fruitless labor and bad diets. The punchline is this: time expended does not equate to results. A paleo diet (no grains, sugar, dairy, legumes) administered like a drug (time the intake of protein, boost the metabolism with lemon juice, cinnamon and certain supplements), a CrossFit like regimen of short, intense, but functional movements, and an obsession with measurement can yield significant results in very little time.

Anyway, self maintenance is a good thing, it’s cheap, and it can deliver great results if you stick with it. So get a lacrosse ball, bookmark the MWOD blog, and read what you can about the science that is turning the FDA food pyramid on its head.

Nearly six months of formal Crossfit training and the results are pretty remarkable. I won’t post pictures of my oily muscles, but let’s just say the day I was able to execute an unassisted classic pull-up was a big personal victory. Now, it’s all about the Work Out of the Day and getting stronger and ready for the next big Churbuckian athletic goal — the 2012 World Indoor Rowing Championships.

Yesterday I embarked on what may prove to be my undoing: the 100 Day Burpee Challenge. If pull ups were my first goal, mastering burpees is next on the list (that and doing a lot of consecutive double-under rope skips, but that’s a digression for another day).  What is a burpee? The New York Times recently asked the question : “What is the best single exercise?”:

“Ask a dozen physiologists which exercise is best, and you’ll get a dozen wildly divergent replies. “Trying to choose” a single best exercise is “like trying to condense the entire field” of exercise science, said Martin Gibala, the chairman of the department of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

“But when pressed, he suggested one of the foundations of old-fashioned calisthenics: the burpee, in which you drop to the ground, kick your feet out behind you, pull your feet back in and leap up as high as you can. “It builds muscles. It builds endurance.” He paused. “But it’s hard to imagine most people enjoying” an all-burpees program, “or sticking with it for long.”

Burpees suck. Especially for big, tall people like me as it involves throwing oneself to the ground into a planked push up position, performing that pushup, and then leaping to one’s feet and jumping in the air with an overhead hand clap. Here’s the video demonstration:

I hate burpees. Dread them. Nothing destroys me faster or more completely than a round of burpees. They make me feel sick, panicked, and woefully old. Hence I love them. This morning’s Cape Cod CrossFit WOD (called the “Airforce WOD”) was a simple round of five relatively light weight exercises, 20 thrusters, sumo high pull deadlifts, push presses, front squats and overhead squats at 95 pounds. Doing 100 lifts against the clock is hard, very hard. But leave it to CrossFit to make it horrible by specifying that every minute, on the minute, you stopped what you were doing to perform four of the evil Burpees.

The origins of the Burpee are in dispute, but I like this explanation:

“The exercise may have been originated by a man named Lieutenant Thomas Burpee (1757-1839). He was an officer in the New Hampshire Militia during the Revolutionary War and was described as “having the innate Burpee fondness for martial exercises” in A History of the Town of New London, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. Lt. Burpee may have used the combination of pushups and squat thrusts as a means of drilling, conditioning, and disciplining the troops under his command. In addition, the exercise may have also been used by the troops as a way to stay warm during the winters in wartime New England.”

Being who I am and believing in attacking weaknesses head on, I am embarking on the dreaded 100 Day Burpee Challenge. Simple enough. One burpee on day one. Two on day two ….98 on day 98, 99 on day 99 ……

I am on day two and all is well with the world. Then again, I managed to have 52 inflicted on me this morning at  while doing the aforementioned “Airforce WOD.” I promise not to blog every dreary day ahead. And yes, there is a cult around this particular silly challenge or, at the very least, a blog.

6 minutes, 39.9 seconds — good enough for 14th place in the 50-54 men’s heavyweight division.

But not what I was looking for. I had gone in hoping to pull an average 500 meter split of 1:38, but completely collapsed in the last 500, allowing three other guys in my heat to pass me in the last 250 meters after holding third place for most of the race. What happened? Negative mindset from the start, a serious desire to put down the handle at 750 meters, then a searing burning pain in my lungs unlike any I’ve felt before. Not my day.

Thank heavens my friend Marta (she of the Charge of the Light Brigade quote in the previous erg post’s comments). She sat behind me and coxed me out of an abject failure and some modicum of victory in that I beat my previous season’s best (6:42) from the Cape Cod Cranberry Crunch and kept my average split just under 1:40. As I told her before the race, keeping the split out of the forties was the main thing. Without her perfect coxing and exhorting I couldn’t have done that.

Michele Marullo from Rome took the race with a record breaking 6:10. Amazing, simply amazing to watch him pull that off.

Well, now I have a mark to beat next year. Onwards to Crossfit Cape Cod and some serious strength training before water rowing resumes in a month.

Here’s the replay of my heat:

In 48 hours, at 9:40 a.m., I’ll be sitting on ergometer #19 on the floor of Boston University’s Agganis Arena, staring at a small square LCD screen flashing the words: “Sit Ready” “Attention” “ROW.”  While I dread it, I have to ask: how awesome is it to participate in the world championships of anything? Even if it is the world championships of indoor rowing? Sunday is the 30th anniversary of the event, which started in Harvard’s Newell Boathouse in the grim winter following the cancellation of the 1980 Olympics (thanks to Jimmy Carter’s Cold War displeasure with the Russian occupation of Afghanistan).  What was a humorous way to kill the tedium of winter training among a few elite Cambridge rowers has now turned into a major affair involving a couple thousand competitors and 10,000 spectators.

Then I’ll be off and puffing for the next six and a half minutes until I pull the handle about 200 times and manage to spin the flywheel at a rate faster than the other 80 or so heavyweight men in their early 50s sitting on identical machines next to me. The results won’t be pretty. The experience will definitely be ugly, and those six-and-a-half interminable minutes will likely be the worst six-and-a-half minutes I experience in 2011.

Or they may be the  best. In the end ergometer racing proves the cliche of the man who hits his head against a wall because it feels so good when he stops.

I’m tapering now with one light,  last row today on the deck in the springlike sunshine, a pyramid of ten, twenty, and thirty strokes at my race pace, then a rare day off tomorrow before Sunday’s moment of truth.  Hydrating, carbohydrate loading, stretching, fretting over my warm-up and race plan, always anxious about whether to set a pace and goal that is within or hopelessly out of reach. Whatever happens, the event provides the venue and the inspiration to dig a little deeper and try a little harder than I would alone, in the shadows of my garage, racing myself against the clock.

Here’s a virtual replay of the finals in my event last year (I didn’t participate).

I’m using the same line twice in two weeks, but what the hell.

Rowed my first formal 2,000 meter indoor rowing race of 2011 today at the Cape Cod YMCA — the annual Cape Cod Cranberry Crunch sponsored by Cape Cod Rowing:  the local club that rows on Lake Wequaquet in Centerville. I was entered in the men’s heavyweight division — there were eight of us ranging from maybe 15 years old up to the 60s — and there were races through the afternoon for various categories of girls, women, lightweights and heavyweights.

My race — the combined boys & men’s 2K — was first, so I started warming up almost as soon as I arrived, got good and loose, peeling off layers of clothing until I was conspicuously perched on the ergometer in lane one in my stylish Union Boat Club uni-suit, aka according to my wife, “The Dink Suit”

The eight ergs were networked and a lane display was projected on the wall showing little yellow boat icons with our names next to it. I rocked back and forth a couple times, mouth bone dry, and the monitor counted down — Attention. Ready. Row!

I did a series of short starting strokes to get the flywheel up to speed, and then lit up at 36 strokes a minute for ten strokes with an average split of 1:20. I had written out a race plan on an index card that was on the erg between my feet, and even though I felt like Superman on Crack in the first minute, I resisted the dreaded Fly-And-Die strategy and settled down to 26 strokes per minutes at a 1:41 for 250 meters, and then further down to 1:44 for the next 250.

At the 500 meter mark — 25 percent of the way through — I started to breath twice on each stroke — exhaling at the finish and the catch and inhaling on the drive and recovery as my metabolism shifted into oxygen deficit and my heart rate was climbing into the 160 range.

I did a hard power ten at the 500 meter mark and saw the 17 16 year-old kid, novice Andrew Pereira on the erg next to me — a 220 lb., 6’5″ beast from New Bedford Community Rowing who was definitely going to kick my butt — was cranking a lot faster and pulling away. I was tempted to ignore the index card and chase, but a plan is a plan and the whole purpose of today’s race was to gauge my speed three weeks before the world championships and the plan was to break 7:00 and aim for 6:45.

I felt great in the second 500 picking up the pace to 1:43 and rowed a power ten at the half-way mark. I ignored Pereira r and his coach exhorting him next to me, and stayed on plan, rowing the third 500 at 1:42, and the beginning of the final 500 at 1:41. With 250 meters or about 25 strokes left I “emptied the tank” and sprinted at 1:38. Ten strokes in and the junior was done, finishing with a 6:31. I put the handle down at 6:42.2, fast enough to win the adult division, but second to Pereira who won the Boys Division and had the fastest overall time of the day.

I won some schwag for the effort and felt good enough about the race to brag in a blog post. I’m now ranked 22nd in the world for the 50-55 heavyweight men’s class.

It’s the depths of ergometer season — when northern rowers are off the water and on their rowing machines racking up meters and laying down a base of fitness for the spring racing circuit.  Having racked up somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 million meters since I started erging in earnest in 1995, I have mixed emotions about a device that I spend an average of 45 minutes a day on, third in terms of device time after my bed and desk chair.  It’s the extreme simplicity of the machine, the fact that I like to take my exercise sitting down, and the unblinking feedback its little computer gives me from one stroke to the next that  makes my rowing machine much more than a way to stay fit.

In some ways my ergometer is a daily test, a check-in between me and my willpower, a place to set goals, to even compete against others, but ultimately a place to zone out in a sweaty, 170 heartbeats and 26 strokes per minute cadence of exertion that leaves me miraculously charged for another 24 hours. Erging is all about goals. Micro goals of getting more than 8,000 meters in 30 minutes, or setting a personal best in the standard 2,000 meter race distance.  Macro goals like rowing 2,000,000 meters in one year, or 200,000 between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Erging is about competing, against the published times of other rowers, sometimes impossible times set by Olympians, but nevertheless times that somewhere deep inside one’s ego reasons is possible to beat if you work hard enough.

Ergs are all about hope and possibilities, the optimism that one can be better tomorrow than they were yesterday. Unfortunately, as my friend Charlie Clapp (silver medal in 1984 Olympics) is fond of saying: “The older we get, the faster we were.”

Alone in the garage, door open onto the village center, watching the runners and strollers and traffic slide by, plugged into some electronica-trance music, stoner rock, or industrial metal,  sawing back and forth, back and forth, the thoughts that creep into my mind as I fight to keep my splits low and my form composed are amazing and nagging like a bad feverish dream. Thoughts of guilt over not trying hard enough, of not working hard enough, of eating that crap the night before, or skipping a day due to some aching ailment or another. But finishing a workout and beating a goal leaves me with a charge of victory that follows me off the erg and stays with me for the rest of the day.

There are moments of transcendence in rowing when everything suddenly goes very zen and effortless, when a flood of power and adrenaline surges and makes you fly. Rowers call this “swing” and it’s a rare but sublime state that only rowers can understand when eight people in one boat suddenly click and the sum of the whole rises as close to perfection as an imperfect world has to offer. The right song, the right point in my training, and the erg can deliver the same brief moments of swing, when suddenly everything is right in the world and my legs, my arms, my back are twice as strong as they were an instant before.

The monotony of the erg is meditation. Swinging back and forth as if riding the end of a metronome clicking away on top of a piano. 26 strokes a minute. Ten meters per stroke. 500 meters in two minutes means 1000 meters in four. The mind does the arithmetic over and over and over, a Rainman insanity of counting through the stroke (one-two-three-four), the piece, the session, all while the machine blinks out its numbers, making stark judgments and humbling the best intentions and plans laid out at the start.

In two weeks the racing begins. First the Cape Cod championships — The Cranberry Crunch — when a couple dozen local rowers come together at the YMCA to endure the hell of a 2,000 meter race. Then, in late February, the World Indoor Rowing Championships, or CRASH-B Sprints, a wild affair with thousands of rowers from around the world — Olympians to senior citizens — competing in their age groups and weight classes for the coveted Hammer trophy.  Words cannot describe the agonizing anticipation one feels before the start signal is given — the foreknowledge that in just a couple minutes one’s body will begin to suffer an agony unlike anything experienced. Think of surgery without anesthesia combined with suffocation and a beating with a blunt object. The vision goes after a while shrinking into a little tunnel focused on the monitor; the lungs burn, thighs turn into wooden blocks, and the head begins to loll around and strange noises come out of it — grunts and moans as first 500 meters, then 1000 (halfway!), and then the dreaded wall of hell until the final 500 when anything is doable and questions of survival give way to the anticipated joy of stopping.

Finish and look to the left — people are still in agony, sawing away. Look to the right, the same, one after another letting go of the handle in a personal victory of having survived the worst 7 minutes of their life. The scores are posted, the judgment is final.

Erg scores are a modern rower’s badge of honor — exposed for all to see. While ergs don’t float and great ergers don’t always make great rowers on the water, the scores are crucial, grounds for invitation to training camps and college recruiting.  There were no real ergs when I rowed in college. Coaches made judgments and selection based on seat-racing and on the water performance. But as soon as Concept2 introduced the first machines in the early 1980s the sport was transformed.

Now erging is a sport unto itself — Indoor rowing. No one is keener on it than the British, who have turned out some amazing ergers over the last twenty years. From English prisons to the Royal Navy, erging is a big deal in England, and nearly every country on the Continent has its own national championships. There have even been suggestions that the sport become an Olympic event.

I suspect I’ll erg right up to the end. Rolling through the meters, thanking the Wheel of Pain for keeping the pounds off and giving me the chance to eat another slice of birthday cake and not huff and puff when I bound up a flight of stairs.  Today, with on-the-water rowing seeming so far away, I want nothing more than to sit in an actual boat on a sunny day and glide over smooth waters under my own propulsion; but once there I know I’ll miss the stability of the machine, the way it lets me pound away without fear of capsizing or running backwards into a dock.

This post is for fellow erg-nerds training for the World Indoor Rowing Championships on February 20th in Boston. With less than 90 days to the worst 6 minutes and 30 seconds (I hope) of physical torture you can imagine, the pressure is building to get going on a training plan designed to make me peak on that chilly Sunday morning when I climb onto my assigned Concept 2 ergometer in Boston University’s Agganis Arena.

Preparing for competition is what coaching is all about, but since I am too far away from my rowing club in Boston to avail myself of the coaches there, I have to train by myself. Because rowing is an extremely quantitative sport — the embodiment of the classic equation Distance = Rate X Time — indoor rowers spend all their time staring at this, the Performance Monitor:

Add a heart rate belt and some software such as RowPro, and the process of training becomes extremely logical and frankly can become very complicated. Assuming a training schedule over a six-day week — with the seventh day taken off for recovery — designing a program to achieve constant improvement without over training or incurring the dreaded lower back strain is very complicated. Fortunately there are a few online options which are very effective — some free, and some expensive.

A popular free program is the Wolverine Plan which was invented by Mike Caviston, coach of the University of Michigan’s women’s crew team. Like all good training programs it begins with a series of tests to establish a baseline, and then spells out, in complex detail, a regimen of varying intensities (watts), paces (strokes per minute), and duration (time and intervals of work and rest) that in theory will yield maximum performance on the day of the race. It worked for Caviston as he holds the world record for his age group and has gone on to be a trainer of Navy SEALS. The Wolverine is very popular, free, and avidly followed by the competitive indoor rowing community, but the most common criticism is its complexity and emphasis on long (60 to 75 minute) workouts at mind-numbingly low stroke rates.

An easier version of the Wolverine Plan which I followed for six weeks — or two three-week cycles — is the Pete Plan, developed by British indoor rower Pete Marston. I achieved some solid improvement on the Pete Plan, but since it feels more oriented to a 5,000 meter distance (under 20 minutes) I went looking for something more oriented to the 2,000 meter, or sprint distance. I shaved 7 seconds off of my average 500 meter times over 5000 meters in six weeks thanks to this plan.

One great online coach is Boston University’s head crew coach Tom Bohrer who, with his wife C.B. Sands, a former elite world championship rower, publish a great training plan at TBFIT.com. Tom was my coach at the Union Boat Club before taking the B.U. coaching job, but his online workouts are very effective and mix in an emphasis on core workouts (abdominal) and weight/strength training not found in the Wolverine or Pete Plans. TBFIT is a subscription model, but Tom’s 2K training plan is very effective and led me to my personal best at the CRASH-B sprints in 2004, a 6:28.7.

I am in the first week of a new online program designed by the former Danish Olympic coach, Bo Vestergaard, called the Rojabo Plan. The first month is free, then it converts to a paid subscription priced at $47 a month (now discounted to $14.99 a month).  Rojabo starts with two tests — six minutes of rowing at specific stroke rates in one minute increments, then an evil endurance test where one tries to maintain a certain watt output over time. Based on those results the system generates a daily training plan which feels very effective and is designed with the specific goal of 2,000 meters on February 20th. How effective won’t be known until I retake the endurance test in a couple weeks to gauge my improvements, but if exhaustion and muscle aches are any indication, it’s working.

Combined with Concept2′s annual Holiday Challenge where the goal is to row 200,000 meters between Thanksgiving and Christmas, my daily hour of indoor rowing (technically outdoor as I do it on the deck or in the garage) is keeping me both fit and sane.

With indoor rowing season under way, I’ve adjusted my exercise  and training routine around the magic date of February 20, 2011 — the date of the 2011 C.R.A.S.H.-B sprints, aka the World Indoor Rowing Championships. Getting ready for this ugly seven minutes of agony is a long process entailing lots of time on the ergometer and weight and stretching work to protect my back.

Since September I’ve been logging steady paced distance pieces: 20 to 40 minutes at a stately pace of 2:00 minutes/500 meters at 26 strokes per minutes (spm), with a shift last month to interval training designed to build endurance and lower my splits to the sprint levels I’ll need to do well in late February. I’m on a training model called the “Pete Plan” which mixes short intense interval work with long distance pieces six days a week. The Plan follows a three week cycle that repeats itself over and over — giving me an indication every 21 days of progress and improvement.

Ergometer training is  brutally boring – a distance piece lasting an hour can accumulate 1,500 strokes, back and forth, like a metronome, with no variation or change other than the feedback delivered by the performance monitor — the computer that indicates effort, time and distance. Following the Pete Plan provides some measure of variation — a sample workout might consist of eight short hard sprints lasting 500 meters with two minutes of rest in between.  The next day might be a leisurely hour long piece.

The key is a good iPod.

While indoor rowing does a good job at working a varied set of muscle systems it can breed bad habits, especially in the lower back region. To compensate one has to stretch a lot and focus off the ergometer on the core.  I spend a lot of time stretching hamstrings, doing situps, and evil medicine ball exercises called Russian Twists. A little weight work a few times each week, and one day of full rest to recover and then it’s on to the next week in the Pete Plan cycle. Everything is logged on the Concept 2 log book, but I’ve pimped my erg with a program called RowPro that interfaces off of my ThinkPad via a USB cable plugged into the performance monitor. I could, if I wished, compete virtually against other indoor rowers over the internet via the Oarbits server, but I use the program to build the custom interval workouts in the Pete Plan, and then upload the results into my Concept 2 log book.

Diet is a big issue — I want to lose weight but not do something goofy that will leave me low on gas for the machine. Thanks to the example set by a good friend, I’ve moved pretty religiously to a “paleo” or “caveman” diet that eschews grains, legumes, dairy and sugar and focuses on lean protein (chicken, fish, eggs), carbs from vegetables (broccoli, sweet potato, cauliflower, etc.) and fats from things like olive oil, avocados and nuts.  Paleo is big in the Crossfit community (which I still subscribe to, but less ardently due to rotator cuff issues) and there is a ton of material and recipes throughout the web. I bought The Paleo Solution by Robb Wolf. The science is a little tedious — as it is in most diet books — but the concept is very simple.

The primary secret to training diets is to log what one eats — obsessively — and to aid in that task I use the Livestrong “MyPlate” app for the iPad, using it as a calorie counter and goal tracker.

The results so far:

• Weight is down 22 pounds since June
• My rankings are decent, but not great:
• 
• My splits are dropping dramatically, especially for the benchmark 5,000 meter piece.
• 

My buddy Phil Odence has started a blog on barefoot running.  I only run when pursued, so not my bag, but still, anyone who pounds the pavement barefoot in eastern Massachusetts in February deserves a shout-out.

http://odence.wordpress.com/

Phil also tweets as @podence and does biz dev for Black Duck Software.

Indoor exercise is tedious and without good tunes, it can be worse than boring and more like torture. Since 1994 I’ve been rowing on my Concept2 ergometer and trying to perfect the perfect “mix-tape.” The last 15 years have also seen me struggle to figure out how to listen to that perfect set of songs without a) horrifying people around me by playing them out loud, in the open and b) killing myself or my personal electronics.

At first I used a Sony portable CD player – one of those little round things – and set it next to the erg on a chair. I’d climb onto the rolling seat, put on the “sports” earphones, and then haul away for 30 minutes to an hour, the thin wire swaying back and forth with just enough slack not to pull the player off the chair and crash it to the floor. Too much slack and the rolling seat would roll over the cable, jam the wheels, bring me to an abrupt halt (not cool when one is pushing a 200 beat per minute heart rate) and trash the earphones.

Then I moved to a MiniDisc player and put it inside of a neoprene fanny pack/belt thing that made me look like an American tourist with black socks and madras shorts in the Bagatelle gardens. That was okay, but when I travelled I had to make sure I had the thing as no belt meant no tunes.

In 2002 or so I joined the iPod movement. I moved to an armband holster thing popular with joggers/runners. That was okay except it constricted the blood supply to my burgeoning biceps and I had to wind the cord around and around the iPod to avoid the aforementioned cord-meets-wheels-surprise.

Forget that little solution at home when I travelled, or lose it, and the iPod would get stuck inside of my rowing shorts – or “trou” as rowers refer to them – a tight lycra-spandex bike short sort of thing without the butt-pad. Rowing shorts are better than petri dishes for growing new biological weapons, and let’s just say you never want to borrow my iPod. Never.

A few weeks ago, while reading the Union Boat Club of Boston’s email listserv, I saw a fellow member recommend a solution called the iErg. This is a fabric cover that fits over the rolling seat of my Concept 2 erg, with a side pocket for the iPod. Brilliant. Ten minutes later I had PayPal-ed an order and within a week it arrived.

Perfect solution. I strongly recommend it. And I paid $25 for it, just so you know I am not blowing blogola/pay-per-post b.s.

Date: 04-26-2009
Distance: 5000 meters
Time: 20:40.0
Split: 2:04.0
Comments: Testing erg score integration with blog.
Tags: workout

I just climbed off the erg for the first time since Jan 7. Six weeks without exercise (other than beach walks) has left me fat and out of shape. So back on to the erg I went today — 5,000 meters in under 20 minutes so the news wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. Rotator cuff not affected by the stroke, so it would appear I have no more excuses and can try to work off the pounds in anticipation for the first water row on or around St. Pat’s.

I have over 500,000 meters logged so far in the Concept 2 log book for the year (C2′s year begins May 1), maybe I can get another 100K onto the books before the calendar resets.

Tomorrow is the CRASH-B sprints in Boston. I have an entry, but I think my best effort might be a feeble 7:30-7:45. Maybe I should man up and waddle up there anyway. Guilt will weigh on me for the rest of the day. And this was to be the year I went for a 6:15 race as it is my first in the 50+ heavyweight category. Oh well. Always next year.

With a mere 20,000 meters to go before I make the 200,000 meter Holiday Challenge, I entered the 2009 CRASH-B World Indoor Rowing Championships on February 22. Two months of training to get my 2,000 time down to something respectable. I’ll be in the Veteran’s 50-54 Heavyweights and the world record is 6:07. My best 2K is around a 6:25 or something in my early 40s …. so I’ll be happy to get under 7 minutes this year.

Something to obsess about.

Every holiday season the good folks at Concept2 — my favorite brand of all time, inventors of the Concept2 Ergometer, or indoor rowing machine — conduct the Holiday Challenge: a hellacious 30 day challenge to row and log 200,000 meters on the rowing machine between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

In the past, if you succeeded at rowing at least 7,000 meters per days for the duration of this challenge, you would win a printable certificate, the opportunity to purchase a t-shirt, and a free pin to wear with pride.

This is not a trivial pursuit. I have succeeded three time since the first time I did it in 2002, and find that if I don’t get the minimum number of meters rowed in the beginning I won’t be motivated to make them up later on. Well of course I didn’t row yesterday — two helpings of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and brussel sprouts followed by two slices of pecan pie, one of pumpkin, a snifter of armagnac, and two glasses of Ruffino chianti — it was Thanksgiving and I did do the Crossfit workout of the day (which is going to make this year’s Concept2 challenge all the more horrible as I intend to do both in my quest for eternal youth and the ability to snap off 10 real pull ups followed by 100 pushups).

Oh well, it’s in my DNA to abuse myself so. Some Anglo-Celtic-Teutonic yeomanic stock that makes it imperative that I turn myself into a human piston for 60 minutes every day.

As my stepbrother says, “The body is evil and it must be punished.” Well, having logged 11,000 meters this evening, that means I have to row only 10,000 tomorrow to be on track for the little pin and certificate. Yay.

I love Concept2. It’s a privately owned company in Morrisville, Vermont that was founded in a dairy barn by the Dreissigacker brothers in the 1970s to make carbon fiber oars and rowing machines. The brothers, both veterans of the USA national team and elite athletes, needed a way to maintain their fitness during the frozen Vermont winter so they cannibalized an old bicycle, nailed it to the floor, and figured out how to make a rowing machine.

That machine has morphed over the last 30 years into a simple, well-engineered, accurate and affordable piece of equipment known as a Concept2 Model D/E ergometer. It is the standard for most high school, collegiate and national rowing programs, and is the centerpiece of the growing sport of indoor rowing. Users can race each other over the internet by networking their ergs, and the exercise is acclaimed by everyone from firefighters to astronauts to radical programs such as CrossFit as the ultimate, full-body workout.

When I travel I try to pick hotels on the basis of whether or not they have a Concept2 ergometer. Very few do, tending to instead buy whatever the corporate headquarters purchasing agent has negotiated as part of a bulk buy for treadmills and stair-steppers, etc.. There are some rowing machines on the market which are complete and utter disasters. The worst of them is the Bally Life Rower, followed, almost below disdain, with any number of cheap rolling-seat-piston based contraptions sold at K-Mart. A WaterRower is an acceptable stand-in, and the other alternatives are almost never seen outside of an elite training facility.

What drives me nuts is the condition of the Concept2s in any given commercial gym. These machines are relatively cheap, but because they are so simple in terms of moving parts they tend to get parked in a corner and ignored until they completely fail. There is a relatively constant, but slow paced upgrade cycle on the machines, with new display monitors, handles, and small tweaks introduced every two years or so. Most gyms never upgrade and because Concept2 operated as a direct web/telesales operation, I doubt there is a large sales force physically calling on the big chains of gyms or hotels to push upgrades.

So Concept2 — here’s a simple idea. Print up adhesive-backed labels with your 800 number, your logo, and a short checklist. The headline should be: “Fix Me!” Put a picture of your latest erg on the sticker with your logo. Under the headline write: “One of your customers thinks you should … then add a checklist:

• Replace this machine with a new Concept2 Model D
• Upgrade this machine with a new Performance Monitor
• Replace the worn foot straps
• Oil the chain
• Replace the seat bearings
• Upgrade the handle
• etc.

Make the labels available on your site and let people like me stuff a few into our gym bags.  I’ve gone up to trainers and sundry attendants and asked them to fix the equipment, but a big sticker stuck on the frame would get their attention, spare me and them the confrontation of arguing over a machine, and give Concept2 a little branding.

I crossed the 200,000 meter mark this morning, making this the second “Holiday Challenge” I’ve completed in 30 years of indoor rowing. It started on Thanksgiving, Nov. 25 and ends Monday night, Christmas Eve. I get a pin for my trouble and the right to buy a t-shirt.

But this isn’t the end, actually it is the beginning of the indoor rowing season. Tom Bohrer, the coach at my rowing club, the Union Boat Club, is running a UBC challenge from Dec. 7 to Dec. 31 and I’m standing third at present against some very committed competition. Then there is the CRASH-B sprints — the world championship of indoor rowing over President’s Day Weekend in February. This is my last year in the 40-49 heavyweight men category, so I am thinking of embarrassing myself one last time before moving into the old fart division next year.

I just want to point out that the leader in the Concept 2 holiday challenge has rowed 1.6 million meters to date. That’s well over 50,000 meters a day. That is insane.

Workout Name:Half-marathon
Date: 12-15-2007
Interval #1: 21097 meters/ 1:25:17.0/ 2:01.3
Comments: First half-mara ever.
Tags: half-marathon

21,097 meters in 1 hour and 25 minutes. Lordy. That’s the longest I’ve ever sat on an ergometer in my life. I celebrated by cooking a massive meal of braised beef short ribs and garlic/blue cheese mashed potatoes courtesy of my new Balzathar cookbook. Heck, I burned 1350 calories according to the machine, so Saturday was eat like a pig day.

I’m 81st in the world of 40-49 year old heavyweight men, in the 30th percentile. So, there is plenty of room for improvement.

I’m still suffering, and did a mere 10K this morning to “recover.”  183,579 meters logged in the Holiday Challenge — one week to go to get to 200,000. Piece of cake — then I transition into the Union Boat Club challenge which runs from Dec. 7 to the end of the year. Major competition from that crew.

Sunday is always the day for my big ergometer effort of the week — usually an hour of power — and today was one of those days of total erg nirvana.

Sixty minutes is a long time to sit on a rolling seat and roll back and forth on a five-foot I-beam staring out the open bay of the boat shop at the bare branches and a bruised looking November sky. An iPod will only cut the monotony so much, so it all comes down to meditation, focusing on everything and nothing at the same time while repeating, like a transcendental mantra, the same repetitious four-count stroke.

As a crew coach once told me, “Rowing is easy. What other sport lets you sit down and work only half of the time?”

By “half the time” he was referring to the “recovery” or the part of the stroke when the seat rolls back to the start, or catch, and in theory, you aren’t doing anything. The drive — when legs-back-arms all fire in one big burst to pull the oar handle — is where the work happens.

What’s interesting in an hour-long piece is first, how rare it is to do something mindlessly repetitious for sixty minutes. The only thing, technically, I do in a 24-hour period that is more repetitive is probably sleeping.
The other interesting thing is what happens physiologically to my body over the course of sixty minutes. I can track the progress from the heart monitor and the split times. Interestingly, the first 15 minutes or 25%, are often the worst in terms of total performance, as my body warms up and moves quickly over the first eight minutes from a starting heart rate of 75 beats per minutes to the magic moment at 8:00 when something kicks in and the sweat really starts to flow. By ten minutes my heart rate is 140 bpm and I’ve settled down into a 26 stroke per minute cadence, averaging 1 minutes and 59 seconds for every 500 meter split.

That 500 meter split is the number you focus on during an ergometer session. Anything sustained under a 2 minute split is pretty good. A racing rate, or sprint, is often under 1:40. In the last 30 days I’ve seen my average splits decline from 2:07 when I was a fat, out of shape whale, to 1:59, an eight second improvement. That average rate is what is termed my “steady state” — the rate at which I can cruise along without putting my heart rate over 170 bpm and dive into lactic acid hell. I should be cruising at 1:55 before I consider myself in good shape.
Anyway, erging is about mental arithmetic. Every session has to be approached with a goal in mind. Mine this morning was to row 15,000 meters in 60 minutes, meaning, I had to row an even 2 minute split for every 500 meters. Not impossible, but the mental torture one has to endure whenever the split slips to 2:02 and the next stroke tries to buy back those 2 seconds with a 1:58 …..

I start thinking about quitting about 25 minutes in. My back hurts. I ate too much last night. I really should rake leaves or pay bills. I’ll stop at 30 minutes with 7,500 meters. That’s a decent amount for the day. Then 30 minutes arrive and my conscience says, “dude, you quit halfway then you will feel like an incomplete loser all day” and the negotiation starts again. Every 5 minute mark is calculated as a percentage and then a fraction of the effort. 15 minutes in — 25% done. 30 minutes in — 50% done. Etc. Etc.

At 45 minutes or 75% of the way through the piece, the fun begins. Heart rate is at 155 and I’m soaked in sweat and have to keep wiping my hands on my shirt so I can maintain a grip on the handle. I am officially bored out of my nut. Every stroke is an effort to keep the pace under 2:00 and the damn monitor shows a projected finish of 14,800 meters. I start bumming out that I’ll miss the 15,000 goal I set out to accomplish, and loserness begins to settle in. Every minute is a struggle, every stroke equals 10 meters, each stroke takes 2 seconds. More math, more arithmatic. I start giving up, “it’s the hour that counts, not the meters, this isn’t a race”, and the splits slip to 2:05, a loser’s pace. Oh well, I tried. I’ll crack 15,000 some other time.

(sidenote, in the 90s I was fifth in the world on the Concept2 online rankings for the hour with 17,500 meters, so the hour is my distance of choice, the rankings list everything from 500 meters to 100,000)

It all comes down to the iPod. The right mix will save the day. Today my iPod was dead on arrival, I forgot to charge it, so I grabbed my son’s and hit play. He had migrated one of my playlists over and fortunately it was perfect over the last ten minutes, with Fugazi’s Repeater kicking in right when I needed it the most.

The projected meter count was still at 14,800, so with five minutes to go I started the mental negotiations and tried to psyche myself into a desperate, valiant effort to take back all those slacked off quitter meters I wasted around 13 minutes to go.

With one minute to go it was do or die. I had 30 strokes to spend and nothing to lose, so I took the stroke rate over 33 and started to thrash, head flipping back and forth, animal grunts, the whole mess. Thoughts of the Battle of Thermopylae, Ben Hur, Glover ferrying Washington back to Manhattan from Brooklyn, Washington crossing the Delaware, Blackburn rowing his dory with hands frozen to the handle …..

The split went from 1:58 to 1:32 — I’m-gonna-need-a-defibrillator-rate — and with five seconds to go the meter counter passed 15,000. Victory!
I ended the piece at 15,003 and felt like I just won the Boston Marathon. Of such small triumphs in a garage, basement, gym or boat shop is the sport of indoor rowing made.

What is interesting, at least to me, in the end, is the competitive aspect of human nature. Some people are content to just do something for the pleasure of the act, others have to do it faster and better … what started out as an effort to lose some weight is suddenly a desire to get higher in the online rankings, to climb a notch above the next person ….

Anyway, only a rower would understand the psychosis I suppose.

Here’s a link to a video of Concept2 founder Peter Dreissigacker rowing a very studly 500 meter piece.