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Woke up at 4am at that awful angst-paved plateau suspended between the captivating crags of alert engagement in life and the rolling waves of sleep.
At 5am, in front of the computer, I imagined another plodding row, and what it would do to the chart. When I sat on the machine at 6am I felt I could acheive an unchallenging goal. Sighing, I set the numbers and began. By the end, I was sprinting some and the fog in my head was clearing.
I'm sure I'll want to get some more sleep later, but for the moment that spiral-eyed feeling is flushed.
Yep, a slow day today confirms the difficulty I'll have sticking strictly the schedule I outlined yesterday. I've got to allow myself to just row at whatever pace if I need to do that for a day. The long/slow short/fast idea is a good framework to try for, but I won't consider it a failure if I don't follow it. It's still about consistency. One month isn't enough to make me a 6am exercise addict.
Added to my distance today, experimenting with a suggestion from my wife for next month: do four days long and easy and two days hard. Which starts to sound more like a real physical training regimen than an experiment in building my mere consistency. Today I feel like I'm ready for it. Based on my past statistics, there should a morning before the end of January when I'll feel like mud and say "no way, keep it simple and easy". If not, then I'll do it: rest Sunday (notice how I mention the rest day first), hard on Tuesday and Friday, long and easy (with a preset goal) on the other the days.
[The title is from an old TV cigarette jingle]
Halfway through the workout I felt good and thought I'd try to beat my best this year. But my memory reversed two numerals, and I ended up way short -- couldn't have done it anyway, in retrospect. But it was good training.
Very slow today, with a good sprint at the end.
It's nearing the end of the month, so it's time to plan a goal for next month. On good days, I wonder about trying for the Crash-B sprints again. But this experiment in just being consistent has given good results, I think, and I want to preserve the consistency aspect, and I'm not sure I can maintain that while adding really aggressive workouts. Not yet. It hasn't become a habit.
So here's what I'm thinking for February: keep the 6am consistency but have one designated day off per week. And add a workout threshold time, i.e. no slack days on the machine. Looking at my times for this month and considering each absurdly slow day as a rest day, this seems very doable. Despite that the hard part will be psychological: knowing that, as my feet hit the floor at 6, that I have a somewhat challenging workout ahead.
(normal workout yesterday)
After staying up late last night, the old "feet on the floor when the alarm rings" trick saved me today. Did fine yesterday too.
Woke up (without alarm) on time this morning, and lounged for 20 minutes before getting up. That was fine this morning, but it could lead to worse. Looking at my rowing performance chart (provided by Concept2's online service) I remind myself that I'm not consistent in rowing strength. So why should I expect that I'll be consistent in getting up if I start giving myself slack? I need the trick of "feet on the floor when the alarm goes off". At least for the rest of the month.
Had a good row.
[These posts are becoming pretty dry, yep.]
whoa, forgot to set my alarm back after setting it for that extra halfhour sleep yesterday. woke up with the alarm and thought "hey, it's already getting lighter at 6!".
light row today. we went xc skiing in NH all day yesterday.
Went to bed too early again, woke at 2:30, read until 6, went back to bed for a half hour nap before working out at 6:30. Steady, easy row with a decent time.
Sure is lonely here in Exerblogland.
I was up on time this morning -- too early, really. I got caught up in computer stuff and didn't start my row until 7am. The wait, and yesterday's extremely slow pace -- a day off, effectively -- paid off today. I did my best time so far this year. Just gotta make sure I keep up the consistency.
It hit me this morning that I'll never equal my best performance of yore working out at this hour. To have a goal of an improved time (my March goal), I'll need to have afternoon workouts. But by then the day is fully blossomed in chaos. It's much harder to plant a stake in the ground and say "I must work out now" than it is to do the same thing in the morning. I can't believe I'm saying this, having just crowbarred myself out of bed an hour ago, but I think it's true.
I'll have to start setting a 3pm alarm and imagine myself stopping everything and working out at that point. What are the barriers?
BTW, the rest day was a big help, though I wouldn't have believed it when I got out of bed.
Also, go Joe! How's the exerbike going?
Took it very easy this morning. Noted that my heart rate at the end was just 90. Which makes me think of another goal, a pure heart-rate goal. Just keep it at 140. I'll try to find my heart rate monitor and try that tomorrow.
This within-workout time goal idea could hinder my consistency goal for this month. Twice now I've started with a goal, then as the workout progressed I upped the ante, resulting in a good time, but a harder workout than I had "planned" (if you can call a moment's decision a plan). I'm afraid that when it's time to get up in the morning, some part of me will remember that pain and argue more forcefully for returning to the pillow. So tomorrow I'll take it easy with a goal that I've already set.
Hey Joe! I just noticed your post after going through the bleary-eyed motions with mine. Whooo! Welcome, dude!
Is it possible to improve one's will? If so, I'm not in that territory yet. It's still a daily battle of planning and trickery against the slug within. The sheets were calling in a siren's chorus this morning. "Don't give in", I had to say softly to myself as I sat up, feet planted on the cold floor.
Now that I live in Frostbite Falls, I *really* need ole exerblog. In fact, I'm doing something I never thought I'd do. Riding frickin stationary bicycle. It's great. A Schwinn. Same brand as the green banana-seat sting-ray I had as a kid. It's on the third floor. My computer w/ big sound is up here as well. I wait until 8. Everyone's gone. Then I crank some spazzizzling shit that only I like, like Gong or Soft Machine or Gorky's Zygotic Minski, and peddle like the wicked witch of the west. Cackle like her too.
This morning I only succeeded in getting up because my feet were on the floor before the excuse-maker in my groggy head got rolling.
Suprise best result today. Hmmm. Seems to be a correlation with (a) sleeping enough and (b) drinking less wine. Hmm.
I set a goal for myself this morning, just for this workout. That's a good idea -- to have small goals within the larger ones. I'll try to do that every morning: when I sit down to row, set some kind of goal. It doesn't have to be a tough one to acheive.
Another thought is to keep track of a moving average of my times, just to see if there's overall improvement. But if it involves more than 15 minutes with Excel, bag it. I don't need any more geekiness in my life.
Stayed up way too late last night, but crawled onto the machine at 6. Went back to sleep afterwards.
At the end of the month I'll want to evaluate the results of this experiment. What kinds of measures can I use?
I'm thinking of where to go after this month-long experiment in simple consistency. Maybe next month, do only 5 days a week without fixed days off, but keep my average time below some maximum. And the following month, just have a single pretty aggressive performance goal with no fixed workouts.
To get started on my rowing machine I enter 'meters' (which defaults to 5000), then push 'OK', then start rowing. This morning that 'OK' was like the 'OK' in the too-familiar computer message 'Application error. The system will terminate your program.' with the only button showing being 'OK'. No, not OK!
So it was another slog-back-and-forth day. Yesterday's 4am row and a lousy night of sleep and two long days of work caught up with me.
Surprised myself. 4am, couldn't sleep, got up and rowed, had a great workout. The animal was driving.
Yikes, I completely didn't hear my alarm this morning and woke up at 6:40. Still managed to get the workout in. Slower-going and lazy today. Just keeping up the consistency.
My rowing machine has an interesting meter called "projected time". If you're doing a workout that's a set distance, then based on your most recent stroke, how long you've rowed, and how far you have to go, it shows your projected completion time.
The upshot is this: in the early part of the workout, I can make a huge change in my projected time just by pulling harder or softer. As the workout proceeds, my past effort --- the immutable part of my projected time -- becomes a bigger factor; I can still improve the projected result by pulling harder, but it becomes harder and harder to do so.
It's all obvious and elementary math, but literally working through it provides a good lesson about acheivable goals, long-term or short-term. Assuming I have a limited time (the assumption that's easy to ignore), the consistent effort even early on is really important. The early part is where I can gauge how I feel and whether I think I can sustain a certain effort, so it's important to pay attention then too. How difficult it is to do this with larger things in life, given all the things vying for attention and all the chaos of life's events. Sitting on a rowing machine is a nice controlled environment; life, thankfully, is more complex.
Today it was back to just shuffling back and forth -- a day when, lacking this goal, I'd definitely be still in bed. But my head is clearer now than before I started the workout and I'm ready for the day without that extra hour of sleep (or maybe it means I'll be in bed an hour earlier, which is good).
This brings me back to the "long term average effort" bullet item from yesterday. I've mentioned that my rowing machine has sometimes-devastating readouts on its meter, like average speed. One of them is projected time, or if you've set a time goal, projected meters. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a "projected annual meters" readout based on recent daily efforts (this would of course be easy to do in a spreadsheet, but what's the fun of that?).
It's no surprise that I felt better today. What did surprise me was that the animal (that thing that's doing the rowing when the head part is half asleep) wanted to do a few bursts of unrequired speed. These brought the average speed up some, but not with the immediate phenomenal impact that the half-asleep head, like a drooling TV watcher captivated by sudden jumpy movements on the screen, expected.
There's more to be said about a few things:
I've taken to keeping a voice recorder next to my rowing machine, and pausing to dictate half-baked ideas and to-do list items.
Ah. I stuck to my commitment to be up at 6:00 am for rowing. When the alarm went off I was too tired to make excuses why I shouldn't do it. The unconscious goal in rowing seemed to be to go slowly enough to not wake myself up too much, so I can go back to bed. The resulting time was an excellent low water mark from which to start the year. I can only improve from here!