I’m looking for some suggestions and guidance about training with pace and power. Living in a city in the northeast USA, I’ve been running less than I’d like to due to COVID-19. (It’s like being in a Pac-Man game… 🙂 ) Becoming a better rower / sculler is something I’d like to do. I’ve focused more on ergometer training lately, and anticipate doing even more over this coming winter.
Training on a rowing erg gives me both heart rate and power data. I’m trying to figure out how to plan and measure my training. I’m a recreational athlete, trained about 225 hours last year and am on track for a similar or slightly higher number of hours this year. So my primary metric that I’m focused on increasing is hours spent training, especially >85% of those hours below aerobic threshold (AeT).
I’d be grateful for any suggestions for how to think about my training, focusing more on erging than on running. The reduced impact / load-bearing aspects of rowing suggest that I should be able to row for more maybe 50% hours per week than I would otherwise be able to run (comparing the ~800 hours per year for elite road runners vs. 1,200 hours per year for elite rowers).
There is lots more data that I can dig into with a power meter. I’ve done a lactate test on the erg, and have wattage numbers at 2mmol/L (AeT) and 4mmol/L (anaerobic threshold, AnT). Training and Racing with a Power Meter by Allen, Coggan, and McGregor has been interesting, although I’m not sure I’ve understood yet too much of the data analysis they present.
One of the specific questions I have is: how might I look at and think about a workout where the hrTSS that TrainingPeaks calculates is substantially higher than the power-based TSS that the software calculates? For instance, I did a 2x20min workout last weekend (link), and the hrTSS was 41 vs. the power-based TSS of 28. I set the my rowing power and heart rate zones in TrainingPeaks based on the results of the lactate test I mentioned.
PS: looks like my post got caught in a spam filter – hopefully I didn’t cause duplicate posts.
