Foundation - Test

I had passed up the opporunity to go for a 2k test earlier in the week due to "life" happening.  I rescheduled it for today and this morning when I got to the gym it was 47 degrees.  That's not too special if you are anywhere other then southern california.  I was cold and whiny.  I had lots of "reasons" I was not going to do the row today.  Long week of training, blah, blah, blah.  Then one of my gym members sat down on the erg after he'd finished his scheduled workout and says to me, let's do a 2k row.  I thought for a moment and all the excuses were harder to find now. 

So I changed, warmed up for about 5 min. strapped the hear rate sensor on, gloved up, threw the head band on, turned up the tunes and got ready to rock. 

Today was the first workout on the slides that just came in yesterday.  I was told that my technique immediatly changed for the better when I started pulling on this little 2k piece which is a good thing.  I jumped out faster then I wanted to, didn't recover from that and paid dearly around meter 1250.  I hit the wall.  What I should have done was pull like a MF'er to get my avg. split time down to the target, then back off for 15 or so strokes, recover a bit from it, then hold that goal split for the remainder of the piece. 

My goal pace was 1:44/500m.  This would have been in line with my heart rate step test I did a few weeks ago.  I did the first 500m in 1:42.  Not cool.  I ended with 1:46 I think and a total time of 7:04.  This was a PR for me, but 9 sec. off my heart rate step test.  I will retest the 2k again down the road after I finish all 3 cycles and see how it affects things.  If it gets worse, the training didn't work.  If it gets better, the training worked, simple as that.

I also picked up a sweet bottle of adaptogens from Mother's Market today.  I'm pretty excited to see how that helps me recover.  It's got a pretty good blend of lots of adaptogens, including Siberian Ginseng and Reishi mushroom.  Click on the names to read about them in Wikipedia.  On top of this, I grabbed a bottle of Carlson Fish Oil.  Oil form!  Says it tastes great, yeah right.  The good news is 1.6g of n-3/serving.  No more 30 capsles/day of the Kirkland signature fish oil!