Last interval on the rower here. Grant calls me bald, old and fat. I think from this video we can verify the first of those things…

However I disagree with the old and fat thing.

Santa just has to bring me one of these heart rate monitors, here’s the HRM data from yesterday’s session. The session was 75 minutes in total which produced the following graph of stress on my poor heart. By the way, you can click on this to get it full screen.
As a bit of a key to understanding this, start from the left. The best bet to understanding the timescale is to use the waypoints on the bottom of the graph, 1, 2, 3 up to 9 just above the times. The small initial spike closest to the left is my warm up on the bike. After that the raised spiky area from point 1 to 2 is my first interval session on the rower. The weights block is after a short rest, between 3 and 4. Aside from a significant drop when I really fatigued during that, followed by a pick up when I realised I was missing my targets by a mile, it’s more or less flat and doesn’t really go above 180 to a significant degree. The next series of spikes represent the second rower interval, between points 5 and 6 on the graph. These are more pronounced as the rest period went up, so the drop increases as I stop, but also significantly increases to a greater degree than in the first interval. The second weights block is next, between 6 and 7. The large spike towards the end of this is when I was told there was a minute to go so I pushed out a last set, just about! Between points 8 and 9 is the last set of rows, with one minute’s rest. Here you can see the pronounced spikes accentuated by the dips as my rest period was longer.

For me the most interesting part of this is the intervals. If you view the graph and overlay it against my actual times for the 100m, you can see that I’m having to work much, much harder to record the same times or below as the session goes on. This may seem obvious that I would have to work harder, but in terms of Will’s plans for the session and how it will progress each time I do it, it makes much more sense.