Janathon day 3: an entirely new concept (2)...

Written Jan 3, 2015, tagged under post,amersham,concept2,exercise,fitbit,janathon,rowing

If you've got kids, and it's the weekend, then your day's going to be pretty busy, right? Do I get a "yes brother"? Today was one of those days.

First, we realised that, despite our cupboards being full of Christmas cake, mince pies and the like, we didn't actually have anything whatsoever to eat as a meal! A pretty extensive trawl around Tesco dealt with this ... eventually - it always takes ages there, as the Amersham Tesco is one of the largest in the country, I gather.

Next, after cobbling lunch together, we had to deal with our oldest son's recent pronouncement: "I need a new trumpet mouthpiece for school next week". Great! Luckily, there's a good brass shop in Chesham - Prozone Music. A trawl down there, and some trying out of different mouthpieces, and we were on our way.

Then - finally, after jobs were done - to the Janathon highlight of the day: a rowing 10k relay, with Holger, on a Concept2 rowing machine!

I haven't rowed regularly since leaving the gym about 4 years ago, so this was always going to be quite a challenge. We decided to take turns doing a timed 1k each, thus rowing 5k each and 10k between us. There was something like a 30 second changeover time between our sessions, to adjust footstraps and so on (for "so on" read "splutter, stagger, attempt to stay in the land of the living").

It was hard work! Holger is rather stronger than me, so consistently beat my times by about 10 seconds for 1k. Nevertheless, I was very happy with my performance, managing the 5 kilometre distances in:

3:39.0 / 3:49.2 / 3:48.9 / 3:48.9 / 3:48.5

My first km was the result of manic and completely unsustainable enthusiasm, but I was pretty happy to see that after that I still managed to stay below 3:50 per km, and actually (just about) managed negative splits!

I'll have trouble walking tomorrow, but 5km of rowing in under 19 minutes I'm delighted with, even if it was in 5 chunks.

And finally while we're talking about Janathon achievements, m'lud, I want taken into consideration the fact that, according to my FitBit, I've walked about 8,500 steps, or just under 4 miles. (This was almost certainly mostly going round Tesco..!)

Tomorrow: crawling on hands and knees (I expect)