Darkoshi

After a failure like not even managing to get to the event at all, just making it to the starting line of an event starts to feel like a victory.

And, lo: on Saturday, I learned how to extract the Mazda's battery (not hard, takes a wrench), and when I tested it then and there, it initially gave a voltage reading of 12.2, which is low, but not catastrophically so. So I connected it to a battery charger that S happens to have for a couple of hours. Then I figured I probably wouldn't want to be working on the reinstall at o-dark n cold thirty on Sunday morning, so I stuck it back in the car just as the sun was going down and verified that the car *will* start. So, no immediate issues on that front, and I was able to drive over to a teammate's house to carpool out to Waltham for Sunday's erg race. Hopefully the driving over and driving back will have topped off the battery for now (assuming no alternator issues). Getting it more thoroughly tested and replaced is still on my short list. The internet says that Auto Zone will conveniently test your battery for you, for free, so I might just go and do that, but I also want to learn more about my options for a relatively high-quality replacement, because S says this is an arena where you get what you pay for.

So, the erg race. I'm generally not a person who scopes out the competition to an excessive degree, but when I went to check the schedule for my race time, I did observe that out of the 5 of us in my category, only 3 had submitted their prior times, and 2 of those submissions were slower than what I could very confidently manage for a 2k race. Those were much better odds than in the year before, when there were 11 of us competing, so I had to figure I should just focus on rowing my own race and not engage in too many headgames about my competitors.

We arrived quite early, in part because my teammate's race was before mine, so there was plenty of time to warm up and ponder my life choices. I mean, really, who gets up at the crack of dawn on a weekend to drive nearly 3 hours to then sit on an indoor rowing machine and suffer for ~8 minutes?? A number of people, I guess.



I had a lot of fun coxing my former teammate JL and current teammate EB during their earlier races, where they were both pleased with the outcome. Then it was my turn. I was glad to be stationed on one of the ergs on the edge, because the air quality wasn't great in the fieldhouse. Too warm and dry.



The race started with a misadventure that requires a bit of explanation. The makers of Concept2 rowing machines created racing software for the monitors nearly from the get-go, because it's way more fun to be at an erg race if you can watch the race status of everyone together. Over the years they have updated the software along with updating the monitor firmware, and they make a software development kit available to anyone interested in developing software for the monitors. I really love this about Concept2 because it demonstrates the company's commitment to providing good things for their users.

Anyway, during the global pandemic, some people in the Netherlands put together some software to make online/virtual races possible, and this software has the added advantage that it will graph each machine's output over time, so you can go back and look at how effective you were at maintaining your target pace.

When the ergs are in "racing mode," it's no longer possible to change settings on the individual monitors. The top half of the monitor screen will display specific information about the individual's race (meters left, instantaneous split per 500m, stroke rate, average split), and the bottom half will be devoted to race status information. When it's time for the race to start, it reads, in sequence: SIT READY, ATTENTION, GO, and the GO is in giant letters.

Oh, and before the start sequence will begin, all of the machine flywheels have to come to a stop so that everyone is starting from an equivalent dead stop. So the time arrived for us to start our race. I listened to the announcer announce that it we could pick up our handles, then watched my monitor go through the sequence, SIT READY, ATTENTION, GO, and Boom! started to go on the GO. But in my peripheral vision, I noticed something weird: the rower next to me hadn't started! So after about 10 seconds it was apparent that something had gone wrong and I stopped rowing. Had I false-started? So confusing.

Eventually the announcer came back on over the mic to say they were having some sort of wifi connection problem. Okay, time to just relax, take more deep breaths, wait for a restart. Several minutes later, a restart, and this one was legit. Here we go!

One of the non-ideal factors this year was that since I missed the race at Pelham the week before, I hadn't managed to do a full practice 2k in quite a long time, and so I really wasn't sure what sort of pace I would be capable of holding. I decided to aim for a split that seemed reasonable for me at the moment (for the 2 rowers in the audience, 1:56/500m), with the plan of just hanging onto that split for as long as possible, and then probably just falling off that pace towards the end in the slow, painful death that is an erg race, depending on how everything went.

There's a thing that often happens at erg races: the erg race environment is different compared to the practice environment, inasmuch as it is FAR more adrenaline-filled. People who try doing an erg race for the first time are almost always caught off-guard by how the adrenaline affects them: it leads to a pronounced "fly-and-die" effect where in the first 60 seconds or so everything feels great and it's somehow possible to engage in a superhuman effort beyond what a person is normally capable of in practice. Mentally, the experience is, "Oh wow! I am so much stronger and faster than I thought I was! This is amazing and I am awesome!"

Eventually, the oxygen deficit catches up with a person, with catastrophic consequences. The mental experience is, "Oh...oh...uhh, this is getting harder...oh my gosh, my legs are turning to jelly and I can't get enough air...oh no, oh nononono..." In the worst cases, the person stops rowing because they just can't deal anymore. In most other cases, they just manage to humbly limp across the finish line, and with any luck they reflect on what happened and get motivated to try again and do better.

I am far from new to erg racing, so by this point I know to just ignore the information that shows up on the bottom half of the monitor for the first 500m or so of the race. During the race, the bottom of the monitor will tell you who is in the lead, and by how many meters they are in the lead compared to you. It will also tell you who is immediately ahead of you, your current position, and who is immediately behind you, also with the gap between you and your competitors.

The utility of this information can obviously vary. Personally, I'm in the racing environment because it helps to push me to go above and beyond what I can accomplish in practice. In this particular instance, by the time I got through the easiest part of the race, the first 500m, I noticed that hey, I was holding onto second place, and doing all right with that. Okay, keep maintaining my pace. In the second 500m, I fell off my target pace a bit, edging up to an average of 1:57/500m, occasionally seeing 1:58 or 1:59, but successfully edging back down to 1:57 or 1:56 here and there. (I did notice a single "glitch" stroke that showed my split at 1:45 once, which is concerning but it did quickly correct back out*)

Between the second and third 500m, I noticed I was starting to close the gap with the rower in first, the margin between us getting smaller and smaller until lo, I was out in front! At this point the mental conversation went something like, "Okay, just hold your pace, hold your pace, get ready for the last 500m where you should give it your all for the sprint."

For whatever reason I should also note that I got myself through the 2000m distance by counting rowing strokes in sets of 10. A 2000m race is around 250 strokes total. So I'm counting, trying to hang onto my pace, and then I start to see the reverse of what I saw when I crept into first place: the gap between me and second is closing up, and it's closing up pretty fast. Yikes!

Well, the only thing you can control is yourself, right? So that's what I did: held my pace, started to ratchet it up, brought my splits down as the finish line approached. I think I saw a 1:53 in there somewhere, and maybe a 1:52, and then it's the last 10 strokes, the last 5 strokes, the finish line.

I managed to close the gap back down, but in the end my opponent beat me by 0.1 second. This is the same opponent who used the exact same trick last year, edging me out from 4th place to 5th place that time! She totally locked eyes with me before the racing start and communicated, "I'm after you." But she also communicated, "I don't know how this year is going to go, I'm not as confident as last year," and I said the same thing. We were both around 4 seconds slower than last year. But I've closed the gap, because she beat me by 1.5 seconds last year, and just 0.1 second this year.



And I know I can go faster than I did this year. I can just tell there's room for me to build more fitness compared to where I am right now.

I am so motivated now to continue my training and go back again next year. I am so grateful to have awesome competition. I am pretty sure that one of the rowers from last year who was far faster than us has aged ahead into the next category; another was more of a CrossFit athlete who may or may not ever show up again. So the odds are looking good, and I'm not really all that concerned about exact finish positions anyway.




*A couple weeks ago I did a race piece at home on my BikeErg out on the front porch in 10-degree weather, and in that case I definitely saw multiple glitches that recorded my speed as about 10 seconds slower than how my work output felt. Most likely that was another situation where cold temperatures affected battery performance. The fieldhouse temperature was warm, so those glitches likely had different causes. Just seems important to document these issues.