For Somebody in China

This morning before getting dressed to row I did what I've been doing every morning since the food poisoning incident. I looked at the Oarbits schedule (Oarbits is what RowPro calls its online rowing server) to see if there was a 1 hour session scheduled at about the time I wanted to row.

There were none, but there was a 2K session scheduled at that time.  It was named "wuyan" and had been scheduled by somebody in China who registered under the name "gang lu".  The session description which gang lu had supplied was simply the one word, "relax".

I had seen a couple of sessions in the online results list yesterday which included gang lu as a participant.  See the images below, for a view of the results of those two sessions.

In this 2K session yesterday, gang lu rowed at a pace of 2:35/500m.

In the next 2K session yesterday, gang lu rowed at an even more relaxing pace of 3:08/500m.

The time for which gang lu had scheduled todays "wuyan" 2K was 1400 GMT which was 0700 local time here in Arizona and was perfect, since I had been up since about 0545.  So I joined the session and anticipated that gang lu would row at a pace of somewhere between 3:08 and 2:35 per 500 meters, if gang lu's past performance was an indication of future intention for a "relax" rowing pace.

I looked up the word "wuyan" to see if I could determine what its English translation would be, but there were at least four possible meanings, depending on how the emphasis was placed on the syllables of wuyan.  The most likely meaning was something like "silent" or "keeping silence" and the second most likely meaning was "no smoking."  None of which meanings conveyed anything in particular to me, since I knew nothing about gang lu.

But when the time came for the scheduled session to begin, gang lu didn't show.  So, I rowed online solo, starting at its scheduled time of 1400 GMT, which was 4 minutes before the sun rose at 7:04 a.m. in Arizona.  In China, 1400 GMT would be 10:00 p.m. local time, so perhaps gang lu did something even more relaxing than rowing online.  Perhaps gang lu went to bed and did some rowing in dreamland, which could be a quite out-of-this-world ethereal rowing experience.

In case gang lu checked the results later, I decided to demonstrate that I'd been willing to cooperate, by rowing at a pace which was approximately an average of gang lu's two previous online 2K sessions. And that is why this post is titled, "For Somebody in China." The somebody in particular is gang lu, for whom I rowed at an average pace of  2:41.8/500m.

I hope gang lu appreciated the relaxed pace at which I rowed this 2K. 

Rowing 2K at that pace wasn't enough to warm up on a cool morning like today's, though.  So I didn't count that session as part of the hour's worth of indoor rowing for today.

Today's hour was done with the plan of rowing the first half at whatever pace it took to keep heart rate somewhere in heart zone 2 and then to do the second 30 minutes at whatever slower pace was needed to keep heart rate somewhere in heart zone 1.  Because the second half hour would be the slowest part, there would be no warm down session needed.

Finish screen for today's hour.

Session report for today's hour.