Yesterday's relaxed rowing session was just a bit too relaxed, which is to say that I was so relaxed afterward that I took a long afternoon nap even though I was not at all sleep deprived. It may have had something to do with the fact that we were out of regular, caffeine-loaded coffee and so there was no caffeine fix yesterday.
Today we are still out of regular coffee, so I substituted 1/2 of a No-Doz caffeine tablet. That did the trick and my mental state doesn't seem the least bit inclined toward a nap today.
But I expected today's pre-rowing heart rate to be somewhat higher than yesterday's of 49 bpm and there was no noticeable elevation in heart rate due to caffeine. However, my subjective opinion is that though the starting effort today was the same as yesterday, heart rate seemed to accelerate a lot more quickly today, to get right up into zone one. Yesterday, it seemed to take a lot more time to get up into zone 1.
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| 100 mg of caffeine didn't raise resting heart rate. |
Today's ethereal hour of indoor rowing was more or less the same as yesterday's with the exception that there were a few more interruptions to operate the remote control while rewinding a few sections of a documentary on history of mathematics in the 18th century.
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| RowPro finish screen for today's hour session. |
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| RowPro session report for today's hour. |
That's an interesting observation about caffeine making your heart rate go up faster, even if it doesn't make the "resting" rate higher.
ReplyDeleteThough it was a subjective, one-time observation, it was the very first thing I noticed after I started rowing: that heart rate climbed right up to and into heart zone 1 in the first minute. The day before, I had noticed that heart rate elevated slowly and then seemed reluctant to raise above 110 until after 6 minutes. Today, it got up to 114-115 in less than a minute, ... but then I had to pause and adjust the remote control and heart rate dropped again... or it would have stayed above 114 from the first split. But only a physiology lab and multiple trials could tell for sure. It could also be that the caffeine stimulated me to expend more effort than yesterday, though the effort seemed the same... subjectively.
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