Row Row Row Your Boat

The water drum rower. This should be renamed "torture device from hell".  Two years ago when I stepped into Orangetheory Fitness for the first time I had never sat on a rower. How hard could it be? Pull the handles and there ya go. Yeah. No. It would take me months and months to not have to take breaks in my rowing. There are so many components. Drive with the legs, enagage the core, lean back, pull with the arms, two count recovery back, catch the water with he rudder and go again. Adjust the watts down for long rows, up for sprint rows. Two years in, I now think I have it. Covering the meters a little faster as time marches on. In fact, I thought it had it all down and had more or less hit my maximum efforts. One hundred meters consistently around 18 seconds. Two thousand in about 6.5 mins. Yep I had this.  S

Enter this week. My trainer fresh off her latest conference pulled up a rower next to the rest of us. "Row with me". Her pulls on the rower were painfully slow for me. Not my usual stroke rate of 36.  She kept saying if we slowed it down and worked on truly recovering for two counts we would get further. I had a hard time believing that. Slower meaning further?  Wasting time recovering when I could be pulling again?    I began to think about how many times we power through life. Pukking daster and faster, believing we got this. Stuck in the notion if we pull faster we will get it done but at times it ends up being like a hamster on the wheel. The proverbial road to nowhere.

I then began to wonder what would happen if I slowed down the recovery. This is a tall order for me as anyone who knows me would say. I work 50-60 hours a week as an emergency room nurse practitioner at two different hospitals. I have four children under this roof all at different stages in life with different demands, a fifth child on her own with her own child, plus races to prepare for and a motivational team to run. Balls to the wall 100 miles an hour is my life.  Maybe the thing to do is to Pause a bit and embrace the two count recovery. Pausing to exhale before driving again.

As to my row today?  The newfound focus on recovery put me at 1190 meters in four minutes, and 655 in 2 minutes , top of my class a personal best at both times. Beating the 20 year old boys a few rowers down did not hurt this grandma either!  Embracing the recovery had brought me the win.  So here we go life, drive hard, lean back, pull hard, exhale, two count recovery and catch the wave.....