Rows and ladders

Another deceptive ladder workout today, this one from Max's fiendish brain. I was tempted to try running, considering how much better my ankle is feeling, but ultimately decided to drag a rower outside and use that instead. This was probably wise, as I would have been tempted to push harder than I should have in a race mentality running with others. Despite its not being a 1:1 effort, to keep things easier I just rowed the same distances as the runners.

* 17.5 hour fast *

Run 1000 meters in 10 minutes
Run 900 meters in 9 minutes
Run 800 meters in 8 minutes
Run 700 meters in 7 minutes
Run 600 meters in 6 minutes
Run 500 meters in 5 minutes
Run 400 meters in 4 minutes
Run 300 meters in 3 minutes
Run 200 meters in 2 minutes
Run 100 meters

3:37, 3:20, 2:57, 2:37, 2:14, 1:49, 1:25, 1:04, 0:41, 0:19
Total time: 20:03

As I said, this was deceptively difficult - on paper, it looked like there would be a LOT of resting - and there was, 35 minutes of it - but that only let you push harder on the efforts, and they really started to burn after the first round or two. It was a good HIIT workout - my heartrate got noticeably higher than it does with Sprint-8 - but the downside is that it takes a lot longer.

An interesting thing about rowing: it's easier to sustain top speed, but harder to get there. So my times were inverse to the fastest runners - in the first rounds I finished ahead of them, but in the short sprints they were faster than I was.