First rowing attempts — the exhaustion and lack of plan

So, I bought myself a rowing machine, specifically, a Water Rower, and started with regular rowing, every day around 5pm, at least that was the plan.

First few days I was doing relatively short distances, 1K, 2K, with moderate rhythm. But being an impatient person, I started to push quite hard, doing longer distances, 5K, and tried to improve my records on shorter distances. Very soon I started to feel exhaustion after each race, and had some strange sensation around my chest and throat, which I believe it has something to do with hearth.

I thought I have been careful with my pace, but obviously I wasn’t.

What really tricked me is the fact that I didn’t have any muscle pains after rowing, which I have found surprising, so I thought I could push harder.

But the reason why I didn’t have muscle pains is that rowing is such excellent sport that it has a very low impact on your body, in terms of stress on muscles and joints. It took me some time to figure that out on my own. I could probably find that out on internet, but I have a bad habit of experiencing things first, then look for confirmation elsewhere :-)

After week or two I realised that just doing the distances will not help me much if I don’t have a plan, so I developed a strategy for five lengths:

500m, 1K, 2K, 5K and 10K.

Plan was simple, once a week do the 10K (which I still didn’t at that point, I’m dreading a bit), four times a week I would do 5K, one times I would do 2K and once a week I would combined 500m and 1K.

I slowed down my pace and stopped chasing records. This was a long term game, so let’s be wise.