First two hour ergo session

I am so glad that the seats in the gig are padded.  Yesterday morning all kettlebell crew members, with the one exception of Jason, who was at a wedding, met at Cantabs rowing club for an endurance ergo session.  For the likes of Steve and Jonathan this would be the longest that they have every worked out before, so quite a shock to the system.

Dennis is a member of Cantabs and managed to get approval for us to use their rowing machines.  We started rowing just after 10am and continued for the next two hours with everyone having just one 15 minute break each.  Whoever was on a break was required to act as a 'cox', which meant giving time checks, reminding people to drink and making sure everyone kept to the same pace.  We also nominated someone to act as stroke every 15 minutes, their job was to set a consistent stroke rate of between 22 and 26 strokes per minute for everyone else to follow.  Ensuring that everyone keeps to the same pace as one person is harder than it might sound, but we were noticeably better at this towards the end of the 2 hour session.

The two hardest aspects of the session, as far as I was concerned, were dealing with the complete lack of cushioning on the Concept 2 seats, and preventing boredom setting in.  We didn't have much of a view from the rather small windows that faced the river.  Everyone noticeably perked up briefly when a female crew appeared and got ready to take an eight out on the river.  I think everyone would have preferred it if they had done a longer warm-up in front of our window.  That was the only distraction we had during our two hour in-door row.  At least when we cross The Channel there should be plenty for us to look out for.

By the end of the session my butt felt raw from spending so long on one hard seat.  I am definitely buying myself a cushion before we do that again.  I'm also going to try and remember to take a camera next time so anyone reading this can see our training environment.  You'd have thought that at least one of us would have taken a camera yesterday.  Unfortunately, not.