Unleash the Monkey Army

I've been thinking about training a bit recently. Partly inspired by the end of the indoor rowing "season" and partly on the back of a couple of  conversations I've been having.  The indoor rowing "season" is actually a year and runs from the 1st May. Having just come to the end of the 2015-16 season it seemed a good time for a  review. Top level, I completed 1.4 million metres over 108 hours of sliding up and down on the metal rail. Sounds like a lot of time in the same 8ft x 3ft but it's  significantly less time than I spend watching TV. Also, while it is two thirds of my recorded lifetime distance, it is a pretty moderate sort of distance for  most indoor rowers. That's not surprising, I don't have a long history of anything that would help me very much and while the physique I've been gifted and  enhanced with nutritional choices (good and bad) might have some uses, it is not one that you would look at and think "rower"...

On Saturday 9th April I went down to Exeter for only my second ever indoor rowing competition, the Fitness Matters Devon 1k and Team Relays . Competition is the official description, I never made any bones about being competitive! If this is your first visit to the blog, welcome! Long-time readers will no doubt be stunned to know that I've been giving the event some thought. Because I'm a caring sort of guy, I'll share those with you. The Concept 2 indoor rowing machine is pretty much the gold standard of rowing machines and has been setting the tone for 40 years now. If you've ever set foot in a gym you'll know what I mean. It looks something like this     and you're pretty much always guaranteed to be able to get on one, no matter how busy the gym is. There's a reason for that! They're pretty much despised by the gym cardio junkie and the meathead (and all stops in between) in equal measure. They're self-propelled but against resistance and am...