Lightweight Eats

My first spring season, I dropped 36 seconds off of my 2000m erg time. My freshman year of college, I dropped 14 seconds from my 2km time, and almost 2 minutes from my 4km time. This season? I'll be happy if I drop 12 seconds from my 6km time.

What's changed?


Well, first of all, each second means more the faster you go. The erg, short for ergometer, doesn't actually measure how far you've got—it measures how much work you've done. (An erg is a unit of work.) The erg looks at how much work you've done in a given time period and tells you how much power you produce—your watts.

The erg then has a formula to predict, if there were 8 of you with perfect technique rowing an eight-man boat, how fast you'd be going. In fact, you can calculate your split for any given wattage: http://www.concept2.com/indoor-rowers/training/calculators/watts-calculator

So let's do that. My freshman year of college, I went from 1:56 to a 1:52.5 split, or 224 watts to 245 (9% improvement). Let's say I want to improve 9% on the watts again—that's 245 watts x 1.09 = 267 watts. That's a 1:49.4 split.

The first 9% improvement, I dropped 3.5 seconds on the split, or 14 seconds overall. The second 9% improvement, I only dropped 3.1 seconds on the split, or 12.4 seconds overall. The faster you're going, the more each second counts. And as I've gotten faster, my improvements seem smaller.


But that's not everything. In high school and college, summer was the off season and boy did I take it off. I was still getting back in shape at the first 2k of the season. Now, we train year-round. And while I may not be in peak 2k shape at the first erg test of the season, I'm not far off. In that regard, I would take a massive improvement in my time over the course of a season as a sign of failure—a sign that something had been sub-optimal in my prior training.

The same goes for weight-lifting. Although I might see some initial improvements when I switch from one lift to another, and there is some variance due to weekly training loads, I'm mostly just lifting the same amount of weight, over and over again.


So if you're not seeing the same massive improvements you saw your first season (or five) as a rower, don't beat yourself up. It's probably a sign you're doing something right!