Speed, HR and cadence

[headmount]

I tore my bicep tendon at the shoulder on 9/11 lowering (dipping, something I almost never do) myself into a construction hole.  So I rested and got three prolo therapy sessions over the next three weeks.  Pain went away remarkably fast.  ROM lagged slightly but just in this 4th week I've begun to swim.  Then in the last three days I’ve ventured back into my surfski to see if the stroke movement can be done without falling back into the ‘white light’ pain experienced when I first injured myself.   

That pain fresh in my mind, made me know that I needed to ease into it slowly.  Slowly meant flat water.  Downwind paddling of anything is like getting ‘the look’ from a Victoria’s Secret model and thinking you can control your HR.   If you’ve hard wired your brain to catch glides for a few decades, you do anything you need to do to get in.  Flat water training was the obvious answer but I had never been one to go out and grind.  If it wasn’t fun, I didn’t have time for it.  But after this injury I realized flat water was my ticket back into the game.

Before the injury I had been using a forearm HR band (Schoshe 24) and a Garmin Fenix 3 since June on all my downwinders to gather data on HR, cadence and speed.  Speed being the most variable data point because of contingency on conditions.   I knew this and HR and cadence were what was really interesting to me. Yet downwinders are a haphazard affair where the adrenaline rush is a major affect on HR.  Sudden and sporadic strong effort for one or two strokes, made cadence data I collected difficult to attribute into any useful conclusions.  So with my initial flat water work outs, I was very interested in what came up.   

I’ve done cool temp, early morning sessions off south Maui where you get a few hours of billiard tabletop.  Data so far has been remarkably consistent which gives me confidence to use the results as a springboard to compare against future work outs.  My MAF (max aerobic function) HR target is 112-120 (at 68) so that’s what I shoot for during an hour work out.  Downwind averages in the past hovered around 145-155 for the same time, which is obviously anaerobic for me (over 80% of my max which is around 165)  My goal is to strengthen my shoulder, improve aerobic function and catch glides without getting as jacked up about it.

[headmount]

With my V8 surfski in flat water, my speed is 4mph with an easy 20 spm cadence at 110 bpm HR.  To ramp up to 6 mph, it takes a cadence of a much more forceful 30 spm and 130 bpm HR.