Post-erg brain mush

I am useless after long ergs.

Well, useless at anything which might be considered useful. I'm relatively stretchy after a long session on the machine, and able to drink impressive volumes of fluid, but also unable to walk straight, formulate a coherent argument, or finish a train of thought.

Despite this (or perhaps because of it) I am usually extremely content following long ergs. Content, de-stressed, at peace with myself, and without inclination to do anything. Even the need to eat seems a monsterous imposition on my otherwise wantless state.

I erged earlier.

I could quite happily live in the post-erg state. It's so very, very untroubled, though I did trouble myself to eat. I'm good at making myself eat even though I may not want to.

I am useless after ergs.

I can't formulate coherent anythings.

I don't mind.

It is not important to formulate coherent things. Not now.

I am content.

Altered Perceptions

This is erging

The building in which my rowing club is based is used by a number of clubs and groups. I have seen various yoga and pilates classes taking place on the upper floors, whilst us sweaty rowers inhabit the sheds outdoors, and the gym and changing facilities below ground. It adds to the feeling of entering the bowels of hell prior to a weights or erg session. It might as well be written over the doorway to the weights room "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here."

Tuesday's training session was not looking promising. Forty-five minutes of erging effort beckoned, I was dehydrated to begin with (silly me), and there was no music in the gym.

Music is vitally important to an erg. It has been suggested that there should be separate records for erging with and without music. In much the same way that track and field events have to be set under conditions with legal windspeeds for records to stand, it is felt that the presence of music assists physical performance on the ergs. This is largely because successful erging is all in the mind. With a bit of technique and fitness, mental strength and an ability to trust the voice in your head which assures you that, despite momentarily wishing you could die just to put an end to the effort, you will survive, you won't throw up, lose control of your bowels, or black out, not before you've got that personal best, or all this pain will have been for nowt, Zilch, so dig deep and make yourself proud. C'MON!

Ahem. I digress. The point I was going to make before that last sentence took over is that once you've got a bit of fitness and technique, controlling the internal cox/coach is probably the factor with the most impact on performance.

That's where music comes in useful. It provides a focus which isn't a physical sensation, reduces the need to concentrate on pain, and makes listening to the internal cox a little bit easier. But there was no music. Only the song of the erg, the swish of the flywheel, the glide of the seat up the slide, the drive, my breathing, and occasional expletive or exhortation to greater levels of efforts. I had to stop that last one when the beginners showed up - they get a bit nervous when they find sweat-drenched seniors talking to themselves. And quite right too - all that energy spent talking could more usefully be spent erging. But I digress. Again.

So, without the music, I had to find other methods of distraction. I watched the beginners for a while. Did mental arithmetic on my split times, times elapsed, time remaining, projected distance. I liked the look of the projected distance - 100m further than last week's erg. Good. Improvement. C'MON!

As time ticked away and I started to believe that I would make it through to the end of the piece, almost certainly wouldn't die, and would probably not throw up, I took a bit more interest in my surroundings. The weights/ergs room is a deeply blue/grey sort of place. It often looks rather fuzzy, both from the fine mist of condensed sweat hanging in the air, and from the impairment in ability to focus that a session in the gym brings on. However, one thing that wasn't fuzzy was the thumping in my head. No, wait. Not in my head. Over my head. That didn't sound like yoga. Nor pilates. In fact, it sounded like a herd of elephants doing high-impact aerobics. Then again, I might have begun imagining things. I often lose track of time. Perhaps hallucinations are just the next stage of erg mentality.

The elephants provided my backing track for the rest of piece.

Much later, I had done it. Finished. And kept control of my bowels. And improved. That felt Good. I stretched, (that felt good, particularly all those stretches which can be completed by lying in various sprawling positions on the ground), changed into dry kit, and headed out into the mild evening. As I emerged up the steps to ground level, I saw the herd of elephants. It was a sight for sore eyes, indeed. It wasn't quite what I expected to see on the banks of the Thames. Then again, it wasn't actually a herd of elephants (not that a herd of elephants would have been a more reasonable sight). It was in fact a collection of about twenty grown men, in gym kit, leaping around, waving sticks and occasionally beating the sticks together, accompanied by an accordion. Yes, it was a troop of Morris Dancers, enjoying the mildness of the night and taking the opportunity to practise al fresco. What sight of a Tuesday evening could be more reasonable than a bunch of grown men jumping in the air, dancing around each other to the strains of the accordion and wielding big sticks, illuminated by sodium street lamps? But of course...

Normally I'd be wondering why people partake in such pointless and futile activities as morris dancing, but having just finished an erg, I didn't feel in a position physically, mentally or morally to question the wisdom of morris dancing.

A date with an erg

This is an erg*:



It's a standard bit of kit for rowers, used particularly heavily in winter months when insufficient daylight prevents us from getting out on the water and we need something else to approximiate rowing on. I have a love-hate relationship with these things. I have sweated on them. Set personal bests on them. Achieved on them. Recited the periodic table on them (forwards, backwards and both up and down groups), not because I'm a complete nerd, but because for some reason I was required to learn it for my university exams. I have worked off hangovers on them. Vomited on them. Blacked out on them. Replaced the pain of being dumped with the physical torture of them. Failed on them. I have collapsed off them, I have cursed them and I have feared them. Ergs have caused me much pain since my first acquaintance with them a decade ago.

Rowing on water, particularly in crew boats, demands attention to detail, a never-ending quest for the perfect stroke - a balletic interplay of balance, timing and the controlled application of explosive force. Erging, by contrast, has had much of the complexity designed out of the motion, particularly with the removal of the need for fine dynamic balance, and provides an almost perfect environment to unleash one's base and ugly competitive streak. In addition, rowing on water is subject to unpredictability borne of the whims of Nature, including flooding, strong currents, high winds, choppy waters. Erging provides reproducible conditions. A poor performance cannot be blamed on conditions. Illness notwithstanding, everything is within my own control. I may have been weak. I may have given in. I can't blame a poor performance on bad weather. And good performances are not down to luck.

I think you have to be a particular type of person to be seduced by the concept that you can be solely in control of your own performance. It suggests, perhaps requires, a level of arrogance that I would find unpalatable in others, but which I con myself into believing is a virtue. A mantra we bandied around a lot in college was "Pain is temporary. Disappointment lasts forever."** The subtext is that you make a choice to accept disappointment if you fail to choose sufficient pain.

What with commuting, I haven't erged recently. In fact, before Sunday, I think it may be a good five months since I applied myself to one of these monsters. But I have missed them terribly. I miss the sense of having actually worked for something***.

I was therefore rather delighted to discover four rowing machines in the gym here, but it was with some trepidation that I approached an erg on Sunday, recalling the sickness generally felt after a session. I did a pick drill to start off (standard rowing warm-up exercise and handy for re-establishing technique), a couple of minutes light rowing, then a power test - three strokes to build intensity then five strokes at maximum power and speed. Unsurprizingly, my maximum power was a bit lot lower than the last time I did one of these tests. And it seemed to take a lot more out of me, as well. Suddenly the concept of just doing half an hour on the erg seemed rather more daunting than it had a few minutes previously.

Instead, I did a 2km erg. My personal best is a respectable-ish 7:27. I managed 7:58. There are persons of pensionable age with better test scores than that. That 2km test erg hurt a lot. Discovering that I could barely beat a lady old enough to be my grandmother hurts rather more. Next time, I would do better, be in more pain, not be so weak. Dammit - it was this sort of resolution to improve that got me hooked on erging in the first place.

I did a half hour this evening. It hurt after five minutes. I found myself reciting the periodic table, as much to numb the boredom and block the pain as anything else. Or at least I tried to recite it, but discovered I could no longer do this****. But I did manage to "empty the tank", or thoroughly exhaust myself, so was roundly chuffed. It also made me feel entitled to indulge in the soft cheeses at dinner.

Anyway, I must get to bed. I need my beauty sleep in advance of a date with an erg tomorrow...

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*An erg is actually a unit of energy. The machine is more correctly called an ergometer, but back in my student days, it was a waste of life to use four syllables when one would do the job.

**We had others, too. "Bleed through your eyes", "Feel your bones crack", "Nurture the pain", "A bit of pain never hurt anyone", and so on, but I feel a bit self-conscious shouting those ones to myself whilst erging.

***Don't get me wrong, I work. I have a job. I participate in meetings and wave my arms in a reasonably effective fashion. But I fail to accept that sitting on one's posterior for vast chunks of the day can be 'work'. I'm not sure what I would call it instead, but 'work' suggests some expenditure of energy is required, in the 'work is the integral of force with respect to displacement' definition.

****This resulted in my taking ten minutes earlier this evening to sketch the thing out on paper. I cannot recall six elements (rare earths, admittedly, but still something I should remember. I am disturbed (take that in what sense you will)).