Nuff respect

At risk of this becoming a rowing blog...

I did a 2km test erg on Tuesday - my first one of the year, pulling a reasonable 7min52s. This is some way off my best (set as a student with all the luxury of being able to train twice a day, have the college kitchen cook my food for me and deal with things like washing up, and feed me subsidised steak, leaving me plenty time to get extra bonus sleep and recover properly between sessions). I got a text message from our captain the next day. It read: Thanks for doing your 2k. Saw your time in the book. Good work! So far so good, but I'm not content with the score and am unshakeably confident that I can knock twenty to thirty seconds off that over the next twelve months with a bit more training, a few fewer post-work-stress beers, and a bit more adrenalin. (This does pre-suppose that I do not find myself commuting to the other side of the country on a daily basis.)

In a fit of benchmarking and seeking a second opinion, I checked out world records by age group for men and women, both heavyweights (open to all weights) and lightweights (that's 75kg (11st 11lb) or less for men, and 61.5kg (9st 9lb) or less for women). I've plotted the records as near as I have the data. My recent erg time is around the red line...

Thus, I would currently lose an indoor race to a couple of twelve year olds, a 60 year old lightweight woman and a 75 year old man, and only narrowly beat a 65 year old woman, and an 80 year old lightweight man. Whilst I have absolutely huge, massive, uber-amounts of respect for any pensioners who erg, and can barely fathom just how rock hard these world-beating erging pensioners are, I'd still like to be able to beat comfortably every octagenarian I might ever encounter, and (ideally) every twelve year old kid. Is that too much to ask of myself?

If that doesn't spur me into shifting those extra thirty seconds, what will?