So much for trying to re-establish a blogging habit – one disruption and I forgot all about it. I did decide to work from home (the lake home) all last week; it was wonderful and went very well, except for having to pay some data overage fees. However, the fees for 3 Gb of extra data were somewhere close to the minimum we’d need to pay every month to get wifi in that house (and were much cheaper than getting an unlimited data plan from Verizon!) so I guess this is what we’ll be doing any other time we work from that house, for the foreseeable future.
I was able to do a considerable amount of knitting while there, so I’ve now finished the initial knitting on this sweater.
Next comes the hard part: steeking, to turn the pullover into a cardigan. I need to sew (with a sewing machine, which is not something I have any experience with) along both sides of that from channel, then cut between the stitches, After that I need to pick up stitches and knit the plackets for buttons and button holes. I probably won’t get to that for a couple of weeks – I want to tackle it on a weekend at home, and we’re going to the beach this weekend. I’ve got a sock still in progress, but have cast on a couple other projects anyway: a sweater, because I want some plain knitting for car rides and telecons, and a shawl for a swap I’m doing.
(I was amused recently when John Scalzi announced the new “digest” topic he’d be using once or twice a week, because it sounds like the way I always have blogged, multiple topics at once.)
So back to my other usual topic, rowing. This is the time of year when I always start building up distance to get ready for the Holiday Challenge. I did get out a bunch of times while we were at the lake, but in general, I’m in terrible shape this year. I still work out five times a week, but I am noticeably slower than I used to be (less speed at the same perceived level of effort) and a lot of my workouts are only 5 km or so. I did do 10 km on Monday, but only 5 km yesterday.
Part of that is in the head rather than the body, and I do know from experience that as I begin to build distance my brain adapts; it learns to zone out so I can row longer distances without it asking “are we done yet? are we almost done?” every 200 meters. Part of it, I’m afraid, is age. According to the US Rowing Masters handicap table, speed drops off more and more precipitously with increasing age. In a 1km race, I would get about a 14 second handicap at my current age, so it seems reasonable to expect my splits (projected time to row 500 m at a given level of effort) to drop by about 7 seconds. It’s probably not linear in real life, in that I suspect the average split for a marathon would not really drop off at the same rate as that for a 1000m race, but that’s still an easy approximation.
Part of it, though, is needing to get butt on erg and do more meters. Sigh.