Row'd Royalty 2021 Throughout this whole 🦠 pandemic last year and into this year I've avoided all virtual running events as they felt contrived, didn't have the excitement of a real event and it didn't feel right to pay for someone to send me a for challenging myself during training. I didn't even contemplate rowing challenges as "I'm not a rower". I was going to continue with this stance until Row’d Royalty Starts Today! appeared in my blogroll this morning which caught my attention from the very first paragraph:

The 2021 Row’d Royalty competition starts today; it is an annual event we love to sponsor due to its creativity, toughness and prizes. Any athlete, at any level of fitness, is welcome to join!

What caught my attention was:

  1. it's a regular event and not something devised because of COVID,
  2. it promises to be creative and challenging and last year's workouts confirm that,
  3. it's for rowing - I've never entered a rowing competition,
  4. some of the workouts have two ways to score points,
  5. it has overall and category prizes!

I'm nowhere near an olympic or top club rower, but I think my times are pretty good for a 40+ year-old and I know my fitness has improved dramatically since I got my rower in July last year, so I thought, "What the heck, lets do it." and entered this morning.

Today's workout:

WATER WATER EVERYWHERE

4x 500m without any rests (2000m total)

Score A: 3rd 500m Interval time
Score B: Time it took to row the entire 2000m

My results (a cropped version of the photo I submitted as proof):

Score A: 1:38.4
Score B: 6:51.9 which is a new 2k PB for me by 8s too.

Which at time of submission put me tie second overall 🎉 - I don't expect to be there very long:

Leaderboard after workout 1

This was a tough workout though I didn't hit my max heart rate so either it's not as high as it was early last year or I had more in the tank and could have pushed harder 😉.

I'm looking forward to the next three weeks' workouts and will blog my progress over the next four weeks.