One of the other rowing challenges out there is the Million Meter Challenge. Can you manage to row a million meters over the course of a year? That breaks down to averaging 2,740 meters a day for 365 days (2,733 if it’s a leap year). Not huge numbers – but who wants to row every single day for a year? I certainly didn’t. But, I also didn’t want to waste the fact that I was already a quarter of the way there in just one month.

I took Christmas Day off and started working on a plan (a failure to plan is a plan to fail – and I don’t like failing). My normal schedule is training on Mon./Tues./Wed./Fri./Sat.and coaching on Thurs. & Sun. If I followed that same schedule for rowing, I would get into a nice habit of rowing as a warm-up and then get some meters after class as a cool down. I really didn’t want to be spending my time rowing during the summer and I knew that I couldn’t keep up the pace I set over the holidays. If I could manage around 4K a day, I might be able to finish in about 6 months or so.

I was already into the habit of rowing just about every day so that was easy. Since it was a reduction in meters per day, it also seemed like I was getting a break from all the previous work. A simple plan with more than enough leeway that I could adapt on the fly should something come up, sickness/injury occur and I would miss little to no WOD time.

Virtually all the planning was done – all I had to do now was row. Sometimes in the Double-wide. Sometimes in the Triple. Before class. After class. Occasionally instead of class. 7,000 meters one day, 11,000 the next. Rinse and repeat.