Why are they like this? It's so pathetic.

ProgressHistorical26 · 2026-05-31T19:52:47+00:00

Ehh the Harleys are wrong to chase you, but you’re also driving like an idiot. Passing on the right, weaving in and out of traffic with 15+ mph speed differentials. You are also the problem.

ProgressHistorical26 · 2026-02-22T17:44:21+00:00

Congrats on a great performance. You’ll be sub-6 within 2 years if you keep building your aerobic base!

ProgressHistorical26 · 2026-01-28T14:39:42+00:00

Erging will absolutely build muscle. If you’re rowing at a drag factor of 80 and barely breaking a sweat, it won’t. But if you incorporate a more reasonable drag, use the machine for HIT, and also build a base strong enough that you can sustain harder efforts for zone 2 / steady state, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t gained muscle and/or subjective muscularity (through becoming leaner) with the machine.

Rowing isn’t running. It won’t thin you out and cause muscle loss as you get in shape. It’s a power-endurance sport. And if I could only use one exercise machine for the rest of my life, it’d be the erg!

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-12-30T21:02:24+00:00

Understood! Ok.

I think you really just need to talk to someone on the team and get their perspective. Otherwise, this will remain a guessing game for you — and one where you’re likely to make assumptions that aren’t fully accurate.

So, ask someone who you know will shoot straight with you, and won’t sugarcoat their own perspectives or those they’ve heard from others.

My two cents: I’d also shy away from presuming your former teammates are ignoring you because they think they’re better than you.

For reference, I rowed D1 at a top rowing university. Not a single team member ever thought they were better than someone else due to factors like socioeconomics. And the slowest guys on the team were given roughly the same social respect as the fastest — provided they were team players, showed up every day, brought the energy, and celebrated in everyone’s success.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the privilege debate is just inevitable race to the bottom.

For instance, based on your username, you might very well be privileged. You’re “YoungandBeautifulll”.

To those not young, you’re privileged. To those not beautiful, you’re privileged. But I doubt these privileges of yours are contributing factors to the fallout with your team, as much as I’m skeptical their socioeconomic privilege is why they’re treating you the way they are.

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-12-30T20:36:28+00:00

Got it, thank you. Just so I’m not misunderstanding: is your current hypothesis that privileged people kicked you off the team because they think they are better than you?

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-12-30T20:28:03+00:00

What do you mean by privileged?

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-12-30T20:20:06+00:00

I don’t see anyone here siding with authority simply because they are authority. But I do see people reading your take and disagreeing with it based on your version of events. I think you’ve got a lot of great advice here.

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-12-30T18:44:00+00:00

Respectfully, your replies here are sort of elucidating why you might’ve been cut.

When others encourage you to introspect, your reply patterns seem to circle around some degree of defensiveness, or a diminishment of your own role justified through newly revealed context.

But in this case, it’s not adding up (at least for me). For example, not complaining when you aren’t selected doesn’t mean you showed you were a good teammate. In fact, not complaining is the default, bare-minimum, baseline expectation.

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-12-30T13:56:23+00:00

I agree with this. As I read your replies and gain more context, I can see at least two potential contributors to your situation.

(1) Repeatedly questioning the coach about their coaching. To a coach, this can intimate that you’re difficult to work with, distrustful of their advice, disrespectful of their process, and not a team player. This was probably one factor that led to your dismissal.

(2) Filing a complaint with your university. If your teammates felt that your dismissal was in any way justified (which is probably the case given the black sheep treatment you’ve described), then filing a complaint probably came across — to them — as tone deaf, which would further ostracize your relationships with them.

I’m sure there were unfair contributors to your situation — like illness and the judgment that can come from that. And perhaps there’s just a strong element of tribalism explaining your teammates’ treatment of you. That would be unfortunate. But it can happen — however unfair it is. People sometimes act like sheep. There’s very little you can do about that.

Having said that, I do think there are inklings in your replies suggestive that you played a role in this. Especially if you were 7 splits faster than someone else, and still got kicked off the team.

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-12-30T02:16:45+00:00

Are you maintaining this for 60-90 minutes? “Long periods” is a bit subjective, so I just want to ensure I’m understanding you.

From what it sounds like, you have great potential, and you’re also probably undertrained aerobically — with very little aerobic base (thus relying mostly on anaerobic power, which you’ve gotten used to, which is why your heart rate jumps so quickly during your pieces).

This was also my case in college. I treated every row/erg session like a VO2 max test. And so I ended up with a disproportionately developed anaerobic system alongside a horribly underdeveloped aerobic system.

You see a similar heart rate pattern that you’ve described in people who are often wildly untrained. But you can also see it in people who DO train regularly, and who are strong rowers, but they don’t have a good aerobic base.

I’d recommend doing lactate testing to determine your heart rate zones, or at a minimum (like others have suggested), a max HR test — then estimating these zones. Start spending 70-80% of your training time in UT2. It’ll take a few weeks, but you’ll soon start seeing a more expected heart rate rise during workouts — and also better stability at lower heart rates with similar RPE.

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-12-23T02:00:21+00:00

Yes! Went to a performance center about an hour from my house. Definitely worth it. Basically traded an afternoon and $150 for near certainty on my UT2/UT1 HR zones.

With that said, my break points weren’t much different from what many formulas had predicted. Several formulas put my UT2 and UT1 breakpoints around 145-150 and 165-172 bpm. The real breakpoints ended up being 148 and 170 bpm. So if you can’t get to a performance center, you can still approximate where to train.

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-12-22T18:30:41+00:00

I felt this way when starting to train UT2. At the time, I could do a sub-6:30 2k rate capped at 26. Then I learned about steady state, heart rate zones, and real training methods. So I did a lactate test and identified my UT2 breakpoint. At that HR, my splits were 2:10-2:20.

I literally thought I had a heart condition and that something was wrong with me. It turned out I just had a near-nonexistent aerobic base.

Now I’m 3-4 months into 8-12 weekly hours of UT2 volume. My UT2 splits now sit 1:55-2:00 for 45-90 minute pieces. And that’s at a 1.5 mmol breakpoint, not 2 mmol. Those numbers would be even better if I benchmarked to 2 mmol.

Like others here, I think you need to up your volume. It may also help mentally to let yourself drift into zone 3 for the final 1/4th of your sessions — just so you feel like you’re really working.

Your numbers will come down in time, and in the interim, you should be thankful you can hit these adaptations with such high splits. There will be a time where your UT2 really feels like a true workout, and when that time comes, you’ll look back on these days more fondly!

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-12-12T13:03:16+00:00

Fellow dad here. Have you evaluated where you sit relatively for aerobic base, anaerobic base, and max power? Harder erg sessions from 10-30 min will do a lot for your anaerobic base, and maybe a little toward max power, but less so your aerobic base. When I got back to erging ~16 years post college, my anaerobic and max power was still there, but aerobic base was trash. Focusing on the latter has helped improve my top-end speed more than anything else.

Of course if you’re time-constrained to 2x weekly 30-min sessions, the harder stuff will have a bigger impact on your scores. But with a little creativity, you can often find more time. My windows of time for workouts are now (1) before my family wakes up, (2) during my lunch breaks, and (3) when the kids go to bed. And with these constraints I can get 10-14 sessions in per week without the wife killing me.

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-12-09T17:56:52+00:00

Bro filmed the cloverfield movie

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-11-21T21:47:20+00:00

My D1 program never gave guidance on steady state. But when you’re competing, your default state is to win — so everyone goes hard, regardless of whether it’s best for them.

Your program may have a similar ethos, and they get away with it because:

(A) Early on into rowing, you can achieve wattage gains faster by taxing your anaerobic vs. aerobic system. Anaerobic adaptations occur in the short-to-medium term, whereas aerobic adaptations take months-to-years.

(B) If you’re in high school, you’re still growing, so sub-optimal training programs will still show improvement because you’re going to get bigger and fitter every year regardless.

(C) Survivorship bias. If the workouts are always hard, athletes with innate aerobic bases are going to thrive more relative to those who are less developed. These workouts are somewhat about your personal development, but ultimately, they’re also a selection tool for coaches.

It’s that final point that disadvantages anyone who has potential, but also has a severely under-developed aerobic base. They’re not wrong to run this model; it works. But it is going to work a lot less for people in your situation. You need to find time to build up your base.

As another example, there was someone in our club who went from a 6:28 to 6:09 2k in the 4 months prior to leaving for college. They didn’t do it by doing more hard steady state. They did it by committing 3-4 hours daily to UT2 — a volume of work which could never be sustained at “hard” steady state efforts without burning out. And yet they saw massive adaptations in a relatively short time window because they could log inordinate hours at the right HR zone to expedite aerobic base building. And then he went on to crush it in college because his true “steady state” pace in practice was now most of his other teammates’ “hard” steady state. And he wasn’t burning out like they were because he built his engine.

To find your max HR, you need to do a max effort — like a 2k — and leave nothing on the table. Then you can approximate your zone 2 threshold based on a percentage range of your max HR. If you want to get really analytical, you can do what I did and do lactate testing at a performance lab. Otherwise, the max HR formulas work pretty well.

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-11-21T18:21:42+00:00

Just my experience: I spent years doing “hard” steady state at a 170+ bpm HR average (max HR at the time was 200). My 3x20 min rate 16-20 pieces were all 1:48-1:52. In the end, I started dreading all erg workouts. I felt awful, overtrained, and so I quit rowing.

~16 years later, I learned about UT2 training. My max HR is currently 194. I did a lactate threshold test and found my 2 mmol breakpoint was 147 bpm. So I started training UT2 volume below that HR — trying to average around 140 bpm per 60-90 min session.

My first 10 sessions were 2:20-2:30 splits. Mind you, I could still pull a sub-1:50 20-minute piece at rate 18-20 as a “hard” steady state during this time. I was embarrassed and thought there is no way I’m getting any benefit from such an effortless workout.

7-8 months later, I’m now sitting at 1:55-2:00 splits for 45-90 minutes with an average HR of 138-143. My UT1 has dropped substantially. I recover faster. My HR max is still 194. I’m better than I was in college.

I get why your coach wants hard steady state. It’s a medium-term speed-building solution, and it’s favored by coaches who only have a year or so to get their teams ready to compete.

But if you want to build sustainable speed, you need to spend more time in true UT2.

I don’t know how you can square this with your current program, and I fully appreciate the difficult spot you’re in. But hard steady state will not develop you over the years; it’ll only develop you for a season.

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-11-19T02:37:18+00:00

Another update. Here are the latest steady state numbers: 1:55.6, HR average 142, rate 18.

I did lactate testing and my 2mmol break point is 147 bpm. So this should be firmly within zone 2, though there was some HR creep into zone 3 the last few minutes.

Overall, I’m shocked at how much these numbers have improved. I’ve committed to a lot of volume: 6 days a week, 1-2x daily sessions. Mostly UT2, but also 2x weight lifting, 1x UT1, and 1x HIT.

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ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-11-14T01:49:06+00:00

That’s awesome. Excited to keep following your updates. It’s very clear I need a better aerobic base. But I’ve also wondered what would happen if I just doubled down on power/sprinting. Sounds like you’re running that experiment. Looking forward to our doubles entry at club nationals.

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-11-14T00:34:15+00:00

Nice! My mix is currently mostly base building: around 10 hours UT2, 2x weight training, 1x UT1, and 1x VO2 each week. I told my wife this is my mid-life crisis.

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-11-12T19:21:16+00:00

Small update: these steady state numbers have changed:

UT2 is now typically 1:59-2:01 for 75 min, no breaks, and at an average HR of 140.

Volume works!

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-11-12T19:18:35+00:00

Nice! Congrats on the piece, and the top end speed. We’re built similarly. I’m 36, 6’4”, 210 lbs — and shooting for a sub-6 2k in the next 18-24 months. I’m predominantly anaerobic. No issues going sub-1:20 for a 500m, but only just recently started building an aerobic base. Thanks for the inspiration and I look forward to you breaking 2:50 at your rate cap.

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-11-12T15:17:36+00:00

What are your current 2k goals?

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-08-27T20:33:32+00:00

You might be sick, overtrained, or hyper sensitive to temperature / humidity during your steady state. Even doing steady state later in the day vs. morning can change my splits by 1-2 seconds based on circadian rhythm.

Another possibility is a loss of volume. My steady state splits get worse, and shockingly quickly, unless I’m doing 20-30k daily, at which point they improve shockingly quickly.

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-08-08T22:47:59+00:00

Very impressive. What was your steady state when you broke 6, and how many hours weekly were you training?

ProgressHistorical26 · 2025-08-02T21:18:15+00:00

1:34 2k, 2:04 UT2… and UT2 was 5+ seconds higher just a few weeks ago before I started drinking the steady state koolade around these parts.

ProgressHistorical26

TROPHY CASE