From Andy Pearce:

My Fiancee Anita and I will be rowing 100km for Sport Relief (www.justgiving.com/anita-wells) on the 17th March next year. Back in September Anita tasked me with putting a plan together to get fit and lose weight for our wedding at the end of June 2012. I've loved Indoor Rowing ever since we did a Charity Challenge at work to row as far as we could as a department in 40 hours (We ended up at 530km) in 2008, and on-and-off ever since I've used the Concept 2 at the gym and at home.

I did a bit of research and came across Eddie Fletcher, and his Marathon Training Plan, and decided to modify this to go for the big one - 100km in one go as quick as possible.

We started this on 3rd October, and we haven't looked back, with Anita losing 10lb so far, me 12lb with both of us losing many centimetres off all the right places. This blog will be a quick weekly update on our training progress and the distance covered.

Week 11 - A busy, busy week

We only got the chance to go to the gym once this week, with Family visits and Christmassy ephemera taking up nearly all of our time. We went on Wednesday, with a planned 3 30' intervals with 3' rest between them - 2:24, 2:17 (PB) and 2:24 for Anita, 2:00, 1:54 (PB) and 2:00 for me.

The first Interval went OK for both of us, though not as easy as normal as we've both been a bit run-down, being so busy with background cold symptoms.

Anita absolutely aced the 2nd interval, setting a PB of 6572m at 2:17/500m - She is an absolute machine and is progressing faster than the training plan - I may very well be amending the plan after the Marathon on the 8th January to take this into account.

I started out well, at 1:53/500m for the first 14 minutes then hit the wall - I'd forgotten my gloves so my grip on the old-style wooden handle became more and more painful, I upped the stroke rate to try an compensate and my heart rate got away from me, and I handled down at 5km in 19:40.

We decided not to do the 3rd interval - I definitely wasn't up to it, and Anita, though she could have done it decided getting home and getting in the shower was more important.

The Plan is now to have a normal Week 12 after 2 disrupted weeks, a Half-Marathon PB attempt on Christmas Eve before two taper weeks, Concept2UK Challenge Series 5K pieces and the C2 Team Challenge 5K (2K, 1.5K, 1K, 500m with 1' Rest between the Intervals) for our Online Affiliation, C2TweetCrew - Onwards and Upwards.