Rowing

I've been exercising with a Concept II indoor rower for about 7 years now. I started after a fairly unpleasant bout of back pain, when I decided I needed to lose some weight and get fit, and I quickly got addicted to it. For about a year I was fairly obsessive, monitoring heart rate, power output, and plotting graphs of my best times, but now I just work out regularly on it.

I bought my own machine just over 2 years ago - cost about £1000, which is about 3 years gym membership, so it's almost paid for itself. I've rowed over 1.5 million metres since I've had it. It's sometimes hard to motivate yourself to get on the thing and row, particularly when it's dark and horrible outside and all you want to do after a full day's work is sit down with a stiff G&T, but I'm sticking with it.

Target for the year is to get back to under 7 minutes for 2000m, and under 19 minutes for 5000m. I used to be able to do these sort of times easily, but I'm getting older, and it seems to get harder to maintain performance let alone improve it. At least though I'm slowing the decline.