A few months ago when I started doing Crossfit at Crossfit Screaming Eagle, I wanted to find a few things that I knew I would be able to use as benchmarks.

There are lots of things, especially on the weightlifting crossfit list, that I won’t be able to PR — at least not for awhile.

The 2K row was one of the first things that I knew I could do and could benchmark.

In early May, I went in on a Sunday to do a 2K without any other fatigue. My PR on that day was 10:41. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had other rows as part of workouts that had gone well. A few weeks ago, I was able to do a 2K in about 10:34, but that was part of a much larger workout.

My goal for the PR was to get right around 10:00. I knew it would be tough because it would require me to pace the row at about 30 seconds every 100m.

I did a quick warmup of 300m – split into 3 sets of 100m. After a little bit of rest, I set the rower for the 2k and got started.

It was tough. Because of how I had set up the rower, it was showing the anticipated finish time and there was a section between 500m-800m where that time had edged past 10:00. But, I pushed through.

Around the 1500m mark, I realized that if I really pushed the last 500m I could do much faster than the 10:00, so I pushed as hard as I could that last 500m.

I surprised myself a little bit by finishing with a new PR of 9:29.5. My next goal is to work that down to under 9:00 and then start working on the 3k.