A month of amassing indoor rowing metres for World Erg Challenge

The event begins every year in mid-March and goes until mid-April. The challenge is for teams and individuals to row as many metres as possible in that time. An impressive 4,397 competitors took part, averaging a whopping 105,039m per person. That’s roughly doing 3,500m per day, every day!

 Age Without Limits was named the team with the most metres for the first time when they beat the three-time winners, the French Indoor Rowers. The Age Without Limits team rowed an incredible 24,039,392m with just 165 participants. This meant an average of 145,693m per participant. Age Without Limits is a virtual group open to anyone willing to participate. Rowers from around the world are part of the team effort to pile on the metres.

In contrast, the second-place team from SLP Rowing is a physical group. It consists of members of the LifeTime Athletic Fitness Center in St.Louis Park, Minnesota, USA. With 242 participating members, SLP finished with 21,245,978m. This also made SLP Rowing the club with the most metres, for which only physical groups are eligible.

In third place was the French Indoor Rowers team. This virtual team encourages French rowers from around the world to log their metres on the indoor rowing machine. With 132 members, they managed to complete 18,599,174m.

Topping this year’s individual count was Don Altrichter, age 59, from St. Cloud, Minnesota, USA. Altrichter rowed an incredible 3,086,913m, meaning he averaged 102,897m per day. To put this in perspective, rowing at a reasonable 2:30 minutes per 500m, this would take more than eight hours per day. The first-placed woman was Billie Spence from the Community Fitness Pointe of Munster, Indiana, USA. Spence rowed a total of 1,131,735m.

The World Erg Challenge gives teams from across the world the opportunity to compete, not for time or split, but rather for total amount of metres logged. In this year’s addition, both Concept2 Ski Erg and Concept2 Bike metres were also counted. However, bike metres were counted as half when applied to the challenge.

The 2020 World Erg Challenge will take place from 15 March to 15 April 2020. Stay tuned for more information.

 For the full results, here.
For more information about the World Erg Challenge, here.