🚣 Rowing Erg Pace Calculator

The rowing machine's watts and your 500 m split are two ways of saying the same thing. Enter either and this works out the other, plus your speed and predicted times for the standard test distances.

The physics behind it

On a Concept2 (and most ergs), watts = 2.80 × (speed in m/s)³, and speed = 500 ÷ split seconds. So a 2:00 split (120 s per 500 m) is 500 ÷ 120 = 4.167 m/s, which is 2.8 × 4.167³ ≈ 203 watts. Going 10% faster takes about 33% more power — that cube is why the last split of a 2k hurts so much.