OTW Row & First Lactate steps

Lactate fun

The “ding-dong” came just before lunch time on Friday. It was the UPS man ringing the doorbell, delivering my lactate meter. I will write a separate review blog about it tomorrow.

It came with a small lancing device but no lancets. No problem. Richard told me that lancing devices are sold in each pharmacy. As I was working from home, I went to the neighborhood Thai for a quick lunch, and as this is in the Czech Republic, there is a pharmacy on every street corner. I am exaggerating just a little. Tried 3 pharmacies and had to explain what I was looking for. I felt very weird, asking for a device to stab myself to get blood. In the third pharmacy they sent me to a shop selling medical devices in the town center.

There, they sold me the Accu-Chek lancing device but the girl told me that they didn’t have the lancets on stock. I asked if there weren’t any lancets in the package with the device. She checked. Negative. I asked her to order them. Tuesday morning.

A bummer, because of course I was very eager to test my new toy.

I ended up trying to stab myself with a (sterilized) needle. This was very painful and yielded just a minimum of blood, which I used to waste two strips.

This turned out to be harder than I thought.

They wanted me to fall on my sword, but I refused.

This morning I finally opened the package with the Accu-Chek for a closer inspection. To my surprise there was a set of lancets packaged with the device.

8b6b37fffa981654152048deefcedf611

The manual to the Accu-Chek said to first test at depth setting “2” (out of a max 5.5). I tried that, but apparently have a very thick skin. After a few more stabs I managed to get a reasonable drop at the maximum setting. It took another two stabs (and one wasted strip) until I had my first reading: 1.5. Hurray!

Tomorrow I will do my first test. I will probably miss one or two data points but who cares. I can repeat it next week.

I am going to the “long step test” where I will do a few 10 minute steps around my presumed 2.0 mmol/L intensity.

My club mates did the classical 4 minutes step test and the trainer has determined their training bands from that. Unfortunately I missed this opportunity. I don’t have the raw data but here is what I reconstructed from the training bands published in our club house:

lactaatnummers.jpg

Quite impressive numbers … I am afraid that when I will do this test, I will be somewhere to the left of this graph.

Today’s Row

We still don’t have a winter dock built and the water level is continuously falling. When I arrived at the club, the air temperature was +3 degrees C and the water was colder.

Instead of wading in, I decided to build an improvised dock. Actually, I was quite proud of the end result which was perfectly usable:

vlot 001
First part of improvised dock
vlot 003
The end result

The water next to my improvised dock isn’t very deep, but when I had removed a few big stones, it was deep enough for a single.

Today, I didn’t have a lot of time, so I did one rate ladder, 4-3-2-1-2-3-4 minutes at 18-20-22-24-22-20-18 spm.

waterspmwater

| Tstart_ | Tstop__ | Dist_ | Time_ | Pace__ | _SPM | avg HR | max HR | DPS | Remarks
| 00:00.0 | 13:09.0 | 02278 | 13:09 | 02:53.2 | 18.9 | 140 | 153 | 09.2 | WU
| 13:09.0 | 17:09.0 | 00831 | 04:00 | 02:24.5 | 17.6 | 144 | 152 | 11.8 | 18spm
| 17:09.0 | 20:08.0 | 00639 | 02:59 | 02:20.1 | 19.6 | 154 | 161 | 10.9 | 20spm
| 20:08.0 | 22:09.0 | 00454 | 02:01 | 02:13.2 | 21.8 | 164 | 167 | 10.3 | 22spm
| 22:09.0 | 23:08.0 | 00227 | 00:59 | 02:10.0 | 23.1 | 169 | 171 | 10.0 | 24spm
| 23:08.0 | 25:08.0 | 00387 | 02:00 | 02:35.0 | 21.4 | 166 | 171 | 09.0 | 22spm; turn
| 25:08.0 | 28:10.0 | 00596 | 03:02 | 02:32.6 | 19.6 | 161 | 165 | 10.1 | 20spm
| 28:10.0 | 32:09.0 | 00774 | 03:59 | 02:34.5 | 18.0 | 159 | 165 | 10.8 | 18spm
| 32:09.0 | 47:15.0 | 02927 | 15:06 | 02:34.8 | 18.9 | 149 | 162 | 10.2 | CD


dist_____|time_____|_pace___|_HR__|_SPM__|_DPS|comment
2278_____|_13:09____|_2:53.2
|140|18.9|9.2|warmup
3907_____|_19:00____|_2:25.9
|157|19.4|10.6|Main set
2927_____|_15:06____|_2:34.8
|149|18.9|10.2|Cool down
9112____|_47:15____|_2:35.6
|150|18.8|10.3|_Total

I still have mixed feelings about the new WordPress.com editor. Today I discovered that I miss the “code"  buttons in HTML editing mode.