The Octuple

Saturday

A rest day after a quite intensive week. We visited one of the caves in the Moravian Karst (basically the hills starting at the end of our street, where I do most of my running). The Moravian Karst, a small region of 25x4km, has more than 1100 caves, of which 5 are accessible for non-speleologists. The others are either closed for humans or only accessible for professional speleologists.

This was one of those easy and comfortable cave visits with a guide. Still it was impressive.

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The Moravian Karst
Katerinska Cave
Katerinska Cave
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Inside Katerinska Cave

Sunday

The training plan called for running, and I really should start to do more running. There is a 10k on 17th November that I want to participate in.

But today there was a better idea. We managed to get eight people together to row in our club’s Octuple, a sculling eight. There was strong wind and quite a bit of chop, so despite the fact that our coxswain didn’t show up, we decided to go into the gorge towards the castle and back. We fixated the rudder and took off without a coxswain, turning the boat into a coxless octuple, or, in rowers’ shorthand: the “8x-“.

It was an interesting experience. Of course the maneuvering of the boat was difficult, and in a few of the river’s sharp turns we had to row half slide strokes and even stop to turn the boat.

I stroked the beast, so my view was not very different from rowing in the single.

https://www.strava.com/activities/760435132/segments/18626169771

Somebody took a picture, but he hasn’t posted it yet, so I have no images of this fun outing, except for the heart rate plot from rowsandall.com:

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