Thursday: steady state

My entire flotilla was on the water. Romana and her doubles partner Veronika were out in our double “Orca” and I took my single “Dolfijn”.

Just 14 km of steady state, rowing back and forth alongside (in front of) the double. Veronika, who is from Ostrava and used to a quiet river, was very stressed by the traffic on the lake. In her own words: “If something floats in our river, it’s dead.”

I guess I have developed quite some nonchalance managing the lake traffic. I take calculated risks and go close. The risk is having to do a dead stop, but most of the time everything is fine. Perhaps my Dutch cycling skills come into play here:

This is how we cycle, where I grew up. I don’t see anything abnormal, but I understand from the circles, that there is something interesting going on.

Back to rowing, I was also rowing low Work per Stroke on purpose, and I was not slow.

A quick look at some metrics:

 

And here is the interesting chart. I am looking at data for the steady state workouts of Tuesday and Wednesday.

And here is the really interesting chart. I took pace vs power (my go-to efficiency chart currently) and looked at average data grouped by work per stroke. The data are from this week’s steady state workouts. On Tuesday I was rowing in the 550-600J range. On Thursday, I was in the 475-550J range:

You see how the boat speed stagnates between 180 and 200W of power? I was just more efficient on Thursday. Getting the same average boat speed at lower power.

The water temperature was the same. The weather was the same:

Thursday: Summary for your location at 2017-08-03T18:22:24Z: Mostly Cloudy. Temperature 78.81F/26.0C. Wind: 0.24 m/s. Wind Bearing: 4 degrees

Tuesday: Summary for your location at 2017-08-01T07:23:25Z: Clear. Temperature 82.53F/28.0C. Wind: 0.79 m/s. Wind Bearing: 147 degrees

According to the weather report there was a slightly stronger wind on Tuesday. According to my own observations, the wind was stronger on Thursday. But light wind in both cases. The wind direction was different, but that should average out over the outing.

I don’t take it as hard evidence but I do take it as an encouragement to keep experimenting with lightening up the stroke.

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