Planning

Wednesday

Back on the erg. This time I was a bit better prepared. For example, I listened to a podcast from the RowingChat series. Catching up with these RowPerfect podcasts, I listened to the episode where Rebecca Caroe was the interviewee.

At one point there is a short discussion about rowing data, and Rebecca remarks that people respond well to small challenges, leading to incremental improvements. YES!! I entirely agree with that. Measuring and trying to improve is a huge motivator. And it can start with simple measures. Even counting strokes on the erg. Or counting the number of strokes you can row with clean blades.

The workout was simple. I did two full sets of 5k, with a roughly one minute break in between. In the last, third interval, I rowed 2.5km at normal steady state pace, and then started to lower the stroke rate. I wanted to generate some data to look at the new Distance per Stroke metric on rowsandall.com.

I noticed that I should clean the erg. The drag factor is a bit low.

So, here are the charts with the nww metric:

Thursday

Rode to work and back on the bike. It was nice weather, and this is a very time efficient way to get 90 minutes of cross training. I am puzzled by the 600m difference between the morning and afternoon ride. It was the same route.

Planning

I have been playing with a new training plan for the coming 12 months. I am going to try out 9 day cycles, as opposed to week cycles. The nine day cycle will enable a very simple ‘rhythm’ of workouts:

Hard/easy/easy/hard/easy/easy/hard/easy/easy

Three of those cycles (plus a few days) is a calendar month, which I plan as training blocks with emphasis on a certain type of training, with a specific goal. The three cycles will be

  1. Intensive, low volume
  2. Low intensity, high volume
  3. Low intensity, medium volume
Of course reality will interfere and there will be deviations, but I hope that the longer cycle of nine days ensbles me to be more flexible.
Tomorrow: another hard day. A full out 8km row on the water. In the single. Whatever the weather.
Rowsandall.com

Apart from the new metric, I have also made a few changes in the code to make adding new metrics even easier. Introducing a new metric (from a new sensor, or a new calculated metric) now is almost as simple as adding a new line to a configuration file. In case anyone is interested.