Sunday: Training & Racing

Sunday breakfast in the beautiful garden of our friends’ house in Břeclav. Their garden is really a miracle. I am afraid we will never even approach this level of perfection. I am too sloppy and not really interested in gardening, and Romana doesn’t have enough time. Still, my doubles partner Radek, who is a garden architect, has redesigned our garden and we will implement the new design. But having breakfast looking at this garden in Břeclav, with nice people, was a treat.

My first race was in the afternoon, and I decided to do a light steady state session in the morning. There is a canal branching off the river, so I figured I could do the training there without hindering the ongoing races.

Of course I managed to mess up this plan a bit. Instead of doing a steady state as a “just row”, I decided to try out the 4x(4/3/2/1m)/3m rest that I had programmed into the SpeedCoach. That was OK but on the first interval I found out that the canal is a dead end, shorter than 10 minutes. So I had a turn in the first interval, and the second interval brought me back on the river for three minutes.

Luckily they were doing 500m races at that point in time, so I had the river for myself.

The third and fourth interval were on a quite narrow and windy part of the river, and paces were all over the place, mainly because I had to steer a lot. Also, wind and current varied a lot. I tried to do some estimates of the current on rowsandall.com, but I am not sure if I got it right. Still I can say that I rowed between 150W and 220W, and that is also how it felt, 3 on a 10 point Borg scale of Rate of Perceived Exertion. Or is it Perceived Rate of Exertion? Or Perceived Exertion?

The “Training with a power meter” book says that you should use the Borg scale at the beginning of the earlier intervals, so I guess that means that you have to estimate how hard it feels, not how tired you are.

I managed to sneak back to the rowing club just before the 1500m races would start. Got a friendly reprimand from one of the umpires for rowing on a course that was closed for training. He was right of course, but I just wanted to do some steady state.

Work Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|00817| 04:00 | 2:26.8| 18.5| 140 | 150 | 11.0
02|00649| 03:00 | 2:18.6| 20.7| 153 | 159 | 10.5
03|00368| 02:00 | 2:43.0| 20.5| 153 | 161 | 9.0
04|00231| 01:00 | 2:9.8| 23.0| 160 | 165 | 10.0
05|00828| 04:00 | 2:24.9| 18.8| 144 | 152 | 11.0
06|00646| 03:00 | 2:19.3| 20.7| 158 | 162 | 10.4
07|00423| 02:00 | 2:21.8| 22.0| 162 | 165 | 9.6
08|00218| 01:00 | 2:17.6| 23.0| 166 | 168 | 9.5
09|00779| 04:00 | 2:34.0| 19.0| 145 | 153 | 10.2
10|00596| 03:00 | 2:31.0| 20.7| 153 | 157 | 9.6
11|00400| 02:00 | 2:30.0| 22.5| 159 | 162 | 8.9
12|00206| 01:00 | 2:25.6| 23.0| 162 | 165 | 9.0
13|00815| 04:00 | 2:27.2| 19.0| 139 | 148 | 10.7
14|00635| 03:00 | 2:21.7| 20.0| 152 | 156 | 10.6
15|00421| 02:00 | 2:22.5| 22.0| 157 | 161 | 9.6
16|00222| 01:00 | 2:15.1| 23.0| 164 | 168 | 9.7
Workout Summary
--|08254| 40:00 | 2:25.3| 20.3| 151 | 168 | 10.2

In the afternoon I rowed two races in the eight. I rowed the mixed Masters eight, where we had the pleasure of rowing in Břeclav’s new Empacher and won. At the end of the afternoon I was drafted for a 300m sprint in a Men’s eight. We were up against the locals (with seats 7 and 8 taken by the Czech Pair who came 7th in Rio) in their new boat, and our boat was a mix of Juniors and Masters from various clubs, in the heavy 1987 Hudecek. Of course we came second (they beat us by a length over 300m), but we got a few nice bottles of wine for giving the Břeclav men competition.

In other races, daughter Lenka rowed two finals. They came third in the girls quad Final in a race that was re-started when they were leading after 500m and the two other boats clashed (umpire being the trainer of one of the quads in the clash). They also came third in the doubles Final.

My son Dominik enlarged his medal collection by steering a winning boys quad and winning a boys double final.

That was the end of a nice small regatta. While I was out sprinting in the eight, the kids had loaded the trailer, and apart from a small Sunday afternoon traffic jam into Brno the trip home was uneventful.

Dinner on our terrace, still 30 degrees at 7pm.

Břeclav rowing club. Finish "tower" and final straight part of the course
Břeclav rowing club. Finish “tower” and final straight part of the course
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