October 2016

Oct 16 2016

Wednesday – Friday: Business Trip

Wednesday

Flight to Brussels and a planned rest day. Preparation of the Thursday meetings and a solo dinner in Hanedan, a Turkish fast food close to the hotel. Fast food sounds awful, but to be honest I think this place serves healthier food than the hotel restaurant. You don’t have to eat all the meat, and there is a lot of vegetables and salad around it. The problem, of course, is that all the meat gets eaten.

Not bad for fast food. The starter was a nice salad with olives.

Thursday

Workout: A mini hotel triathlon, i.e. 10 minutes elliptical, 10 minutes treadmill, 10 minutes spinning. Then a 45 minute weights workout.

Then a full day of meetings, and a late flight home.

Friday

My planned exercise for the day was 2×45 minutes of easy cycling, the ride to work and back. Unfortunately, I discovered my tire was flat. So I changed to normal clothes and drove to work in the car, planning to return in time to get in a 90 minute erg.

Work was longer than expected and I arrived home late and tired. No energy for a workout.

On a day after a business trip you have to have the little tricks ready to make sure you do the workout. This time, the tricks didn’t work because of the flat tire.

Also: DOMS.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: crosstraining, hotel gym, rowing, training, weights

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Oct 11 2016

Steady State and some memories

Today’s session was planned as 80-90 minutes of steady state, but it wasn’t to be. When I arrived at the club just before 7am, I had some business to do with the head coach, which took more than I expected, so I didn’t launch before 7:30. After the workout, work would be waiting and there was much to do, so I decided to shorten the session to 12km. As the lake was getting choppy, I decided to take the gorge to the castle and back. In this time of the year, that is always a great choice. The trees are now more colored every day, and the water in the gorge is flat and easy to row with less wind than on the lake.

It’s going to be 15 degrees and sunny on Saturday. Maybe I should take some pictures.

This being the first row after a race also meant that things were a bit improvised. Packing my stuff, I had concentrated on getting enough clothes into the bag to have a good choice of layers depending on the weather. That meant that I had forgotten to pack my Wahoo Tickr, which is usually a part of my rowing bag, but was left outside after Sunday’s bike ride. So, no heart rate data today. I estimate it to be the usual steady state stuff, average heart rate somewhere between 150 and 155bpm.

Today I read a nice blog post by Jeff Bolster, Keeping it Simple. I found this piece because of a blog by Göran R Buckhorn on Hear the Boat Sing.

Reading about the rowing boats of the past I was reminded of my mother’s parents, who lived as vegetable farmers in Sloterpolder, a part of the world that has literally disappeared under the post-war expansion of Amsterdam. At my grandparents’ well-attended birthday parties, we grandchildren played in one part of the room while the old people were sharing old memories in the other part of the room. I found the interesting website “Geheugen van West” (Memory of West Amsterdam) which seemed as a continuation of these birthday parties, minus the cigar smoke and the “Jonge” (Dutch gin). The site collects stories from old people in “West” and “pre-West”, and has old documents and pictures.

I am sharing this because rowing boats was an integral part of the Sloterpolder. To get to your house from the public road, you had to row. To bring vegetables to the markets in Amsterdam, people rowed. To go to the library in the city, you rowed. Here are some pictures.

sloterpolder_1946-jpgd9ed62b2d0c131030d6577fdca9a46df — The person on the right is identified as “Piet Sickman”, which is a name I remember from the stories, and some of the Sickmans are my distant relatives. Boy is unidentified.

jan_harte-jpg811612fb111b2f7b157e54a0e656215e — The polder. Amsterdam in the background

het_huis_aan_de_slotervaart_in_sloterpolder-jpg5c48f60d876c211cb53984f7a76afcaf — My parents have some pictures of my grandparents’ house. It looked pretty similar to this one. The greenhouses in the back of the “garden”

The guy on the left is "Ome Han", also a name that rings a bell — The guy on the left is “Ome Han”, also a name that rings a bell, but it could be coincidence as it is a very common name

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 2 • Tags: OTW, river, rowing, single, steady state, training

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Oct 10 2016

Steady State 4×15 minutes

A long day at work. Also, I didn’t really want to spend time driving to and from the lake. Too much other stuff to do.

So it was a steady state session on the erg. I decided to try a 4x15min format instead of 3x20min, and I liked it. At 185W, the 15 minute intervals gave me a predicted distance of just above 3600 meters, so I could mentally split all the intervals in 6 pieces of 600m. I need to do these mind games to avoid stopping rowing out of boredom. I need to download something interesting to listen to.

Workout Summary - C:/Downloads/4x15minb.csv --|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg --|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS --|14996|63:29.0|02:07.0|21.4|150.1|168.0|11.0 W-|14546|59:51.0|02:03.5|21.4|150.7|168.0|11.3 Workout Details #-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS- 01|03629|14:56.4|02:03.5|21.1|138.9|149.0|11.5 02|03645|14:58.0|02:03.2|21.5|149.8|158.0|11.3 03|03636|14:58.2|02:03.5|21.6|155.4|168.0|11.2 04|03636|14:58.9|02:03.6|21.5|158.8|163.0|11.3

Good statistics, I think. Heart rate behaved nicely. It felt hard at the beginning, but that was gone after five minutes. I also had some good music from the “Music to erg” blog and spotify channel, which made it easy to fall into a rhythm (or a trance).

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 1 • Tags: concept2, erg, OTE, rowing, steady state, training

Oct 9 2016

Hradiště Head Race and a Wooden Eight from 1934

Friday

No training. In the evening, Romana and I made the program for Hradiště, i.e. the instructions where everybody would be at any given point in time. It’s not easy.

There’s a small bus with all the rowers at the start. One by one they do their warming up, get ready to race, and row the 6km race. Somebody needs to bring their shoes and some clothes to the finish, especially when it’s 9 degrees and chilly. Then there’s three singles that are used in the morning and in the afternoon. So at some point in time we have to drive my small trailer from the finish back to the start for those three singles. Then Romana wants to be at the start to help her girls with warming up and race prep. And I will spend the morning on the bike cheering various athletes. One thing is easy. Head coach will be in the big turn half way with his stopwatch, a pen and a note book. He will record all times and give key info to the guys racing, how they stand respective to their competitors.

So our day was planned from 7am to 5pm with 15 minute precision. Well, it’s an important race for the youth. Their 6km OTW time is measured against a standard, and each participant who scores more than 100% will be invited for a 6k erg race and some further testing. If successful, the youth will be part of the “Youth Sports Center” for rowing, and the club will receive state funding for covering training costs.

Saturday

So alarm clock at 6, leave house at 7, drive to rowing club to get small trailer, drive the 70km to Hradiště, park trailer. Then Romana takes the car to the start and I hop on the bike.

My first task was to cycle with one of the juniors, cheer and give steering instructions. Mr Cermak had the luxury of having his parents on the bike, so I chose to bike with Mr Kuncak. (Sometimes the parents’ steering instructions are counterproductive, but Kuncak is our biggest Ace in the juniors field.)

On the right bank you can cycle the entire 6km. On the left bank you can only do the final 3km. I chose to cycle on the left bank with a better bike path, because I didn’t want to spend my race energy cycling through a stubble-field on the right bank. Picked up Mr Kuncak with 3km to go and started cheering and steering. When I passed head coach we got the information that he was rowing in 2nd place with 2 seconds loss to the fastest guy. So I cheered and cheered. Shouted at him to just keep rowing the same 30spm stroke and hoping it would help.

When Mr Kuncak finished, I cycled back to wait for the race of my daughter Lenka. I saw Mr Cermak in passing, with his father cheering.

Had to spend more than an hour on the 3km point. The autumn sun disappeared and I did a few kilometers of cycling around the local villages just to stay warm.

Lenka arrived on our single. I measured the distance to the girl ahead of her. With 1 minute between starts, Lenka arrived 50 seconds behind that girl, so that was 10 seconds to the good. There was a big gap behind her, so a very positive situation to cheer and steer. Lenka was rowing 26spm, but that didn’t bother me as I knew she had been ill a week ago and the 26-27spm reflected her fitness. I think I cheered her through the tough part between 4km and 5km, and then got her rating up in the final km. Today, she told me she didn’t hear me well, and she didn’t understand what she heard. OK, so far for the coaching. 🙁

Mr Kuncak finished third in the Junior’s field, 5 seconds behind our club’s Mr Cermak, who surprised us all by coming second, just 0.5 seconds behind the winner. Lenka finished somewhere in the middle of her field, but her final time was good for a >100% score, which means she is still in the game!

Our club also won the Men’s single, the Boys 15/16 pair, and got a third place in the men’s lightweight single. Because of the points earned for all youth categories and the U23 rowers, this was a huge success in a race with very strong competion.

It was time to return to the small trailer. Three singles (including my single “Dolfijn” which was rowed by Lenka) were prepared. Romana arrived just in time with the car, and we drove to the start, where we unloaded the single, rigged them, and then drove back with the trailer (and some bags with shoes and dry clothes).

Then we took the car back to the start, and it was time for me to get ready for my own race.

Two years ago, I won, with a few seconds lead. Last year, I lost. Mr Polasek gave me 5 seconds. Unfortunately, I had found out during the morning, that Mr Polasek had cancelled. He had a cold last week and didn’t feel like it. At the start, I also found out that the two guys from Ostrava had cancelled. This kind of reduced the tension of the race. My club mate Eduard was the next fastest guy on paper, with me being the fastest. The other participants were three guys from the rowing club in Hradec Kralove, who looked like newbies in the Masters Rowing field, and Mr Bejbl from Brandys, who I estimated to be slower than me.

I found out it is good that I have pre-race routine with a lot of reserve time. Only when I put the single in the water, I found out that I had forgotten to move the footstretcher from Lenka’s position to mine. That is a problem, because one of the nuts is normal one, and you need a tool to unscrew it. Luckily, Romana was still on the bank collecting our slings, so I could get to the car and get the tool. I still had time enough to do a 2km warming up drill on the water.

Here is the full race video:

I made a terribly bad starting stroke, which made me smile and shake my head. Then I was off. After a few start strokes I dropped to my well-tested 27spm and didn’t dare to go higher. I think I made a wise decision. Looking at the power plot, corrected for the river’s current and the headwind, I more or less rowed a flat row in terms of power (Watt).

Pace helped by the river current, but in a slight headwind from 12 minutes onwards.

The guy starting 60 seconds before me was a 68 year old Masters rower. Just a year younger than my father! I passed him in the first kilometer, and then I had enough space to focus on my own rowing. I think I steered well. Perhaps the big turn at the beer brewery was a bit wider than could have been, but the river was really the fastest in the middle. Whenever I got closer to the banks, the pace numbers started to worsen.

After the big turn I was rowing into a light headwind, and I had to tell myself that it was a headwind, and not worry too much about the pace creeping up above 2:00 minutes per 500m.

In the final 1000m I started counting strokes, and in the final 500m I had company of our friend Ludek on the bike, which was very good because it helped me rate up to 28, 29 and then 30spm.

I did a 1km cooling down and when I was taking the single out of the water, I heard the speaker announce the results. I had won!

Second place was for my club mate Eduard.

It took us about 30 minutes to get the boats ready for transport, and then we walked over to the club house to receive our medals:

We arrived home around 8:30pm.

Sunday

Around 2pm we drove to the rowing club. We unloaded the trailer. I washed my single, and then we watched something very exciting.

Our club was founded in 1912, and in the old hangar at the river club house we have a few very old wooden boats. A few of our older club members have made it a project to restore these old boats. Their first piece was a 1944 clinker eight, one of the few left in this part of the world. Today, after more than 50 years, it was the first row for a 1934 clinker eight, a lighter and faster boat than the 1944 one (and made of better quality wood).

This was no easy restoration. A big part of the middle of the ship was rotten and had to be replaced completely.

By the way, 1934 was also in the time when Czechoslovakia, in the middle of a worldwide economic crisis, warmly welcomed German refugees, antifascists and jews escaping Nazi Germani. A bit of a contrast with the political climate of today. 🙁

My workout of today was cycling home from the rowing club. It was rainy and cold, but it was a nice recovery workout:

https://www.strava.com/activities/739596293

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 4 • Tags: head race, OTW, race, river, rowing, single

Oct 6 2016

Crack – a short session

Arrived at the club at 4pm just to see my daughter taking the single. A little miscommunication. Romana had told me in the morning that Lenka had school late and wouldn’t make it to practice. However, being nervous for the race in two days, Lenka had swapped a class and managed to be in time. Everybody wants to get OTW kilometers in to do some final technique fixes.

So I did 4km of unrecorded erg rowing on one of the rowing club ergs, and then I could get on the water. I wanted to do just a quick 6km round and then load the boat to the trailer.

The two kilometers from the dock to Rokle were uneventful. I did 20 strokes at head race pace into the headwind. At 2:04 pace, so probably a bit too hard. Then I turned around.

In front of the nude beach, I wanted to do another 20 strokes at head race pace. I was interested in the pace in the tailwind. After two strokes, I heard a loud cracking sound.

My wing rigger had cracked. This is not the first time it happened to me. This wing is already a replacement, after the original wing cracked a year and a half ago.

I guess the pictures are not very clear. Here you can see it happen in the session graph. The pace dip at 11 minutes is me turning around. The dip at 15:30 is when the rigger cracked.

So the only thing I could do was row back slowly to the dock, which was quite different because the oar angle had changed and my blades were disappearing under water. Then I called the manufacturer, a local boat builder.

He will bring a spare rigger this evening.

I loaded the boat on the trailer, took a shower and drove home, broken wing in the back of the car. It’s on the kitchen table now. I have measured all the rigging parameters and when the new rigger arrives in an hour or so, I will be able to set it up identically, such that Lenka will be able to do her practice row in Hradiste tomorrow morning.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 3 • Tags: broken wing, OTW, rowing

Oct 4 2016

A short OTW session and some thoughts about “SPI”

The featured image does not reflect today’s weather conditions.

Today’s session started quite dramatic. Seven AM. Rain. The wind didn’t seem so strong but it was creating a big chop. I am not a native speaker so haven’t mastered the 57 or more words the English language probably has to distinguish between different ways of water surface movement. Ripple. Chop. Waves. On the lake part of the outing, I would say it was significantly choppy. Now and then a wave would wash over my stern, and the waves definitely slowed down the rowing.

When I set off, I needed a few strokes to feel comfortable in the rough circumstances, but then I got moving, albeit slowly, towards Rokle, where the river part starts.

That is where I did my workout. Today it was just a few short bouts at head race pace, 5x3min/3min rest. After 2 intervals, the NK SpeedCoach started flashing “Low Memory”, which caused a bit of a panic. I stopped, abandoned the workout, and went to the list of workouts, intending to delete one or two older workouts to make space. It turns out that on the SpeedCoach, you can only erase all workouts, which clearly I didn’t want to do, because I needed the data of the warming up and the first two intervals. Luckily, the workout list also told me that I was consuming 90% of available memory, so I estimated that I still had about an hour of rowing left before the memory would be full.

Work Details - Part I #-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS- 01|00672| 03:00 |02:13.9| 26.3| 163 | 173 | 8.5 - headwind, turns 02|00536| 03:00 |02:47.9| 19.3| 146 | 172 | 9.2 - rest 03|00709| 03:00 |02:06.9| 27.0| 169 | 176 | 8.8 - headwind 04|00055| 00:20 |03:09.0| 17.3| 173 | 176 | 9.2 - abandoned Workout Summary --|01972| 09:20 | 2:22.1| 24.0| 161 | 176 | 8.8

Work Details - Part II #-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS- 01|00736| 03:00 |02:02.2| 27.3| 168 | 176 | 9.0 - tailwind 02|00554| 03:00 |02:42.4| 18.3| 146 | 175 | 10.1 - rest 03|00730| 03:00 |02:03.2| 27.7| 169 | 176 | 8.8 - tailwind, turns 04|00541| 03:00 |02:46.3| 18.7| 147 | 175 | 9.7 - rest 05|00743| 03:00 |02:01.1| 27.7| 169 | 177 | 9.0 - tailwind, chop 06|00555| 03:00 |02:42.1| 18.0| 145 | 175 | 10.3 - rest Workout Summary --|03859| 18:00 | 2:19.9| 22.9| 160 | 177 | 9.3

Two of the intervals were steering through a couple of tight turns and thus good “mirror practice”:

Here are the plots for the two parts:

I may have overestimated the wind strength a bit, because I think I was working a bit less hard in the headwind intervals and a bit harder in the tailwind intervals than suggested by the power values.

On Quadrant Charts in Cycling and Rowing

Cyclists with a power meter are fond of plotting pedal velocity against average effective pedal force. Here’s a good example:

There are several reasons why this plot is interesting. The power is effectively given by the product of the pedal velocity and the average effective pedal force. Crank length comes into play as well, but this is usually fixed. Cycling speeds and gearing can result in circumferential pedal velocities which are so fast that it limits the average effective pedal force.

An equivalent plot in rowing would be to plot the average handle force as a function of handle speed. There are a few issues with that:

The handle speeds are rarely that high that it limits the amount of force that you can apply
The power is not given by the product, because (especially on the erg) a rower is free to chose the duration of the recovery
We do not adjust the drag factor (OTE) or the rigging settings (OTW) during a race or training. We do however vary the stroke length by shortening up on the slide.

Here is a typical plot (of a recent 15km erg workout):

Not a lot to see.

As Thomas Carter (“Stelph”) has remarked, there is another plot that could be used for what cyclists call “Quadrant Analysis”, and here it is:

Here I plot the amount of Work done during the drive vs stroke rate. I should have not called this “Drive Energy”. “Work per Stroke” is a much better name, and I shall remind myself to change this. As with the cyclists plot, the power is essentially the stroke rate times the work per stroke (divided by 60 if you want power in Watts). Work per stroke is a function of drive length and drive force, and thus the plot doesn’t tell whether I shortened up or reduced force on the 25spm strokes, compared to the 20spm strokes (I did both).

I can imagine two ways of using this plot. For an analysis of a single session, you could see how fatigue influences drive energy and stroke rate. Usually, we go down in drive energy and increase the stroke rate to compensate. For multiple sessions, it could be interesting to see how these plots evolve over time for similar types of workouts. To be continued.

What is interesting is that the “Work per Stroke”, which is in my mind just a physical parameter to measure, is dividing the erg community. Dividing power by the stroke rate, you get something that erg rowers call SPI (Stroke Performance Index) and there are “believers” and “non-believers”. I believe there is some use, as long as we remember that average rowing power is a function of stroke length, handle force, and time taken on the recovery.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 9 • Tags: OTW, power analysis, river, rowing, single, training

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Oct 3 2016

Sunday – Recovery / Monday – Steady State: Autumn Colors!

Sunday

The plan called for a recovery cross training. Romana had to pick up some things from the river club house of our rowing club, and the boys needed some exercise as well. So the four of us took bicycles and did a big 2 hour loop through Brno. First following the brook that flows through our neighborhood, then over the Lesna hill and down to the Svitava river, which we followed for about 25 minutes. We crossed Komarov to the other river, Svratka, and followed it back into Brno and to our rowing club’s river base. Then back uphill to Kralovo Pole and home. 27 km in total, 2 hours at a leisurely pace. Average heart rate 97bpm, max heart rate 144 bpm when I was pushing Robin near the end. So not a very high suffer score, but I think the workout fulfilled its goal: Get some light exercise to help recover from Saturday’s session.

And Saturday’s session was hard. I was still feeling it in my legs and shoulders and even got some massage to help recover from it.

https://www.strava.com/activities/731901065/overview

Interesting development. The leaderboard for one of the segments was removed by Strava, because it was “flagged as hazardous”. I agree. It is a hazardous segment. You’re crossing two ramps to a four lane road in this segment:

https://www.strava.com/activities/731901065/segments/17951576030

In the evening, I planned my workouts for this week, and I also started planning the next meso cycles. I have a head race coming Saturday, and after that it is no OTW racing until April. I admit that I am looking forward to the winter period. I always feel it’s a nice time of the year. Many steady state sessions, laying the foundations for a successful next rowing season. For now, I am planning to do 4 Steady State rows, 1 other rowing session and one cross training session per week, plus cycling to and from work and strength training. The other session type will be “hard distance” trials in the beginning, as well as some of the lactate tests, although I am wondering whether I keep the “2 speed test” on the list.

Monday

I feel like I am still recovering from Saturday’s session, but today was a nice steady state row in the single. I went up to the castle and back. If I had a camera with me, I would have taken a picture. In the gorge, the leaves are starting to get yellow and orange and it’s very beautiful. This will probably not last long because the forecast for this week is cold and rainy weather, and hard wind for this afternoon and Tuesday. Today it was fantastic. The temperatures haven’t dropped yet and the “rain” was just a mild drizzle in the last 20 minutes of the row. The water was flat.

On the SpeedCoach, I had selected total time and total distance, and I didn’t know the heart rate until I analyzed the session afterwards. It turns out the average heart rate was only 139bpm. During the row, I tried to just focus on technique (and a bit of steering) and I was estimating I was going at around 170-180W of “equivalent erg pace”. From the graph, it seems I was more at 150W, increasing a bit in the second half. So perhaps I was working less hard than I thought I was, but the pace was pretty OK.

Here is a comparison of today’s row (blue line) with the Steady State row of last Tuesday (red line). Same section of the lake/river. Same time of the day:

So on Tuesday I rowed with an average heart rate of 150bpm, same average stroke rate. Same average temperature. Same distance. A week ago, my average pace was 2 seconds per 500m faster.

The difference is of course that a week ago, I started with a faster pace and a higher stroke rate, whereas today I eased into the session.

If you’re wondering what the little pace jump is at the end of the row. Coming back to the lake, I met three of our elite scullers who had just completed their warming up. I passed them while they were turning around, and then they started their session. I am not sure what they were doing, but they were at 25spm and catching up with me. I first did a test, rowing their rhythm for a few strokes to assess what their stroke rate was, then waited until the second guy was next to me and switched to 25spm. I stayed next to him during the few strokes, and then I turned the boat towards our club house. It was interesting to do. This was a heavyweight guy who has more experience in sweep rowing, and his 2k erg is around 6:10. His stroke was noisier, heavier, harder, but my silent, light, and weak stroke was ok to stay next to him for a few strokes, doing 1:59-2:01 pace.

In the esoteric plots part of this blog, here is the one for this session:

The Y axis is “Drive Energy”, which is the amount of energy you put into the motion of the boat. The X axis is stroke frequency. Multiplying these two parameters gets you the power. To illustrate this, rowing at 20SPM with 600J per stroke is the same power as 15spm with 800J per stroke, even though it will activate different fibers in your muscles. By the way, the energy per stroke is a parameter of the same dimensions as the infamous “SPI” that some people use on the erg.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 2 • Tags: OTW, river, rowing, single, steady state, training

1 2 3 4

October 2016

Wednesday – Friday: Business Trip

Steady State and some memories

Steady State 4×15 minutes

Hradiště Head Race and a Wooden Eight from 1934

Crack – a short session

A short OTW session and some thoughts about “SPI”

Sunday – Recovery / Monday – Steady State: Autumn Colors!

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