Nov 16 2016
Monday/Tuesday – Bulgaria
Monday
A long day. I left for Brno airport just before lunch time, to take the flight to Munich, expecting to take a lunch at the layover in Munich.
The flight to Munich had a 3 hour delay. We were offered money to buy refreshments at Brno airport, but the choice of healthy food is not exactly overwhelming there. Anyway, with work to do, documents to read, and internet connection, the three hours of quiet working time was definitely not wasted.
Arrived in Sofia at 10pm, which means I missed the business dinner with our local partners that we were invited to. A good start!
The taxi from the airport to the hotel drove 140 km/h on a road with a speed limit of 80 km/h and signs warning for speed cameras. Crashed into hotel bed and slept.
Tuesday
Headed to the hotel gym and did an aerobic warming up (or was it a waking up). Ten minutes on an elliptic, ten minutes on the treadmill, and 10 minutes on a spinning bike. The elliptical fitness trainer was of an interesting make. It was constructed in such a way that you could vary the stride length, which meant you could vary between something resembling stairs walking (short stride) and cross country skiing (long stride). It was fun, actually, to vary this.
Then it was time for weights. The problem was that the 25 square meter gym was by now filled with about 7 people, which made it a bit difficult to work out. On top of that, the hotel was the venue for some kind of military conference, so the weights stations were quite popular. I did some bench presses, and then I headed back to the hotel room, where I completed the workout with sit ups, reverse push ups across the bed and the cupboard, and back exercises.
This morning’s taxi driver was even more interesting than the one of Monday night. This time it was a bipolar guy with an economics degree, who took the outcome of the Bulgarian elections very seriously. At one crossing he got fed up of waiting to turn left, crossed over to the opposite side of the street, drove 150m into upcoming traffic, exclaiming that he didn’t care any more, passing police (who didn’t seem to care), and turned left. Then he started to talk about moving to Germany to take a cleaning job.
Meetings were good. At the end of the day I took a taxi ride to the airport and a flight to Vienna, and after two hours in the car I arrived home. The taxi ride to the airport was extremely boring (for Bulgarian standards).
Interestingly, the Garmin Forerunner seems to have captured speed from the treadmill:
https://www.strava.com/activities/775807378
Joe Friel’s blog is relevant: http://www.joefrielsblog.com/2016/11/travel-and-training.html
Nov 16 2016
New Painsled beta, steady state erg and mind games; and playing with data
Painsled iOS published a new beta version of their Concept2 data capture app. It’s really a very promising application and it has now gotten even better. Of all the ways to capture erg data, Painsled is the most complete. Now they have added stroke force profile feedback to their app, so besides safely capturing all your strokes for post workout analysis, there is also a useful screen to see how consistent you are from stroke to stroke, while you are doing the workout.
This being a beta, it comes with very little explanation, but the graph looks like a standard stroke force profile, but it is overlaid on the past few strokes. Also, during the recovery, there is a bar which moves across the screen to a second bar. I think that when you take the catch exactly when the two white bars match, you are exactly copying your previous stroke (or perhaps the average over the past few strokes). I need to ask the developer what it does exactly, but I think it is very powerful, especially for steady state, where working on technique and stroke consistency is a big sub-goal of each workout.
Having data captured in painsled, I send them by email to workouts @ rowsandall.com, where they automatically end up in my account. Here are the stats of the workout as they arrived.
Workout Summary - media/mailbox_attachments/2016/11/16/aa5e11a267c142448e0aaedb6cd95eea.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|14999|63:31.0|02:07.0|176.6|20.2|158.9|174.0|11.7
W-|15005|63:31.0|02:07.0|176.4|20.2|158.9|174.0|11.7
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|174.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|01179|04:57.9|02:06.4|170.4|20.1|130.1|150.0|11.8
02|01196|05:00.4|02:05.6|176.8|19.5|149.4|154.0|12.3
03|01204|04:54.7|02:02.4|191.6|20.4|158.1|165.0|12.0
04|01212|05:01.8|02:04.5|182.0|19.9|160.8|163.0|12.1
05|01196|05:00.6|02:05.6|177.9|20.0|160.4|167.0|11.9
06|01214|05:02.4|02:04.6|182.3|20.5|164.2|168.0|11.8
07|01124|05:09.0|02:17.4|160.1|19.8|155.4|168.0|11.0
08|01216|04:59.8|02:03.3|188.0|20.8|165.4|170.0|11.7
09|01192|04:59.1|02:05.5|177.6|20.0|166.6|170.0|12.0
10|01202|05:01.0|02:05.2|180.1|20.3|167.5|171.0|11.8
11|01203|05:00.2|02:04.8|182.3|20.5|169.3|174.0|11.7
12|01139|05:10.6|02:16.4|167.3|20.5|164.1|174.0|10.7
13|00726|03:13.9|02:13.5|147.3|19.9|152.0|159.0|11.3
That’s basically an hour of “Just Row” at steady state. But wait, to break the boredom I had some structure in the workout. After the business travel and another long day at work (and a “Monthly Operations Review”, a 4 hour marathon meeting) I arrived home empty, tired, and not motivated to work out. I had dragged myself to the erg and after 2k of warming up I came up with a mind game that might motivate me to row a full hour.
I decided to row 8x1500m, with each 1500m divided as 750m at 18spm, 500m at 20spm, and 250m at 22spm. Somehow, distance based rowing always makes the time go by faster to me, compared to time based intervals.
I paddled the final 250m of the fourth interval and drank some water. Finally I completed the workout without problems. On rowsandall.com, I can add this interval information after the fact. The workout summary then becomes:
Workout Summary - media/20161116-20100719o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|15004|63:30.0|02:07.0|176.6|20.2|158.9|174.0|11.7
W-|14755|61:59.0|02:06.1|177.9|20.2|159.2|174.0|11.8
R-|00250|01:31.0|03:03.3|094.0|18.8|142.7|174.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|02000|08:23.5|02:05.9|173.6|20.0|137.6|151.0|11.9 - Warming up
02|01500|06:09.9|02:03.3|187.5|20.0|156.0|165.0|12.2
03|01500|06:11.0|02:03.7|185.9|20.2|161.6|167.0|12.0
04|01500|06:15.1|02:05.0|180.3|20.4|161.0|168.0|11.8
05|01250|05:13.0|02:05.2|179.3|20.1|164.3|168.0|11.9
06|01500|06:12.0|02:04.0|184.5|20.4|162.4|170.0|11.8
07|01500|06:12.8|02:04.3|183.6|20.5|167.4|171.0|11.8
08|01500|06:13.9|02:04.6|182.7|20.5|168.1|173.0|11.7
09|01500|06:15.3|02:05.1|180.2|20.5|168.2|174.0|11.7
10|01005|04:53.6|02:26.1|134.1|19.3|152.2|172.0|10.7 - Cooling Down
And here are the plots:
The Work per stroke for all strokes (except the 250m of paddling in the middle):
Same plot, but only for the 8x1500m (excluding the 250m of paddling):
Ah, so the “structured mind game” helped to make the strokes more consistent! Just for fun, peak and average force for the same stroke selection:
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: concept2, erg, OTE, painsled, rowing, steady state, training