The showdown that didn’t happen

Friday

With the new users flocking to rowsandall.com in droves, I get a lot of reports about issues. The new users use the site in different ways than the crew of beta testers, and so new bugs are being discovered. One of the bugs seems to have a root cause in the data we receive from the Concept2 logbook for interval workouts. So I did Thursday’s workout with ErgData instead of my favorite Painsled for iOS.

On Friday, I wanted to test the new version 5 of RowPro. I have been an avid user of RowPro, but that ended in March 2016, when I started experimenting with Painsled, and after that the OTW season took off and I didn’t spend much time on the erg. On the Analytics Blog, I wrote a post about applications to capture erg data, so I wanted to test the new RowPro myself.

The idea was to row for an hour, have RowPro and Painsled open at the same time (RowPro through USB, Painsled through bluetooth link), and then compare what Rowsandall.com can do with the data from both apps.

It wasn’t to be.

Not having rowed with RowPro for months, I forgot a few peculiarities of the program. I sat down on the erg, connected everything, programmed a 1 hour workout, and set off.

After six minutes I realized I had forgot to “connect” the Heart Rate belt to the PM5. I had no HR data. So the only thing I could do was stop the row.

In RowPro that means you have no data. When you abandon a row early, it is like if you didn’t row it, even if you stop a 60 minutes row after 55 minutes. It’s tough.

Luckily, Painsled was happily recording data on the side. There is much to be said for data redundancy.

I quickly changed the plan, connected my HR belt to the PM monitor, set up a 10k and set off:


Workout Summary - media/20170106-1710100o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|10000|40:30.0|02:01.5|195.3|21.4|164.8|178.0|11.5
W-|10000|40:31.0|02:01.6|194.7|21.3|164.5|178.0|11.6
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|178.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|01000|04:04.4|02:02.2|188.8|20.0|145.4|158.0|12.3
01|00750|03:01.3|02:00.9|198.0|21.0|158.8|162.0|11.8
02|00500|01:58.8|01:58.8|208.2|22.0|164.3|168.0|11.5
03|00250|00:58.3|01:56.6|221.0|22.9|168.2|170.0|11.3
04|00250|00:58.3|01:56.6|220.8|23.1|170.5|172.0|11.1
05|00500|02:00.8|02:00.8|198.9|22.0|169.0|171.0|11.3
06|00750|03:04.0|02:02.6|190.2|21.0|165.4|169.0|11.7
07|01000|04:09.7|02:04.8|180.0|20.0|162.4|165.0|12.0
08|01000|04:05.1|02:02.6|190.2|21.1|164.7|167.0|11.6
09|00750|03:00.4|02:00.2|201.0|22.1|168.3|171.0|11.3
10|00500|01:56.2|01:56.2|222.7|22.9|172.7|176.0|11.3
11|00250|00:57.0|01:54.1|235.4|24.4|177.0|178.0|10.8
12|00250|00:59.7|01:59.5|206.0|22.5|176.0|178.0|11.2
13|00500|02:02.7|02:02.7|189.9|22.3|171.1|175.0|11.0
14|00750|03:06.1|02:04.0|183.4|21.4|167.2|171.0|11.3
15|01000|04:09.1|02:04.5|181.2|20.6|166.8|171.0|11.7

And in pictures:

I was quite intrigued by the “work per stroke” plot as a function of distance. An interesting case of slacking off on the final rate ladder down to lower rates.

I also did a 2k cooling down row.

Saturday

Normally, Saturday is our regular “club run” day, but today was special. For more than a week now, the ice on our rowing lake is thick enough for skating. Until Monday, there was a perfect black layer of smooth ice, without snow.

On Monday I was still not well, and I did the erg row with video.

For the rest of the week, I was too busy, and still not well.

From Tuesday to Friday, there were frequent snow showers. Luckily, there was a stiff north wind as well, so there was just a thin layer of powder snow on the ice.

I spent 45 minutes wiping a 400m oval. Then I started skating, taking breaks to improve my “Olympic Oval” gradually.

The boys played ice hockey. Some people went on the lake on X country skis. I am going to do that tomorrow.

Here is the Strava summary: https://www.strava.com/activities/823892699/overview

And here is the SportTracks.mobi summary:

You can see from the HR plot that the snow wiping was quite hard work as well. After 90 minutes on the ice I was quite tired. It was also quite cold. When we started, it was -15 degrees C. When we finished, it was “only” 12 degrees below zero.