Mar 11 2017
Friday – 18x45sec – and fusion work
In the morning I hit the road early and drove to Prague. On the D1 route through the Czech-Moravian highlands I was surprised by two pretty heavy snowstorms, but I arrived (unexpectedly) on time, because there were hardly any traffic jams into the city.
Had a few meetings in our Prague office, then drove to Andel for a lunch with a few rowers interested in rowsandall.com. It was a very positive meeting, and perhaps some nice side projects result from it. It’s encouraging to see that people see the value of the little toolset I have built in the past year.
This was the blog post on the day I started to look at some Python code in an email from Greg. On March 17th, he had written. “Hey, check this out. I made a python post processor for Painsled stroke files. Still working on the time formats. Thought you’d be interested.”
Well, yes I was interested.
Currently I am working on Data Fusion. I need this because on my rows at the rowing club, I am working with Concept2 ergs with the older PM3 monitor. I have no heart rate dongle for that, so the idea is to capture the PM data with one app and record heart rate with another app. Then fuse the data, which means that I add the heart rate data to the PM data into a new workout. It sounds very simple, but there is some time alignment and interpolation involved. Fortunately, it is easy to get Python and its Pandas package to do this to your data.
Here is one successfully fused steady state workout (3×20 minutes):
Pretty cool stuff.
I did a sprinterval workout yesterday, after an uneventful drive back to Brno. I went to the rowing club and dialed up 45 seconds “on” vs 1:15 “off”. Unfortunately, Painsled didn’t do a very good job at recording the workout. It didn’t record the real power and pace in the “off” sections. Also, I need to replace the battery in my Wahoo heart rate belt. It is showing some weird value swings. Hope it is just the battery.
Here is the resulting plot (after data fusion):
Mar 11 2017
Saturday: Up and down, up and down, up and down the river
Another day at the river club house. First, Lenka went on the single. I gave her the SpeedCoach because I was curious to see her metrics.
During the workout of the girls, I did a crazy 50km tour around Brno, driving back home to get the papers to the company car that I had forgotten, fill up the car with diesel, then return the company car at work, get Romana’s car that was parked there, and return to the rowing club. When I returned after about an hour, the girls were still rowing.
I took some time to explore our river club house (1936). There are some 1930s notice boards, virtually unchanged. Also, you can see from the way the main club room is designed that rowing was an upper class sport in those days. It’s now rented out as store space, but this was a place with big open windows to a garden, and enough space to organize a ball.
Outside, I also opened what looked like a place to store oars, and I found about twenty wooden oars, in pretty good shape. Here are some random pictures from the 1926 chronicles:
Different times.
After Lenka’s row, it was my turn. I rowed up and down the river 2 and a bit times. There is really not much to say about these trainings. You cannot row really fast because of the turns and the traffic. I am really longing for the ice to melt and being able to train intensity rows on the lake.
That said, I dare to say that my boat feel is slowly returning. There were a few stroke sequences where the boat was running fine, according to my standards.
Here are the metric plots. I had catch angle and slip on the monitor and was pleased to see my catch angle consistently around 61 degrees, slip around 6 or 7 degrees when I was rowing well.
Accelerating slightly on the last bit of the recovery helps to get both catch angle and slip right. I have been working on that last year, when I didn’t have this excellent feedback tool, and I am happy to confirm that I was on the right track.
A few more of those fascinating old photos from our club. It’s a pity I don’t know the stories behind some of the scenes. That “new” building was our 1936 club house being built. Just two years before 1938-1945 …
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: OTW, rowing, single, steady state, training