March 30, 2017

How many times have I made this mistake? Many times.

Actually, I was fully aware that I was making this mistake when I made it. But I guess this is how I am wired. I was going to try anyway.

This is the failure mode:

1. Go on a business trip
2. Return late in the evening
3. Have a busy day at work catching up with all the stuff of running a research department
4. Plan to row an erg test (a 6k this time) in the evening
5. Fail

Our coach wanted us to row the spring 6k test a week ago, but I was in Racice rowing on the water. This week I was on a business trip. Today I was doing item 3 above, with on top of that a key meeting where I had to announce a major course change to a project team, as well as two technology demonstrations to our CTO. So it was quite a busy day,

Oh, and I hadn’t slept too well. Some stuff related to growing up children that kept me awake. I guess the usual stuff parents go through.

But I still wanted to give the 6k a try (and at the same time record a time for the 5142 meters CTC challenge). So I dialed up a 6k.


Workout Summary - media/20170330-2015100o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|06000|24:10.0|02:00.8|203.8|24.0|163.9|178.0|10.3
W-|06000|24:10.0|02:00.9|201.9|23.9|163.9|178.0|10.4
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|01500|05:32.6|01:50.9|254.5|26.6|166.2|178.0|10.2
01|01500|06:15.8|02:05.3|187.8|23.8|161.4|178.0|10.1
02|01500|06:09.1|02:03.0|188.0|22.7|163.1|168.0|10.7
03|01500|06:12.7|02:04.2|182.9|22.7|165.0|170.0|10.6


So you can see that I gave up after 2000m and made this an ordinary steady state row.

Well, I guess I will always dream.

Rowsberry Pi

Talking of dreaming. The Rowsberry Pi is going well. I have a quickly hacked version that logs my workouts automatically and sends each workout to a configured email address when you press the Menu button on the PM.

Rowing with the iPhone running Painsled, it was kind of cool to see emails coming in immediately after I pressed the menu button.

This project is now officially Open Source and it lives on Github. One developer has joined me and is doing a fine job of decluttering and refactoring the code.

The end goal should be an easy to use software that you can burn to a microSD disk and use with a Raspberry Pi. The software should be used as a datalogger, and will then be expanded to be much more than that.

Any rowing Software developers skilled in Python out there? Come and join the effort. I guess this is a dream project in a way … so if you like to do things that can’t be done, and you are a rower … come join!