Monday: More race pace training

It’s a Labor Day in Europe and in this part that is a bank holiday.

The training plan that the coach sent didn’t take into account the fact that I am racing in 5 days, so I had to improvise a bit. But Thursday’s workout looked interesting.

3x(7x40sec/20sec)/5min at race pace

I woke up into a nice sunny day, but the trees were moving and the wind forecast wasn’t great, predicting 7 to 8 m/s, which on our lake means it may be a bit rough. The forecast was confirmed when I arrived at the club. So I decided to just cross the lake to Rokle and then take the river to Veveri Castle and beyond.

I got a little bit of water in the boat while crossing the lake. I am afraid it didn’t really look like rowing in this part, but the goal was just to cross. It was a little choppy, really:

On the river, I did the workout. I had to improvise a bit. Some of the turns are a bit sharp, so I took the rest instructions as “inspiration” and adjusted the rest and work intervals to suit the turns.

myimage (22)

This is a great training. Perhaps I should have increased the stroke rate a little, because it wasn’t as hard as I expected, but this was difficult on the river, with the turns, the wind, and the other traffic.

The need to watch the traffic and steer made it a bit hard to watch “Wash”, but I think there were a few intervals where I had the right emphasis.

bokeh plot (30)

 

bokeh plot (32)

 

The average “wash” value at 28spm and higher is 13.6 degrees, but if you look at the dots (each one being a stroke), you can see that this is skewed a lot by steering strokes and I would argue that I am closer to 12 degrees.

bokeh plot (33)

 

Here are “wash” and “effective length” vs stroke rate. I don’t think it makes sense to look at the averages. Crossing the lake twice, I had to revert to short strokes. There was no way I could do something that looked like rowing in those conditions. Also, after I finished the third interval, I paddled quite lightly, just enjoying the scenery.

And here is the video. I took the FIT file from the SpeedCoach and just did a quick DashWare overlay using the power, cadence and pace values. The averaging causes the metrics to change very quickly at times. Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to overlay Empower Oarlock metrics like slip, wash, catch and finish angle over the video? I guess you would have to do a slightly better job at synchronizing than I did, though:

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