Friday to Monday

Friday

It was a hard day at work and I was looking forward to rowing OTW. Unfortunately, I also had some shopping to do and I got stuck in a traffic jam, spending 30 minutes trying to leave the mall parking garage. So instead of driving to the club, I headed home.

Sat on the erg, booted up the new Beta of Painsled, and tried to connect it to Zwift. I didn’t manage to get that going because I was short of one Bluetooth device. If I understand it well, the phone with Painsled running serves power data. You then need another device with a Zwift Mobile app which collects the data and relays it to the Zwift app running on the iPad. I may try it again, but I am waiting for the next beta of Painsled. You will understand why in a minute.

I put on the latest BRowShow Podcast about recovery and got going.

A nice first 30 minutes in which I pushed the average power to 185 Watts without seeing any alarming things happening, heart rate wise.

The second 30 minutes proceeded in a similar way. No issue at all. Average power 183W. Heart rate where I like it.

At the end of the session I did a lactate test. Recorded 2.1 mmol/L. A few minutes later, I did the test again, now measuring 1.9 mmol/L. I believe this indicates that I have been working in the desired training zone.

I didn’t get to row on the water, but at least I had a decent erg session in. I was looking forward to see the data. So I started export the workouts from Painsled to rowsandall.com, which is normally a simple email export from the app to workouts@rowsandall.com. This threw an error. I tried various settings, and 30 minutes later I still had no luck.

Later that evening, I downgraded to the normal version of Painsled, losing all data in the app in the process. So, no data for this workout.

So, let me recap.

  • A difficult day in the office
  • No OTW row because of traffic
  • A good OTE workout but no data to prove it
  • Oh, and a couple of bug reports on rowsandall.com.

On that last one, I had spent quite a lot of time doing some user interface upgrades on rowsandall.com, and on Friday I wanted to have all that finished and working. Instead, I was looking at some weird bugs, and there was no way I could understand what was going on. Sometimes, the site seems like a lot of hard work without some real benefits.

I wasn’t in the best mood.

Saturday

Got up early but not early enough. We all went to the rowing club with the idea to start a session at 9AM, and finish it in time for a club activity starting at 10.

I set up the erg on sliders and got going warming up. I was waiting for Romana’s girls to join, and wanted to join in their 6x1km/5min workout (at 6k pace, 28-30spm on sliders).

After a 2.5km warming up the girls disappeared for stretching. That turned into stretching and chatting and I did another 5k at steady state pace in the mean time.

By the time the girls came back to start the 6x1k, there was very little time left. I wasn’t in the best mood (again), because I knew I would have to stop at 10AM and wouldn’t be able to finish the workout.

Also, I had terrible issues with the sliders. I kept bumping against the ends of them. I don’t know if I set them up wrongly or if my technique was so terrible, but it just wasn’t working. I basically became so annoyed that I stopped and walked away from the erg in the third 1k.

Notice the erratic second 1k interval. I really was a jerk on Saturday.

The activity starting at 10AM was mowing the banks of the lake, an activity that we as rowing club members have to do, and I didn’t want to let the others down. So I spent three hours mowing and clearing one part of the lake’s bank. It was a good way to channel some bad energy. Felt a lot better afterwards.

Sunday

The only thing I did was a short run with my daughter.

Oh, and a lot of moving in our house. The boys move to the big room in the attic. Romana’s study goes to the smaller room in the attic, and Lenka goes from the smaller room in the attic to the former boys’ room.

In the evening I found some time to finalize those rowsandall.com user interface improvements. These are a couple of tweaks that don’t change the functionality but make the loading of slower parts of the site much more attractive to the user.

Monday

So no risks today. A stable version of Painsled. Some nice music on, and a session from our club’s official training plan for Masters. I make my own plan, but I try to pick as many sessions from the official plan as possible. It makes it easier to socialize with the other Masters, and even do the odd training together in the club erg room. Today it was

3x15min/4min with 15 min as 3x4min @ 20spm, 1min @24spm

Here’s the result. It wasn’t too hard to do. I am not sure about the physiological training effect of the 24spm speed bumps, but it broke down the 15 minutes in a nice way.

With a 2.5km warming up, that is 16k for the session.