Mar 26 2018
Sunday – breaking ice with the ladies
The Veterans Ladies were missing a fourth person, so they offered me a stroke seat in a quad outing on Sunday afternoon. I was in for a nice, short row, so I gladly accepted.
Romana and I arrived early because there was some work to do. First, we put our single and double back on slings. Some experiments on Saturday had revealed that the new tight racks are a bit too tight. The guy who built them used two of the smallest boats as measures and some boats simply don’t fit. Everything has to be disassembled and rebuilt from scratch.
Then, I wanted to make sure the quad was in good order. There are a few crews in our club with a habit of cannibalizing club equipment, so in the popular boats you can never be sure you are using the original foot stretchers, sliding seats, and more.
The situation was not good. A lot of red C rings were missing under the oarlocks, and the club’s spare part are in Italy with the Juniors and Men on their rowing camp. So I had to take from my own spare parts collection. Also, the stroke seat foot stretcher was not the original one, but I had no way to fix that, and finally some parts of the rudder were missing. The boat was rowable, but it would take a bit more effort for me as a steering stroke to make sure we were going straight.
Finally, we launched, and in the mean time the wind had strengthened. It was a few degrees above the freezing point and the waves were pretty strong. After building up from arms only to a full length stroke, I settled on 16 SPM and we tried to steady the balance on waves, in a blazing tailwind, at this low stroke rate.
I love these kind of challenges, and I think it really helped us rowing technically well, when we went in to the narrow twisty bit of the gorge at the north end of our lake. The idea was to find quiet water, and we did.
It was nice to find out I could still toe steer a quad blindly through the narrow twisty bit. With a slow turning boat you have to make sure you are a little “higher” going into a turn, and I managed pretty well, relying on our bow seat to be on the lookout for any traffic or obstacles.
Out of the twisty part, we were all glad and looking forward for the straight kilometer, and I guess our bow seat reduced the frequency of looking. In fact, it was me who spotted the ice first, and very late. We made an emergency stop, breaking ice with our blades and boat, turning the river into a huge black field looking like a gigantic glass of Coke with ice cubes.
We backed out of our Coke with ice, then turned the boat, and headed back for the lake.
The wind had gotten stronger, a head wind now, and we were slow in making progress. When we were half way the lake, our 2 seat asked that we Row back to the club. I didn’t blame her, because through the waves, she and bow seat were wet from head to toe from splashes of icy water.
We returned safe and put the boat in slings for s thorough inspection. Luckily, no scratches or anything from our ice breaking adventure. We did mention the ice in our incident report but the bit about missing boat parts was longer.
I am typing this from a British Airways flight from Vienna to Heathrow, where I will board a plane to Phoenix, Arizona.
How-to
With no holder for a SpeedCoach and classical riggers on this quad, I decided to use the BoatCoach Android app on my waterproof Samsung phone. This works perfectly with the RAM mount and BoatCoach has a splash guard mode preventing splashes to accidentally activate the touch screen.
[amazon_link asins=’B074KG6G5Q’ template=’ProductCarousel’ store=’rowingdata-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’d047ac6e-3176-11e8-aa61-ad75becb394b’]
After working through a few data related bugs with the BoatCoach developer last fall, this app is pretty good for recording and showing stroke rate. I still think the user interface is overly complex, though. Using the app for the first time after a few months, I wasn’t sure if I was recording the outing at all, or if the app only recorded the data after starting a “piece”. As I hate having my crew waiting for me fiddling with menus and settings, I just kept the settings as is and hoped for the best. As a backup, I also recorded position and heart rate with the Garmin Forerunner watch. This connects to my Wahoo Tickr X heart rate belt through the ANT+ protocol. I was glad I did, because it turns out the BoatCoach app hadn’t connected with the BLE channel of the heart rate belt. So I ended up uploading two separate data sets to Rowsandall.com and then using Data Fusion to merge them.
[amazon_link asins=’B0160BC1FO,B013GMWTCU’ template=’ProductCarousel’ store=’rowingdata-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’0180615a-3177-11e8-87c1-5360e71c77fd’]
The power data were calculated using Rowsandall.com’s Physics Module. For this to work well, you need to input wind (strong today) and current (not applicable to this row), set the boat type correctly and estimate the average crew weight. If you get all this right, the Physics Module does a pretty good job at estimating power from boat speed and stroke rate. It is accurate enough to get a good value for the average and normalized Power, which is currently the most important metric for me on an outing like this. I just use it to get a value for the training load. As we rowed only 40 minutes and most of it was well below 20spm, the training load wasn’t very heavy.
Mar 31 2018
Two Trail Runs (and one Not So Trail run)
Tuesday
Hotel room in Phoenix. Up at 2:30. Spent some time reading emails, then decided it was time to hit the trails. On this trip, I was prepared. I had brought a head lamp and thus was able to fit in desert trail runs before dawn. It wasn’t particularly warm outside, about 9 degrees C, so I put a shirt with long sleeves over my T-shirt, got in the car and drove to the trailhead, arriving there at 5:45.
I saw a closed gate and was confused. Perhaps this part of the desert was closed for some reason? I drove back to the hotel, parked the car and started running, back to the trailhead.
When I arrived there, the gate was open, and I was able to see the sign saying that the trails opened only at 6AM.
Unfortunately, by that time it was time to run back to the hotel, take a shower, eat a breakfast and go to the office.
So no trail running on Tuesday. To-the-trail-running.
Wednesday
This time I was better prepared. I had discovered that the Apache Wash trailhead, a bit further away from the hotel, opened at 5AM. Same routine. This time I woke up at 3am. I did some email reading, some real reading, and then I got in the car and drove to Apache Wash.
It was a great run. It was pretty dark during the first 25 minutes, but the head lamp helped a lot. Better than trying to use the torch function on the iPhone.
Then, there is this moment when birds start to sing, and then the sun rises above the mountains to the east.
I was running on the Apache Wash (“AW”) loop, but from a quick glance at the trailhead map I estimated that doing the entire loop would take too long. I hesitated at a sign that said “Connector to AW”, about 25 minutes in, but then I continued, and after exactly 30 minutes, I turned around and ran back to the car.
Another “there and back” run. I tend to have a strong preference for loops, but on a new trail, in the desert, I didn’t want to risk. It didn’t matter much, because the experience was great. It’s also pretty much the only time I am outside. My company’s offices are bunkers without direct daylight, and I don’t count a quick run across the street to get lunch.
Thursday
Up at 4:30 this time. Same routine. A bit of emailing with the team back in Europe. Then in the car for a 15 minute drive to the AW trail head, putting on the head lamp and run.
I took a second quick glance at the map and learned that that “connector” trail after 25 minutes would be ideal, and I would be able to run a loop!
Strava told me I was 10th overall on this loop. Yay! I didn’t run that fast. I was able to get into what I call my “fifth gear” and run effortlessly, but I stopped to take pictures.
Sunrises (and sunsets) are beautiful in Arizona.
Friday
This morning, I packed and checked out from the hotel. I had a 8AM meeting in Tempe, so there was no time to go running. (Also, I woke up at 5:30 today.)
My 8AM in Tempe was followed by a 9AM meeting at the Sky Harbor Circle office (my company has many offices in Phoenix) was lasted until lunch time. I had lunch with a colleague, and when he had to go to the airport, I drove over to the botanical gardens. That was my exercise for the day, a 2 mile strawl through the botanical gardens.
Now I am at the gate, an hour before boarding my flight to Heathrow. In Heathrow, I will connect to Prague, followed by a 2 hour drive to Brno, which brings me home late Saturday night. I predict that I will not be able to fit in a workout on Saturday.
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: arizona running, cross training, trail running