May 2018

brnenske2k

May 31 2018

The Eight That Doesn’t Practice Again

Wednesday – Eights Day

As we have a 2k race on Sunday and as we are defending our Primatorky win on Saturday June 9th, it was time to continue not practicing. 🙂

This time we didn’t do a 4x4min/5min with the 4 minute interval being 1min/1min/1min/1min at 24/26/28/30spm.

I am still in “recovery mode” and planned to do only light UT2 workouts this week, so I broke my recovery plan for the sake of the team.

In a few days, I will also launch the “Brno 2K” 2 months of virtual racing on rowsandall.com. Here’s a poster I had designed for it:

The QR code links to this article explaining the principle of virtual racing in Czech and English.

This evening I am going to put up the posters on the notice boards of the two rowing clubs. It makes me a little nervous. I hope this catches on and a few people are going to participate, but as always when you stick your head out, it’s a scary thing.

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May 29 2018

Monday – Another recovery row & Tuesday – Strength

Monday

A hot day, but it was a holiday in the US so I could go to the rowing club early (because no calls with our US colleagues) so I had no excuse to put in another recovery row.

Before the row, I discussed my training plan for this week with our head coach. He confirmed, that after an absence of almost 2 weeks and illness, it is wise to stay at Steady State for a week. He said I even had permission to do “improper” (his words) steady state. He means: Err on the light side.

Just to see where I stand, I used rowsandall.com to compare Heart Rate response and Average Power for three “Steady State” sessions of approximately the same duration:

The May 5 workout is my “healthy” baseline. Sunday saw a drop from 160W (median Power) to 136W and heart rate up from 145bpm to 157bpm. On Monday, I was at 138W and 146bpm.

I used the Quiske sensor again, but on the other side. I wanted to look at the stroke curve. Unfortunately, I must have slightly misaligned the sensor compared to Sunday, and I didn’t get data I could compare.

I am able to look at total stroke angle though. Here’s a comparison, taking care to compare the same intervals:

It was slightly more choppy on 5/27 than on 5/28. Still, I was a bit longer according to both the Empower and the Quiske sensor. The Empower records a length differnce of 1.5-2 degrees from Sunday to Monday. Quiske, on the other hand, shows a shortening of 3.4 degrees going from the left hand to the right hand. So yes, I take that as a pretty strong indication of asymmetric rowing. I’ll look into this more and see if the picture remains like that.

Here are the charts (blue = Monday, green = Sunday):

Boat Acceleration. Green – Sunday, Blue – Monday
Oar angular speed. Green – Sunday, Blue – Monday

Just as a check, I added a piece that I recorded on Monday, but in contrast to the two recordings I compare above, it was rowed in tailwind conditions (cross tailwind).

Oar Angular Speed. Green – Sunday head crosswind, Blue – Monday head crosswind, Red – Monday tail crosswind

So according to Quiske my right hand gets a little longer in tailwind. Looking at Empower data for the same part of the row, my length doesn’t change compared to the headwind conditions. So does that suggest that I am more assymetric in headwind conditions?

Tuesday

Today, I decided to try out a new, small fitness center that opened a stone’s throw away from my office. It’s literally a 5 minute walk from the moment I drop my pencil to the moment I walk into the changing room. I can say I should really make use of this facility. It has 2 Model E ergs with PM 4 monitor. Here are a few pics of the possibilities for a strength workout:

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And the best thing is, to use this facility costs only CZK 80 (about 4 USD) per workout.

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May 28 2018

Long Silence – Back on the Lake Again

I posted my last blog post on Monday, two weeks ago. It was a race report of a strange race day. On that Monday, I thought I was just tired.

But when I woke up on Tuesday, I knew it was something a bit more serious. The common cold. Nothing to worry about. I would just take an extra rest day and then carry on.

Unfortunately, Tuesday and Wednesday were long and stressful work days. I got worse during Tuesday and even had a light fever. Finally, on Thursday, I found time to recover from home. By now I was coughing heavily, trying to control my temperature and generally extremely miserable.

Friday to Sunday I gradually got better, to the point that on Sunday I even took time to visit the rowing club and watch my sons race. I still wasn’t in any shape for exercise, but by now the main focus was to get healthy enough to fly to the US for a business trip.

On Monday I did so. The dry air on the plane and the 3 hour wait at the immigration in Atlanta didn’t help either.

Tuesday started with a working breakfast and ended with a business dinner.

Wednesday thru Friday I was locked up in the Atlanta Hilton hotel for a big tech symposium organized by my employer. The days were all the same. Working breakfast at 6:30. Tech lectures from 7:30 to 12:30. Working lunch. Breakout sessions between 13:15 and 18:00 and tech poster sessions from 18:00 to 21:00.

Heavy. Even if the days would have been lighter, I doubt I would have the energy to visit the fitness center. I was still coughing heavily and not feeling well.

On Friday evening, I boarded a plane to Amsterdam, and around 4pm on Saturday, I was home.

Romana arrived in the evening, with news from the regatta in Hodonin. On Sunday, she had to get back to Hodonin as a coach. After a long, lazy morning, I rode to the lake and did a slow steady state session in my single. Still coughing a bit but feeling better. The temperature was about 28 degrees C, so it was hard for me to judge if the rate of perceived exertion was due to the temperature or a dramatically reduced fitness level after 2 weeks of doing nothing.

It was a nice row. It was very hot but there was a bit of wind. There was a windsurfing race going on in front of our neighbors, the wind surfing club, so I started out in the South direction, which is very unusual for me. Arriving at Sirka for the second time, I was just in time to see the mass start of the swimming leg of the Brno Triathlon. That’s a lot of splashing!

The water was a little choppy but in a nice way. In Brno, we’re used to a bit of chop and we even enjoy it. As this was a hot day, there were swimmers of course (you have to really scan and find the heads to avoid rowing into them), and the usual armada of SUPs doing yoga, or meditating, or taking their dog out, and the armada of boys with girls on pedalos, drinking beer, taking selfies, and generally not concerned with surrounding traffic. So it was good to be back on the lake again.

The pauses between 40 and 45 minutes were me watching the Triathlon swim start.

I also used the row to check out the new generation Quiske rowing pods.

As you can see from the images, the first generation was 3D printed, while the New Generation is a nice, sleek, molded plastic. Quiske also improved the method to attach the pod to the oar, using an elastic sleeve which is a lot more secure and fixes the pod better. Good improvements.

Boat Acceleration
Oar angle velocity – notice slight acceleration into the catch

Thinking about the oar angle velocity chart. It starts with the catch on the left and the key there is to quickly accelerate the blade to match the water velocity and place the catch at exactly the right speed to produce a “V” shaped splash. Then we see the boat accelerating, which results in an angular velocity which increases during the drive. Really this part of the curve should closely match the boat speed curve. In the absence of blade slip, the two curves should match exactly (not in terms of exact shape, but one cannot drop while the other increases, and the other way round).  Around the catch, it all lines up perfectly. Around the final part of the pull I am less sure. The angular velocity starts to drop while the boat still accelerates (albeit slower), which must mean the blade is starting to drag through the water? At this point in the stroke, the pressure on the foot-stretcher is dropping, and that would mean an acceleration of the boat even if the blade was still in the water. Very interesting timing interplay and I need to model them a bit more.

For today, I am planning another slow, low rate row, and then I need to pick up my training plan again. I wonder how to restart after such a hiatus. Luckily, I will have three race weekends in a row. Good opportunity to check where I am.

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May 14 2018

Piestany Sunday – Mixed Feelings

Mixed Quad

We lost this race a year ago by half a stroke. It’s the local Piestany team’s specialty and they were very very certain that they would win. Every time I met one of them on Saturday, I was greeted with an evil smile and  a “See you tomorrow at 9 AM”. They had done most of their trainings as a mixed quad.

This is a 500m sprint. Short. Painful.

We decided to put our club’s 2 mixed double crews behind each other, with me on stroke and Romana on 3, “Krocan” on 2 and “Spaca” on bow.

Rowing up to the start was OK. Practice starts were good enough. We lined up in our lane 2, slightly behind Piestany because of the diagonal start line.

We were out of the starting blocks pretty good and within 5 strokes it was clear that it would be a race between Piestany and us. The two other crews were too far behind to catch up. We rated 45 spm for the first 10 strokes. Then I lowered a bit to 40spm.

We were one man up, i.e. I was rowing next to their 3 seat. Enough to control and my plan was to switch to controlled rowing and leave some energy for the final 100m.

With 300m to go, Krocan shouted “GO!” and started to rate up. Correct. Not the stroke man, the author of this blog, but the 2 seated. Suddenly stroke seat was late at the catch. What the … ?

The effect was immediately visible. We slowed down. Piestany started to move on us.

It was only a few centimeters per stroke but it was going in the wrong direction. All the ugly, uncoordinated rowing going on in my crew was sapping me of strength and we were basically defenseless.

The bank was cheering for the locals.

We lost the race on the finish line. I was very emotional, disappointed, angry, etc, and I confess that my first reaction was to turn around and telling “Krocan” that if he would like to stroke, he should have raised his hand when we were discussing the crew line-up. I used some pretty bad wording, which I won’t repeat.

I was even considering leaving the boat immediately, swim to the bank and let them return with three rowers. But, the last 1% of reasonableness that was left in me convinced me that that was a very bad idea.

We paddled back, and listened to the speaker announce our win.

Our win?

Yep, our win. Apparently we had beaten the locals by 0.25 seconds. I guess I was fooled by the diagonal finish line.

I did deeply apologize.

Learned something again. 🙁

Here are my thoughts on this, and I mean it. Apparently I have become pretty intolerant to bad sculling, to the point where I am rude at other people, where I perhaps should have politely declined to race this race. On the other hand, I didn’t want to spoil the party, and we’re also looking to make sure that all people in our Masters group have some races to race. So, as usual when I am frustrated, I have just myself to blame for some bad communication, expectations setting, and commitments made. I may learn this one day.

In the mean time, Robin came in third place in the double:

The Single

I had a little over an hour between the race in the mixed quad and my race in the single. My head cold was a bit more prominent every hour but I didn’t think it would limit me, even though it seemed to get to my throat as well. (Masters rower inserting a comment about his health as excuse for upcoming bad result? Perhaps.)

I wasn’t too worried, by the way. The strongest of my opponents was Antonin (“Tonda”) Pribil from Breclav, and he hasn’t beaten me yet.

So I rowed up to the start, and did a few practice starts and 10 stroke intervals at what I had decided to be my race target: 320 Watt on the power meter (which had been re-calibrated after NK discovered a software bug and is now showing 10% lower numbers than I am used to).

Tonda was in the lane next to me and slightly ahead at the start. Did I mention the diagonal starting line?

He had a really good start and trying to remain next to him cost me an initial ten strokes at 400W and higher. See the chart (and I don’t know what the Heart Rate sensor was thinking, but it clearly underreported my heart rate).

Pretty explosive, and what did I get? Tonda was still in front of me.

So now it was time for me to stick to the race plan. I dialed back to 320W (you can see that transition pretty clearly in the Watts part of the chart above). I knew Tonda is a bit of a Duracell Bunny, so I was hoping that he would fade sooner or later. I hoped for sooner.

The problem was that in the cross/headwind I had trouble even holding 320W. At 500m to go, Tonda was still ahead of me (a bit less than a length), and I was struggling to hold 320W. It may have been empty legs from the quad race. It may have had something to do with my upcoming cold. I was seeing numbers slightly below 300W.

The good news, though, was that Tonda was “stiffening” (as they say in Czech). He was experiencing the very unpleasant effects of a lactate rush and he was fading, like the bunnies in the Duracell commercials. It also helped that the head/crosswind was a bit stronger there and there were some ripples on the water. Normally that would be an advantage for a big guy like Tonda, but his problem is that he rows in Breclav on a very shielded river, where they have mirror flat water. After the race, he was talking about “the chop”. He should come and train in Brno.

Slowly, but surely, I pulled him in.

Then I pulled away from him. The power numbers were not near to where I wanted them to be, but I just kept going. Luckily for me, Tonda was broken, and I managed to create enough light between him and me to row the final 200m in a very comfortable lead.

In the Masters A/B race, our club president Tomas came second in a close finish, in a time that was a second faster than mine. I know he is 32, but it still hurt.

So four wins out of four. Still, I am not happy.

  1. My stupid behavior after the Mix Quad
  2. Not having the fastest time of all Masters singles
  3. Rowing under my power target in the single
  4. meh meh meh meh

I still picked up my medals and made a picture of my son’s coxed quad picking up theirs.

Robin is the second guy from the right. They also got another medal in the double (close finish):

And my other son Dominik stroked a coxed quad to victory, with Robin as a coxswain:

Here are some of the metrics charts for my single race:

Apart from power, the other metrics look okay, I think.

After all the excitement, we spent a bit over an hour loading the trailer, and then we drove home in a little over two hours. We were home by six pm.

Today, on Monday, I woke up feeling very tired and almost unable to speak. I am taking an extra rest day today.

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May 14 2018

Piestany Racing – Saturday

An early start in order to be in time for the Club Representatives meeting. Free coffee and entertaining listening to the “horse trading” of incomplete crews.

  • Club A: “I need a fourth girl for our Girls Quad”
  • Club B: “I have a thirteen year old. She’s been rowing for three months but she’s pretty good.”
  • Club C: “We have a fourteen year old who already raced last season”
  • Club A: “We also need a boat.”
  • Club C: “Never mind.”

Then it was time for the long wait. My first race was scheduled for 15:45. In the mean time, my sons did some good work. 

That last race actually took place an hour late. Around 2:30pm, the racing was stopped because of a thunderstorm:

In the end, there was no rain at all, because the thunderstorm passed just east of us, but it looked pretty scary for a while. And we were busy cleaning up tents and securing boats. At 3:30 it was announced that the program would continue with all races shifted by exactly one hour.

Quad

Then it was time for our Quad race. We were up against the locals from Slnava Piestany and our friends from Hodonin. Hodonin had quite big age differences in their crew (28 to 61) but Piestany could be dangerous.

Our strategy was to row as low stroke rate as possible and we succeeded. In lane 3, we started slightly behind the Piestany crew, but in the first 5 strokes we managed to come level and then pull out to a small lead of about half a length.

I lowered the stroke rate but not as drastically as the chart below suggests. I was using BoatCoach on the Android phone because it was easier to attach the phone to this boat which was missing a NK holder.

Apart from slightly wiggly steering from my part, the first half of the race was without incidents.

Around the 500m mark, we started to slowly row away from Piestany. I think we were gaining about 10 to 15 cm per stroke but we were moving. I think I was level with their bow man (I was on stroke seat) and there were less than 200 meters to go when I heard their call for a final sprint. I waited for one stroke, then called for our response. We rated up a bit and that secured our win.

The first win of the season!

Eight

Then it was time for our Masters eight, the crew that doesn’t practice. We rowed in a borrowed boat and there were some issues with the coxbox. While we were trying to fix them, Dominik’s single scull race was passing the finish line (his third 1k race of the day).

For the Under 14 year categories, the organization was giving out bronze, silver and gold medals. So Dominik secured another medal.

The race in the eight was great. We were quite nervous about the capabilities of SVK Bratislava, but it turned out we could perfectly control them. Our crew has a higher average age, but we were rowing “compact”. I love rowing in the eight. Sweep rowing is simple, and at 2 seat all I have to do is keep an eye on the stroke’s blade and watch my own technique. As the eight is light and fast, I visualize my hands moving along a rectangular box very quickly. This helps me putting the right accents on the catches and finishes, which are a little bit more “solid” than in the single.

We didn’t win by a big margin and we did have to rate up a bit by the end to match Bratislava’s offensive, but with 10 strokes to go I knew we were going to win, so I even had time to enjoy listening to the regatta speaker announcing our names as we stormed towards the finish line.

Our Coxswain’s name is incorrect. It should read V. Rytir

“Pazdi”‘s wife made some pictures of our cooling down row:

And there was time for a group picture (I had already switched to clean clothes):

The boy on the left is called Vit. We were a bit nervous of taking him as a cox, because he had never coxed an eight. But in the end he did a great job, and he was very enthusiastic after the race, telling all his friends how cool it is to steer such a long and fast boat.

Romana won the women’s Masters quad and came second in the women’s Masters double.

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May 14 2018

Last Week – leading up to Piestany Regatta

It was a bit too hectic to blog, so here is a summary.

Monday – Sprintervals

The plan called for 2x(8×40″/20″)/5min, at 32-34 strokes per minute. I eased that up a bit by shortening the interval length by 10 seconds and increasing the rest by 10 seconds. So 30″ on, 30″ off. I did that hoping that it would enable to focus on the quality of the workout.

I rowed this with our club president (who is a Masters A category rower, 32 years old) as a sparring partner. It was pretty exhausting but fun to do. At the end, we also did a few test starts. Rowed 11km in total.

Tuesday – Hiking

Tuesday was a holiday. We bought a one day ticket for all buses and trains in the region and traveled to Dolni Vestonice, hiked up to the castle, and then along the Palava Hills to Klentnice, where we had lunch at a beautifully restored vicarage turned restaurant.

View on the village of Pavlov from the castle

We ended tasting wine in Mikulov:

Then we took the bus home.

Wednesday

A busy day at work, and when I arrived at the club, the trailer loading activity was in full swing. I figured it would be better to load my single now, when there were still people around to help, rather than doing it solo after a training. The eight training had been canceled for lack of eight rowers. I wonder if some of them knew there was a trailer to be loaded.

After the trailer loading I drove home where I did a short strength workout (mainly body weight).

Thursday

A row in the double with Romana. We rowed steady state up to the castle. This was the first time this year the double felt “heavy”. We did some technique exercises and that lightened up the stroke a bit. Something must have been slightly wrong with the timing. I completely forgot to wear a heart rate sensor. Another 12k of steady state in the bank.

Friday

No training. On Friday evening, we drove to Piestany for the upcoming weekend’s racing.

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May 6 2018

Saturday – Steady State and RiM test

Interesting conditions. When we arrived, the lake was pretty choppy, but it calmed down while I prepared to row. Then, during the row, the chop became gradually worse. I actually enjoyed it and tried to row stably in all conditions.

I was also test driving RiM (Rowing in Motion) on Android. RiM is an app developed by Johannes Rudolph. RiM measures boat acceleration and allows you to analyze the dynamics and efficiency of your boat. The last time I used this app was in September 2015, so we have two entire seasons between data collection. Here’s a chart:

5 May 2018 vs September 2015 – 28spm. Click on the chart to see a bigger version.

And here are is another chart, looking also at 30spm:

The legend:

And some metrics:

Interesting that the Catch Slope (for the 30/31spm strokes) has become less steep over the two years, but the catch duration has shortened. The catch duration is the time during which the boat decelerates at the catch. So, my catches have become a bit less hard and thus the boat decelerates less. That would be a good development and something I have been working on. The question is whether the differences are significant, and whether these two small samples are characteristic.

This also shows some of the weakness of analysis based on picking a number of strokes. One needs an underlying model of what is going on, linking the metrics at different stroke rates to one underlying stroke characteristic, and monitor the metric continuously over time, for every stroke. The question is, of course, if a 20spm stroke has a similar characteristic as a 36spm stroke. I think good scullers adapt to the different boat speed and boat dynamics.

Anyway, I’d love to hear where these metrics are in comparison of some of my readers, if they use RiM as well.

In the final 15 minutes of the row, I switched off RiM and used the phone camera to record a sternward view of the chop. Here’s a little video compilation:

The practice start at 12 minutes into the row was liked by rowsandall.com with the following email:

Given that I am now on 10% lower power values and I haven’t corrected the old ones, that is a nice way to tell me that that start wasn’t bad at all. It’s not unimportant what happens in the first 10 seconds of a race.

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