The rest of the week

After Tuesday’s 3x6min session I packed my travel bag and hopped on a train to Vienna. It was nice to watch the Neue Donau regatta course when crossing the railway bridge. A few days before, Romana and I had had a few great races there.

I took a plane to Brussels and arrived late, tired, and sweaty. I knew I was really exhausted after a long weekend of racing and not taking any rest after it.

I was supposed to do a weights session on Wednesday morning, but I just stayed longer in my hotel bed instead. Actually, I did get up and put on my workout clothes, but then I returned to bed. My body just didn’t feel like it.

A long day of meetings in Brussels, then a flight back to Vienna, where a driver picked me up for the final 2 hour stretch home. I wanted to sleep in the car, but the little chat with the driver turned into a 2 hour long conversation about football (soccer for my US readers), building permits and other important things in life. It was nice.

On Thursday, I had a meeting I was moderating, starting at 8am. That was hard. At the end of the day, I had time for my weights session. Sixty minutes of various weight lifting exercises. Boring, but useful.

Rowing outside, at the end of the day, would have been very hard anyway. It was 35 degrees C.

Friday

Overnight, the temperature dropped by 20 degrees, from 35 to a cold 15 C when I launched my single on Friday morning.

It was very choppy so I rowed up the gorge to the castle, and a little beyond.

All that green is forest. When I go rowing in the morning and go in the gorge, I always feel very lucky to be out enjoying the nature. In the NW most stretch, after I turn and start rowing south again, I see a few higher hills from the Czech Moravian Highlands in the distance, and otherwise I am just surrounded by forest. The city seems very far away.

My Empower oarlock disconnected and wouldn’t reconnect with 3km to go. Only switching off and on the SpeedCoach did the trick. Luckily, I have means to glue together the data from two “workout” files, like I did in the chart above.

I wanted to work on technique but got carried away by the views and it ended up as just rowing for pleasure. Not a bad thing, I guess.

Saturday

The wind had gotten even stronger overnight and we were looking at white caps. Not good weather to do the intensive session that we had planned. Eventually we decided to do it on ergs. We put three ergs on coupled sliders, so I was stroking a 3 person “boat”, with Radka and Romana behind me. The session was a 1km/1km + 500m/500m + 1km, but we changed it to a 4min/4min + 2min/2min + 4min erg session so we could all row in sync.

As this was an unexpected erg session, I didn’t have the connector cable with me. I did record heart rate and the data show that I have been up to 186bpm, which tells you how hard work this session was. 65 minutes of rowing in total, because we did long warming up and cooling down.

This session came from our club head coach and I like it. The final 4 minute was really tough, after only 2 minutes of rest after the 2 minute work interval. Pretty good race preparation.

Sunday

It seemed to be less windy this morning, so at breakfast Romana and I said to each other that we should go rowing, in case Monday turns out to be windy again. Arriving at the lake, it was actually much choppier than we had estimated at home. We really do need that web cam at the rowing club.

We took the double up into the gorge again and I made a conscious effort to stroke at low rate today. It was a great session, although the steering did slow us down a bit. Not a very long session, because we had to be back in time to do some groceries and to be ready for our visitors this afternoon.

We took our visitors to a place to eat and drink a bit, and the guest on the neighboring table was one of the country’s most notorious criminals, who served 23 years of his life sentence for two contract killings in the 1990s (which he has denied being guilty of) before receiving a presidential pardon a year ago, after which he achieved cult status.

I guess it gave some couleur locale to our visitors from out of town.

In other news, my son Dominik stroked a 4+ to a bronze medal at the Czech Championships in the boys 13/14 category:

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