Aug 17 2018
Back OTW – short and intensive
After two weeks of vacation, spent doing nothing apart from walking around in nice Italian cities, and swimming, I was back on the water this morning.
I had told myself that actually swimming in the Mediterranean had kept my fitness sort of OK, but when I paddled away from the dock in my single, I had to check if I hadn’t caught some weeds around the fin. It felt … hard.
Apart from that everything was fine. I was geared up fully. My usual basic electronics set was expanded by a Scosche Rhythm 24 on my right upper arm (with the Polar OH1 on my left arm). The Scosche was connected to my iPhone in a waterproof bag and logging HRV. I am doing a little mini project trying to figure out the good, bad and ugly of HRV measurements for myself, so I needed to log the basic HRV measurements. More about this project later.
This would also be one of my few opportunities to do a full, semi-hard 2k on the Brno 2k course, for a virtual regatta that we have set up. So the outing was simple. A 3k warming up. A 2k “full out”. And then a 3k cooling down. Full out, after the vacation, meant stroking around head race pace to get to a semi decent time. There was no way I was going to be able to hold my usual numbers right now.
It got quite hard in the second 1000m of the 2k, when my heart rate entered the red zone and the lake became a little choppier. Here are the stats for the interesting bits of this workout.
Workout Summary - media/20180817-0630250o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|08309|45:11.0|02:43.1|138.7|21.3|145.1|182.0|08.6
W-|02404|10:10.0|02:06.9|224.9|26.7|165.8|182.0|08.8
R-|05912|35:01.0|02:57.7|113.7|19.8|139.1|182.0|09.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|00110|00:31.0|02:21.3|205.3|23.2|114.5|118.0|09.1
02|00096|00:25.0|02:10.1|257.5|27.9|118.2|124.0|08.3
03|00111|00:28.6|02:09.1|249.1|27.4|147.0|164.0|08.5
04|00108|00:27.2|02:05.3|219.7|24.5|141.0|148.0|09.8
05|01979|08:18.6|02:06.0|223.4|27.0|173.8|182.0|08.8
The empower metrics were in the usual ranges, so that may mean that I haven’t unlearned rowing entirely.
Aug 18 2018
Saturday – technique row in the double
Last chance to row the double before leaving to India on a business trip. Romana and I did just 10k with lots of technique exercises. Watching the video from the Munich (winning) race had made her think about a few technique flaws, her being shorter and taking the catch slightly early.
I think the early catches were a specific of that race in Munich. We led the field so early and we were increasing our lead so fast that Romana was in unknown race tactics domain and mistook my shouts for calming down for power tens. Racing in CZ, it is almost always trying to come back from behind.
We had Martin Krocil with us in the launch and he confirmed, Romana’s timing was perfect. She was just a bit shorter.
We did some technique exercises to determine the exact catch length and then our focus shifted to the tap down and hands away. I had RowP (https://www.rowingperformance.com/) running in the mode that shows the boat acceleration.
This chart is showing averages over a few strokes recorded between 15 and 30 minutes into the workout. When running in real time you can see the boat acceleration of the last stroke. The interesting feature I should the little acceleration bump around 30% in the chart above. When our timing was good and synchronous, that bump was short and sharp. When the timing of the hands away was off, the bump broke down in two or three smaller bumps.
We also measured oar angular velocity and oar trajectory (on my right scull) but I didn’t look at it during the race. The only parameter I looked at now and then was the total angle reported by the RowP app, because without an Empower Oarlock on the double this is a good alternative way to look at stroke length consistency.
Here are the charts anyway.
It was a light training but that was good. Temperatures were already very high, even though it was only 10am.
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: double, OTW, rowing, technique