September 2019

Sunday

The weather was so beautiful, it would be a sin to not sport outdoor. So a bike ride:

It was great fun. First, from home to the village of Lelekovice. In Lelekovice, a nice climb started:

This was the climb between 5 and 8km in the elevation profile. At the top, there were some nice forest trails down to the village of Vranov:

And then the big drop down to Sebrov-Katerina:

Then some gradual up and down to Lipuvka, and after that I tried out a new bike path leading gently downhill to Kurim:

Ninety minutes of bliss. I wasn’t fast, but I think an average heart rate of 145 beats per minute is a good workout on the bike. With a maximum heart rate achieved of 183 and a 10 minute interval with heart rate above 175 it was perhaps more of an irregular interval workout than steady state.

Monday

Stormy weather, so ergometer instead of On-The-Water rowing. I took it easy, putting more weight on finishing a full hour on the boring erg than achieving a certain power score:

Monday

No training. I need to change this as of next week. It’s nice to devote the Monday entirely to work, but I am seeing an increase in business travel in the near future, so I will need the Mondays for training.

Tuesday

An interesting morning at the rowing club. I tested the Randall foils. I have written an extensive report about it here.

Wednesday

Business travel to Prague. I took the 5:48 AM train.

I had an interesting meeting at the U.S. Ambassador’s residence in Prague. Then, as a substitute to exercise, I hiked from Prague 6 Dejvice to the center. So more than an hour of hiking. I took the 5:20 train back to Brno, but unfortunately, about 20km before Brno the train stopped. The train had hit a person, and they announced a 2 hour delay  because the police were investigating the accident. After about 30 minutes I left the train, walked back to the nearest train station and took a stop train to Brno. I was in bed quite late.

Thursday

I had to do an erg session late in the evening, because it was the only time left. After about 30 minutes I gave up. My heart rate was too high and I didn’t feel very well rested. There was also an issue that was nagging me. I had been checking the financial situation of Rowsandall.com and the numbers didn’t add up. After the row I found the culprit. I had forgotten to check the PayPal account.

Friday

A pretty heavy weights session. Making progress on deadlifts and squats. The session ended with Plank and Plank to Push-up, which killed me completely. Happy though to have completed such a heavy session. In the week after WRMR I had too much accumulated fatigue to really go up with the weights.

Saturday

On Saturday, I did the first (and last) 6k trial before next week’s 6k race. I did it on our lake, and I used the blades with the Randall foils. My body was hurting from Friday’s weights workout.

The idea was to hold 220W and let the stroke rate sort out itself.

Turns out this was a bit too ambitious. I was pretty pleased to see the tailwind splits around 2:07 at 25spm, but when I turned around for the headwind 3km, the struggle started. On the positive side, I managed to fight off the handle down demons and kept pushing until the end, even though there were stretches where I was looking at a 2:20 split and really feeling like giving up.

I didn’t give up and completed the row.

I guess it wasn’t so bad, comparing it to a similar workout from two years ago:

Sunday

It’s another of those great, sunny September Sundays. This morning, I did some planning for next year’s rowing camps, then we went to the museum. The Technical Museum has an exhibition about the beginnings of sports in Brno.

That yellow boat in the back is a 2011 Empacher single, weight 65 to 75kg, and it’s the boat that won the 2012 London Olympics. Owned by the Czech Rowing Federation. I would love to try out that boat.

Most of the artefacts at the exhibition are from our rowing club. We got reprimanded by the guards for touching the artefacts. This was funny of course, because we were standing around boats and things that are normally lying around in our boat house and our repairs shed, so we touch and manipulate with them regularly.

For this afternoon, I have the choice of going to the rowing club to row the single, go out on the bike, or to row a steady state erg session. I think I will do the bike. It’s nice to do some cross training. I will go sculling tomorrow.

On Monday, I unloaded the boats from the trailer and gave them a good wash.

On Tuesday, I drove to Prague, which took me more than three hours. I checked in to the hotel and then took the walk from Strahov to Kampa Island. Here’s a picture I took on this 30 minute downhill walk.

There was some rain coming from the west, looking by the clouds. I had a very nice dinner in the restaurant Kalina Kampa.

On Wednesday, I spent the entire day in Jenec, presenting at a Drone conference:

The picture shows me before lunch and before I destroyed my tie by spilling the contents of a profiterole all over it. Petroleum ether came to the rescue, luckily.

No training on Thursday. It was another day of presenting, this time at the home base.

So after all the Linkedin-fame, Friday was a day for a workout.

To ease into training again.

My strength trainer totally got the point. An easy session, not too hard. You bet. I don’t know what she made me do but I felt it for two days afterwards. Just some deadlifts, squats, bench presses, cable rows, and other exercise.

On Saturday I did the first row after WRMR. A steady state in the single. I rowed up to beyond the castle and back:

It was a gorgeous row. The only problem was that I had forgotten my SpeedCoach at home. This always happens after a regatta. I have my rowing kit in the wrong bag, or I have to charge it, and I forget to put it in my standard rowing bag. Well, at least I had heart rate data from the Polar arm belt, and stroke rate and pace data from the Garmin watch.

Today, the weather was gorgeous. I had originally planned to go swimming, but with the sunshine and the nice autumn temperatures (18 to 22 degrees and sunny) I decided that a bike ride would be more like it.

I rode up to Vranov and back through mostly forest trails:

Here’s an example of a nice trail:

Going down through the forest, I didn’t take pictures. Actually, some places were so steep that I got off my bike and hiked.

I made a stop in the village of Lelekovice and a beer in a pub garden. It was nice to sit in the sun, listen to the silence, and gaze at the forest.

On Monday, we just loaded the boats. On Tuesday, we drove to lake Velence in Hungary, which is just a 3.5 hour drive from Brno. Boat trailer density increased steadily on the highway as we got closer to our destination. At Velence, our friends from Ostrava had reserved some nice boat rack space in the small boat peninsula. Our boats are on rack C16 on this photo:

There are many more boats to the right of this. After preparing our boats, Romana and I took our double for a spin:

On Wednesday morning, I managed a short training in the single:

On Thursday, I had no races. Romana and her crew had a fantastic victory in the Women’s D coxless pair:

When I was welcoming them back to the dock after the race, one of the ladies (the second from the left on the picture) was selected for doping test. I went with her, as she doesn’t spea kany other languages than Czech. In the end the whole exercise took more than three hours.

On Friday, it was time for me to race.

I was very nervous of course, but as always the nerves disappear after the first stroke.

I wanted to row around 330 to 350W for this row. Not everything went as planned. I came out of the start pretty well, but there were two guys who just rowed away from me. I was the leader of the rest. Around the 500m mark the others started to fall behind and I ended up rowing in no-man’s land, too far from the leaders, but too far ahead of the rest. Third place. A slow time of 3:59. All times were slow at this lake.

My 2x partner Kazi won his race in 3:56.

On Saturday, Kazi and I rowed a pretty good race. Again, somebody was depressingly fast out of the start and way ahead of us. At the start we were fifth, but we quickly passed some boats and then started to catch up with the second placed boat. We were third in a great time of 3:23, which would have one a few of the other heats.

The first race on Sunday morning was the Mixed 8+.

I really enjoyed racing the eight. It’s nice to sit in a big boat, and even great to sit on 5 seat. You just place your blade and pull, that’s it. We were up against Hodonin, 60 km from Brno, so rowing up to the start we joked with them that we could have done that race at home in Brno or Hodonin.

We were up against a International crew featuring some impressively muscular men. Still, we were one of the few boats being able to keep the pace with them. In the end we were third, 5 seconds behind the winners and 0.05 seconds behind Cambridge. Not bad, given that one of our men, Cenek, wasn’t pulling for the last 300 meters. This being just a spontaneous mixed eight, we had difficulty finding the fourth guy. In the end we got Cenek, who trains regularly, but seldom rows above 18 strokes per minute. Doing 35 and higher for more than three minutes, in combination with him being very nervous and having eaten a bit too much at the breakfast buffet, it killed him after 2 minutes and a bit. We paddled back to the dock and had a medic look at him. Everything was fine. Cenek took a nap under a tree and an hour later he was OK.

The final race of this great regatta was the mixed 2x.

This was our best race of this season. We had a great start and we raced some very good opponents, so again we ended up rowing in the middle of the pack. At every point in the race we were racing some other boat, and in the end we were able to race up pretty high and come in fourth place after a great fight for third place.

After that it was time to load all the boats on the trailer, have a quick lunch and drive home. We arrived home at 7pm, after a great regatta.

Romana had some great races (second place in two quads). The weather was great. We slept in a great hotel with a fantastic restaurant, had some good food and good wine. We met friends, chatted about rowing and other things.

Basically the last full week before the World Rowing Masters Regatta. Also the week in which we would have guests from the USA, Australia and New Zealand for the second Prygl Rowing Camp.

On Monday I did nothing. I think it was a typical long work day Monday. It’s become a habit to have Monday fully dedicated to work and not bother with any exercise.

On Tuesday, I did a 6x250m workout. The bad thing is that I don’t remember if I did it in the single or the double.

It looks like I rowed in the double. Why would I use the rowsandall.com power estimation functionality if I rowed it in the single? But the workout is recorded as a workout done in the single. I do vaguely remember that my Empower Oarlock battery was flat, and I probably also forgot to take the heart rate sensor. The splits do look more like a workout rowed in the single. Let’s assume I rowed this in the single.

On Wednesday, I did the last weights session before WRMR. In the evening, we had our welcome session for the camp.

On Thursday, I did a short paddle in the single, while the camp participants were doing their third session of the day. After the warming up, I did one 2k, starting at 24spm and increasing the stroke rate every 500m.

I had to stop early because I got waked by a coach’s launch. It’s ironic that it was my wife Romana who waked me.

On Friday, I had time for another short paddle with some speed bursts:

For a change, my heart rate sensor failed completely.

On Saturday, I did 2×10 minutes on the erg, as part of an ergometer data instruction session. The first ten minutes we rowed with feet out.

On Sunday, we did our only training in the WRMR mixed eight.