May 18 2019
The working week (Monday to Friday)
Monday
A busy day at work and no training. I decided that recovery from an intensive weekend of racing was a good idea.
Tuesday
Weights! My personal trainer decided that I am ready for the “big exercises”. So we did only three of them:
- Bench press
- Dead lift
- Squat
The protocol is to start with light weights (or only the bar) as a warming up, then gradually increase the weights until I can do about 10 repeats, with stretching between each series of 10. Then weights are increased one more time to get to failure somewhere between 5 and 10 repeats. After that weights are reduced again to do a few series at 15 repeats.
For the deadlift and squat the protocol was a bit more gentle. We didn’t push to failure but stopped at the point where I was starting to fail on technique, i.e. I was starting to use the wrong muscles to just get the weights lifted.
After that we did some 10 minutes of exercising the core.
Boy, I did feel this training the next three days.
Wednesday
I have started calling our Masters eights crew together, and this time it was a success. We had 11 candidates show up, so we hit the lake with a double, a single, and an eight. The water was slightly rough and the coxswain slightly inexperienced, as the map clearly shows:
I had some data challenges. Forgot to charge my heart rate belt.
Well, it was just steady state. A pretty short workout as well, as some of our crew members were time pressed.
Thursday
More data issues. I still haven’t managed to sort my regatta bag and move some essential equipment from the regatta bag to the training bag. I have a pretty good system. A separate “rowing electronics” bag that goes into my small training bag or my big regatta bag. The problem with regattas is that they are so hectic that I become messy with where I put my gear. So rowing electronics ends up in the wrong part of my regatta bag, and then I show up on a training day to discover I have left the SpeedCoach holder at home. Sigh.
At least the OH1 heart rate arm band was charged. However, it didn’t seem to respond very well in the first 20 minutes of the workout.
The session was 4 series of 6×45″/75″ at race pace. These series are tuned to our lake length, and after doing one, I wondered if I would be able to complete the workout. In the end I manned up and just did it. It was so beautiful rowing weather that it would have been a sin to shorten the time on the water:
I gave myself some technique targets, focusing on finishing the stroke strong. I am not sure if I am fooling myself, but it looked like I was faster when I focused on that. Here are the data to prove it:
I am charting “Wash” vs “Boat Speed” for each “on” stroke. The line is my totally unscientific interpretation of the data. So a 5% pace improvement? That would be encouraging!
Friday
Another weights session. Bench press. Squats. Deadlift. And cable rows. Seventy five minutes of heavy work. I am due for a light steady state session today.
Jan 5 2021
November, December and year overview
Year Overview
Did anyone have a normal training year this year?
Of course not, but allow me to summarize what was different for me:
So how does this year compare to other years in terms of training. Here’s a screen shot from the Strava/Elevate App data:
The absolute top years were 2016 and 2017. Those also happen to be the years in which I did play a lot with lactate measurements, and I put in pretty long indoor rowing steady state workouts during the winter. It’s actually my goal to get back to that level, as these were also the years in which I won the most races.
Looking at the total number of hours, 2020 was pretty similar to 2018 and 2019. One could say that without travel and without having to commute between work and how, I could have put in more training hours. But I guess these were reduced by having fewer races to prepare for (zero, actually) and the energy I put into starting my new job and moving internationally. Also, in the first half of October, I was in quarantine with my family, so I couldn’t go out to train. Let’s look at the year in detail.
So, on average, I was working out 5 hours a week, but in “good” months, I was doing closer to 6 hours. That means that if I could stick to only “good” months, I would be able to get 50 more hours of training in in 2021. So that should be my target (as well as finally competing in some races again)!
The other things I notice when looking at those charts: I thought I did much more swimming in the beginning of the year, but it is actually just a few sessions in January and February. After June I haven;t done much indoor rowing. I did more cycling over the summer months. I am making good use of the mild winters here, closer to the North Sea, and getting in a large amount of on-the-water rowing instead of erging, which I very much enjoy. My rower is in a storage until February, and unless we get some real winter weather, I have no intention of taking it out of storage.
A final way to look at the year is through the performance chart. The Performance Manager is based on scientific literature on modeling human performance. A good description can be found here. You can see that I did a pretty good build up of fitness from January to the end of April. Actually, the second half of the first lockdown, when we were allowed to row OTW in singles again, was pretty good. From that moment on, I had some stress with finishing my old job and onboarding for my new one, moving house internationally, etc, and I am happy with every workout I got in. I completely stopped training when I was quarantined. After that, it has been a gradual build-up, taking a mini break around Christmas, and now looking at how to continue building my fitness. I think the most gains are to be had from making the workouts a little longer, not by adding more training days.
November and December
Much of November and December, I have been on a simple schedule. I start the week with a run, then a weights session, and close it off with one or two OTW sessions during the working week, a long row on Saturday (mostly in the single) and a technique row on Sunday.
They closed the gyms in the middle of December. That made sense from a Corona perspective, but I am missing the weights sessions. The gym I go to was already pretty empty (there was a maximum number of visitors), and I cleaned my hands and the machine before and after every exercise.
Some random photos from my runs and rows:
By sanderroosendaal • OTW, pictures, Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: 1x, 2x, OTW, rowing, steady state