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Dec 29 2017

Train rides, reading and a 6k

Tuesday – Steady State

We met at the rowing club. By the time everybody was ready for the 3x15min steady state workout, I had already done a 3km warming up.

Here is the entire workout in one chart combining warming up, main intervals and cooling down.

Heart rate data are slightly offset, because I recorded them separately and didn’t bother to adjust the time offset on the rowsandall.com site.

Wednesday – no training

In the morning, there were some chores around the house. Then we took the train to Pardubice to visit Romana’s mother. The entire trip takes two hours by car, and three hours by train and bus, but in this time of the year I prefer that. I spent most of the time reading. Before Christmas, I plundered the Math/Phys section of the Academia bookstore in Brno. In fact, I bought so many books that the one purchase earned me a lifetime 20% discount card.

The selection is not as great as Amazon.com, but their in-store coffee house has great espresso, and their Physics and Math section is serious, so there you go.

(A note to my American readers, who may be imagining something like the Barnes & Nobles coffee corner when I mention espresso in a bookstore: We are not too far from Italy, and all countries of the former Austro-Hungarian empire have a great coffee house tradition. We are in a different league here. Come over and try yourself.)

Thursday – 6k

Spent the morning at my mother in law, including lunch, and then a bus/train ride home. Again, lots of time for pleasant reading. The car alternative would have involved driving on wet snow and freezing rain. Arrived home around 4pm, so no excuse to skip the next Ranking Distance: 6k.

First, a nice long warming up. For the shorter ranking distances, a good warming up is important, and I have learned that it doesn’t hurt to do 20 minutes including some pretty tough intervals.

Then the main piece. The CP chart gave me the bounds. I was supposed to go faster than 230W (of course, because I had held 230W for 30 minutes just three days earlier) and the stretch target was 245W.

I decided to start at 230W, then accelerate at 3600m to go. I set the PM to record 400m intervals. From 3600m to go down to 1800m, the goal was 235W but I did go slightly higher.

Workout Summary - media/20171228-1636020o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|06000|22:30.0|01:52.6|245.6|26.6|168.7|180.0|10.0
W-|06000|22:31.0|01:52.6|244.7|26.5|168.4|180.0|10.0
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|180.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00400|01:30.7|01:53.4|231.7|25.9|127.7|156.0|10.2
01|00400|01:32.0|01:55.0|230.9|25.5|161.1|164.0|10.2
02|00400|01:31.6|01:54.4|232.6|25.6|164.3|166.0|10.3
03|00400|01:31.7|01:54.7|232.4|25.4|167.1|168.0|10.3
04|00400|01:31.5|01:54.4|233.6|25.8|167.8|169.0|10.2
05|00400|01:31.2|01:54.0|236.2|25.8|170.4|171.0|10.2
06|00400|01:31.0|01:53.7|237.9|25.9|171.0|171.0|10.2
07|00400|01:30.9|01:53.6|238.0|25.9|171.2|172.0|10.2
08|00400|01:30.8|01:53.5|239.5|26.1|172.2|173.0|10.1
09|00400|01:30.5|01:53.1|241.7|26.4|172.2|174.0|10.0
10|00400|01:30.3|01:52.9|243.7|26.5|173.5|174.0|10.0
11|00400|01:29.2|01:51.5|252.7|27.0|174.8|176.0|10.0
12|00400|01:28.3|01:50.4|260.5|27.6|176.9|178.0|09.8
13|00400|01:26.9|01:48.6|272.2|28.7|178.6|179.0|09.6
14|00400|01:25.0|01:46.2|292.2|30.4|179.5|180.0|09.3

As you can see from the summary, things continued favorably and I managed to finish in 292W, raising the average power to 244W and a total time of 22:32.4. (Somehow, the total time in the summary misses 2.4 seconds, probably because I skipped the final pull.)

So that was a good one, at 96% of my PB power. Looking forward to the 5k on Sunday, actually.

Friday

I did a recovery training in the pool. I swam 2km in about 50 minutes. This time it was slightly challenging, because the pool entrance was free today.

It was nice to see kids from poor families enjoying the water, but it also required a bit of flexibility from the endurance swimmers.

I almost felt like a seasoned swimmer, in this chaos. That was partly because I was swimming with swimming goggles.

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Dec 17 2017

Running / Low Batteries

A busy day! First relaxing after breakfast, then a run. Followed by sauna and rowing club social event.

Romana and I went to the sauna today. I ran to it. About 11 km through interesting terrain. Two big hills. The temperature was slightly above zero.

When I had to set off, there was a light panic.

The Garmin Forerunner was completely discharged.

My iPhone was at 20% battery. I had forgotten to put it in the charger on Saturday evening.

The Samsung phone was fully charged but I had not paired it with any of my HR measuring devices.

The Polar arm belt was low battery. I had put it in the charger on Saturday, but the funky charger thing can also go into a USB socket the wrong way. So no charging.

In the end I managed to remember my password for Polar Flow, and the Samsung seemed to pair with the Polar OH1, so I opted for that combination. Turns out the heart rate was never recorded.

I ran to Maximus Resort, close to the rowing club. Romana arrived by car, with dry clothes. We enjoyed 2 hours of sauna and relax. Then we went to the rowing club for a Christmas get together.

The ice on the lake seems to be disappearing, but still about 70% of the lake is covered, and the pieces of ice are being blown around by the wind.

Tomorrow: Last working day of the year and a light training.

It started snowing.

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Dec 17 2017

Half Marathon – Holiday Challenge – My own site is smarter than I

So the holiday season is nearing and I decided to restore an old tradition: To row all ranking distances during the holiday break, starting at the longest one, and use the results to get an idea of my current shape.

It is also a good way to get some kilometers in the bank (and raise some money for the Concept2 Holiday Challenge).

I do skip the Full Marathon. My behind would hurt too much. I probably would have to skip trainings after it, and I would have to build an entire day around making time for it.

The morning was a bit busy. I had to go to buy a Christmas tree, then carry it home over 1.5km. I could of course have mounted the roof rack on the car and spared myself the walk, but I don’t like to mount the roof rack, and I don’t mind a little walk.

I paid almost 900 Kc (roughly $45) for the tree, which is ridiculously expensive given that the forests around Brno are full of perfectly fine Christmas trees. Some people solve it like that, they go to the forest to illegally get a tree. Not for me. Growing a Christmas tree of the size I bought takes about 5 years, so imagine how the forest would look if we all took our trees there. Coming to think of it, that price was pretty reasonable.

Then another chore. Got rid of the old water closet, which again I did walking, this time with the wheelbarrow. It’s just a few hundred meters, and this time I wanted to avoid any liquids dripping into my car from the old water closet.

Then it was lunch time, and after lunch I finally sat down to sort out the target pace for my Half Marathon. Here’s what Rowsandall.com said, using the Pro Users OTE Erg CP chart:

Well, that was clearly not useful. I haven’t done any longer hard rows recently, so the extrapolation to 21km is far too optimistic.

So this time I used the CP chart on the free version of Rowsandall.com. The difference with the Pro version is that it only uses the official Concept2 ranking pieces that it finds in your workout history. But this time, that was an advantage, because it finds them automatically, and I could set it to look back a little further:

All right, 1:58.1 based on some pretty old rows. My PB pace is 1:57.5, which I also noted down on the piece of paper that I took with me to the erg basement.

After 5 minutes of warming up, I set off. I wanted to row at 1:58-1:59, but the faster pace came easily, and I soon found myself looking at a 1:22:38 estimate at completion, which is my PB. So I decided to hold 1:57.5 exactly …

I shouldn’t have done that, of course. I had to gradually increase the stroke rate from 24spm to 25spm and eventually to 26spm to hold that pace. With 12km to go I was still optimistic, and I started to play number games. As I passed the 12km to go mark at a time that looked like xx:38, i.e. 38 seconds after the minute, I was going to change that time by 5 seconds every kilometer, to finish exactly at 1:22:38. The idea was to get slightly ahead of that schedule and then push.

With 9km to go the pacing got wobbly, and suddenly I started seeing 2:00, and 2:01.

Time to reconsider.

I would have hated to hand down after rowing for so long, so I decided to back off a bit and aim for 1:58.5 average pace.

I backed off too much, and 1:58.5 average pace came with more than 5km to go. I didn’t have the energy to get back to pulling 1:59.

Only on the final kilometer I started to get back to 1:57, then 1:55 to get the final time under 1:24:00.

Workout Summary - media/20171216-1610470o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|21097|83:57.0|01:59.4|205.9|25.1|172.1|180.0|10.0
W-|21097|83:58.0|01:59.4|205.8|25.1|172.0|180.0|10.0
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|180.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00097|00:22.0|01:53.4|206.2|22.9|099.7|107.0|11.6
01|01000|03:55.8|01:57.9|213.5|23.9|152.7|162.0|10.7
02|01000|03:54.9|01:57.4|216.0|24.2|164.2|166.0|10.6
03|01000|03:54.7|01:57.3|216.7|24.1|169.5|172.0|10.6
04|01000|03:54.6|01:57.3|216.7|24.5|171.4|174.0|10.4
05|01000|03:54.9|01:57.4|216.1|24.8|172.9|174.0|10.3
06|01000|03:54.7|01:57.3|216.7|25.2|172.5|175.0|10.2
07|01000|03:55.3|01:57.7|214.8|25.1|173.7|176.0|10.1
08|01000|03:55.3|01:57.7|214.9|25.3|175.7|178.0|10.1
09|01000|03:55.0|01:57.5|215.9|25.6|176.6|179.0|10.0
10|01000|03:54.9|01:57.4|215.9|25.9|176.7|179.0|09.9
11|01000|03:55.5|01:57.8|214.3|25.8|176.5|178.0|09.9
12|01000|03:55.5|01:57.7|214.4|26.0|177.3|179.0|09.8
13|01000|03:56.8|01:58.4|211.0|26.2|177.2|178.0|09.7
14|01000|04:00.6|02:00.3|201.4|25.7|175.5|177.0|09.7
15|01000|04:05.4|02:02.7|189.5|24.9|173.8|175.0|09.8
16|01000|04:04.5|02:02.3|191.5|24.9|174.0|176.0|09.8
17|01000|04:07.3|02:03.6|185.5|24.5|171.8|174.0|09.9
18|01000|04:05.0|02:02.5|190.2|24.8|172.7|175.0|09.9
19|01000|04:08.6|02:04.3|182.9|24.9|171.9|174.0|09.7
20|01000|04:11.7|02:05.8|175.6|23.9|168.6|170.0|10.0
21|01000|03:56.1|01:58.0|214.2|26.9|174.5|180.0|09.5

Here is an interesting chart of Work per Stroke for the row:

Here are some stats from rowsandall.com:

rPower 207.4W
HR drift 10.66%
rScore 117
TRIMP 244

The rPower value basically tells me that I could have held 207W (as opposed to 206W) by rowing flat, instead of holding 215W and then crashing to 190W. This sounds correct to me.

Here is the updated CP chart after including the HM:

And the updated predictions:

That looks more realistic. I think I am able to hold 211W for the Half Marathon, on a good day. The predicted 10k target is faster than my PB. I think I am going to approach this very conservatively, around 90-95% of the predicted 247W, then see how much I have left in the tank with 2km to go. One has to take into account that the predictions are for a full out effort from a fully rested state.

Still not entirely happy with the predictions. I wondered where rowsandall.com takes the data for rowing at 260W for 15 minutes from? It turns out it found those records in the ANP test, but because of a Painsled bug (in Painsled Beta), it didn’t record the power during the 2 minute rest intervals but kept logging the last power value of the work intervals, so that is an overly optimistic number. When I removed that workout from the Ranking Workouts, I got this:

And the following predictions, which I will use for my Holiday Challenge rows:

It is interesting how big a difference there is between my steady state pace of 2:01-2:02 and this HM pace of 1:59!

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Dec 17 2017

Friday: Steady State and some stats

I succeeded in getting home from work early enough to get in a workout before dinner. Dialed up a standard 20 minute interval at one minute rest. I was afraid that doing this as a “Just Row” would tempt me to stop somewhere between 40 and 50 minutes in. With the intervals, I always feel obliged to finish the interval, so that would guarantee that I would row at least 60 minutes.

I did finish all the intervals, and I did it at a better power than I had expected. I concluded that I am back at the level of 2 seasons ago, where I did all my steady state between 195 and 200W.

Workout Summary - media/20171215-1615300o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|15155|63:00.0|02:04.7|193.6|22.6|159.8|171.0|10.7
W-|14846|60:00.0|02:01.2|196.5|22.7|159.9|171.0|10.9
R-|00312|03:00.0|04:48.4|084.7|20.6|155.9|171.0|00.5
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|04983|20:00.0|02:00.4|199.9|22.4|151.0|164.0|11.1
01|04971|20:00.0|02:00.7|199.0|22.7|163.9|169.0|10.9
02|04892|20:00.0|02:02.6|190.5|22.8|164.9|171.0|10.7

The statistics on rowsandall.com:

rPower 196.1W
HR drift 9.8%
rScore 77
TRIMP 140

rPower is the normalized power, which is an interesting metric. It basically says that the 3 minutes of rest, which brought down the overall average power to 193W, can be ignored, and the workout is virtually equivalent of rowing 63 minutes without breaks at 196W.

Heart Rate drift slightly higher than normal. Normally, I am in the 5-7% range. It may have been just an artefact of me slacking down on power in the final three minutes.

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bokeh_plot (28)

Dec 14 2017

Good Days and Bad Days – a comparison of two steady state sessions

I have been wondering about good and bad days.

On Monday, I did a session that was prescribed by our coach:

2.5 km warming up, 15min/2min, 20min/3min, 15min, 5 min cooling down

All was to be rowed at 20/21 spm. The circumstances:

  • Rowed the day after a pretty good 4x2km
  • Overall feeling “above average”, HRV 7.2, morning pulse 55, fatigue low
  • Music was pretty monotonous techno rock for workouts

This was the executed Monday session:

Stats from rowsandall.com:

  • rPower = 197W
  • Heart Rate Drive = 5%
  • rScore 79
  • TRIMP 129

Note that I did row at lower stroke rates than prescribed. To break the boredom, I did rate ladders, starting at 18, up to 22spm, than oscillating between 21spm and 20spm, and finally down again.

Tuesday

The plan was another steady state session, but there was a guy doing a quick repair on one of our Water Closets. Long story short: The quick repair turned out to be a total replacement of the WC, which I needed to assist with, including driving to the hardware store to buy the thing.

Perhaps carrying old WC down the stairs and new WC up the stairs can count as strength training?

Wednesday

  • Rowed after an unplanned rest day
  • Overall feeling “above average”, HRV 7.7, morning pulse 46, fatique low
  • I listened to the latest Rowperfect.co.uk podcast (“Small Puddles”)

The HRV value is higher (worse) but overall I am on a decreasing HRV trend since I came back from travels. Here is the executed Wednesday session:

Stats from rowsandall.com:

  • rPower = 186W
  • Heart Rate Drive = 6%
  • rScore 81
  • TRIMP 119

On Wednesday, I was free rating but I intended to hold 195W and higher (blue in the chart). I pretty much succeeded and the workout felt very easy.

The mental trick I played was dividing each 20 minute interval into five 4 minute intervals and focus on some aspect of my rowing for four minutes.

So in Summary:

  • Monday – lower average power, workout felt hard
  • Wednesday – higher average power, workout felt easy

Here are the comparison details:

Orange is Wednesday. Higher power.

Interestingly, despite feeling easier, my heart rate was significantly higher on Wednesday.

The chart above clearly shows the different approach to rating.

In terms of Average/Peak force ratio, the workouts are nearly identical.

However, on Monday the average and peak drive force was higher. Also, the drive length was a few centimeters longer:

All this resulted in a significantly higher Work per Stroke value for the Monday workout:

I find this highly interesting. It shows how small things can have a big impact. To summarize:

  • I was on an improving trend in terms of being rested (HRV, resting heart rate)
  • On Monday I was sore from a hard workout on Sunday. Wednesday was done after a rest day
  • I eased up, shortened up slightly, and adapted the rating to get the desired power output

Three things that are small, but the synergetic effect is huge.

Also shows how unreliable Heart Rate is as a measure of fitness. I wish I had done Lactate measurements for these two workouts …

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7644E16F-2ECF-43C6-A915-FE55B4E23E2A

Dec 9 2017

An Icy Run

I longed for outdoors activity so I went running. It turned out to be a slow run. The snow had melted, and then frozen again.

frozen run

frozen run

frozen run

frozen run

frozen run

frozen run

frozen run

I took a new shortcut near the end of the run. That turned out to be a bad decision. I ended up above the road I wanted to get to and the only way to get there was to slide down a very steep slope.

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Dec 7 2017

Hamburg

Monday

A light hour of steady state on the erg, right after breakfast. Still hurting a lot from the Saturday and Sunday sessions, so I took it a lot easier than I would normally do on these steady state sessions.

Then I headed to the railway station, took the 11:38 train to Hamburg via Prague, Dresden, Berlin. I usually travel by plane, and this train trip was a very nice variation. I love that you have enough leg space, power, USB plugs, and can go to the restaurant wagon whenever you like. I spent most of the time making notes for my speech, then writing out my speech, then condensing it to notes again. It’s how I have learned to prepare and memorize. If I do it well, I can throw away the notes, but I usually like to have them around.

On the train, I also looked at my erging data for the past few sessions.

The Saturday session sticks out. I didn’t split up this session in rest and work strokes, so the averages are pretty skewed, but the top values in the box chart are definitely different than those for a normal session. I was expecting that for “work per stroke” and average and maximum force, but apparently also the stroke length was distorted. Interesting …

Arrived at Hamburg pretty late, took the S-Bahn to my hotel, called my wife, crashed in bed.

Tuesday

Slept too long to do any exercise, and spent the little time I had to have a good breakfast and go through my speech one more time, delivering it to my hotel room. The hotel room didn’t say much, so I guess it was OK. It was a bit short, about 10 minutes shorter than the 40 minutes that I was expected to speak. I guessed that the audience being more interactive than the bed and empty chairs in my hotel room, and leaving a couple of minutes for questions and answers, I would be fine.

Joined the conference, listened to a couple of interesting talks, had lunch, and then it was time for me to deliver my part.

I had just asked a critical question to the previous speaker, and the chairman made a lengthy introduction. To break the ice, I expressed the fear that the chairman (and myself, with my question) had raised the expectation a little too high, and then I started with my intro.

Getting some nods and comments, and expanding a bit on a couple of points that were already raised by previous speakers, I filled the 40 minutes easily. A guy form Alitalia had a few interesting questions and comments, and that was it. Job done. I like to talk about the work that my guys do, but I have to have the time to prepare well.

In the evening, we were invited to drinks and dinner, and I had a good time. The drinks were served inside the airport, on one of the upper levels. This was approximately the view from where we were having our drinks:

Because I had been a speaker, people would come and talk to me, and comment on my talk, which was nice. Met a few of our suppliers. Sneaked out of the party around 10pm, walked back to the hotel through the rainy and windy Hamburg weather, and went to bed.

Wednesday

Set alarm clock for 6am so I could get in some exercise before breakfast. For such an expensive hotel, the Radisson Blu Hamburg Airport, the gym wasn’t much. A few elliptical and a few stationary bikes. Spent 15 minutes on each, then went back to my hotel room and completed the session with 20 minutes of body weights exercises.

I have started to use an app called HRV4Training, which supposedly measures Heart Rate Variability (HRV). You use it each morning. It measures your pulse through the smartphone camera and derives HRV, and something called “Recovery Points”, which I can sync to SportTracks. It also asks questions about travel and alcohol consumption.

For three days I have used it, and my scores have been constantly improving, while I traveled to Germany, trained and slept irregularly, and there was alcohol consumption. Still, my resting heart rate and my “recovery points” keep improving.

Will continue to use it a bit longer to see if it discovers any trends.

I spent the rest of the day at the conference, including an evening workshop.

Thursday

Up at 5 to catch the S-Bahn to the railway station. I had noticed that there was an entrance to the S-Bahn right in front of the hotel, but when I wanted to take it, I noticed the sign that this entrance was closed. Had to walk a long distance to another entrance to the same station, and missed my train. Luckily, I had built in quite some reserve, so even with the next train, twenty minutes later, I had plenty of time at the Hamburg station to take a coffee and some pastry.

Now, I am in the train, between Berlin and Dresden. I hope to arrive to Brno around 5pm, and I hope to get in a steady state erg session. Probably not one with impressive splits, though.

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