Sep 23 2017
Hard Distance – 8km in the single
Another rainy Saturday. It is interesting. On Friday, when I had to give up OTW rowing because of work and traffic jams, it was nice and sunny autumn weather. Today it was gray and rainy. And choppy. We managed to get the rowing training in during the only window of dry weather of the day, but it wasn’t ideal.
I was going to do my 8km hard distance, and Romana’s Junior girl Iva was doing a 6k full out. We are both preparing for the same head race. We paddled a warming up paddle to Rokle and then we had to wait. Two big tourist boats were passing, and we had to time our start to minimize the risk of getting into a collision course with these boats (which do a zig-zag trajectory crossing the lake several times) or having to row through their wake. You can see their course on the map. It’s the dashed blue line.
I gave Iva a 1 minute advantage, but when I saw her steering a quite wide course in that first minute, I decided to give her 2 minutes. Ideally, that would allow her to stay in the lead for her entire 6k and help her achieve a maximum effort. So I sat around waiting for another 2 minutes.
During which a clueless kayakker paddled right into my trajectory, turned around, and stopped paddling, his back towards me and staring in the other direction. With 20 seconds to go I caught his attention and when he finally understood that I would prefer him to not be in my course, he paddled away slowly.
After 1000m I had to deviate slightly from the ideal line to avoid the worst wake from one of the tourist boats. In the second kilometer, I thought that I was gaining fast on Iva, but it was confusing. Then I remembered that Iva doesn’t row in anything else than bright, fluorescent colors, so the rowers in front of me were probably somebody else. Indeed, they were a double and a single from the other club.
I rowed into the narrow part at Sirka when Iva was leaving it. After 3km, I stopped, turned, and got rowing immediately.
About 4km in, I had to change course to avoid being caught between two tourist boats. I also rated up slightly because I wanted to cross in front of one of them.
Despite these complications, I was getting closer to Iva. About 500m after the pedalo rental was the point where Iva was supposed to go all out. Indeed, it seemed that the rate of me closing in on her was slowing down a bit. It was a great hunt. It is really good to row and compete with someone else, even when you give yourself a handicap.
Turning around to do the final 2km of my 8km was hard. I shouted a few encouragements to Iva who was finishing her 6k, and then set out to survive the 7th kilometer, and wind it up for a big push on the 8th. I did the big push, and it was mentally very hard. But as always, I was glad I did it in the end.
Looking at the pace, I am glad to see it responded quite well to the increased power. Technique was not falling apart today. I am also fascinated by the speed peak at 17 minutes into the row. This was when I had to row harder to stay ahead of the big tourist boat. I guess being distracted, not focusing on the pain, but just on passing in front of that boat, gives you a boost in boat speed.
I did use the Quiske system with the sensor under the seat again.
During the row, I had the Quiske RowP app set to show acceleration. But I have to be honest. I didn’t check it once during the hard distance row. There is too much going on when your heart rate is above 180 to look at a wiggly curve on a phone screen. Otherwise, the after-row curves, averages over all strokes per section of the row, are consistent with my feeling that I was pretty consistent. That is consistency doubled. The differences I see can be explained by rating up to higher and higher rates.
Finally, a series of metrics charts.
Pretty happy with this row!
Sep 24 2017
On being a prick (a steady one)
Sorry for the title. Couldn’t resist.
I tried to make an hour of steady state on the erg a bit more interesting. On Friday, I had tried to use Kinomap and wasted 10 minutes of precious exercise time trying to revive my Kinomap account. Didn’t work. I think I am going to uninstall Kinomap from my devices. It is never straightforward, and it is always taking more time than I want.
So I dusted off my lactate meter and decided to take measurements every ten minutes. I did a baseline measurement before the row, which gave me a nice 1.2 mmol/L value. That was slightly higher than expected, but OK.
Down to the erg room. Dialed up a 10 minute and rowed. I decided to aim for a 200W average, which is probably higher than I should row my steady state, but I wanted the lactate readings to tell me that. You basically want to see that the blood lactate concentration keeps rising steadily during the entire hour.
The dip after a few minutes is when I decided to stop erging and increase the volume on my radio. I was listening (again) to the BroShow podcast on training planning and the volume was too low to hear anything.
Measured lactate after 10 minutes and got an “Er1” value. Hm. Probably due to me learning to do lactate measurements again after almost a year. I tried with a new strip, and got the same problem.
So I did another 10 minutes.
I did hold 203W exactly. Somehow, 203W is a more attractive value than 200W, because it means that in 10 minutes you cover exactly 2500m (and row at 2:00 pace).
Did a lactate measurement (so this is now 20 minutes into the hour): 1.7 mmol/L. Phew.
So I had the feeling I was going to run out of Lactate strips before the end of the hour, so I dialed up 20 minutes and rowed for 20 minutes, average power 203W:
Heart rate is behaving nicely. Everything was fine. And steady. Fourty minutes done in total. So I perforated my finger another time and took a measurement: 5.6 mmol/L. WHAT?
Well, no time to think. Dialed up another 10 minutes and rowed.
This time the Lactate measurement gave 1.9 mmol/L, which seems more in line. So I had good hopes for the final 10 minutes.
And the lactate meters said … 3.9 mmol/L. Damn! I had one strip left of the set I took down to the erg room. I wanted to use that to measure after a five minute cooling down paddle, but now I used that one immidiately. The result: “Er1” error. Not good.
Well, I guess it was a good steady state session. Probably at a slightly too high power value. From past seasons using the lactate meter, I know that my steady state, stable lactate level is lower than the 2.0 mmol/L that people use. I also know that my feeling of how hard the row was correlated quite well with the lactate readings. So, I tend to conclude that the high values are due to incompetent measuring from my part, and the 1.7 and 1.9 values are correct.
I am wondering, however, if I should order a new set of lactate strips, and row with lactate this winter, or not. The only reliable use I got out of the device was checking my steady state. The other tests gave results that were hard to interpret. Just doing steady state to confirm my subjective feeling of hardness doesn’t seem to give a lot of added value. Lactate is always a measurement after the row, so you cannot use it to adjust the intensity during the row. Especially for steady state, I think it is important to adjust the intensity when you are feeling it is too hard.
Over lunch I watched the Poznan and Lucerne World Cup singles races on YouTube. I am really impressed by Manson’s boat skills at 38spm. He is my favorite for winning the world title in Sarasota, even though I live in the land of Synek. I am also going to cheer for Annika van der Meer (in the Mix 2x Para event) and Marieke Keyser (LW 1x), both from the Netherlands. For the eights, I am neutral. I think the Dutch eight is not good enough (yet) for a big win. But there are a lot of very good heavyweight sweep rowing men in NL. Hoping they can prepare something spectacular for Tokyo.
Oh, and I will cheer for the Czech Women’s 2x, and hoping the Dutch will take silver.
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 2 • Tags: concept2, erg, lactate testing, OTE, rowing, steady state