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Aug 20 2017

Friday – race prep

A very hot day in Trebon. Before lunch, I did a short row with my son Dominik (12) to check the setting of the double. Unfortunately, I couldn’t test the sculls with the Macon blades, because our other son Robin (11) was out in the single.

We did a few practice starts and then a full 500m at the end. I had forgotten my SpeedCoach at the hotel, so the workout was captured through Garmin Connect, and stroke rates are off.

In the afternoon, I had a few work related calls. I was glad to be inside because the heat outside was getting unbearable. At the end of the afternoon, Romana and I went out to train in the double. It was a nice row. We did a warming up, then 3x250m with 500m rest, and then a long cooling down.

Work Details #-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-SPM-|-Pwr-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS- 01|00250| 00:55 |01:50.5| 33.6| 000 | 144 | 166 | 8.1 02|00500| 02:26 |02:26.3| 21.7| 000 | 143 | 167 | 9.4 03|00250| 00:55 |01:49.9| 32.7| 000 | 163 | 175 | 8.3 04|00500| 02:31 |02:31.8| 21.3| 000 | 148 | 175 | 9.3 05|00250| 00:53 |01:47.3| 34.6| 000 | 166 | 178 | 8.1 06|00500| 04:16 |04:16.3| 10.1| 000 | 144 | 178 | 11.6 Workout Summary --|02250| 11:58 | 2:39.6| 20.2| 000 | 150 | 178 | 9.3
A light tailwind during the 250m sessions.

Sixty minutes of rowing for the entire day.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 2 • Tags: double, OTW, race prep, rowing, training

Aug 17 2017

Thursday – 4x2km in Trebon

We are racing in Trebon coming weekend, and today we moved to this lovely little town in South Bohemia.

We did the three hour drive “around lunch”, leaving Brno at 11am and arriving at 2pm. We rigged the boats. Daughter Lenka went for a training in the double, my sons Robin and Dominik rowed the single, Iva went on the single, and I did my planned 4x2km in the single.

It was great to row on an Albano buoyed course again. There were plenty of other boats on the water. This place is a popular destination for an end-of-summer training camp, and there were four or five rowing clubs on the water.

Great rowing at 26spm. I passed lots of boats. I worked on keeping the stroke light, and even though I was in the red for heart rate and power, it didn’t feel like a hard workout when I was doing it. After the workout, I had to drink lots of water, though.

Work Details #-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-SPM-|-Pwr-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS- 01|02000| 08:54 |02:13.5| 25.4| 248 | 168 | 176 | 8.8 03|02000| 08:33 |02:08.2| 26.5| 241 | 170 | 178 | 8.8 05|02000| 08:42 |02:10.6| 26.9| 254 | 173 | 183 | 8.5 07|02000| 08:33 |02:08.4| 26.9| 246 | 174 | 185 | 8.7 Workout Summary --|10150| 54:43 | 2:41.7| 21.2| 211 | 164 | 185 | 8.7

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: 4x2km, hard endurance, OTW, rowing, single, training, trebon

Aug 16 2017

Bird Song and Sunrise

Tuesday

No training. It was my 20th wedding anniversary. We had a fun day ending with a very nice restaurant dinner.

Wednesday

Got up very early and headed to the lake. Glorious steady state in absolutely flat water, rowing in the river Svratka gorge.

I am going to refrain from numerical analysis today. I mostly ignored the SpeedCoach and worked on feeling the boat run. The conditions were ideal to do that. Working on the recovery, playing with slight nuances in the speed profile of the recovery.

I am absolutely stunned by the low heart rates I scored today. Perhaps an after effect of the restaurant dinner (including wine)? Or the calming effect of listening to the forest bird song?

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 5 • Tags: OTW, rowing, single, steady state, training

Aug 14 2017

Monday: 4x1km/5min – 16 minutes of pain

I didn’t do my weekend homework – so I had to get to work early and do it in the morning. Visits from the US and I got to play my boss. It all went very well, except that the A/C broke down in our building and it was 28 degrees in the meeting room. We should have moved to the patio, where it was just 26 degrees.

So after a long day I waved goodbye to my guests and headed to the rowing club. I was going to do a 4x1km and tried to get some of the Masters crews to row it alongside me, but nobody fancied this training. I don’t blame them. It is quite hard. But I am doing a mini cycle with threshold training and intensive distance, hoping it will move my anaerobic threshold a bit, which should help me at the Masters Worlds, if I manage to convert that to boat speed.

That’s the theory. Besides that, the 4x1km is just a hell of a session. The big advantage of rowing with a power meter is that you can take the average power of the last time as a target, and then try to improve. There is still a weather influence. It will be harder in choppy conditions, but it is still a lot more quantitative than trying to row to feel or a target pace.

I was tired and worried that I would have low grit to complete the session, but everything turned out better than expected. The target power was a bit lower than the first three intervals of last week (because the overall average was lowered by a dramatically slow fourth interval), so it was tough but doable, and I was able to focus on technique as well.

A slight additional difficulty was the fact that the place I chose to row the workout brought me in near collision course with big tourist boats on all intervals except the first one. In the second interval I managed to cross in front. In third and fourth interval I had to row through the wake. That explains short drops in power.

Interesting that my heart rate graph shows more red in the third interval. The fourth one was definitely a harder one.

Work Details #-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-SPM-|-Pwr-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS- 01|01000| 04:12 |02:06.2| 29.2| 293 | 169 | 180 | 8.1 - headwind 03|01000| 03:58 |01:59.0| 30.5| 294 | 173 | 181 | 8.3 - tailwind 05|01000| 04:08 |02:04.4| 30.6| 292 | 173 | 182 | 7.9 - headwind 07|01000| 03:57 |01:58.5| 31.1| 296 | 172 | 183 | 8.1 - tailwind

I set average pace on the lower right of my SpeedCoach and rowed this like an ergo training. Static start. Off you go, a few start strokes, then drop the pace immediately. Row slightly under the target until the average power hits target, then keep holding target power.

Here are the metrics charts. I include all of my regular ones this time. You can click on one of them to see a bigger version and then browse through the image gallery. The point I am trying to make is that it looks like pretty consistent rowing.

I am still fascinated by the trend flex charts. Here is this row, pace vs power, split by stroke rate:
For comparison, here is the power/pace behavior with every individual workout stroke:

Most of those high stroke rate strokes are from the final 250m in the final interval:

Those 250m really really hurt. I think I haven’t been that deep in the pain box in training, recently. Again, that is the power of training with a power meter. Having a target and wanting to improve is what really kept me going.

I improved by 1 Watt. One tiny Watt. In terms of energy expended, that is 1/200th of an Apple. The progress is that the way I rowed it, it felt easier.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: 4x1k, 4x1km, intervals, lake, OTW, rowing, single, threshold, training

Aug 13 2017

Sunday – mix double – training racing

Spent most of the day running errands and doing some work in the garden. I grilled some nice steaks for lunch.

At the end of the afternoon we headed to the rowing club. Romana and I arrived earlier than the Masters Men’s Pair, so we took some time to check the rigging of our double Orca. All OK.

First a warming up and some training starts.

The high stroke rates in the beginning are our usual drill. Starting to row with arms only, then arms+body, then half slide, 3/4 slide, and finally on to full slide.

Pazdi and Krocan weren’t ready yet, so we did the first 500m with race start on our own.

Then a longer rest paddle. A training start with Pazdi and Krocan next to us in the pair, and finally the second 500m. We lined up the boats and off we went. The pair was leading slightly out of the start and they managed to keep the lead all the way to the end. I called “go” with 200m to go and increased the stroke rate.

Romana is a “feel” rower. She doesn’t need any gadgets, is not very interested in looking at graphs and playing with data. But this time she wondered aloud whether the stroke rate increase had increased boat speed. Let’s check the graph.

The static chart is not very easy for reading the stroke rate, so let’s look at the flex chart:

So yes, there seems to be an increase in pace. But what is interesting is that the pace seems to increase even more when we drop the stroke rate slightly after a few strokes of the sprint. Here are the comparison charts for 500m take 1 vs take 2:

The second 500m was 5 seconds faster. We rowed it in identical conditions. Same part of the lake. Same weather (mirror flat water, no wind).

Then we did another loop of the lake together with the pair. On the 3km straight stretch from Sirka to Rokle, Romana and I rowed really well together. We fell into a nice rhythm at stroke rate 23. It didn’t feel hard at all. Our timing was just perfect, and we moved from rowing slightly behind the pair to passing them and finishing about 50m ahead of them. Nice row. Everything just clicked.

You can see how my heart rate nicely stays in the very narrow blue band during the entire 3km stretch (7 minutes to 19 minutes) . I was watching the SpeedCoach during the row and when the timing was perfect, the pace improved from 2:12 to 2:09. A few times the pace dropped to 2:16, but focusing on timing brought that back to 2:12 easily.

The pair were wondering what was going on. They were visibly working hard and we passed them so easily. That 3km stretch was the one that brought out the smiles.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: double, mix, mixed double, race simulation, rowing, steady state, training

Aug 13 2017

Saturday – A bike ride instead of a row

On Saturday morning, our usual training time, we had to bring our son Dominik to a summer camp. He wanted to participate in a “Parkour” camp. The place was an hour driving away. I guess it was only when we arrived there, that Dominik realized that he actually doesn’t know anyone at the camp. He was a bit silent. I think he will be OK. The camp staff looked like nice people.

Romana and I drove back to Brno to do a row in the double. Bad luck. There was a really strong wind, and wind surfers were having fun. We wouldn’t be having fun, so we decided to not even go out. With a few other rowers who were present, we agreed to go 6pm on Sunday.

At home, I finished a project with my youngest son Robin. We have been building this garden shed. We were finishing the roof, and I sent Robin up on the roof to fix the roof coverage. He had a lot of fun doing it. At the end he lied down on the roof and proclaimed he was Snoopy. I wasn’t even aware that he knew the Snoopy character.

It was 4pm by the time we were done. I set out for a bike ride to compensate for the missed row. Here is the Google Earth plot of the ride.

The records are broken in two parts. I started recording using my Garmin Forerunner, but after 16km the battery died. So I continued using the Strava app on my phone. Here is the elevation profile of part I:

I am a slow rider and a slow climber. I ride on a mountainbike. The 40 minutes of steady climbing was a good workout, comparable to a hard 10k on the erg. On the Google Earth map, this section starts top middle and goes north (top right) to the top of the village Vranov, where I took this picture:

The church is huge. The climb to the church is long. Then you pass the church, turn, and the climb gets steeper. At the top of the climb I turned left and descended to Adamov. One day I must ride up that climb, because it is pretty long and steep. Nice training. Instead, I decided to continue towards Bilovice nad Svitavou, following the Svitava river.

Here is my heart rate plot for the first part:

This second part was 7km along the Svitava river. Then I stopped to take this picture:

A nice, cold StaroBrno 10, fresh from the tap. A light beer. Nice and refreshing. I am always amazed how good beer tastes after a row or a ride.

I still had to climb out of the Svitava valley and get home, so I only took one beer and then hit the road again.

You can see that I managed to get my heart rate up to quite high values (high for cycling, that is) on the flat first part along the river. I was riving on a bigger gear and I was trying to catch up with a cyclist in front of me.

Strava estimates both rides to be around 200W on average, and that is consistent with how I felt.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: bike ride, cross-training, rowing, training

Aug 13 2017

Friday – A very short row

I headed to the lake for a row with my brother-in-law Tomas. I left work at 1pm, to get the row done before the afternoon series of conference calls would start.

While I was driving, the 5pm call was moved to 2pm. The logic behind that was that the US participant couldn’t make it, and my European colleagues didn’t want to have a call at Friday Happy Hour time. I only found out after the row.

At the rowing club, I found a rather tired Tomas. He had had a party the evening before, and he had slept on a patio, but there had been a pretty violent thunderstorm around midnight. (Romana and I got up and frantically started closing windows. Lightning was visible at a frequency of more than one per second. In our street, one tree fell.)

OK, we would just do a quick round and we would do starts practice and a few short bursts.

On the rowing data side, I switched to the Leaflet open source library for interactive maps and I am glad I did. The Google Maps never really worked, and the Leaflet API is very user friendly. It was pretty easy to figure out how to automatically zoom the map to the level that just fits the entire row. I also added a few layers (satellite, street, outdoors, nautical) to play with. Here is the result:

Maps are nothing revolutionary, of course, but having a user-friendly library opens possibilities for map based representation of rowing and weather data. Plenty of ideas, very little time to implement.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: double, OTW, rowing, training

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Uncategorized

Friday – race prep

Thursday – 4x2km in Trebon

Bird Song and Sunrise

Monday: 4x1km/5min – 16 minutes of pain

Sunday – mix double – training racing

Saturday – A bike ride instead of a row

Friday – A very short row

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