Jun 6 2017
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Jun 4 2017
Primatorky 2017 – Masters Eight race report
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Saturday, June 3. 7pm.
Four boats at the start of the first race of the Masters 8+ program of this most prestigious of Czech eights races.
Watch this video to get the atmosphere:
104. Primátorky – pátek 2. června
A jaký byl první den 104. Primátorek? Podívejte se na video ze včerejšího úvodního závodního dne, který byl ve znamení závodů handicapovaných veslařů, žákovských kategorií a Univerzitních osem. Program pokračuje dnes rozjížďkami a finálové klání vypukne už zítra, v neděli 4. června! Přijďte zafandit na náplavku Rašínova nábřeží, nebo sledujte ČT sport či si nalaďte Český rozhlas – Radiožurnál !
Posted by Primátorky on Saturday, June 3, 2017
And two random pictures to show where we race, in the middle of Prague:
But first, let me go back a year. In this post, I describe how we missed the start call of the race because we couldn’t hear it through the loud engine noise of a big boat next to us, how we came in second place, immediately filed a protest and got a re-row, which we didn’t row in the end.
Regular readers of this blog will know that this year’s preparation wasn’t ideal. Only in this week did we manage to get in two trainings in an almost complete crew. So we considered ourselves outsiders. This was even the spirit of our pre-race briefing. We gathered around the boat and talked about rowing clean and not going out of the start like madmen. The race lasts for three minutes and in the final 400m, past the railway bridge, there will be ugly water, and you need to have some energy left to row clean and not lose too much speed in the waves. Don’t wake up the carps sleeping on the bottom of the river! That wasn’t our motto for the race
This year, we would just enjoy the races. Romana and I left Brno at 12:30, arrived in Prague a bit over two hours later, and it was so hot that the smartest thing to do was get a big glass of lemonade and retire to the couch in the back of the CVK Praha club house. I also downloaded this race’s official App and filled out my race predictions. I liked that, a cool new innovation. You basically predict the winner of each and every race, and you get 4 points if “your” crew wins, and one point if they become second. I had no chance of winning of course, because I had missed predicting all of Friday’s racing and half of Saturday’s. But it is still fun, and the scores are updated live. Betting with virtual money.
After that, I slept for an hour and a half, on that couch in the back of the CVK Praha club house. Then I got up, and we did the warming up with the rest of the crew.
So, at 7pm, we lined up at the start. To the left of us, Blesk. To the right of us a Blesk/CVK Praha combination in lane 3 and Pardubice in lane 4. Blesk were looking very confident.
Our start wasn’t as clean as some practice starts had been, and I think I was off a fraction of a second in the first three strokes, but then we caught on and got going.
After the start, the plan was to do 15 strokes at high rate, after which we would lengthen and settle for race pace. I listened to the cox counting the fifteen strokes and I focused on the stroke’s blade and the back of the guy in front of me.
After the fifteen strokes, I dared a quick look out of the boat, and I immediately saw all boats more than a length behind us. Wow!
So now we all focused on lengthening and we succeeded to do so. In fact, we found a lovely rhythm and we kept rowing away from all the others. By the time we arrived at the railway bridge, we had a length of light between the boats. There were two instances where we raced through motorboat wakes but we managed to do that pretty well.
Under the railway bridge, Ludek shouts: “One minute to go!”. He always shouts something there.
Even in the very choppy water we kept our distance to the other crews. Blesk started a final sprint. I slammed my blade into a wave twice, but we managed to stay together.
Crossed the line.
First. I think the carps were still sleeping.
Waited for the others to cross the line. Shouted three cheers for our opponents.
Rowed to the medals dock.
Got our medals.
Rowed back to the Rower’s Island.
Took a group picture.
Shower.
A beer. Some food.
Two hour drive home. Which we filled talking about this 3 minute long race.
And the results:
I also include the results of the other race. The boat that was trying to draft me came in second place:
So we were by far the fastest crew of all Masters 8+, 14 boats if I also count the G and H race, who were of course a bit slower than the younger crews.
All in all a very nice race!
Jun 3 2017
Friday morning – Rowing Nirvana
A 6:30 AM row before work. Steady state. Through the gorge/canyon, towards the castle and beyond. Steady state, playing with technique and rates 18, 20 and 22spm. I am also playing with Kinomap which is an app to sync video with your ergometer rowing. Potentially interesting to spice up boring OTE steady state rows coming winter.
Kinomap syncs with Strava and adds the map of your virtual row to Strava. Not sure if you also compete on the real segments. That would be a little unfair, because OTE you go a lot faster than on the water. Kinomap also exports basic data as ErgData does (stroke rate, distance, time, pace, power) so I will probably make a filter so people can use Kinomap data on rowsandall.com.
I made two videos, a short Warming Up and a long one of 48 minutes that I called Bird Song. Feel free to use them on your erg. I turned the GoPro around so that you have the same view as the rower (although from a slightly lower point of view). Here is a short preview. I have added canned bird song, because the GoPro was unable to capture the tweeting concert from the forest. There sure was a lot going on on that forest’s Twitter accounts:
And here is an accelerated run through the entire 48 minutes row. It takes only 12 minutes. The 48 minutes one is a great calming, hypnotizing video, though. I can look at the puddles forever.
Can you imagine how energized I arrive at the office after spending 80 minutes in such an environment?
The row itself was almost identical to the one on Thursday, although slightly shorter. The graph only shows the 48 minutes “middle” part. I recorded warming up and cooling down to different SpeedCoach sessions.
And a few box plots to compare Friday’s session with comparable sessions of the past months:
Pretty happy with the rowing.
Jun 1 2017
Thursday – Long and Steady Morning Row (birds singing)
This was a great row. The lake was a little choppy but all the canyon part was very flat, oily water. The birds were singing in the forest. It was 20 degrees C at the start of another tropical day.
I did 3min@18spm/2min@20spm/1min@22spm and just kept repeating that until I arrived at the little waterfall in Veverska Bytiska, where I turned around, did two minutes of rest to arrive at a multiple of three minutes on the elapsed time, and started again, repeating until I was 400m away from our dock.
And here are a few pictures to compare this workout with similar ones:
Jun 1 2017
Wednesday – High Rating Eight
Out in the eight again. I felt guilty for arriving 5 minutes late, but one guy came an hour late. So it was a short training.
This plot is a merger of Garmin data (heart rate, GPS location) with stroke rate and pace from the SpeedCoach.
We did a couple of 30 second intervals with 1 minute rest. Four of them in tailwind, from a rolling start, and four of them in headwind. We also did a race start plus 30 seconds.
We were almost able to hit the prescribed stroke rates (34, 36, 38 and 40 in each series) and the paces were nice. Sweep rowing is nice for a change. A simple short stroke. Just one oar to hold on to. Much less complicated than sculling. I also enjoyed going at much faster paces than in the single.
Our strokes fall apart slightly in the last part of the recovery, just before the catch. For the rest it is fine. If the entire crew were fit, we would be a contender for the win. The problem is that half of the crew thinks they have to pull holes in the water, so they will waste all their energy on the first 300m, creating enormous puddles. After that, we will be in survival mode.
May 30 2017
Roeicorvée
Roeicorvée.
Corvée is the Dutch word for drudgery and roei is row, so roeicorvée would be rowing drudgery.
I wanted to row late in the evening, when the temperatures start to drop from the high of 30C. However, by the time I wanted to drive to the rowing club, the sky was black and the weather forecast looked like this:
Not so good, in other words. So I opted to row the steady state session on the erg. Roeicorvée. It was a good decision. The hailstones were the size of golfballs.
Kinomap
One of my Strava followers had talked about Kinomap. This iOS app shows you footage of rowing while you are pulling on the erg. I thought it would make the erg less boring so I installed it on my iPad and rowed the first 2k with it. That is, I played the only video of a 2k effort that was available on the free version and rowed while it played, covering s little over 2400m while looking at some single sculler on a brautiful lake.
For data capture, I had Painsled running in the background, but connecting Kinomap through BlueTooth actually threw out Painsled, as I discovered after the row. Bugger.
But Kinomap syncs automatically to Strava, except that it didn’t transfer heart rate data from the PM5. Here is the workout after import to rowsandall.com from Strava:
So I tried to look at pricing of Kinomap but couldn’t find a way to subscribeor find any pricing info on Kinomap’s website or in the app. I thought about connecting Kinomap through the USB cable (using the connector cable for the iPhone) but the connector csnle is very short and I had no way to support the iPad next to the PM.
So I rowed another 30 minutes of rowing drudgery, wiped off the sweat from the handle, my hands snd my face, dialled up a 5k and rowed on. Here are the PainSled plots. These ones are missing SPM values because Painsled has corrected a typo in the CSV column header (stokes instead of strokes) without informing the developer at rowsandall.com. I will fix that asap.
All really slow as you can see. Tomorrow: another row in the eight.
Jun 10 2017
Friday: a row in the desert
Wednesday
Travel from Minneapolis to Phoenix. No exercise. Adding a few more hours to my jetlagged body.
Thursday
A workout in the hotel gym. Basically 50 minutes of threadmill running with a slight incline. And 10 minutes on the elliptical.
Friday
Rowing in the USA, so the alarm clock went off at 4:15am. Drove from Deer Valley to Tempe, zipping down the I17 in about 35 minutes. I guess the early rowing is related to the heat. Yesterday’s max was 109 Fahrenheit. I don’t even want to know the conversion to Celsius, because it felt awful just walking to my rental car on the parking lot after the working day.
At Tempe Town rowing, I met with Dottie and a couple of other single scullers. They gave me a 2002 Sykes single built for Lightweights (72.5kg) and it was just fine. The boat had been broken and repaired and looked a bit battered but it was rigged well, it was responsive, and I managed to get a good boat run. I basically did two loops and a bit on the lake and then I had to leave.
Zipped back up the I17 to take a shower in my hotel, then back down that same I17 to make it to my 8:30 meeting at Sky Harbor. Next time I should book a hotel in Tempe, be closer to the rowing and commute to work. It would save a lot of driving time and eould allow me to sleep longer.
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: OTW, rowing, single, steady state, training