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racice2

Mar 22 2017

Račice day 3 – Steady State

Steady state row before breakfast. Breakfast. Drive to Prague. Traffic Jam. Park at first Underground station. Metro to work. Work. Metro back to other side of the city. Drive back to rowing canal.

Is there more I can say about today’s workout, you’re asking?

Yes, there is. Even though this was a time-pressed steady state at 18spm, there are a couple of things I would like to mention.

First, even though it started raining lightly during the workout and the temperatures were a lot lower than yesterday (about 3 degrees C), this was a superb row. The water was mirror flat, and I was the only person on the water. The birds were singing. The water was so flat that I did use the first 2k for drills, drills, drills. On our moody home lake, the water often is not suitable for doing drills.

Second, I tried a new thing. The Empower Oarlock with the SpeedCoach set to the “skills” display. I chose to work on finish angle and wash, which seemed a good one after the square blade rowing I had finished the drills with.

The SpeedCoach/Oarlock/HR belt combo hung up on me after about 3/4 of the workout, so the graphs come in two parts.

Here are the metrics plots. I still have to get a feel for it, but I think the Wash values are good for 18spm (at higher rates and pressure it is easier to get to lower slip and wash values). I also noticed that, indeed, when focusing on good form and a clean tap-down, the wash number was lower. When I concentrated, I could get the value below 10 degrees.

I am also quite proud on the constant stroke rate in the second part of the workout. Mind you, I only had finish angle and wash on my display. No other information. No stroke rate, no pace.

They are working hard to renovate the rowing canal and be ready for the European Championships in May. Here is an artist’s impression of the end state:

Most of it is done.

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metro

Mar 21 2017

Račice day 2 – Sprintervals

Alarm clock at 5:30, pushing off the dock at 6:00. With the jet lag and everything I had expected this to be very hard, but I hopped out of bed with no problem. Then I had the canal for myself and mirror flat water. Heaven!

The session was Nx30″/60″ with N being the number of intervals that fit into three straight 2k segments. In the end N turned out to be 21, if I count correctly.

On purpose, the breaks were long enough to allow me to focus on form, rather than going into workout survival mode. I think that paid off. As the intervals progressed, I got back that boat feeling (that one so successfully destroys when stuck to the static erg) and was able to see some nice pace numbers (1:48 was the lowest split I saw).

A slight adjustment in the foot stretcher. I think I am where I want to be now.

Here are the pie charts:

I was curious to see the technique metrics (slip, wash, effective length vs total length, etc) for this first time in the season I have consistently worked above 30spm on the water.

I think the slip and wash numbers look pretty good. I am wondering whether the numbers given by NK in their guidance are for race pace, because I get higher numbers for the paddling and steady state. Paddling between the intervals, both stroke length and effective stroke lengths are shorter, but this was just me paddling really easy. In most of the graphs above, I have selected only the “work” strokes. Here is the drive length graph for all strokes:

After the workout, I drove to the P+R just north of Prague and took the metro to our office on the other side of the city. It took me more than 90 minutes door to door, but the 45 minutes on the metro were usable for reading and working, so not much time lost.

Tomorrow: Steady state, again in the early hours. It will be just me, mirror flat water, and birds singing in the forests around the canal.

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mapka

Mar 20 2017

Cool stuff you can do with an Empower Oarlock

Saturday

I flew from Newark in the evening. Dropped my bags in the morning and took a train to Manhattan. My exercise for the day was hours and hours of walking.

At the end of the day, I took the flight to London, then London-Vienna, then a car home. Arrived at 2:30pm. Romana wasn’t at home. There had been a burglary in the houses her company is building near Pardubice. They got into two almost finished houses and took the stoves and cookers. She spent the whole day waiting for police technicians to come and try to find fingerprints. Not sure if they will ever catch them.

No exercise on Sunday.

Monday

This week is our annual training retreat. We drove to Račice, the “Labe Arena National Olympic Watersport Center” north of Prague, a three hour drive from Brno. It’s a long name but it’s just a FISA compliant rowing canal. We will be here until Friday. My plan is to train early in the morning and then go to the office in Prague.

Here is the club’s trailer a few minutes after we arrived.

First, the girls went for a training. I removed the Empower oarlock from my single and mounted it on Iva’s boat. Calibration was done quickly and off she went. There is a problem with her stroke. Romana complains that she has an exaggerated lean back which doesn’t add speed. So I wanted to see this.

So here is her “force curve” as measured by the Empower oarlock:

Two things are different from my own power curve. First, the average to peak power ratio is much lower than mine. Second, there is a kink in the curve around 19 degrees, which is where the lean back starts. Iva has a “wash” value of 27 degrees, which is about double my value. For comparison, here are two of my workouts from today:

It will be interesting for Iva to work on it and take another measurement for example on Friday. Or to set up her SpeedCoach to show wash and let her work on reducing it.

So after the girls finished, it was time to swap the oarlocks back and get my own workout in before dinner time. I started with the same workout as a year. A 4x2km. The warming up was recorded as the last part of Iva’s workout (forgot to reset the SpeedCoach):

It was just a 2k with some faster intervals towards the end. Then I turned my boat, removed one layer of clothing and got ready for my first 2k.

I was very curious to see how I would hold up the power. This was the first time this season where I could row a straight 2k. The 4x2km (at 2 minutes rest) is quite a good simulation for a head race, even though I rated it a lot lower.

After the first 2k (tailwind), I thought I could hold 230W, but that was a mistake. The second interval, with headwind, wore me out. So in the third interval I tuned down the power to 210W. In the final interval, again into headwind, I had difficulty keeping the rate and power up. I guess it was a good workout.


Workout Summary - media/20170320-183856-Sanders SpeedCoach 20170320 0453pmo.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|08000|36:01.0|02:15.1|211.2|25.3|173.5|180.0|08.8
W-|08000|36:01.0|02:15.1|211.0|25.3|173.5|180.0|08.8
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|02000|08:32.2|02:08.0|232.9|25.9|171.7|180.0|09.0
01|02000|09:16.6|02:19.2|210.4|25.4|175.1|180.0|08.5
02|02000|08:45.5|02:11.4|203.6|25.7|174.1|178.0|08.9
03|02000|09:27.3|02:21.8|198.7|24.4|173.0|179.0|08.7

Here are the metrics plots. I have moved the wing rigger a bit bow-wards. Perhaps a bit too much. Need to adjust it slightly.

Wash was 14.5 +/- 1.4 degrees. Slip was 5.5 +/- 0.9 degrees. Effective stroke length was 86 +/- 3 degrees at a total stroke length of 106.3 +/- 1.8 degrees. Pretty consistent, I would say. These metrics take into account only the 2k efforts, not the paddling in between.

In the US, I got myself an additional heart rate belt. I bought the advanced version of the Wahoo Tickr, the Tickr X. It’s a cool device. It can record a workout without the need of a watch or phone (you can sync later, when you’re near a phone), and claims to record cadence, stride length, and other cool parameters.

I downloaded the Wahoo Runfit app and did their “7 minute body weight workout”. It is fun to see how they use the accelerometer to measure number of pushups and jumping jacks. This is extremely cool and I will certainly make this HR belt my travel belt, to use with the Runfit app for hotel room workouts. It really helps to have your phone shout instructions at you like a real workout coach. It also claims to do rowing. I will take a look at what it recorded later.

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HH_fitnesscenter01_16_675x359_FitToBoxSmallDimension_Center

Mar 19 2017

A week in Parsippany

On Sunday I flew to the USA, and spent a week in a hotel somewhere in New Jersey.

I attended a week-long job-related training course, which included mandatory fun in the evenings. I did wake up early, but often spent too long answering emails from and making calls with my people back in Europe. So this week was a bit light on the training. Luckily I had scheduled it as a light week.

I just spent time on all of the equipment in this picture, staring at the wall painting and wondering what the heck it was depicing:

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1926b

Mar 11 2017

Saturday: Up and down, up and down, up and down the river

Another day at the river club house. First, Lenka went on the single. I gave her the SpeedCoach because I was curious to see her metrics.

During the workout of the girls, I did a crazy 50km tour around Brno, driving back home to get the papers to the company car that I had forgotten, fill up the car with diesel, then return the company car at work, get Romana’s car that was parked there, and return to the rowing club. When I returned after about an hour, the girls were still rowing.

I took some time to explore our river club house (1936). There are some 1930s notice boards, virtually unchanged. Also, you can see from the way the main club room is designed that rowing was an upper class sport in those days. It’s now rented out as store space, but this was a place with big open windows to a garden, and enough space to organize a ball.

Outside, I also opened what looked like a place to store oars, and I found about twenty wooden oars, in pretty good shape. Here are some random pictures from the 1926 chronicles:

Different times.

After Lenka’s row, it was my turn. I rowed up and down the river 2 and a bit times. There is really not much to say about these trainings. You cannot row really fast because of the turns and the traffic. I am really longing for the ice to melt and being able to train intensity rows on the lake.

That said, I dare to say that my boat feel is slowly returning. There were a few stroke sequences where the boat was running fine, according to my standards.

Here are the metric plots. I had catch angle and slip on the monitor and was pleased to see my catch angle consistently around 61 degrees, slip around 6 or 7 degrees when I was rowing well.

Accelerating slightly on the last bit of the recovery helps to get both catch angle and slip right. I have been working on that last year, when I didn’t have this excellent feedback tool, and I am happy to confirm that I was on the right track.

A few more of those fascinating old photos from our club. It’s a pity I don’t know the stories behind some of the scenes. That “new” building was our 1936 club house being built. Just two years before 1938-1945 …

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sucessfusion.png

Mar 11 2017

Friday – 18x45sec – and fusion work

In the morning I hit the road early and drove to Prague. On the D1 route through the Czech-Moravian highlands I was surprised by two pretty heavy snowstorms, but I arrived (unexpectedly) on time, because there were hardly any traffic jams into the city.

Had a few meetings in our Prague office, then drove to Andel for a lunch with a few rowers interested in rowsandall.com. It was a very positive meeting, and perhaps some nice side projects result from it. It’s encouraging to see that people see the value of the little toolset I have built in the past year.

This was the blog post on the day I started to look at some Python code in an email from Greg. On March 17th, he had written. “Hey, check this out. I made a python post processor for Painsled stroke files. Still working on the time formats. Thought you’d be interested.”

Well, yes I was interested.

Currently I am working on Data Fusion. I need this because on my rows at the rowing club, I am working with Concept2 ergs with the older PM3 monitor. I have no heart rate dongle for that, so the idea is to capture the PM data with one app and record heart rate with another app. Then fuse the data, which means that I add the heart rate data to the PM data into a new workout. It sounds very simple, but there is some time alignment and interpolation involved. Fortunately, it is easy to get Python and its Pandas package to do this to your data.

Here is one successfully fused steady state workout (3×20 minutes):

sucessfusion

 

Pretty cool stuff.

I did a sprinterval workout yesterday, after an uneventful drive back to Brno. I went to the rowing club and dialed up 45 seconds “on” vs 1:15 “off”. Unfortunately, Painsled didn’t do a very good job at recording the workout. It didn’t record the real power and pace in the “off” sections. Also, I need to replace the battery in my Wahoo heart rate belt. It is showing some weird value swings. Hope it is just the battery.

Here is the resulting plot (after data fusion):

bokeh plot (75)

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myimage (36)

Mar 9 2017

A long day and a 5x1500m

I started the workout very late. I had a long day at work, trying to cram all the week’s interactions with my people into one day. I will be out on travel tomorrow. Just a day trip over to Prague (2 hour drive). And after dinner, my sons were quizzing me about computers and programming, so I showed them the Sonic Pi program on the Raspberry Pi. It’s a simple integrated development environment to program sounds. A kind of synthesizer software that teaches you to program. One of my sons plays guitar, so he know chords, and soon we were trying to program chords.

Still, I was determined to get a 5x1500m in. I know these workouts are always hard after an exhausting business trip, so I aimed at 1:52 average pace. Somehow, I went slightly faster in the first. I got tired, but I had a good rhythm and just kept going. After the second interval I shifted the stroke rate up a little and that turned out to be a good move. I didn’t have difficulty hitting 1:50 pace consistently, and that in itself was a huge motivation.

So, very glad I finished this workout. And when I look at my scores from 2 seasons ago, when I did a strict Wolverine plan, it’s a pretty good average pace. My fastest 5x1500m from that winter was 1:49.9 pace.


Workout Summary - media/20170309-2010220o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|11142|52:37.0|02:21.7|205.1|25.4|150.3|180.0|08.3
W-|07500|27:36.0|01:50.4|260.6|27.3|158.0|180.0|09.9
R-|03645|25:01.0|03:26.0|096.6|23.6|142.0|180.0|00.2
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|01500|05:32.1|01:50.7|255.5|26.6|152.7|171.0|10.2
01|01500|05:35.6|01:51.9|255.7|26.9|158.0|167.0|10.0
02|01500|05:31.5|01:50.5|260.7|27.5|159.6|175.0|09.9
03|01500|05:30.9|01:50.3|258.9|27.2|164.4|180.0|10.0
04|01500|05:26.5|01:48.8|272.2|28.5|155.3|174.0|09.7

The PM gave an average of 1:50.2. I believe something is wrong with the average reported in the second interval. Also, the heart rate graph seems a little weird. I had was wearing the Bluetooth HR belt and had the feeling the PM was lagging behind. The values on the Garmin watch (connected over the ANT protocol) seemed more reliabe.

And here are the metrics charts. I leave the interpretation as an exercise to the reader. It is quite evident what is going on.

I was also recording heart rate in parallel on the Garmin. I am making progress on Data Fusion for rowsandall.com. I may publish some sneak preview screenshots in a separate post over the weekend. Then we can see if the Garmin recorded different heart rate values.

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