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ifema.jpg

Mar 9 2017

Tuesday & Wednesday – Steady State

Tuesday

My boss’s phone call woke me up. He was stuck at the airport in Toulouse because of Air Traffic Control strike and couldn’t fly in to Madrid. Suddenly I was the person who had to speak to his contacts and his boss’s contacts.

So that threw my plans out of the door. As my luggage hadn’t arrived on Monday evening (despite Iberia’s promise), I had to rush to downtown Madrid, hit El Corte Inglés for clean shirts, smart pants and a tie, and rush back to the IFEMA, where the conference was held, then find our Government Relations lady and align our talking points.

I really love clothes shopping. Not. My usual style of clothes shopping is already quite close to a covert operation, and this time it was really get in, find shirts, find matching tie, try, pay, get the hell out of there.

ifema

After the prep, it was a whirlwind of meetings, then a reception with a few drinks and lots of discussions. I ended up at my hotel room extremely tired, and even canceled the planned dinner. No time for training.

Wednesday

Dragged myself down to the hotel fitness room for an erg session before breakfast. I was extremely uninspired, dialed up a 10k and started rowing, 2:05 split. After 2.5km I added in a 10 stroke acceleration to spice up things a bit and that seemed to help. So I did the 10 strokes at 1:52 pace every 1000m until 2k to go, at which point I settled for a cooling down.

Not the ideal training but about the maximum possible given the circumstances.

The rest of the was catching up with my own meetings which I had moved out of the Tuesday, and then I caught a flight back home. Arrived pretty late.

Today I am catching up with overdue blog posts, and more importantly trying to catch up with everything at work, because tomorrow I will be on a business trip to Prague, and on Sunday I am leaving to the US for a week. I don’t think I am getting in the required amount of training this week, and definitely not the right intensity. Well, that just comes with my job. I have a cool job, so there I will have to accept the occasional suboptimal training.

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3814096_20_z.jpg

Mar 9 2017

Monday: Travel blues & Steady State

 

Every spring I attend the World ATM (Air Traffic Management) Congress in Madrid, Spain. It’s a nice event where the entire industry gathers. A great opportunity to compress in a few days what otherwise could have been endless conference calls or numerous business trips. Also, the chance of nice weather early March is a lot greater in Madrid than in Brno, so there is the additional benefit of feeling the sun on your winter skin during a lunch break.

For the past three years I have stayed in a hotel in central Madrid, but this time I decided to return to a hotel close to the conference venue, because I knew the fitness had a Concept2 erg. Here it is. Do you see the Concept2 erg?

3814096 20 z

At Vienna airport Iberia forced me to check my luggage.

At Madrid, only 10 suitcases arrived on the belt. All the other luggage had remained in Vienna. Great. So instead of heading directly to the hotel and get in my workout, I had to queue more than an hour to fill out my lost luggage form. Iberia promised that the luggage would arrive on the next flight. I didn’t believe them much.

So after I arrived at the hotel, I headed to the shopping mall opposite and bought the cheapest workout clothes I could get. A 3 Euro T-shirt and training shorts. Then I took my iPhone connector kit, heart rate belt, Garmin watch (all of which I luckily had in the small carry-on bag), and headed down to the hotel fitness.

The Concept2 was there waiting for me. Unfortunately, the PM3 on firmware version 82 did not connect to the iPhone. I tried both Painsled and ErgData but no luck. Oh well. The training effect is there even without recording the data, right?

I rowed a 15km of steady state. It was dry and warm and at the end I was very sweaty. I didn’t go very fast.

IMG 1378

I also noted that the poor erg had been idle for a very very long time:

IMG 1380

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czechoslovakia1956

Mar 5 2017

Short Intervals & The Rowsberry Pi project

First, a cool photograph that I came across today. It is totally unrelated to the post, but I like it, and I find my “feature image” featuring charts and graphs a bit boring:

Czechoslovakia, 1956

There are five people on the photograph.

Today’s row was the short interval session that I had planned for this week. It is not part of my club’s training program, but I have decided to go hybrid. I have planned out my training periodization and the type of workouts I will do in each period. On Monday, when I receive the coach’s training plan, I will plan out the rest of the week, adhering as much as possible to his sessions, but making sure I remain close to my planned periodization, and thus adding, replacing or adapting sessions where needed. It allows me to join the group erg sessions on the club but still understand what the purpose is of each session.

After lunch, I played a bit with the Raspberry Pi, for the “Rowsberry Pi” project. The idea is to create open source software that can be loaded on a Raspberry Pi, turning it into a low-cost data logger for erg sessions. I started with PyRow and I adapted it slightly to capture some extra stroke stats, like drive length, work per stroke, etc. It took a few iterations to get that to work, so my family saw me running back and forth between the rowing basement and the living room.

The basic idea is as follows:

  1. One or more ergs connect to a Raspberry Pi through the USB cable
  2. The Pi just listens to the ergs. When a workout is programmed and started, it starts recording automatically.
  3. At the end of each workout, the Pi saves the stroke data to a CSV file. If configured with an email address, the workout is uploaded automatically to rowsandall.com. Otherwise, the data are available on a shared drive on the network

It should really be a plug-and-row solution. Here’s a picture of my “test lab”:

The Pi is connected to the network through Wifi, and has a network address rowsberrypi1.local. It is connected to the erg through USB. I still have to manually start the program before each workout, and get the results from the Pi by FTP. So there is still some work to do. Also, the recording of the interval session failed. I manually started the session, then programmed it on the PM. I believe that the Pi thought that the session ended at that point.

So, lots of fun details to get right. But imagine being able to install a few Pis in the rowing club ergroom and just silently log all the data … or have your own Pi for recording sessions while traveling. With the network access, even more can be done. A coach can set up all ergs to the same workout remotely through the network.

So here is  my traditional warming up with a few hard strokes, as recorded with Painsled and processed on Rowsandall.com:

And here are a few quick graphs from excel, from the CSV file produced by the Pi. Same warming up as above:

And here is the main session. I did 15 intervals of 40″ on, 1 minute off:

Finally, I did a 3km cooling down.

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1920juniori

Mar 4 2017

Saturday – OTW in the single

A jedeme v tom zas. #cvkbrno #czechrowing #loveit

A post shared by Leňaa (@lenka_roosendaal) on

This morning I drove to the lake to pick up another batch of singles and pairs. In the erg room I saw Eda, who just finished his first set of 10 500m pieces (see yesterday’s blog). He was rowing them in 1:42-1:44 pace, but rating around 28spm instead of the prescribed 26spm.

Took the boats to the Pisarky (river) club house. Then quickly hopped in the single for a short row, knowing that Lenka would be around in 45 minutes for her row.

I had to reset the SpeedCoach after 1800m. I was rowing with Slip and Catch angle values on the bottom row of the screen. Suddenly there were no values any more. First I tried switching off and on the oarlock. That didn’t help. Then I reset the SpeedCoach, which solved the issue.

First part:

Workout Summary - media/20170304-102315-Sanders SpeedCoach 20170304 0927amo.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|01839|09:26.0|02:33.9|159.2|21.0|150.9|166.0|09.3
W-|01839|09:26.0|02:33.9|159.2|21.0|150.9|166.0|09.3
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|166.0|00.0

Second Part:

Workout Summary - media/20170304-102435-Sanders SpeedCoach 20170304 0938amo.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|07351|38:53.0|02:38.7|147.4|20.7|161.4|172.0|09.1
W-|07351|38:53.0|02:38.7|147.4|20.7|161.4|172.0|09.1
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|172.0|00.0

I had moved the seat rails a bit sternward to allow for full reach with the new foot stretcher settings.

I was watching slip and catch angle for most of the workout. Only in the last leg did I change it to wash and catch angle.

It’s a great spring day today. I had to interrupt sitting in the sun in the garden to write up this training log. I guess the Rowsberry Pi work will have to wait until tomorrow.

Adding two pictures from an old album about our club.

The juniors (1920)
A party at the rowing club (1936)

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myimage (21)

Mar 4 2017

Friday – a lot of 500m

This is the mirror post to this one, so I suggest you read Greg’s observation first. The training was 2x10x500m/80″, with 4 minutes between the sets of 10. And with a rate cap of 26spm.

This was on my training plan and Greg agreed to do it as well, so we could test some of the new “team” functionality on rowsandall.com.

I will go straight to the results.

Set 1:

Workout Summary - media/20170303-1700260o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|07000|29:39.0|02:07.1|205.9|24.0|159.7|175.0|09.8
W-|05000|18:40.0|01:52.1|253.1|25.8|161.2|175.0|10.4
R-|02000|11:00.0|02:45.0|098.1|19.8|156.2|175.0|08.8
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00500|01:51.4|01:51.4|245.8|25.6|150.0|165.0|10.5
01|00500|01:52.5|01:52.5|256.6|25.7|158.6|170.0|10.4
02|00500|01:51.5|01:51.5|253.3|25.8|158.2|168.0|10.4
03|00500|01:52.0|01:52.0|257.7|26.3|162.4|171.0|10.2
04|00500|01:53.1|01:53.1|251.3|25.7|160.3|172.0|10.3
05|00500|01:52.6|01:52.6|255.4|25.9|162.0|174.0|10.3
06|00500|01:52.1|01:52.1|248.4|26.1|164.1|174.0|10.2
07|00500|01:52.3|01:52.3|252.0|25.7|165.1|174.0|10.4
08|00500|01:51.5|01:51.5|258.1|25.9|164.4|174.0|10.4
09|00500|01:51.8|01:51.8|252.6|25.8|166.7|175.0|10.4

Set 2:

Workout Summary - media/20170303-1700240o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|07000|29:32.0|02:06.6|206.4|24.2|162.6|179.0|09.8
W-|05000|18:13.0|01:49.4|264.2|26.2|163.7|179.0|10.5
R-|02000|11:19.0|02:49.8|080.8|19.9|160.2|179.0|08.9
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00500|01:50.3|01:50.3|253.2|25.9|154.6|171.0|10.5
01|00500|01:50.1|01:50.1|259.2|26.4|162.0|174.0|10.3
02|00500|01:50.0|01:50.0|261.0|26.2|163.7|174.0|10.4
03|00500|01:50.1|01:50.1|258.1|26.2|162.9|175.0|10.4
04|00500|01:49.9|01:49.9|257.8|26.2|163.6|174.0|10.4
05|00500|01:49.6|01:49.6|265.8|26.2|165.6|175.0|10.5
06|00500|01:50.0|01:50.0|259.9|25.9|164.4|176.0|10.5
07|00500|01:49.7|01:49.7|263.1|26.0|164.6|175.0|10.5
08|00500|01:47.6|01:47.6|276.7|26.2|167.3|177.0|10.6
09|00500|01:46.7|01:46.7|288.0|26.3|168.5|179.0|10.7

And the graphs:

It was a doable workout. On paper it looks very brutal, but I didn’t have any problems rowing it. Hence I accelerated in the second set, by focusing on long strokes.

While rowing, I was wondering how Greg was doing. I imagined 1:44 pace. After we both uploaded our workouts to rowsandall.com, we could compare:

So you can see that we were really close in terms of heart rate and power. On the dynamic, Greg upped the stroke rate a bit.

Here are the metrics plots, just because I have them. Nothing special to observe, except that I did a good job holding length.

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myimage (16)

Mar 1 2017

Steady State in the single (and more empower thoughts)

The clouds looked like they contained either rain or snow, but luckily they were just very threatening.

The training plan said “45 minutes of swimming”, but I went to back to the single again. Moved my footstretcher sternwards to try and get a bit more catch angle. Feels heavy.


Workout Summary - media/20170301-185315-Sanders SpeedCoach 20170301 0421pmo.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|10552|55:58.0|02:39.1|150.1|20.5|156.7|179.0|09.2
W-|10552|55:58.0|02:39.1|149.9|20.5|156.5|179.0|09.2
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|179.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|02200|11:36.3|02:38.2|162.0|19.9|150.8|166.0|09.5
01|02200|11:05.3|02:31.2|159.3|20.9|160.6|176.0|09.5
02|02200|11:47.5|02:40.8|156.6|21.3|162.4|179.0|08.8
03|02200|11:19.9|02:34.5|151.2|20.8|160.1|177.0|09.3
04|01752|10:09.2|02:53.9|116.5|19.3|147.9|164.0|09.0

I set the bottom left part of the screen to “Work per stroke” and left it there. Indeed, technically good strokes on straight bits of the river came in between 450 and 600J. Paddling and turning was below 450J.

Catch angle today: -60 +/- 4 degrees

Catch angleMonday: -58 +/- 4 degrees

Finish angle today: 44 +/- 4 degrees

Finish angle Monday: 45 +/- 4 degrees.

These are median values (not averages). I will explain the reason for that below. Slip and wash nearly unchanges as far as average values were concerned. Two remarks, though:

  1. In the first 2km I had catch angle on the display and I do believe I saw values between 60 and 65 degrees consistently. This is also confirmed by the catch angle plot. What is less satisfactory is that the effect went away as soon as I started monitoring a different metric.
  2. Looking at slip, I could consciously get the number down to 5 degrees and I like how I was rowing when I achieved that.
Monitoring catch angle in first 2km. You can see the effect ebb away after that.
Slip values – I could work on it consciously and get the lower values
Wash. I didn’t monitor this so the values are “as is”.

The Wash graph is also interesting for two reasons. First, I didn’t monitor “wash” during the row, so you can see a natural spread of finish angles (lean back?) and wash values. It is clear that a better lean back lowers the Wash values (which is better). It is also clear that on the long rows you cannot average over the entire row. The sloppy strokes (paddle strokes) all are biased to low values of finish angle and high values of wash. This distorts the average if you don’t look at a specific interval. The median value of 44 degrees is much more representative.

The two charts above show this well for the slip parameter. I plotted it against Work per Stroke (left) and Power (right). Good strokes are above 500 J per stroke. So that brings me into the slip values of 6-7 degrees. And as said, working on technique brought that down, which illustrates how this tool can help you work on technique.

Here are the overview plots of the workout:

And here is the full set of metrics plots:

Here is the row on Strava:

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Rowingchat-logo-on-soundcloud

Feb 28 2017

3x20min at the rowing club

I got up very early. We took the 6:07 train to Prague, for another visit to the embassy, this time with the kids, to get the documents for the rest of the family in order. I spent a few hours in the train updating the rowsandall.com site with some advanced filtering of Empower Oarlock data.

The training plan was clear and this is a training I recognize.

3x20min / 4 min rest. Alternate 20 and 22 spm each 2 minutes

I rowed this at the rowing club and the turnout was great. We Masters occupied 5 ergs. Doing the rate stuff in a row of five ergs is interesting when you sync your strokes, as we did.

I was on the erg next to the wall, and I did notice that air circulation is a lot worse there. I am used to my cold rowing basement and I did have a lot of trouble rowing in this hot, humid environment.


Workout Summary - media/20170228-1920230o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|15791|72:00.0|02:16.8|190.0|21.2|000.0|000.0|10.3
W-|14649|60:00.0|02:02.9|189.3|21.4|000.0|000.0|11.4
R-|01146|12:00.0|05:14.1|188.7|21.9|000.0|000.0|00.2
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|04900|20:00.0|02:02.5|190.5|21.4|000.0|000.0|11.4
01|04883|20:00.0|02:02.9|189.8|21.3|000.0|000.0|11.5
02|04866|20:00.0|02:03.3|187.6|21.4|000.0|000.0|11.3

I was the slowest of the lot, but I think I am the only one who knows about a polarized training plan. I tried to explain that this should be rowed at “conversation” pace, but the others wanted to pull faster splits than their neighbors.

I am happy to report that my Sunday hour of updating firmware was successful. I have the full metrics from Painsled now.

No heart rate data. I recorded that separately on the Garmin, but I haven’t finished my Data Fusion functionality on rowsandall.com yet.

Oh and I should mention that you can listen to my on Sunday 8pm UK time, when I will be in the RowPerfect Rowing Chat: https://www.rowperfect.co.uk/rowingchat/

You can also download the podcast afterwards and listen to it later.

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