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Feb 27 2017

First Empower Connected Row

So today I had a long gap between a busy first half of the working day and the evening series of conference calls, which was ideal to drive to Pisárky and do a longish outing in the single. This time I did pay attention to switching on the SpeedCoach correctly.

I did three “rivers”, i.e. rowing up to the hydro plant in Komín and back. That is a little over 2km per stretch of river, 4.4km per loop, and the total workout duration was 13km.

Rowing on a river is interesting for me as a lake dweller. There is much more waterfowl and bird life to watch during the row. Except for two mean looking swans that is really a plus. The other difference is how close you are to people walking on the banks. Mothers with prams and small children. People relaxing on park benches. People standing on bridges, just staring at the water. And most of those people smiled at me, which is great.

I played with the SpeedCoach settings. With the Empower oarlock, there is a whole set of new parameters to watch during as well as after the workout. The “classic” screen looks like this:

You set up the top row before the outing, but you can very easily switch what is displayed on the bottom row at the turning points. I was running the Garmin Forerunner in backup mode, so I didn’t need to see heart rate.  Here are the settings I chose:

  • Average Power & Instantaneous Power
  • Catch angle & Slip (a measure of how quickly you take pressure on the blade, after the catch)
  • Finish angle & Wash (a measure of how much the force drops off in the second half of the drive)
  • Total drive length (catch to finish) and effective drive length (taking slip and wash into the equation)
  • Max Force and Average Force
  • Max Force Angle & Work per Stroke

I found the effective drive length a really interesting metric to display during the row. I have to work on my sequencing, and when I do this right, I see that I maintain the effective length well above 85 degrees. When I become lax, it drops quickly. Average power seemed to be more relevant when you do pieces. I couldn’t relate much to the force numbers. I also liked to watch “work per stroke” but it isn’t entirely clear to me how to use it. Perhaps when you do rate ladders, you can try to keep this value constant when you go up the ladder.

Talking about all those metrics, here is what rowsandall.com had to say about correlations. Mind you, this is for a single row and I mainly rowed at 20spm.

Interesting that “wash”, which has to be low, strongly correlates with Peak force, power, drive length, finish angle. The only concern I have here is that with the twisty river, there were a lot of strokes where I was steering. Especially on the turns to starboard, where I row a slightly shorter, weaker stroke with my starboard scull, this may lead to a relatively large portion of “non-relevant” strokes.

Export to Strava, now with real power values:

Here are the big plots:

Classic OTW plot
With power plot

And here are the metrics plots:

I leave them without comments for now.

Now that I am a first-hand user of the Empower, I already discovered a couple of improvements that I need to implement on rowsandall.com. Also, I am suspicious of the drive length. Probably a small mistake in a calculation I made. I like how the SpeedCoach talks about drive length in degrees and I like the “effective drive length” parameter. To make this maximally effective, I will add these parameters exactly as they are represented during the row. That makes it easier for coaches and rowers to analyze the training and then transfer the lessons learned to the next practice.

Next time I will try out the “skill” screens of the SpeedCoach.

http://www.nkhome.com/rowing-sports/empower-oarlock

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IMG_1359

Feb 26 2017

Exciting and disappointing at the same time

So I had an exciting morning. I drove to the lake to pick up the trailer with three singles. As you can see, the lake was still frozen and it will take another few weeks before it will be rowable.

Frozen Brno lake

We took the singles to the place where our rowing club started 105 years ago, which we still own, even though most of the buildings are in bad need of renovation.

There, it didn’t take us long to get two single ready and we headed out on the water. My first row with the Empower Oarlock, so I badly wanted to record it. Unfortunately, I made a critical mistake. After a few months without using the SpeedCoach, it’s user interface managed to confuse me. Seeing the message “stop”, I figured it was running and recording, and I could “stop” that by pressing the “back” button.

So I happily selected which parameters to watch and went off rowing, already looking forward to taking a critical look at the data.

Unfortunately, as I just found out, you have to set it to “ready” and not to “stop”. All I have is a 27m segment when I was fiddling with the setup! 🙁

Other than that, the row was fun, and luckily I had the Garmin Forerunner running in parallel, so I do have heart rate and pace.

The rowable part of the river is about 2.5km long, between two sluices. It is quite windy.

In the first 2.5km, I selected stroke rate/pace/power/catch angle. I started with arms only, then arms and back, and then to half slide, three quarter and on to full slide. It was fun to watch the catch angle go up. If I remember well, I ended up around 61 degrees.

Power was around 180W. It dropped down to 120 when I was turning to starboard, and went up to 220W when I was turning to port. And as this is a windy river, there was a lot of turning.

At one point, I ran into a thin sheet of ice. Luckily, no scratches on the boat.

At another point, I surprised a few swimmers. I didn’t expect swimmers. I should have known better, with the Czech Republic the world center of cold water swimming. The girls were splashing in the ice cold river while Eda and I rowed by, and only on our second loop they were back on the shore. Amazing!

I experimented a lot with the third and fourth metric to watch, so on the first return leg I looked at slip and average power. Average power stayed at zero. (I know understand why, but it didn’t occur to me then.) Slip was around 4 to 7 degrees. Then I looked at wash and total stroke angle, with wash around 11 degrees, and total stroke angle around 107 degrees, if I remember correctly. And finally, back to power and finish angle. All very exciting. If only I had all the data afterwards. Well, I guess it’s my fault.

It was also fun to watch how my power remained consistently oscillating around 180W, while pace varied with the stream and wind.  I am already looking forward to training for the 6km head race and figuring out what power I can sustain over that distance. I plan to spend some time doing that, and then on race day I can just hold that power for 4 or 5km, and then go for it. Having power feedback available during a row is perfect. Really perfect.

I guess only in the turns, the power value can be deceiving.

After the row, I took a few pictures of our river rowing venue.

After the row I drove the trailer back to the lake venue. I took a shower there and replaced batteries and did firmware upgrades on 8 of the club ergs. After that I drove over to the electronics store to pick up a new Raspberry Pi for my little rowing data logger project.

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Feb 25 2017

Friday – cycling / Saturday – planning

Friday

Cycled to work and cycled back.

Strong headwind in the afternoon (and a slight tailwind in the morning).

I also installed PyRow on a Raspberry Pi and rowed 100m on the Concept2 erg to test it. It worked flawlessly through the USB interface and a short CSV file was the result. So I have another small project, to adapt PyRow to record more metrics and produce a CSV file compatible with Rowsandall.com. If I get them interested, I want to involve my sons in the project. The Pi is ideal to show how a computer is built, and how computers communicate.

PyRow also shows the strength of open source. I was up and running in 15 minutes, and I have plenty of ideas to implement, which will flow back to the original PyRow, and thus can be of use to many other people.

Well, so far it’s just ideas.

Saturday

Also just an idea, so far, is the following:

Today we had our annual member’s meeting at the rowing club. My club, CVK Brno, has two locations. The lake venue is where we have most of our boats, the club house, the erg room, and where we train.

We also own the original venue on the Svratka river, a few kilometers downstream from the lake. There is the original club house, which is now rented to an outdoor clothes store, and a few old hangars. In the summer, we rent the garden to a company that commercially exploits dragon boats.

The entire area around the river is interesting. There are a few rowing and canoe club houses (some of them abandoned). One of the main ring roads, a tram line and the river fight for space:

The city council is now making serious plans to revitalize the whole area, and the club has to decide whether to hop on this boat or not. Here is one of the plans, putting the traffic and the tram partly in a tunnel. Our club house is in the top of the image, before the bend in the river.

Here is a visualization seen from the north, with our club house among the other historic club houses to the left of the small bridge in front of the picture.

This is how the road and tram are almost pushing into the river today. The river is on the right. The road is too narrow and is one of the main problem points with long traffic jams every day, so it has to be widened, but between the river and the hill there is almost no place. So that is why they are talking about a tunnel.

One of our ideas is to renovate the old club house, depicted below on an old photo, and turn it into our main place to do land training. There would be a gym with ergs, bike trainers, and treadmills.

Talking of old club houses, next to our club house is an even older rowing club house, which is now abandoned.

The picture is from the early 20th century, and now the building looks like this:

Not a very good shape, but this building is under monument’s protection, and one of the ideas is to make it into a small museum about rowing.

All of this are really plans for the coming 5-10 years, and they are just visions, and nobody knows what is really possible, but if we make the wrong decision now, we may not be part of the planning, and an opportunity may be lost.

Actually, tomorrow I plan to row from this location.

The lake is still frozen and it looks like it will take another month before the last ice is gone. So this morning I mounted my new Empower Oarlock and did all the calibrations, and then I prepared the single on the trailer. Tomorrow, I plan to move the single to our river venue and row from there, until the ice thaws on our lake.

By the way, the mounting and calibration of the oarlock too no more than 30 minutes, and I had to check on the great YouTube instruction video only once.

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Feb 23 2017

Power at 17spm

Today’s workout was another interesting one:

5x(6x15strokes on / 10 strokes off)/5 minutes rest. Drag 145. Stroke rate 17spm

My Masters team mates warned that this is a “very heavy” workout. So after another long day at work, I went down to my erg cave. Tired, but curious.

I did a 1500m light warming up without any fast strokes. Then set the drag to 145 and started a “Just Row”.

After the first interval I took a piece of paper and wrote down a row of numbers 1 to 5 and another row of numbers 1 to 6. Then I took two coins and placed one on the 1 in the top row and the other one next to the 1 on the bottom row.

After each 15 strokes “on”, I moved the bottom coin to the next number.

The only way for me to count the number of intervals and sets. Counting to 15 and 10 was hard enough.

Here are some stroke stats:

Pace-wise, I paddled the 10 strokes at a very light pace, and the “on” strokes got down to 1:54, but usually were between 1:56 and 1:58. It took about 10 strokes in each set to get below 2:00 pace.

It wasn’t very hard, and I was surprised how fast the first 10km passed. Perhaps I was doing something wrong? Perhaps I should pull harder?

Doing the flex charts I made an interesting discovery. The average/peak force was unusually high for me. Normally it is around 0.56 or 0.57. Today it was significantly higher at 0.62. Most of the following plots are made on rowsandall.com by selecting only the strokes below 18spm:

Not sure about this workout. Let’s see. Either I did it wrong, or I wake up tomorrow with a 10% increase in leg strength.

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Feb 22 2017

February CTC (10×90″/30″)

Well, that was painful.


Workout Summary - media/20170222-2000230o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|04931|20:00.0|02:01.7|244.4|26.8|170.3|181.0|09.2
W-|04129|15:00.0|01:49.0|274.0|27.9|169.9|181.0|09.9
R-|00813|05:00.0|03:04.6|110.8|22.5|172.9|181.0|02.4
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00417|01:30.0|01:47.8|268.6|27.8|145.1|163.0|10.0
01|00408|01:30.0|01:50.2|270.8|27.1|162.0|169.0|10.0
02|00407|01:30.0|01:50.7|261.7|26.9|166.9|172.0|10.1
03|00414|01:30.0|01:48.6|268.6|26.9|169.5|173.0|10.3
04|00415|01:30.0|01:48.5|283.5|27.8|171.7|177.0|10.0
05|00414|01:30.0|01:48.6|272.2|27.3|175.2|179.0|10.1
06|00411|01:30.0|01:49.5|273.3|27.0|175.9|180.0|10.2
07|00415|01:30.0|01:48.5|278.9|28.7|176.7|180.0|09.6
08|00415|01:30.0|01:48.6|279.4|29.1|177.5|181.0|09.5
09|00413|01:30.0|01:48.9|282.8|30.2|178.4|181.0|09.1

The training plan called for a 50 minute gentle run. I came home very late and had 4 performance reviews today, one of which was a very tough one.

Also, I wanted to get the CTC out of the way, and with a 2km warming up and a 2km cooling down, it would be a short workout.

Short but painful. I aimed for 1:49 pace. The 30 second “rest” is just enough to make you go harder than if you would row this without breaks, and you pay for it after 3 or 4 intervals.

A bunch of stroke metric plots:

And here is the correlations table:

You can see the strong negative correlation of stroke rate and average/peak force ratio. I would also like to point out the strong positive correlation between Work per Stroke and stroke length. A fact we all know but forget as soon as we sit down on the erg.

Finally, a few cumulative statistics. I am building the map of New Zealand by plotting power vs stroke rate. Stroke Force Ratio is pretty constant across stroke rates. 

You can also see that in the past 10 days I have done a bit more speed work, compared to the past year.

I nearly fainted after completing the workout. This is a real hard one, especially on a day with a few performance reviews.

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myimage (63)

Feb 21 2017

Team workout

Armed with my iphone connection kit and a 30-pin to firelight (or firewire or wirefire, whatever), I took to the rowing club. I want to get into the habit of doing one or two sessions per week with the other Masters rowers. It is good to train with others.

It is also unusual. The erg room is hot and sweaty, not like my gloomy but nicely cool rowing cave. There is other music. But mostly, you are rowing next to other guys and there is the peaking on each other’s PM’s factor.

Today’s training was 3x15min/4min with the 15min at 20spm, but every fifth minute at 24spm. We rowed in sync.


Workout Summary - media/20170221-1825230o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|13178|57:05.0|02:10.0|172.1|17.6|0.0|000.0|13.1
W-|11320|45:00.0|01:59.3|206.8|21.2|000.0|000.0|11.9
R-|01861|12:05.0|03:15.0|001.0|00.1|000.0|000.0|382.8
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|03814|15:00.0|01:58.0|212.5|21.0|000.0|0.0|12.1
01|03759|15:00.0|01:59.7|204.9|21.2|000.0|0.0|11.8
02|03747|15:00.0|02:00.1|203.0|21.3|000.0|0.0|11.7

The plots are a bit weird. I was hesitating if I would add a fourth interval or not. In the end I couldn’t convince Martin (gasping for air) and Tomas to do it, but I did a few strokes into a fourth interval. Painsled didn’t like that really.

I also discovered that the PM3 doesn’t send the cool metrics like drive force and drive length over the USB connection. Messes up the stats.

As I don’t have a Polar heart rate connector, I recorded my heart rate separately on the Garmin Forerunner. Quite high heart rates. I didn’t much like this workout. Too low stroke rate for me.

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lelekovice-web-85

Feb 19 2017

Recovery run

I had to stay on the roads. The forest is still not runnable. Ice and snow and icy snow. And mud.

It was a nice run. Originally planned to go out for just 8km, but I always prefer running a loop over running the same way back, so in the end it was almost 13km.

I just threw my running into fifth gear and enjoyed my stream of thought. Rewinding yesterday’s races and some stuff related to the rowsandall.com site.

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