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Nov 25 2016

About Ranking

Hurray, I have made it to the top 10 in our Czech Rowing Masters competition.

The final results table shows quite well how this competition works. You basically get 6 points for winning regattas, 5 for coming second, etc. The National Championship wins earn you double points.

My critique on the ranking has always been that it rewards participation more than the quality of the result. I guess, by doing a few more regattas (Trebon, Brandys) I used the system to my advantage.

In 2015 I was eigth as well with 91 points from 12 qualifying races (7.6 points per start). This year I have 108 points from 15 qualifying races (7.2 points per start). On average I scored 94.5% of maximum available points per start in 2015, compared to 87.5% this year.

A year ago, I also had some thoughts about rankings. Applying the formula that I describe there, to make the reward for starting often a bit less strong, I would have fallen down to 11th place:

It’s funny, because without doing a thorough numerical analysis, I considered my 2016 OTW season to be more successful than the 2015 one. I guess the wins in Slovakia and at Euromasters are not reflected in the Czech Masters ranking.

They the key to being happy in life is having low expectations. I don’t entirely subscribe to that philosophy, but it is true that I am satisfied with the 2016 season because the results exceeded my expectations.

At work, I am going through the annual “goal setting” exercise with my team. So I find this playing with rankings and thinking about what success entails quite relevant. Granted, there are differences between being successful in the business of innovative technology versus Masters rowing, but still. I truly believe that many of the things we learn by doing competitive rowing can be applied in our professions, and this is just one example.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 2 • Tags: masters, ranking, rowing

Nov 22 2016

Tuesday – Steady State

This is going to be a hard week to row according to my training plan. Both my boss and my former boss are in town. Yesterday, a full day with my boss and his team, followed by a dinner.

Today was a normal day. But tomorrow, I will have dinner with my former boss and his wife, and a few other colleagues, to celebrate is retirement. And on Thursday I will go to a concert.

As usual after a later dinner, I didn’t sleep well. So when it was time to do my steady state workout this evening, I was tired and not motivated. Still managed to row 12.5km.

I have also worked a bit on the performance of the rowsandall.com site. I can now make a plot of all my strokes over the past year, without crashing the site:

Yes, that’s all strokes rowed on the erg in the past 365 days.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 1 • Tags: concept2, erg, OTE, rowing, steady state, training

Nov 20 2016

More Steady State & Bad Technique

Just a 15km Steady State row, partitioned as 6x2500m, with the first 3 intervals rowed as 1000/750/500/250, and the final three intervals as 250/500/750/1000. In the first interval, I rowed at 18/19/20/21spm, in the second one 19/20/21/22spm, and in the third one 20/21/22/23spm. In the second half of the row I climbed down those same ladders in reverse order.

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Bad Technique

On Friday, I introduced a new parameter, the ratio of the average and peak drive force, and I found a study by Kleshnev that links this parameter to rowing style. Going one step further, I wanted to know if the value could be used to fingerprint bad technique. I set up a 250m intervals with 20 seconds rest and rowed. In the first and final intervals, I rowed my “normal” stroke, which I believe is decent, technique-wise.

In the other intervals I rowed exaggerated versions of common examples of bad technique. Here is the resulting table. I don’t see a correlation.

	Fratio	Ldrive
Good	0.58	1.40
Bad 1	0.56	1.38
Bad 2	0.59	1.38
Bad 3	0.57	1.45
Bad 4	0.59	1.41
Good	0.56	1.38

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 3 • Tags: concept2, erg, OTE, rowing, steady state, technique, training

Nov 19 2016

Saturday – more Steady State

It was rainy and dull, so no good weather to go out running. Today, I programmed 20k in the PM5 and rowed it down to zero. A few sessions ago I came up with a 750m/500m/250m sequence and Greg Smith, the quantified rower perfected that to 1000m/750m/500m/250m which gives you a nice 2500m interval. The fun part is to try and row each part of the 2500m at a prescribed stroke rate and work on consistency. It really makes long workouts fly by.

I also had a little fun with the interval editor on rowsandall.com and created these monster stats:
Workout Summary - media/20161119-1200070o.csv --|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg --|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS --|20000|86:14.0|02:09.4|174.5|19.5|153.7|166.0|11.9 W-|20000|86:16.0|02:09.4|172.9|19.4|153.0|166.0|11.9 R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|166.0|00.0 Workout Details #-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS- 01|01000|04:23.7|02:11.9|163.1|18.0|130.3|140.0|12.6 02|00750|03:08.6|02:05.7|176.2|19.1|142.9|149.0|12.5 03|00500|02:02.9|02:02.9|188.3|20.2|151.5|154.0|12.1 04|00250|01:00.7|02:01.5|195.4|21.4|154.3|156.0|11.6 05|01000|04:12.8|02:06.4|173.4|18.7|149.4|155.0|12.7 06|00750|03:08.9|02:05.9|175.4|19.3|148.0|151.0|12.4 07|00500|02:02.7|02:02.7|189.4|20.1|154.2|157.0|12.2 08|00250|01:00.7|02:01.4|196.5|20.9|158.9|161.0|11.8 09|01000|04:11.8|02:05.9|175.5|18.7|155.1|158.0|12.8 10|00750|03:06.9|02:04.6|180.8|19.3|156.3|158.0|12.5 11|00500|02:03.2|02:03.2|187.1|20.3|160.0|162.0|12.0 12|00250|00:58.1|01:56.2|192.4|21.1|161.7|163.0|12.3 13|01000|04:15.0|02:07.5|175.1|19.4|157.7|163.0|12.1 14|00750|03:05.4|02:03.6|185.5|20.3|160.6|163.0|11.9 15|00500|02:01.6|02:01.6|195.1|21.3|163.9|166.0|11.6 16|00250|02:43.4|05:26.7|111.2|18.0|129.3|165.0|05.1 - drink + 1.6mmol/L 17|01000|04:46.8|02:23.4|166.4|18.6|148.2|159.0|11.2 - playlist issue 18|00750|03:11.2|02:07.4|168.7|19.4|153.4|159.0|12.2 19|00500|02:04.8|02:04.8|180.2|20.4|157.2|159.0|11.8 20|00250|00:59.7|01:59.5|186.9|21.3|158.2|159.0|11.8 21|01000|04:16.7|02:08.4|169.3|18.6|156.3|160.0|12.5 22|00750|03:10.7|02:07.1|170.5|19.3|157.8|159.0|12.3 23|00500|02:05.3|02:05.3|178.1|20.5|158.5|160.0|11.7 24|00250|01:00.6|02:01.2|192.1|21.4|161.0|164.0|11.6 25|01000|04:18.0|02:09.0|163.8|18.4|157.3|163.0|12.6 26|00750|03:12.6|02:08.4|165.4|19.5|154.9|158.0|12.0 27|00500|02:05.8|02:05.8|175.5|20.2|156.3|158.0|11.8 28|00250|01:01.3|02:02.7|185.2|21.3|158.9|161.0|11.5 29|01000|04:20.8|02:10.4|159.0|18.8|154.2|160.0|12.2 30|00750|03:10.9|02:07.3|169.6|19.6|156.1|160.0|12.0 31|00500|02:04.5|02:04.5|181.5|20.7|160.3|162.0|11.7 32|00250|01:00.1|02:00.1|182.8|21.5|160.5|162.0|11.6 - 1.0 mmol/L

I paddled the final 250m of the fourth interval and stopped to take a lactate measurement: 1.6 mmol/L.

Then in the first 1000m of the second 10k, my playlist stopped, so I had to get off the erg and restart it.

At the end of the row, I measured lactate again. By now, that was very tricky because sweat was dripping from all my body parts. I was wearing a moisture wicking long-sleeved shirt. The moisture wicking combined with the high humidity in my rowing cave resulted in me being covered in “dew”, which steadily dripped off the sleeve ends. Hard to not contaminate the lactate strip. Anyway, I measured a low value of 1.0 mmol/L. I think it is time to man up and go 10W higher.

For the period between September 1 and today, my Power histogram on the erg looks like this:

So 80% of my strokes below 200W (which is steady state). The peak is around 185W, and 50% of the strokes are at a lower power.

Also this interesting plot is available for everybody who uses rowsandall.com.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 4 • Tags: concept2, erg, OTE, rowing, steady state, training

Nov 19 2016

Friday – 12.5km Steady State / force curve

Friday was a bridge day between a Bank Holiday and a weekend. I decided to take a holiday and catch up with some maintenance on the site, as well as preparation for a workshop on Monday. I ended up taking more time on the website, and will have to prepare the Monday workshop today.

At the end of the afternoon, I descended to my rowing cave. First I played a bit with the official Concept2 smartphone app “ErgData”, and then I reverted to my beloved Painsled app to crank out a 12.5km steady state. I wanted to do more, but I ran out of time.

Here are a few new plots. I am still looking for the “signature” set of plots for a workout.

I have added a new metric to Rowsandall.com. It is the ratio of the average drive force vs the peak drive force, and it tells you something about the force curve. For a perfectly “flat” stroke profile, this ratio would be 1.0. For any sort of triangular profile, the ratio would be 0.5. The higher the value, the longer the force plateau during your drive. It seems from the plot above that I am pretty constant throughout the 19 to 22spm stroke rates I rowed in this session.

Here is a study by Kleshnev on the force curve in rowing. Here is a key plot from the study. “Classical style” would give you a force ratio close to 0.5. “Simultaneous style” is significantly higher (looks like 0.7 by eye). Kleshnev is not making conclusions on what is better. It is interesting that the tables in the study show force ratios between 0.4 and 0.6, but not much higher, for the rowers that he has in his database.

This plot shows work per stroke and power output. The average power was 174W (yes I have added annotations to the plots), and the work per stroke was 600 J. However, the plot clearly shows that it is dropping slowly but steadily during the workout.

Stats:

Workout Summary - media/20161118-1610052o.csv --|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg --|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS --|12508|52:38.0|02:06.3|174.0|19.7|151.3|163.0|12.0 W-|12508|52:38.0|02:06.3|174.0|19.7|151.3|163.0|12.0 R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|163.0|00.0 Workout Details #-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS- 01|02500|10:23.6|02:04.7|178.3|19.3|141.9|153.0|12.4 02|02500|10:24.5|02:04.9|180.0|20.2|150.5|159.0|11.9 03|02500|10:37.6|02:07.5|169.1|19.3|150.2|159.0|12.2 04|02500|10:29.1|02:05.8|176.2|20.3|156.0|163.0|11.8 05|02508|10:43.9|02:08.3|166.5|19.5|157.6|162.0|12.0

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 2 • Tags: concept2, erg, OTE, rowing, steady state, training

Nov 17 2016

Jehnice running event 2016

A holiday today, the celebration of the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Czechs fall in a few categories in this day:

Those who go to their cottage for a long weekend
Those who go shopping
Those who participate in a sports event
Those who go to the main square to listen to political speeches

Then there is also a loud minority who take part in extreme right or extreme left demonstrations.

As every year, I chose option 3.

Same run as a year ago, but the weather was different. A year ago it was sunny and dry. Today, it was wet and misty, and 2 degrees above 0. In the past few days we’ve had this bad weather. Snow alternated with rain, and the temperature oscillating around the freezing point.

My goal was to beat last year’s effort. I had written down last year’s passing times for a few key points along the route, but during the run I failed to remember them. In fact, I was thinking that I was one minute ahead of my target time for most of the run, where in fact I was a minute behind.

A year ago, I ran 47:07 on dry ground. Today, it was 48:17 on muddy ground.

Strava link.

In terms of relative effort, this year I was 158th of 346 (56% percentile), 12:03 minutes behind the winner. A year ago, I was 170th of 422 (60% percentile), 12:19 minutes behind the winner. I conclude that the results are probably very comparable. Average heart rate was 171 bpm this year, vs 173 bpm a year ago.

The nice thing about these running events is that they’re so massive. As a rower who runs occasionally, you end up in the middle of the pack, but there are hundreds of people, and there is always someone slightly ahead to pass.

I also discovered that none of the running sites offer a comparison between two workouts. I would have loved to compare a pace vs distance plot for the 2016 run compared to the 2015 run. It’s so simple to make one plot with two runs overlaid.

A few pictures from the event:

Yours truly almost invisible (yellow cap behind bearded man). Mr “Always One Step Ahead” was one step ahead of me until the second climb where I passed him

Oh, and this, the first Empower Oarlocks are shipping. This is very exciting:

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: event, race, running

Nov 16 2016

New Painsled beta, steady state erg and mind games; and playing with data

Painsled iOS published a new beta version of their Concept2 data capture app. It’s really a very promising application and it has now gotten even better. Of all the ways to capture erg data, Painsled is the most complete. Now they have added stroke force profile feedback to their app, so besides safely capturing all your strokes for post workout analysis, there is also a useful screen to see how consistent you are from stroke to stroke, while you are doing the workout.

This being a beta, it comes with very little explanation, but the graph looks like a standard stroke force profile, but it is overlaid on the past few strokes. Also, during the recovery, there is a bar which moves across the screen to a second bar. I think that when you take the catch exactly when the two white bars match, you are exactly copying your previous stroke (or perhaps the average over the past few strokes). I need to ask the developer what it does exactly, but I think it is very powerful, especially for steady state, where working on technique and stroke consistency is a big sub-goal of each workout.

Having data captured in painsled, I send them by email to workouts @ rowsandall.com, where they automatically end up in my account. Here are the stats of the workout as they arrived.

Workout Summary - media/mailbox_attachments/2016/11/16/aa5e11a267c142448e0aaedb6cd95eea.csv --|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg --|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS --|14999|63:31.0|02:07.0|176.6|20.2|158.9|174.0|11.7 W-|15005|63:31.0|02:07.0|176.4|20.2|158.9|174.0|11.7 R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|174.0|00.0 Workout Details #-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS- 01|01179|04:57.9|02:06.4|170.4|20.1|130.1|150.0|11.8 02|01196|05:00.4|02:05.6|176.8|19.5|149.4|154.0|12.3 03|01204|04:54.7|02:02.4|191.6|20.4|158.1|165.0|12.0 04|01212|05:01.8|02:04.5|182.0|19.9|160.8|163.0|12.1 05|01196|05:00.6|02:05.6|177.9|20.0|160.4|167.0|11.9 06|01214|05:02.4|02:04.6|182.3|20.5|164.2|168.0|11.8 07|01124|05:09.0|02:17.4|160.1|19.8|155.4|168.0|11.0 08|01216|04:59.8|02:03.3|188.0|20.8|165.4|170.0|11.7 09|01192|04:59.1|02:05.5|177.6|20.0|166.6|170.0|12.0 10|01202|05:01.0|02:05.2|180.1|20.3|167.5|171.0|11.8 11|01203|05:00.2|02:04.8|182.3|20.5|169.3|174.0|11.7 12|01139|05:10.6|02:16.4|167.3|20.5|164.1|174.0|10.7 13|00726|03:13.9|02:13.5|147.3|19.9|152.0|159.0|11.3

That’s basically an hour of “Just Row” at steady state. But wait, to break the boredom I had some structure in the workout. After the business travel and another long day at work (and a “Monthly Operations Review”, a 4 hour marathon meeting) I arrived home empty, tired, and not motivated to work out. I had dragged myself to the erg and after 2k of warming up I came up with a mind game that might motivate me to row a full hour.

I decided to row 8x1500m, with each 1500m divided as 750m at 18spm, 500m at 20spm, and 250m at 22spm. Somehow, distance based rowing always makes the time go by faster to me, compared to time based intervals.

I paddled the final 250m of the fourth interval and drank some water. Finally I completed the workout without problems. On rowsandall.com, I can add this interval information after the fact. The workout summary then becomes:

Workout Summary - media/20161116-20100719o.csv --|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg --|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS --|15004|63:30.0|02:07.0|176.6|20.2|158.9|174.0|11.7 W-|14755|61:59.0|02:06.1|177.9|20.2|159.2|174.0|11.8 R-|00250|01:31.0|03:03.3|094.0|18.8|142.7|174.0|00.0 Workout Details #-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS- 01|02000|08:23.5|02:05.9|173.6|20.0|137.6|151.0|11.9 - Warming up 02|01500|06:09.9|02:03.3|187.5|20.0|156.0|165.0|12.2 03|01500|06:11.0|02:03.7|185.9|20.2|161.6|167.0|12.0 04|01500|06:15.1|02:05.0|180.3|20.4|161.0|168.0|11.8 05|01250|05:13.0|02:05.2|179.3|20.1|164.3|168.0|11.9 06|01500|06:12.0|02:04.0|184.5|20.4|162.4|170.0|11.8 07|01500|06:12.8|02:04.3|183.6|20.5|167.4|171.0|11.8 08|01500|06:13.9|02:04.6|182.7|20.5|168.1|173.0|11.7 09|01500|06:15.3|02:05.1|180.2|20.5|168.2|174.0|11.7 10|01005|04:53.6|02:26.1|134.1|19.3|152.2|172.0|10.7 - Cooling Down

And here are the plots:

The Work per stroke for all strokes (except the 250m of paddling in the middle):

Same plot, but only for the 8x1500m (excluding the 250m of paddling):

Ah, so the “structured mind game” helped to make the strokes more consistent! Just for fun, peak and average force for the same stroke selection:

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: concept2, erg, OTE, painsled, rowing, steady state, training

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Uncategorized

About Ranking

Tuesday – Steady State

More Steady State & Bad Technique

Saturday – more Steady State

Friday – 12.5km Steady State / force curve

Jehnice running event 2016

New Painsled beta, steady state erg and mind games; and playing with data

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