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Apr 21 2019

A week in Phoenix

Sunday

Just a mish mash workout in the hotel gym in Atlanta. They had new technogym equipment with virtual runs/hikes/rides. So I rode a bike for 10 minutes “in the Provence”, then I hiked “in Utah” and then I ran “in Tibet”. It’s actually much more pleasant to have the video of an outdoor ride/run/hike in front of you. Makes those long indoor running minutes go by much faster. After that I played with the weights. I think I got a good workout in, judging by the muscle soreness the next day.

I spent the rest of the morning working from my hotel room, then had lunch in central Atlanta before I drove to the rental car return, took the train to the airport and took a flight to Phoenix.

Monday

A long day full of meetings. I did not work out.

Tuesday

The Desert Vista trail head, which had been in reconstruction the last time I was in Phoenix, was open again, so before dawn I hopped in the car, drove the five minute drive to the trail head and did a nice run in the desert. Much better than Technogym virtual runs.

I always wonder what the story is behind the rusty car.

Wednesday

See Tuesday. It’s great to run outdoors. It’s even greater to see the sunrise in the desert. And the best bit is that it’s good to be out in the nature when the rest of the working day is spent in windowless meeting rooms.

The Strava title of my run, is a Dutch word play. Skip the followin paragraph if you’re not interested in an incredibly boring explanation of my word play.

“Wadlopen” is best translated as mud flat hiking. Wikipedia: “Mudflat hikers are people who, with the aid of a tide table, use a period of low water to walk and wade on the watershed of the mudflats, especially from the Frisian mainland coast to the Frisian islands.” And “de hei” is “the heathland”. So literally the title is “mud flat hiking on the heathlands”, but when you say it, it sounds like “Wat lopen op de hei”, which means “a bit of running on the heathlands”. I guess I found it funny to call a desert run like that.

You can start reading again.

Well, actually, my meeting room on Wednesday did have windows. I joined my team doing flight testing. It was great. We flew to Winslow for some testing of traffic alerts, so the tests involved both the Dassault Falcon as well as a King Air. After Winslow, we went to Wickenburg (which had fewer clouds) to do some testing of a new function that is active during the descent phase. Did four go arounds. I love it, but it’s not for everyone.

The picture above is taken during one of those go-arounds above Wickenburg. After all the tests were done, Petr, our flight test engineer, went to the back of the plane and I got to sit on his place in the cockpit during the approach and landing at Deer Valley airport in Phoenix.

I took my team out for dinner in the evening. I am really proud of them. They have done a five week campaign here in Arizona, with excellent and important results.

Thursday

A long day in the office, and this time it started really early, so I had to skip the morning run.

Friday

My final morning run, and because I wanted some change. and because it was my birthday, I drove a little further. The Apache Wash Trail Head is a fifteen minute drive from the hotel. The loop there is nice because it’s flat.

It was a beautiful full moon, and at the end of the run I witnessed the launching of more than 15 hot air balloons:

Then, work in the office and in the afternoon I headed to the Phoenix Sky Harbor airport. British Airways brought us to London in probably their oldest Boeing 747 (I slept most of the time, so I wasn’t too upset that my little screen didn’t function). We camped for about an hour at Heathrow Terminal 3, and then we took the BA flight to Vienna, where the company driver was waiting for us. At home at 9:30 pm. Spent a few hours chatting with Romana and the kids, then went to bed.

Sunday

Garden work. Then two hours of light cycling. Romana, Robin and I rode to Bilovice nad Svitavou, where we had a lemonade, and then back. This evening, we’re going out to Koishi, one of the best restaurants in this country, to celebrate the birthday of my daughter Lenka, as well as my own birthday.

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A7BB8AF0-48B1-44CC-98E6-964AA6BB334B

Apr 13 2019

Georgia on my mind

Monday

I did a good weights session at the gym close to our office.

Tuesday

A long day at the office. I was hoping to do a short run in the evening but I got home around 8pm, had a sandwich and a beer, and then continued working until 10pm. Some important stuff needed to be sorted.

Wednesday

An 8am car to the airport of Vienna. Vienna – Heathrow. Heathrow – Atlanta, landing at 8pm local time. I was through immigration in 10 minutes. It’s not a record. I have done immigration in 5 minutes at Minneapolis. But still it was good. In 2018, I spent 2 hours in those queues.

Picked up rental car, drove to hotel. Crashed on bed.

Thursday

Up early but no time to workout. Because of the urgent and important things that popped up a week ago, I didn’t have time to finish the preparation of my US trip. Luckily my people had dutifully provided me with some powerpoints and some of their wishes, but I had to prepare and make sure I knew what I wanted out of those meetings.

A full day of meetings followed.

Friday

More meetings in the morning, then attended a presentation by some Georgia Tech students. I am always excited to listen to students presentations. It makes me remember the days when I was a young adult trying to make sense of the (corporate) world. Also, these kids were given a very relevant project, and they are unaware of our office politics, so a fresh look at an important topic is always welcome.

Around 4pm, I arrived at Peachtree rowing club. I was met by Mark, a nice guy who is running the guest rowing program at PTCRC. We chatted a bit, he showed me around the “boat house” (open air storage with the ergs in a party tent) and then he proceeded to give me a choice of fine Wintech singles. I chose the lightweight boat, we did a quick check and then I was off on the water!

Their rowing lake is fantastic. It’s quiet. No motor boats. Flat water. Nice golf course on one side, nature (forest, islands) on the other side. And it’s 2.7km long and straight, so that makes for a perfect place to do rowing workouts.

I remembered there were one minute on / one minute off intervals on the schedule, but I didn’t remember how many of them. I just started doing 1/1 intervals after a 3km warming up.

I was delighted to see some nice splits going down the course. Back at the rowing club I met Megan in her Filippi single. She is a member of the Masters Rowing International Facebook group, and I got Mark’s contact through her. So I interrupted my intervals for a little chat with her. She rows beautifully, by the way. I could not detect a single technique flaw.

I continued my intervals in the tailwind direction, and I was happy to see a 1:52 split in the “last 10 stroke pace” field on the BoatCoach app. That was my fastest split. Mostly it was around 1:59 per 500m.

Saturday

Another row at PTRC. Mirror flat water this morning.

Before we launched, I went through some technique work with Mark on the erg. I don’t usually critique people who invite me to guest rows, but Mark asked for it, and so I gave him some tips, illustrating the points on the erg, and showing him some technique drills on the water. It will make him faster!

The workout of today was 4x1500m with 500m rest.

Unfortunately, the OH1 heart rate sensor had an issue in the first interval. Paces were around 2:15 for the 24spm bits and around 2:09 for the 26spm bits. Here are the data:

Pretty happy with that, although I do suspect that the warm water temperatures here do help a lot.

Tomorrow afternoon I am flying to Phoenix. The morning forecast is thunderstorms and winds, so I am not going rowing. Probably a hotel gym workout.

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Apr 7 2019

No fiddling!

These guys seem to be happy fiddling, but the combination of Sander, rowing electronics, and fiddling is not a pretty sight.

Today there was too much fiddling with the Quiske app. I had moved the sensor to under the seat, but I am always uncertain about the correct orientation of the pod, and there is no quick google answer to that. Quiske has a couple of user guides and other documents, but all I need is a simple table which I could print out and put on the inside of my locker door.

Pod Position Pod Orientation
Under Seat (OTW) Oar handle from logo pointing to stern
On oar Oar handle from logo pointing to rower
On oar Pod facing towards bow during drive
Under Seat (OTE) Oar handle from logo pointing to erg handle

I think I got this correct, but I need to check it.

What added to my frustration is that the Quiske app sometimes doesn’t update the lines. The only way to get it to behave again is to go out of the application, kill it, and start again. Or, at least, that seems to be the procedure. On the water, of course, I am trying out all kinds of menu and settings combinations before I kill the app.

Anyway, enough about fiddling.

When I had finally set up my gear correctly at the end of the warming up, I was happy to find myself alongside another Masters team. In the spirit of GDPR, I shall not reveal who it was, but suffice to say it was a big, coxed, sweep boat. And there were eight ladies in it. Of varying age. The prettiest lady being Martin on stroke seat.

So, of course, I wanted to focus on technique, get some good Quiske curves measured at various stroke rates, but I also wanted the eight to not pass me.

We did three full lake stretches of about 3 kilometers each, and the score was 3-0 for the single sculler. Well, in the first two stretches the eight was also doing technique drills, but in the final one, they were rowing at a steady pace.


Workout Summary - media/20190407-172713-Sharing file: SpdCoach 2136923 20190407 0426PMo.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|11412|67:38.0|02:57.8|162.0|22.9|148.8|184.0|07.4
W-|05264|24:53.0|02:21.9|216.5|23.6|164.1|184.0|09.0
R-|06157|42:45.0|03:28.4|130.3|22.6|139.9|184.0|03.8
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|00490|02:29.0|02:31.9|196.0|19.8|134.5|143.0|10.0
02|00150|00:46.0|02:32.9|186.3|19.5|134.7|145.0|10.1
03|00221|01:04.8|02:26.7|207.1|21.2|161.1|164.0|09.6
04|00251|01:10.0|02:19.7|229.8|24.0|164.9|172.0|08.9
05|00233|01:04.3|02:18.2|256.0|26.0|171.4|176.0|08.3
06|00422|02:01.0|02:23.3|193.3|20.8|152.7|161.0|10.0
07|00282|01:17.1|02:16.6|214.6|23.0|164.1|170.0|09.5
08|00284|01:10.0|02:03.2|265.3|27.4|170.2|177.0|08.9
09|00120|00:30.9|02:08.3|266.6|27.3|158.2|163.0|08.6
10|02810|13:20.4|02:22.4|215.9|24.4|172.3|184.0|08.6

The summary table shows the splits for the pink intervals shown on the chart. Looks like it was a bit harder training than intended. Well, I don’t think it hurt me. A bit of good sparring with random other crews (preferably when they are not aware they are in a race) is always healthy, I think. It pushes me a bit further.

And now follows a whole bunch of Quiske charts.

Headwind 3km, 22, 25 and 27spm intervals
Tailwind part – entire recording, 22spm , 25spm and 28spm bits

An interesting observation. At 22spm, my seat is accelerating during the recovery, but as stroke rate increases this acceleration disappears and at 28spm (and higher) the maximum seat speed is during the middle of the recovery.

Seat speed during recovery is, for me on the single at least, an intuitive thing. I hope I am trying to not slow the boat down too much, but to be honest I am not sure how I determine the subtle things (or not so subtle things) I do on the recovery. I did not try to change my natural rowing style in this outing. I just wanted a good baseline of my current style.

The new(ly discovered) red lines on the Quiske chart

By accident, I produced the above chart with the handy red lines on the Quiske web portal. I presume the lines coincide with, from left to right:

  1. Maximum deceleration of the boat (that is where Quiske places the start of the stroke cycle)
  2. Maximum acceleration of the boat
  3. Maximum boat acceleration during recovery (?)
  4. Seat speed reversal point
  5. Same as 1.

So what can we learn from this chart? To me the most significant point to notice is how much the boat slows down after the seat speed reversal. What Quiske cannot say if this is before or after the blade has entered the water. Here is a “powerpoint attempt” to determine this.

So what have I done here? I basically combined a few analyses from yesterday and today, selecting strokes at 27-28spm. I looked at the boat acceleration curves (not shown here) and determined that they were all very similar. From that, I conclude that these curves represent my typical (average) stroke at 28spm. Then I took screenshots of the oar angle velocity and seat speed curves (measured at different days) and in PowerPoint, I overlaid these charts, drawing a few vertical lines to indicate “significant” moments during the stroke. From left to right:

  1. Maximum boat deceleration point (Quiske stroke cycle start). Both the scull and the seat are moving. Quiske doesn’t tell if the blade is already in the water or not. During my rowing, I am making nice “V” splashes with the blade. That means that at entry, the blade is not moving in the reference frame of the water. However, because the boat has a non-zero speed, this means that I must be already moving the oar (and seat). At this point, the seat speed is about 0.56 m/s, the oar angle velocity is about 29 degrees per second from the measurements) and the boat speed is 3.1 m/s. If I wouldn’t open my back, then with my rig, the seat speed would translate to a blade speed creating a forward splash. If I look at the oar angle speed, the blade hits the water with a slightly negative speed, creating a backward splash. What happens in reality, I think, is that the blade enters the water a bit earlier than the Quiske stroke cycle start. The conclusion that I am opening my back still holds though. Interesting. Need video evidence.
  2. I have drawn the second black line at the point of maximum seat speed. What I find interesting here is that the oar angle speed curve shows a more pronounced bend than the seat speed curve. That would suggest that I stop opening my back here. After this point, the seat speed starts to decrease while the oar angle velocity keeps increasing. This is where I start the back swing.
  3. The third black line is at the point where the seat stops and my oar angle velocity is close to maximum. I suspect that this is close to the moment where I end the back swing and start the arms only phase.
  4. The fourth black line is at the point where the oar changes direction. This is slightly after the tap down.
  5. The fifth black line is at the point where my seat starts rolling again. Arms are away and, hopefully, the body is rocked over. Or is it?
  6. The sixth black line is at the end of seat acceleration. You can see that during the entire seat acceleration phase, the oar anglular velocity is roughly constant. That suggest that my body rock over hasn’t fully finished when my seat starts to go towards the stern. This is not necessarily a bad thing. After this line, there is a phase where seat speed and oar angular speed seem to be coupled well (taking a cosine by eye!), which indicates that during the second half of the recovery I am already in catch position.
  7. The seventh black line is the point where seat and oar angle reverse. These points coincide. Nice. This is also just before the catch.

Interestingly, this set of measurements shows no sign of any funny movement just before the catch, like an extra reach or anything. I am sure Olympian rower have better timing around the catch than I do, but all in all I don’t see any big flaws, apart from using a back opening to do the catch.

And that’s a long story to say I need side video analysis.

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Apr 6 2019

Week Review

Monday

No exercise.

Tuesday

Prototype testing day. Romana and I were out in the double wearing some interesting new rowing kit. I am not going to tell much about it, but it was very interesting.

After the session, we analyzed the data, and zoomed in on a technique flaw of mine, around the catch. I should get my GoPro out and do a good side video, or have someone shoot a good side video from the launch. What we saw from the prototype’s data, my shoulders do a funny extra moment just before the catch.

I am wondering if it is related to this thing:

I mean the red circle. This is my oar angle velocity as measured with the Quiske pod. It basically says that the oar turning point is way before the point where the boat deceleration is maximum. So I am pushing on the footstretcher before my blade is fully immersed. Quiske doesn’t tell me if this is “missing water” or if this coming into the front stops too hard. More about that later (under the Saturday header below).

Wednesday

There are many things wrong with this summary of the 4x5min/4min workout.


Workout Summary - media/20190403-1917150o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|07256|35:59.0|02:28.8|152.2|21.0|160.3|182.0|09.6
W-|05326|19:50.0|01:51.7|235.6|26.5|167.4|181.0|10.1
R-|01934|16:00.0|04:08.1|050.3|14.3|151.2|181.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|01366|05:00.0|01:49.8|239.1|26.1|164.9|179.0|10.5
01|01348|05:00.0|01:51.2|233.3|25.8|169.2|181.0|10.4
02|01351|05:00.0|01:51.0|239.8|27.0|169.8|181.0|10.0
03|01261|04:50.2|01:55.1|230.0|27.2|165.7|178.0|09.6

The instructions said “4x5min” 1-2 at 26spm, then 3-4 at 28spm. I thought that the coach meant doing the first 1 or 2 minutes of each interval at 26spm, then increase to 28spm. I later found out that I was supposed to row the entire first two intervals at 26spm, and the final two at 28spm.

Oh well.

I actually thought that this was going to be too easy and was planning a fifth interval, to make this look closer to the 5x1500m/5min Pete plan workout. Well, here is what I did:

You see how the chart is missing strokes? That is PainSled dropping strokes, and it seems to be a BlueTooth issue. Greg Smith has done some extensive investigations and found that other apps on the same phone (ErgData) do not show the dropped strokes, using the same combination of bluetooth speakers (earphones) and PM5 connected to the phone through BlueTooth. He’s working with the Painsled developer to figure out what happened and how to correct it.

But you can still see how I was completely gassed in the fourth interval, so I didn’t attempt a fifth one.

The chart above is the Quiske record for one of the intervals, green line for 26spm, blue line for 28spm and red for entire session. Solid lines are handle speed and dashed lines are seat speed.

This chart shows the entire interval average curves for all four intervals. So first the good:

  1. [35% to 55% of time on the chart] Almost no seat movement during the last part of the stroke and the first part of the recovery – which is the arm swing mostly
  2. [80% to 100% of time on the chart] During the second half of the recovery, handle and seat have the same speed, as they should. That means that I am completely rolled up with my back and I am just sliding forward in catch position
  3. … that’s it. I can’t think of any other good things to say.

Now the questionable:

  1. [0-5% on the chart] In the first part of the drive, the handle speed is slower than the seat speed. It looks like I am shooting my bum a bit before the handle picks up speed.
  2. [0-20% on the chart] Nowhere in the first part of the drive is the handle speed equal to the seat speed. Actually, soon after the bum shooting, my back opens and the handle speed starts exceeding the seat speed.

Ideally, you would like to see the dashed and solid lines overlapping for the first part of the drive. The interesting thing was that I was looking at this chart during the row and I had the feeling I was rowing stroke profile that was closed to ideal for many strokes. Below, you will see that I have the same observation on the water. It seems almost as if the Quiske app (used during the row) is more positive than the Quiske cloud (used for post workout analysis, to generate the charts above). I guess I need to start making screenshots during the row.

By the way, I moved away from the “Quiske Virtual Coach” view and started looking at the raw curves directly. I want to work on one aspect of my technique, and the Quiske Virtual Coach gives feedback on 5 points after each stroke. I find that too much data. Using the stroke curve directly, I find it easier to focus on one aspect and on the technique flaw that is related to it.

Thursday

A 45 minute run. This was on the schedule, and it was an ideal way to workout in the evening. It’s light longer now, and I really enjoyed running through the forest.

We have some pretty tough things going on at work, and I am sure I wouldn’t have lasted for 45 minutes on the erg. I didn’t have time to drive to the lake and take a single (it would have been dark already).

In fact, the work things were going through my head during most of my run, and I even wrote up a “stream of consciousness” paragraph or three after the run. I need to look at it, check if it’s total crap or not. But perhaps that doesn’t matter. It was a better way to relax than to watch TV.

Friday

An hour long session in the gym. In fact, I paid a personal trainer to look at my muscles and their balance. She praised my lats and admired my “Plank”, but the rest was heavily criticized. We didn’t really do a workout, but basically went through all the exercises and worked on good form. I have been doing a couple of exercises wrong, employing the wrong set of muscles. Excellent feedback, and I am probably going to take a few more sessions with her, to see how she lays out the program.

Saturday

The workout (OTW) was 2x3km/7min. It was nice weather. Slight rain when we drove to the club but it cleared up. There was a mild wind, which was a head wind in the first interval and a tailwind in the second one.

Here are the summary data (obtained by the Rowsandall summary “Interval by Power” function, which is very handy for OTW workouts).


Workout Summary - media/20190406-0920370o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|11309|65:12.0|02:53.0|153.7|21.9|147.9|183.0|07.9
W-|06133|27:44.0|02:15.7|221.9|26.0|172.2|183.0|08.5
R-|05179|37:28.0|03:37.1|103.3|18.9|129.9|183.0|06.9
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|00082|00:21.9|02:14.0|224.4|24.6|105.9|108.0|09.1
02|00101|00:25.8|02:07.8|250.2|25.6|138.9|143.0|09.2
03|02974|13:54.4|02:20.3|216.2|25.1|172.7|183.0|08.5
04|02976|13:02.0|02:11.4|227.0|27.1|174.5|182.0|08.4

So a 2:15.7 average pace. Here’s the SPM and boat speed in one chart:

I checked a few 6k efforts that I did in the fall, and there my average boat speed was around 3.7 m/s, so 0.5% faster but without the 7 minutes rest in the middle. Maybe I shouldn’t be too worried about my base speed. Especially considering that my stroke rate was significantly lower than the target rates today. I was lazy, but not slow.

Let’s look at technique. This is from the second 3k. The green curve is just before the end of the interval.

I am disappointed to see that the oar angle velocity doesn’t start at 0! I remember it looking a bit better on the phone screen during the row. It’s also interesting to see the differences between handle speed and oar angle curve. One cannot compare these quantities one to one, as the erg handle goes in a straight line while the scull rotates around the pin.

Being conscious of the catch during the row, I checked my blade splash a few times, and I do have a nice V splash. That indicates that my blade is going in at the right speed. I think that it is too simple to say that I am missing water at the catch. It’s more about the dynamics of how I accelerate and decelerate during the recovery and how much I check the boat around the catch.

I think I need to do some seat speed rows as well and see what’s going on.

In the 2k cooling down I did a technical drill aimed at improving the dynamics around the catch each 500m. That helped a lot.

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20190331_103918

Mar 31 2019

A sunny weekend / 4x1500m OTW

Saturday

A quick run because I didn’t have time for a longer one, and also because there was a 30 minute run on this week’s training plan that I hadn’t done yet.

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It was nice and sunny weather and the birds in the forest were giving a brilliant concert.

After this, Romana and I headed to a cooking studio for a workshop on meat preparation. It was great fun and here are some of the results:

We spent 6 hours cooking, eating, and tasting local wines. It was great.

Sunday

Two of our mixed eight canceled at the last moment. We did rig the eight, but went out in a quad, pair and single instead. I opted for the single, Ivan and Martin went out in the pair, and the girls took a quad. I did the following workout:

4x(500m@24spm + 500m@26spm + 500m@24spm)/500m.

We decided to make the rest 100m longer to allow for turning. I did outrow the pair, so at the end of the third interval I had some time to take a picture:

The lake was mirror flat. It was sunny. It was great.

I forgot that the NK SpeedCoach doesn’t record rest strokes, so the chart below only shows the work bits:

The hardest bit was to hold the 24spm in the third 500m.


Workout Summary - media/mailbox_attachments/2019/03/31/208a4fc14c744b9fbbfee5ecd1e323b7.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|-Avg--|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|-SPM--|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|06001|27:05.1|02:15.7|223.0| 23.5 |164.0|175.0|09.4
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|-SPM--|AvgHR|DPS-
02|01500|06:40.7|02:13.7| 241.0 | 24.0 | 162.0 |09.4
03|01500|06:47.8|02:16.2| 215.0 | 23.5 | 164.0 |09.4
04|01500|06:46.6|02:15.9| 220.0 | 23.5 | 165.0 |09.4
05|01500|06:50.0|02:17.0| 216.0 | 23.5 | 164.0 |09.3

And as you can see from the chart, I didn’t hold 24spm in the third 500m. One of the excuses I had was that I was trying to work on being relaxed around the catch and avoiding a short catch angle.

Looking for slip, catch angle, drive length and effective drive length trends in the OTW workouts I recorded with the Empower Oarlock this year, I don’t see any change between today (focusing on the catch) and the other days.

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Here are strokes from the third and fourth 1500m measured using the Quiske system:

I report virtually no change from how I rowed on Friday morning. Need side video.

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circles

Mar 29 2019

The End of March

Monday – Rest Day

Tuesday – Erging with the Quiske Virtual Coach

I wanted to do this week’s weights session during my lunch hour, but I found out I had left my training shorts at home. So, instead, I spent an hour on the erg in the evening.

The Coach like some aspects of my rowing:

Let’s translate that image:

  • A score of 5 on Drive Ratio
  • A score of 5 on Legs Rhythm (percentage of time seat is moving)
  • A score of 6 on Legs Speed (fast is better according to the Quiske virtual coach)
  • A score of 8 (yay!) on Seat Stopped (which is a measure of how well you are sequencing)
  • A score of 5 on front loading of the drive (Quiske likes front loading). Another way to look at this is as a measure of opening the back too early (which I like more than front loading)

Here are my own charts on drive rhythm and drive speed, adding power and stroke rate for reference:

So I rowed three intervals and used Quiske in the first and last ones. The virtual coach liked the last interval much more than the first one. What are the differences?

More interesting is to look at seat speed (dashed line) and handle speed (solid line). The blue line is the session average, green is in the beginning of the session and red is near the end. Here are my observations:

  • Seat speed faster than handle speed in the first part of the drive? That doesn’t look good.
  • Handle speed then takes over seat speed in the first half of the drive. This is my back opening (or my arms bending). That doesn’t look good either.
  • As I get tired (red curve), the hands away is less pronounced.

All in all a whole lot of technique things to check on.

Wednesday

A brutal weights workout, well at least for my tiny muscles. After months of body weights and cable machine exercises, I am starting to be ready for the “big” weight lifting exercises.

I did a 2k warming up on one of the horribly maintained Concept2 ergometers, the one with the working battery. In true gym style I have to set the slider to 10, but that is only to get a reasonable drag factor (120).

The sets shown on the left are the “work” sets. For each of the workouts, I did a few “warming up” sets, where I gradually increased the weights. The prescribed “work” was 3 sets at 60% of 1 Repetition Maximum (1RM) and 2 sets at 70%. I had to guess my 1RM maximum, because I have never done the testing.

Each set was to be done to exhaustion, but as I had no chaperone, I stopped one or two reps early, just to make sure the weights wouldn’t collapse on me.

I found a very cool app to record my workouts. It’s called “Simple Workout Log“. It’s perfect.

It doesn’t get in the way.  You prepare a routine with all the exercises you want to do, then when you do a set, you quickly enter the weight and number of reps, which is a one thumb operation. Also adding a new set is a one click. Even though the app looks very simple, you can basically operate it with one finger, and it seems to be very well thought out. The next screen I needed was always just one click away.

I am not very sympathetic to people playing with their phones in the gym. When you’re working out, you’re working out. OK to use a phone to record your workout, but I see people writing emails, making phone calls, texting, apping, facebooking, and what not, all the while occupying workout stations.

Once you have done a few sets, the app also estimates your 1RM maximum, which is probably slightly underestimated in my case, for the reasons mentioned above, but it is a very cool feature anyway: It gives you a little table of weights for 1 rep, 5 reps, 10 reps, 15 reps etc.

It’s also syncing to the cloud so you can use the app on different devices. And finally, it charts your progress. I think I am going to be finding a lot of motivation from this extremely simple app. It shows that providing just a little extra functionality on top of a paper notebook can already be very valuable.

So Bench Pull, Leg Press, Bench Press, and Power Clean, in that order. Power Clean is really the exercise that I am the weakest on.

For next week, I have hired a weight lifting pro for one hour, to help me with form.

Thursday – Morning Row with Quiske

I had a late ending work day, so I went out in the morning. I forgot to wear my heart rate band and when I discovered that on the dock, I was too lazy (and time pressed) to go back to my locker. This was supposed to be a steady state row anyway, so I wasn’t expecting any heart rate data of interest, and as I have a power meter, I can use power to measure training load.

I actually did a few 2 minute intervals at fixed stroke rates (22, 24, 26), with tailwind, and with headwind. I did this with the plan to run the same test on a boat I was going to test on Friday. I will defer the Quiske analysis to the end of this post.

Friday – Boat testing (also with Quiske)

Up early for the drive to the Argonauten rowing club in Vienna. My own sculls on the roof rack. It’s just a 90 minutes drive, so I left 5:15 to be in time for a 7AM training. The single didn’t have a C2 holder, and it had one of those modern reverse wing riggers, so I didn’t have a place to put the NK SpeedCoach.

The chart you see is a miracle of data fusion. I recorded heart rate on the Polar OH1 arm, position and speed using the Garmin watch, and I got stroke rate and stroke length from the Quiske app (using their CSV export to Rowsandall). So in the chart, each window is from a different device. As you can see, I just did a short workout on the Alte Donau.

The little backtracking bit of my trajectory is when I saw some Vienna Masters rowers and friends (Andreas Kral and Marko Milodanovic) park their double (called “Kralovic”) at the Donaubund dock, so I shouted “Good Morning” and then reversed to their dock for a little chat.  A very pleasant surprise. I have to consider coming to their International Regatta, but there are so few free weekends this coming season …

I did the same 22spm, 24spm, 26spm intervals as on Thursday, and I took a few strokes at 35-37 spm as well, just to test the boat. Here’s me doing 22spm:

So how did the comparison work out?

  • Bird song in Vienna is the same quality as in Brno. I love morning rows for the bird song.
  • I won’t go into comparing boat speed, because the water temperature in Vienna was much higher (a tropical 8 degrees C) but the Alte Donau is much shallower, so comparing boat speeds is not a good thing.
  • The boat felt very comfortable, familiar, and responsive. Stiffer than my own older single. Very similar to our (same brand) double ORCA.

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In the Quiske boat acceleration charts above, red and cyan are Thursday (my boat) and green and blue are Friday (test boat). Here is the oar angle speed chart (same color coding):

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And what shocking conclusions do I draw from all those beautiful curves? The following:

  • The boat run is similar

Is that all? Yes.

Well, almost. There is also a little bump at the start of the oar angle curve. I have circled it in red here in the 26spm chart:

That is me being to cramped at the catch. I need to get rid of that bump.

And now that I look in detail again, I notice that I am cleaner on the tap down today than yesterday. Not sure if that is the boat or just me trying to row cleaner because of a coach on the bank.

And then there is a final thing. Looks like the last part of the recovery is a little different. Hm, have to think more about this.

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Mar 25 2019

Sunday – Sparring with the boys

I took another Filippi, with the right shoe size this time. The downside was a very heavily rigged pair of Croker sculls. Croker is OK, but I wasn’t comfortable with the heavy rig.

But we were under time pressure and I was on a borrowed boat, so I didn’t change the inboard or oar length. Just got on with it.

I was joining the boys (15/16 year olds) with their final session of the camp.

The idea was to run 4 2k trials, at stroke rates 22, 24, 26 and 28 SPM, downstream. The rest would be the paddle back to the start. Jakub, the boys trainer, would be the starter, while Romana would note the finish times at the end of the dock of the Pardubice rowing club. Here’s the workout map, indicating the start and finish:

We met a little earlier than what I considered to be the 2000m point, but Jakub stopped us at the 969th kilometer (measured from the mouth of this river Elbe at Hamburg) which was 1300m from the finish. I didn’t mind too much. Here’s the summary, noting that this was rowed downstream so the pace values are flattering. Also, I think my Polar OH1 heart rate arm band moved after interval 02 and the heart rate values are unreliable for the two final races.


Workout Summary - media/20190324-1630470o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|15091|112:15.0|03:43.2|000.0|21.8|119.1|171.0|06.2
W-|05282|21:43.0|02:03.4|000.0|25.4|133.1|171.0|09.6
R-|09814|90:32.0|04:36.8|000.0|20.9|115.8|171.0|06.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|01315|05:37.3|02:08.3|000.0|22.5|150.2|164.0|10.4
02|01323|05:29.8|02:04.7|000.0|24.7|155.9|171.0|09.7
03|01332|05:20.5|02:00.3|000.0|26.7|109.8|113.0|09.3
04|01312|05:16.0|02:00.4|000.0|28.0|115.0|120.0|08.9

So we spent nearly two hours on the water rowing four five minute sprints. Yes, but it was fun!

It was especially fun because my son Dominik (pictured above) was starting 30 seconds before me, so there was a little family prestige thing going on here.

Here’s the old guy. The family prestige match ended in 4-0 for the old guy, but the margins were very small.  I rowed slightly higher rate in the 24spm race, because things were going well and I had a natural tendency to push for higher rates, despite the heavy rig. Of course, in the 26spm race I tried to close in on Dominik and he defended, so we both rated slightly higher. Finally, in the 28spm bit, I started off much too aggressive, seeing 1:53 pace on my SpeedCoach, and I paid for it coming out of the bend when I saw my pace drop from 1:58-1:59 to 2:05 when a slight headwind started to blow and I had difficulty getting the stroke rate back to 28spm. Here are the important charts:

I beat Dominik with margins of 5 to 15 seconds. Still, I find it amazing given that he is 40 seconds slower than I am on the 2k erg. Of course, he is 15 kg lighter than I am and he has the musculature of a strong 14 year old. It would have been great to compare power and stroke average force if we had power meters.

I chatted to Dominik’s trainer after the session, and he told me bluntly that Dominik has better technique. That’s his explanation. It hurt a little, but he gave me some good technique feedback so I guess I have to put my pride aside and start working on some of the flaws he saw.

After the session we had an hour to prepare the boats for transport. We went for a quick lunch, and then I towed the trailer back to Brno, which is a two hour drive. I was pretty exhausted at the end of the day.

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