Uncategorized

mapka

Mar 22 2019

Mirror Flat Lake in Brno

Thursday. Sunny weather. Which means -2 C in the morning, which is a bit chilly on the scooter, and 14 to 16 degrees in the afternoon, which is great for rowing.

Half of our club is in Gavirate for a camp, and the other half are doing a camp on the Labe (Elbe) river in Pardubice. I will join the Pardubice crew for the weekend. But this Thursday it meant that I had the lake almost for myself. There were a few rowers from the club on the other side of the lake.

Steady state. I didn’t monitor the Power values during the row, but focused on Effective Length and Work per Stroke.

During km 6 to 8 I rowed without feathering. I was pretty happy with the execution of the drill, but looking at the data after the row, it shows that I significantly shortened the finish during that bit.

I had a fun “Masters Rower Price” moment in the final 3km full lake stretch. A junior from the other bank was trailing me and apparently doing some intervals. He was fiercely rowing at 30spm and catching up. His rowing was ugly, but he had the strong body of an 18 year old. When he was almost level, I increased stroke rate from 17spm to 24 spm and was able to stay ahead of him by keeping the length and rowing nice and clean, until he gave up. I enjoy those moments. Here’s a zoom in on that bit:

Recently, I have started to use Boat Speed in meters per second for the speed plots, but I am adding a pace (seconds per 500m) for those not used to the meters per second values.

How much more enjoyable is this. Being out on a sunny day on the lake, gliding over the water, outrowing a junior. Compare that to doing mindless steady state on a static erg in a basement, without company. I may ditch erg training early this season. Time to do more running.

By • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: , , , , , ,

th

Mar 20 2019

About Stress and Training Load

Monday and Tuesday were long and stressful days at work. They happen, right? I work with people and I lead a group that executes complex technology development projects in the Aerospace industry. Stressful days are part of the job description.

But I am still learning (or perhaps refusing to learn my lesson) about the relationship between work related stress and training stress.

In terms of improving fitness, training “stress” is good stress. You won’t get any fitter, stronger or faster by being a couch potato. You have to get off the couch and exercise. Actually, exercising helps a lot to relax from work related stress.

Work and life related stress can be “good” stress also, in the sense that you need the stress to perform well. However, it adds nothing to improving fitness or strength.

And then there is “bad” stress. Non constructive stuff. Painful stuff. Sad stuff.

But while exercising can relieve some of the other forms of stress, in another way all the forms of stress add up. On a busy day with good work related stress, the training has to be lighter. On a bad stress day, I might as well take a day off.

Monday and Tuesday were busy days of work, mostly busy in a good way, but there were also a few projects that had issues. I cannot go into details, but “We have accidentally killed the Austrian Arch-Duke and now Austria has declared war on us” is a good way to describe one of the issues. It’s my job to solve. So that’s what I do. We are not at war any more.

And I was wise on Monday, taking a rest day (training wise).

On Tuesday, I was forcing myself to get back to training. Easy. Steady State. On the erg. After 30 minutes I bailed. Erg is boring, tedious, and you need a certain amount of concentration and motivation to do it, especially when you do it alone, in your basement.

On Tuesday, I had time for a longer lunch break weights session. Nice. Go to the gym. See some other people. Pull and push some weights. Think through some work related things during the pauses between sets. This is much more tolerable than erg training when your mind is occupied with work related stuff.

Make Note to Self.

By • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: , , , ,

IMG_1526

Mar 17 2019

Double the Fun

Beautiful weather today. The wind direction turned 180 degrees since yesterday and calmed down. It was sunny and 14 degrees, but on the lake it felt like 20. I am talking Celsius scale now.

The Masters were present in a large group. Martin, Lubica, Zuzana, and Darinka took a quad. Tomas went out in the single. Romana and I did our first workout in the Double of the year.

Warming up. Then breaking down the strokes by stops. In Dutch we call them “first stop”, “second stop”, and “third stop”. These are stops at, respectively, the finish, arms away, and body rocking over. We started with all three, then removed the first, then the second and finally went back to rowing continuously.

Then, we rowed without feathering for 2km.

And finally we did a special, secret, technique drill that makes us very fast. You can see its mark at 6800m and 9000m in the chart above. And here’s a panorama shot from our dock:

And another one:

By • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: , , , ,

Screenshot_2019-03-16_15-01-24

Mar 16 2019

Fanatically OTW

Thursday

A workout that doesn’t look so hard on paper, but after I’d done it I was sure my arms would fall off.

30 minutes of running/cycling. I did both, in the fitness center close to the office.

Then the following:

6 sets of 20 burpees / 20 jerk (20kg), one minute rest between sets

6 sets of 20 squats (12 kg) / 40 boxing punches holding 6kg dumbbell.

Pretty explosive and pretty heavy on shoulders. It was fun.

Friday

I was able to leave work early and arrived at the rowing club at 4pm. I decided to take the single out. It was “nice” weather. A light rain, but it wasn’t too windy. Steady state and mainly technique focus. I used the effective length metric on the NK SpeedCoach/Empower in combination with the Work per Stroke. Returning to the water after a winter of erging, my strokes are a bit too heavy around the catch. Need to lengthen up, lighten up and still get those Watts in the stroke.

You can see in the section between 0:42 and 0:56 how it all came together and I cradually increased the stroke rate to 24spm. Unfortunately, the Empower Oarlock disconnected after 36 minutes and I had to pair it again with the SpeedCoach. After the training, I downloaded and installed new SpeedCoach firmware.

Saturday

The forecast was that the wind would be strong during the night and slow down in the morning, but when I arrived at the club, it was not a calm lake. For a moment, I considered using the LiteBoat coastal single, but in the end I wanted to get more practice in in my own single. I figured that the water would be calmer on the opposite shore and in the canyon.

Here’s how I rowed (short sliding) the crossing of the lake to find calmer water:

The training was 3x2km at 24 spm. As I rowed up into the canyon, I decided to row two intervals into the headwind, and two intervals with tailwind on the way back. It seemed a pity not to do 4 2km intervals, and it was perfectly doable. The tailwind intervals were very enjoyable, and I was happy to see that I could rate up to 27spm in those bits without really getting tired.

Well, I did get tired, but I was having so much fun that I didn’t notice. After lunch, I had to do groceries, and at one point, all I really wanted was to find a quiet part of the store, lie down and rest a bit.

I do have video from the row, but as it’s the start of a new OTW season it’s not perfect. I mounted my GoPro 90 degrees rotated, so instead of a nice wide view, I have a portrait video. Also, I left my Windows computer in the office, and I am still learning the video editing software on the official Rowsandall developer’s notebook, which is running Linux (because developing under Linux is so much easier and the rowsandall.com site itself also runs on a Linux distribution). I haven’t found anything that could replace Dashware to get telemetry data into the video.

While my videos are uploading, I can only show a comparison between Friday’s technique session and today’s choppy, higher rate session:

You can see that I was a bit shorter today, but I find that acceptable given the conditions. Otherwise I think I should be happy with the result.

After the row, I had a nice coffee at the club house, giving me the opportunity to boss around the juniors who were loading my trailer. They are going for a week long training camp on Monday.

It was good to get some good OTW kilometers in the bank.

Edit 1

The first high res video has finally uploaded. The other one will be ready in 40 minutes:

Edit 2

Second video uploaded. Second 2km – headwind.

By • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: , , , , ,

IMG_1477

Mar 7 2019

60 minutes of bliss and 5 minutes of terror

Monday

Up at 5:30 for transport to the airport. Flight to Paris, then on a (delayed) flight to Casablanca. Check in to the hotel and one local beer tasted before going to the land of nod.

Tuesday

Up early. It was still dark outside. Also, I wasn’t sure where to go running in Casablanca. It was a pity, because exploring new places by running is an excellent way to get more sight seeing out of a business trip.

I headed down from my 26th floor hotel room (magnificent views!) to the gym at the second floor. A typical hotel gym. The training plan prescribed 30 minutes of running which I replaced with 10min/10min/10min of treadmill/elliptical/spinning. After that, the second part of the session looked horrendous:

6x (20x burpee + 20x jerk 25kg)/60″

6x (20x squat 10kg + 40x boxing with 6-8kg dumbbell)

I was under time pressure so I did 6x (20x burpee + 40x boxing). And that was hard! So all in all a session of 50 minutes but I got some work done.

We had a good meeting, and then there was some time for sight seeing. We took a taxi to the biggest mosque of North Africa, right on the beach, and took a few pictures.

The famous lighthouse “El Hank”

Then we took a taxi to the fishing port. We passed “Rick’s Cafe“, then a part of the waterfront that looked like a piece of Monaco transplanted to Morocco. You can see it in the background of this picture.

In the port, we watched the boats getting prepared and leaving. We were at a significant risk of being covered in seagull poop, but we still stood there watching for a while, taking in the aroma of diesel, fish, sea water, and other undefined.

We had great seafood in a nearby restaurant.

Wednesday

Basically spent the whole day making it back from Casablanca to Brno, with stops in Paris and Vienna.

Thursday

Back in the office and lots of things to do. But it was great spring weather and I knew that our local rowers have been rowing OTW since Monday! I needed part of the action, so I left early, claiming to be tired from the business trip and grabbing the opportunity offered by one canceled meeting. Drove home, grabbed rowing gear, went to lake.

The lake was perfectly flat. Took out the single and did a little over an hour of 18spm steady state. I had no need to go any higher. This was a session to work on technique on the water, after a winter stop of three months. Oh, how I enjoyed feeling the boat run between strokes, something that no erg can simulate, dynamic or not.

I must have switched off the SpeedCoach after the warming up. I noticed half way the first “lake” that the SpeedCoach was showing “Ready”. It took a while for me to realize that this was not OK. So the session was recorded as 55 minutes, but I rowed for 68 minutes. I have the Garmin backup data to prove it.

After 40 minutes it started raining a bit, and when I was closing in on the last part, the water got a few wrinkles. I turned at “Sirka” and started the final 1000m back to the rowing club. After a minute or so I heard the wind, and then I felt it. A very strong headwind came up and within 30 seconds the lake turned very choppy. And another 30 seconds later I was rowing in white caps and getting water in the boat. As I caught water, a little later it took just too big waves to completely fill my boat with ice cold water. I saw my water bottle float away but I decided not to go back to catch it. I was only 400m from the dock but I was fearing I wouldn’t make it.

Actually, I turned around to see if anybody was outside on the rowing club who could help me. Nobody there. I swore loudly, but in the wind nobody heard it.

Look at the chart and you see the frightful bit. With 200m to go I was considering to just paddle in survival mode until the wind would die down, but eventually I made it to the dock. There, I found that my shoes had been blown into the water and were nowhere to be seen. Well, the advantage of cold, numb feet is that you can walk without feeling the sharp stones. I had to put the boat in slings  and secure it before I could put it in the boathouse, because the wind had slammed the doors shut.

Well, that was quite an unexpected adventure. But it was great to be out on the water again. Here are some of the metrics:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

By • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: , , , , ,

Capture

Mar 2 2019

Starting up after illness

It’s been a long time since I worked out. Here’s the chart that tells the story:

On February 14th, I did a normal 60 minute swim session. Nothing to complain about.

On Friday, February 15th, I was heading to my weights session when I noticed something like an upcoming cold. I don’t need HRV measurements to figure out when to take the intensity back. I am blessed with a pretty good feel for the state of my body. I did, however, decide to press on with the session. A weights session is intensive for the muscles, but in my experience it doesn’t worsen an upcoming cold.

On Saturday, I woke up with a very sore throat and a terrible headache. I canceled my session, thinking that a day of rest and a slow spinning or running session on Sunday would get me over it.

On Sunday, I was worse, and I canceled the light exercise that I had planned.

On Monday, I had a 39 degree fever. I should have stayed in bed, but I moved to the sofa and did my work calls from there. There was a major emergency at work that needed my full attention.

Of course that doesn’t help recovery. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I worked from home, still with a fever. On Thursday, I tried to get to the office, but that was a mistake.

I took the weekend after to get more rest and finally climb out of the valley of misery. On Tuesday, I still wasn’t feeling ready for a workout, and on Wednesday and Thursday I was on a two day work related conference that left me no time to work out.

So, long story short, today was the first day for two short workouts. A 30 minute run followed by a 30 minute workout in the rowing club weights room.

The weights room workout consisted of:

  • Bench pull
  • Leg press
  • Bench press
  • Hyper extension
  • V-ups
  • Rope skipping
  • Jerk
  • Push ups

And finally a ten minutes of cooling down on the spinning bike.

The stats are pretty depressing, but it was so good to be active again:

There is also some very good news. The ice on our lake is retreating fast:

Tomorrow, I will do a group erg session with our Masters training group.

On Monday morning, I will fly to Casablanca for a customer visit. I’ve never been to Casablanca, so I am looking forward to it. The following video pretty much sums up what I know about Casablanca, but I expect it to be a bit different:

By • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: , , , , ,

52387539_615341682236200_6162537789196861440_o

Feb 14 2019

The Naked Rower

Monday

A planned rest day. Note to self. A rest day means going to bed early. Recovery has a lot to do with sleeping well and sleeping enough.

Tuesday

Unplanned “rest” day. I arrived home from work, looking forward to doing a steady state workout. I found the house dark. My daughter Lenka was in bed with a fever. As the rest of the family is out in the mountains (it’s school vacation), she had been alone the entire day.

So I scrapped the training and headed out to the pharmacy. Also had to do the groceries which I thought Lenka had done.

Wednesday

I worked from home in the morning, to make sure Lenka would be taken care of. As I was up pretty early, I had time to do my Tuesday’s workout before my first call.

Nothing special. A bunch of longer intervals rowed at steady state pace. I did however put the Quiske pod under my seat pad and rowed with the Quiske app. I am not going to go into details about the Quiske app, but the essential thing is that it measures your instantaneous handle and seat speed and is able to make recommendations about your rowing style based on that.

The app gives you live feedback on how you are doing versus their ideal style.

I have to say that I would like to distinguish between “technique” and “style”.

The picture above shows the famous classification of rowing styles. You can row any of those styles without technique flaws.

Anyhow, I was curious to see how I would fare. Here was Quiske’s summary after 20 minutes:

So all yellow and one red, nothing green. That isn’t very good, isn’t it? Well, I opened the debate about this with the developers of Quiske. You can read it here on the Rowing Data Facebook Group. 

So in this picture you can see a chart of my typical handle (solid) and seat (dashed) speed during a rowing stroke. The table above it gives you the “Virtual Coach” ideal values versus mine. You can see that I am not so far away.

It’s funny to see the data versus how it felt. I am (I think) very consciously working on leg push and a more phased stroke (legs, trunk, arms) but to get the balls green during the row I had to change much more than I thought I would have. It felt very awkward.

With a coach present in the erg room, normally you would get corrections immediately. The Quiske system is great for basement rowers like myself, to get honest and factual feedback.

I would like  the Quiske app to be programmable to a certain style, though, as I think coaches should have the option to promote the style they think is best, as opposed to having it prescribed by the developers of Quiske. On the other hand, I understand how labor intensive it is to develop a set of metrics that correctly catch a certain style and quantifies deviations from it (at various stroke rates), so I don’t see this as a major issue. You can always look at the curves directly.

And as my preferred style does approach what Quiske recommends quite well, I am going to use it more often.

The workout was a 3km warming up followed by 20min/3min + 12min/2min + 10min at 20/21 spm:

I seem to be suffering from missing strokes in the data stream. Not sure what is the culprit. This time I was listening to classical “ether” radio, and the only bluetooth connections were between my iPhone and the PM, the OH1 and the PM, and between the Quiske Pod and my Android Phone. Usually I have an additional Bluetooth link between iPad and iPhone (for Zwift) and between the iPad and the radio (for music).

By • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: , , , , , ,

«< 6 7 8 9 10 >»