Mar 26 2016
Račice the video
Oh that mirror flat water. It was a good, good week!
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Mar 26 2016
Back home: 2x3km and easter traditions
The trip home was uneventful, luckily. Here’s a picture of our trailer ready to hit the road.
Before we left, I took a final picture of the canal. Empty because of lunch time.
We had become used to the mirror flat water. We were spoiled.
Today’s training was a 2x3km “at head race pace”. After a full week of rowing, I am looking forward to Monday’s rest day, but this one had to be accomplished.
We headed to the rowing club, prepared the boats, and headed for the water. Romana and the girls took it to the castle, to avoid the chop. I hesitated, but then I decided I would row on the choppy lake.
The goal was to row a 2:13 or faster average and at least 27spm. I didn’t manage to row higher than 26spm in the first 3km (tailwind). In the heavy chop the stroke rate went down and I couldn’t even get my heart rate up.
A two minutes rest and then battling into the headwind. I had done the tailwind section in 2:08 pace, so I didn’t want to be slower than 2:18 in the headwind, and I had to work hard to achieve that. Still, I am glad I gave myself that pace target, because it gave me an incentive to keep going, even on tired legs. Even managed to get the stroke rate up to a decent 28/29 spm in the final 1000m (counting strokes).
Oh, how we’ve been spoiled on the mirror flat water in Račice. I will upload a video soon to show you.
Here’s the same picture, but instead of distance I have time on the horizontal axis.
In the cooling down I started to accelerate because I wanted to stay ahead of Romana and Lenka in a double.
After the session, I went to our lake shore with the boys to collect young willow branches.
On Monday, we will celebrate a special local Easter tradition.
In the morning, men spank women with a special handmade whip called a pomlázka (in Czech) or korbáč (in Slovak), in eastern regions of former Czechoslovakia Moravia and Slovakia they also throw cold water on them. The pomlázka/korbáč consists of eight, twelve or even twenty-four withies (willow rods), is usually from half a meter to two meters long and decorated with coloured ribbons at the end. The spanking may be painful, but it’s not intended to cause suffering. A legend says that women should be spanked with a whip in order to keep their health, beauty and fertility during the whole next year.[4]
An additional purpose can be for men to exhibit their attraction to women; unvisited women can even feel offended. Traditionally, the spanked woman gives a coloured egg (kraslice) prepared by themselves, invites to eat and drink as a sign of her thanks to the man. If the visitor is a small boy, he is usually provided with sweets, and a small amount of money.
You can buy the whips in the supermarket, but the idea of course is to make them yourself. This is the idea:
Our end results were quite good. Actually better than this picture, because we did the handle part from willow branch and not with tape. The boys did most of the work themselves.
Tomorrow, I will do a nice outing in the double with Romana. Then we’ll switch on the TV in the club house and watch The Boat Race.
Mar 25 2016
Račice day 5: Intervals and leaving
A quick blog between the shower and loading the trailer.
The workout was 45 seconds “on” / 1 minute rest. Again I focused on a “light” catch and a clear, clean tapdown which works wonders to get up the stroke rate. In the final 6 intervals I played a bit with the stroke rate to get down to head race stroke rate.
Took a video but I will not get to processing it before the weekend.
Quite happy with the paces achieved.
Mar 24 2016
Račice Day 4: Insomnia and steady state
Our group is staying in two bungalows at the 1500m mark. The boys are sleeping in one bungalow, and the girls, one trainer and myself in the other bungalow. The boys bungalow is a bit unlucky. On Monday, the first boy got a mild stomach flu, so he stayed in bed on Tuesday. He was better on Wednesday, but then the next guy had the same symptoms.
I went to bed at 10pm on Wednesday evening. Some time between midnight and 1am I woke up because somebody was knocking on the door of our bungalow. It was Lubos, my single sparring partner of this week. He had a terrible, unbearable earache and wanted to see a doctor. So I get my clothes on, found the nearest hospital in the navigation app and we drove to nearby Roudnice nad Labem.
They couldn’t help us there, because they had no ear/nose/throat doctors on the night shift. They explained that by saying they’re a small hospital, and told us to go to Prague or Ústí nad Labem. Both were about a 30 minute drive so I settled on Prague. Bigger city, probably bigger hospital. Lubos was in great pain.
We arrived in Prague and quickly found the night sister on the ENT ward, who woke up the doctor. Otitis Media, was the verdict, probably as a result of a cold. The doctor punctured the ear, which gave immediate relief, and gave Lubos a recipe for antibiotics, which we picked up at the nearby night pharmacy.
We were in and out of the hospital within 30 minutes. Back at the rowing center at 3am. It took me another hour to get to sleep again, and then I slept until 7.
Lubos kept apologizing, but I don’t know what for. He was in great pain and he was helped. It was an interesting excursion and the problem was quickly solved.
Anyway, it means I will have to train alone, because Lubos obviously has to rest. But that’s no problem now. A few more rowing clubs have arrived, including an interesting Swedish group. I chatted with them after the training. They are a mix of national squad members and club rowers who are staying three weeks in Račice. Some of them will compete on the head race in three weeks.
The morning session was 16k of steady state. I made it more interesting by rowing it as 2k intervals with a 1 minute rest, and doing rate ladders 18/20/22/20/18 per 2 minutes.
The afternoon session was 10k of technique. Romana cycled next to me for 2k and I did what she told me to do. Then I repeated that. I stopped after 8k. Good enough.
Perhaps I should have gone to a pub or a night club in Prague. 🙂
Mar 24 2016
Račice day 3 -ANP training
Tuesday afternoon. A technique session. I did the whole variety of technique exercises.
Wednesday morning. I looked on the wrong data in my training plan, so instead of a planned steady state session, I did my first ever “ANP” (Anaerobic Power) session. This is one of the four training types from the Olbrecht book. It is supposed to be at >100% of race intensity, short bursts with short rest. The overall training volume is short and it is usually followed by a long, low intensity steady state. That looked quite close to what we rowers do quite frequently, namely “10 strokes on / 10 strokes off”. So I decided to do 4km of 10 strokes on/10 strokes off, followed by steady state. Here is the data:
After that a long teleconference with Brussels. My partners are just one subway stop from the Maelbeek station, so you can imagine the emotions. Everybody is OK, luckily.
I didn’t have to go to Brno, because our Brussels based customer canceled his business trip, for obvious reasons. Being really tired from the intense training, I decided to go and explore the region. Visited the old (12th century) Rotunda church on the legendary mountain Říp (the climb was a 30 minute brisk and steep climb, so I count it as a short recovery session) and visited the town of Mělník.
Mar 24 2016
OTW data tool in python
There is very little distraction here in Račice, so I had some time to play with a python based data analysis tool that Greg Smith (from Quantified Rowing) developed for his Painsled CSV files.
I have slightly rewritten it to better match my workflow (sorry, Greg), but more importantly I have added a TCX Parser that parses my CrewNerd files. It took me some time to get up to speed with parsing XML. First time I worked with the lxml package and I needed to learn the syntax of “xpath”, which was greatly complicated because my network connection broke down on Wednesday morning.
Anyway, I succeeded in writing something that converts a TCX file to a “painsled style” CSV file and here is Tuesday morning’s workout in a first crude graph. I need to smoothen the pace graph (probably by a running average) a bit to get the noise level down. Also, I need to calculate useful stuff like meters per stroke etc. The colorful bar graph produces some strange red spikes during the interval part. Not sure what that is.
But for that I am on common ground. No problems to work with the data once I have them.
Update
The moving average thing took me 5 minutes. Updated graph:
Mar 28 2016
Surprise session and day off
Sunday
The plan was to row the double with Romana. The girls would do a hard 4k and we would paddle next to it in the double.
Reality was different.
There was such an amount of chop that it was irresponsible. We didn’t realize it at first, but when we brought out the girls’ singles and put them in the water, they were swamped immediately.
So we decided to take a quad. So suddenly I was to stroke a 4k.
The lake was unrowable. We reverted to the river/canyon. Romana in bow seat. The girls Iva and Lenka in 2 and 3 seat. I stroked. In the end we did it as a 2x2km with a 2 minute rest which is needed to turn the quad.
I stroked a comfortable 27spm on the tailwind part, and a fine 28spm on the headwind part. Not too taxing for me.
It was great to stroke a quad again.
After that, we wanted to see The Boat Race on TV, but we discovered that we don’t receive any channel that broadcasts it. Eurosport had other sports.ČT Sport didn’t have it either. And the bbc.co.uk website declined to stream the images outside the UK. 🙁
Monday
A rest day. Romana, the boys and I did a short hike to a nearby 14th century castle. Thoroughly enjoyed this rest day …
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: OTW, quad, rowing, training