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IMG_1673

Jan 24 2016

More ice skating

I may be jeopardizing my planned 5k attempt for tomorrow, but when it’s possible to skate, I will skate.

It had been snowing on Saturday afternoon, so I had to start from scratch making my oval. I made it a bit longer than yesterday. An hour of hard work. Temperatures are up and the snow is wet and heavy.

But the end result was ok. A little narrow which made it difficult to take over the slower skaters. I also made one of the turns a bit too sharp so I had to make it wider.

When the work was done, I did about 4o minutes of just circling. The rest of the lake was difficult to skate on with speed skates. Too heavy snow.

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100 minutes of aerobic exercise.

Some pictures I took of the boys:

Oh, and the ball was great. We were home at 2am and we had a very good time.

Tomorrow: A 5k. Only opportunity to do it before the end of the month.

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schaatsen

Jan 23 2016

Alternative use of rowing lake

  • Wednesday – 8 cm and more (measured)
  • Thursday – 10 cm (estimate)
  • Friday – 12 cm and more (measured)
  • Saturday – 14cm (estimate)

Yes, I am talking ice thickness. On Friday it finally reached a thickness that is considered safe by the local police (and I have no reason to have a different opinion). Here’s a picture that Romana took on Friday afternoon, when I had to work:

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That is Czech rowers playing ice hockey, the number two sport (after football/soccer) in this country. Perfect black ice, unfortunately covered by a thin layer of powder snow.

Hockey is not a very Dutch sport. We go crazy on speed skating. This stuff:

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Stefan Groothuis wins the 1000m sprint at the Sochi Olympics

Well, Stefan is doing a 1000m sprint in the picture above. I am more passionate about this:

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Natural ice tour skating

Global warming doesn’t help, but when the canals and lakes freeze in The Netherlands, it is great. You can skate from village to village and spend the entire day on the ice, doing 50 to 100km. Locals set up food stalls on the ice.

Back to the Czech Republic. Of course I had skating fever, so I couldn’t wait and we drove down to the lake immediately after breakfast.

Put on the skates and skated away … bliss. It’s like rowing, you never unlearn it. Also the feeling is similar to rowing, you push and glide, push and glide, and you can get into a great rhythm.

Spent the first 30 minutes wiping a crude 400m oval clean of snow. Locals quickly discovered it and started circling with me. A bit annoying that about one third of the people skated the oval in clockwise direction! 

Clockwise direction. That’s very dangerous. You bump into people. It’s like going down the highway in the wrong direction.

The oval was OK but there was an entire lake to explore. So I skated up to Rokle, then to Lodni Sporty, back to our rowing club. A few more loops on the oval, then to Lodni Sporty to greet some friends who were preparing a hockey field for a match at noon. Back to the club.

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I wanted to take pictures but I left the camera in the car. It was snowing lightly and the light wasn’t very beautiful.

After 20km I stopped. I was worried a little that this would be too light training. It felt so effortlessly. Walking up the hill to the car, I noticed that my legs were tired anyway.

I was very surprised seeing the heart rate levels reached during the skating:

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Not bad.

Tomorrow again. Then temperatures will rise, so next weekend will probably not be safe to skate.

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2speed

Jan 22 2016

Plan, Periodise, Train, Adjust and Win Part II

On December 18th, 5 weeks ago, I did the two speed lactate test. Read my blog of 18 December about it.

Today, I planned to repeat it. I tried to copy the protocol as much as possible. So first a Fletcher warming up:

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Higher heart rates than 5 weeks ago.

Then the main event, two 1k tests spaced 15 minutes apart. The first one at head race pace. Second one at 2k pace or faster (full out allowed). I looked up my stroke rate of 5 weeks ago. They were 27 spm for the first one and 31 spm for the second one.

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Again, a higher heart rate in the second 1k.


Workout Summary - Jan 22, 2016
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|Watts|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|02000|06:58.5|01:44.6|305.6|29.5|173.9|185.0|09.7
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|Watts|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-|Comments
01|01000|03:36.5|01:48.3|275.8|27.4|168.7|180.0|10.1| 2.6 mmol/L (1.9)
02|01000|03:22.0|01:41.0|339.9|31.8|178.8|185.0|09.3| 4.1 mmol/L (3.2)

So, compared to 5 weeks ago, there are the following differences:

  • 2 seconds faster split on the first 1k (stroke rate 0.4 spm up)
  • HR 10 bpm higher on the first 1k
  • Lactate 0.4 mmol/L lower after the first 1k
  • 2.3 seconds faster split on the second 1k (stroke rate 1 spm up)
  • HR 7 bpm higher on the 2nd 1k
  • Lactate 0.4 mmol/L lower

So I am faster at lower lactate but higher heart rate. This sounds plausible. For the aerobic energy path way, the heart rate has to go up when delivering higher power.

In a graph, it looks like this:

2speed.jpg

To be honest, I had hoped for a right shifted first point and a steeper curve. You can’t say I didn’t try. The second 1k is a Season’s Best.

I did another lactate test after a 2k cooling down. 2.3 mmol/L

So I guess my aerobic fitness has increased. Next test in 5 weeks.

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ples-v-opere-brno-mahenovo-divadlo-43_denik-600

Jan 22 2016

Thursday: Two short trainings

The first training was Bow Tie training. I haven’t worn a bow tie since my Ph.D. thesis defence, and I didn’t even own one until this week.

A Dutch Ph.D. thesis, by the way, to steal the words of this blogger, “The ceremony is incredibly formal, fairly succinct and the party that follows approaches the level of a wedding reception. The scale and grandeur of the event is a fitting marker of the accomplishment of completing a doctoral degree.” At that event, my “paranimfen” and I were wearing a full tuxedo, as is required at such an event. Formally, my “paranimfen” (usually good friends or a colleague) are the only persons who are allowed to wear a sabre during the examination, so they could defend me in case the commission attacked me. We refrained from that right, however.

So that was my last bow tie wearing of 16 years ago, in this room to be precise:

academy-hall

But on Saturday I have to go to a ball with Romana, who got herself a beautiful dress for the occasion. I could of course wear a suit and tie but I would feel as if I was going to work. I craved for something that was acceptable to the occasion but also has a fun and party air to it. So the bow tie.

The training took 30 minutes and I went from zero skills to being able to tie an acceptable tie.

The second training was 40 minutes of strength training. Nothing special. Just my weekly routine. This time without a light steady state to precede it, because it is low volume week.

So on Saturday I will be dancing at the Ball of the Olympians. Something like this, but with Olympic medal winners (and us).

ples-v-opere-brno-mahenovo-divadlo-43_denik-600

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3x20interrupted

Jan 20 2016

Concessions

Monday

Plan: Free form steady state

Execution: Did a 4x2000m “biathlon game” Concept2 with 250m penalty rounds each interval for

  1. Exceeding 190 strokes – penalty round 250m for every 10 strokes)
  2. A 250m round for each second above 2:00 average pace for the interval (2:00.9 – zero penalty; 2:01.0 – 2:01.9 – one penalty; and so on)
  3. A 250m round for each part of the interval where HR was 161 or higher.

I ended up doing a few penalty rounds as you can imagine. It made the time pass quick.

Tuesday

Plan: No training, rest day

Execution:

  1. Alarm clock at 2:30 am to catch taxi to airport, then flight to Brussels
  2. 10 am to 5pm – meetings in Brussels
  3. 7pm to 11:30pm – travel home by flight to Vienna, then taxi home

What a rest day!

Wednesday

Plan: 3×20 minute steady state erg @ 200 W

Difficulty to wake up. Decided to work from home and do the workout before work. Would give me time in the evening to spend with my family.

Execution:

  1. Wrote important email briefing on Tuesday’s meeting to my boss and other stakeholders. I bring home a few facts that may change a few important decisions. Then quickly sat down on erg. Between this and my first meeting of the day, there was only just enough time to do the workout and a quick shower
  2. A 1km warming up, followed by the 3x20min
  3. Power seemed to come easy. HR was high but the perceived rate of exertion (PRE) was OK and I didn’t have difficulty holding the 200W average.
  4. Started second interval. RPE was a bit higher now. Still holding 200W.
  5. A few minutes into the second interval, my audio stopped (I was playing some course material) and I noticed an incoming call from my boss. Stopped to answer the call and talked to him for the rest of the interval and the beginning of the third interval.
  6. Finished 3rd interval and measured lactate: 1.7 mmol/L

I am not sure about the significance of the Lactate reading as I had an interrupted row.

3x20interrupted.jpg

I had 10 minutes left between end of shower and first meeting. Made a coffee and went to work.

Did some of the urgent “emergency” tasks, multitasking during the meeting and am now caught up enough to take 10 minutes to write this blog.

I had to make a few concessions but this week there are a more than a few crucial work topics to finalize and decisions to make. Also, I preferred a compromised row in the morning over spending the evening in the erg room without seeing the kids.

It’s a low volume week anyway, and the recovery is the most important part of the training. So, in that light, the decision to sleep in that caused the compromised row was a great one.

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run 007

Jan 17 2016

Run, Ice and Sauna

A nice sunny morning. I did a run followed by two hours of sauna and relax.

I had my phone with me so I could inform Romana about my expected time of arrival at the sauna. This enabled me to take a few pictures. It was supposed to be a calm run but in the climbs my heart rate did go up quite a bit. First time I took this route. I like to explore the trails around my house, and sometimes I do regret that I don’t run more and row less.

Here is the start of the run. This is 5 minutes from my house, leaving Brno town through a mix of car dealers, hypermarkets, and other places of low interest. To the right of this are the hills towards Oresin and Utechov, my usual running playground, but today I would take on those hills in the background, nature park Velka Baba. run 001.JPG

After the village of Ivanovice, infamous for the Harok family murder, which led to the first case of a US citizen, the prime suspect, being extradited to the Czech Republic.

Shortly after the village, the climb starts. That’s where I found out that the snow of last week had turned into ice:

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Not good. I had to slow down and run on the edge of the path.

A nice view on the top:

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I descended into the village of Jinacovice, first through an area where forest workers had been working with heavy equipment, so the trail was turned into something that looked like a frozen training facility for tanks. Going downhill, I had to slow down a lot.

A bit lower, I had the pleasure of running through a very nice forest. This is what I call running heaven:

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Then I took the “red” marked trail to Rozdrojovice. Again, a few pretty frozen parts made me slow down:

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That is ice that you see, not snow.

Hura do sauny 1-17-2016, Elevation.png

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It was a really slow run. I covered the 12km in 80 minutes. The stops to take pictures may have slowed me down by about five minutes, but the real difficulty was the ice. Still, I don’t regret it. It was a very nice outing with a variety of forests and fields, a different trail every few kilometers. Will repeat this run.

After that it was two hours of taking saunas and relaxing in front of the fireplace in Maximus Resort. Splendid.

Now I am very lazy. There are some chores I should be doing but the chair is just too comfy. It’s the end of a high volume week. I did 10 minutes of exercise less than planned. Still a good score.

 

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ergroom 003

Jan 16 2016

Saturday: Two Flavors of Steady State

At the rowing club. Romana’s girls had a 30 minute run and then a 30 minute erg. I was elected as their “running coach” so I went with them.

Passing the fire station, a fire truck honked at our little group. I guess it wasn’t my attractive sportsman body that they were admiring. :-/

I taught the girls a few basics about the 30 minute run from our rowing club.

  1. Run slowly, conversation tempo
  2. Run to the other rowing club
  3. At the other rowing club, touch the gate
  4. If you’re feeling naughty you can ring the other club’s doorbell
  5. Turn around, run back slowly

We got to Lodni Sporty when one of their Masters rowers was just done with training. With a smile, he invited me for coffee. I declined the offer, saying I still had to do my training.

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https://www.strava.com/activities/471342951

141 bpm average heart rate. 5km. 30 minutes.

Then it was time to erg.

The girls spent ages in the changing room. Romana told me that they were completely exhausted after their run with me.

I did an hour on the erg, as various just rows because I had to interrupt the rowing to fiddle with the radio.

The rowing club erg room with the view on the (frozen) lake:

ergroom 003.JPG

 

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