Jan 6 2016
Roads too slippery to cycle to work. 🙁
Did a 3×20 min capturing the data with Painsled. Played with a spreadsheet to create colorful graphs from the data.
The Drive Ratio is the duration of the drive as a percentage of the total stroke duration. I just wanted to see how consistent I am in this. Not a lot, it seems.
Jan 5 2016
Today I did an easy row and some weights.
For the easy row I used the Chrome app function of Painsled. Although I don’t like its name, it’s an interesting app (in beta). I stumbled upon it on the Concept2 forum because the developer advertised a mobile version. What it does? It connects to the PM monitor and then logs data (stroke data). There is an iOS app that works with the wireless enabled PM5. For my PM3 I have to use the USB connection and use the Chrome App version. Here’s a screenshot:
It works pretty nicely. You basically have it running on your computer and don’t care about it. You use the PM to set up workouts and row them. The app just follows what you are doing on the erg and logs each stroke. It shows the data on the screen, so you basically have an extra erg monitor with some data (stroke power curve, watts, 500m pace all in one screen). The logs correspond to the Just Rows or Workouts that you did on the erg. I guess when the PM saves to the log card, a new log is started in PainSled.
After rowing, you can export the data to a CSV file. I did that and then played a bit with Dan Burpee’s spreadsheet so I could manually copy data from the CSV to the spreadsheet and create pretty graphs:
I like the philosphy of the app. Just a data logger. There is a TCX export plugin available which I couldn’t get to work. Also, I noted that the cumulative meters in the CSV file stopped after the second 1500m interval. Probably a bug in the software, but the stroke specific data were there so I could easily correct it.
The CSV file is very complete. Here are the data that I found in it:
And if you can write plugins, you could probably make a function to upload the row to Concept2 and other nifty things. A semi automatic excel to extract data from the CSV file is easy and very interesting.
Unfortunately I don’t have a PM5 (nor will I see many PM5 monitors on the hotel gym or crossfit box ergs that I frequent), so the mobile app is useless for me at the moment. In that respect, ErgStick seems promising.
So definitely something to watch.
Jan 4 2016
Back at work and a lot of work to do.
Temperatures have dropped even more and it’s snowing all day. A very fine and dry snow at -8C, but when it continues long enough it covers everything. Even streets are white.
Went to the rowing basement in the evening. Outside temperature -8C, inside +4 and dropping once I opened the door to get fresh air.
The drill was 20x1min, every fourth as a full out, the others “controlled”.
Workout Summary - Jan 04, 2016
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|Watts|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|09174|40:00.0|02:10.8|156.4|25.2|166.5|182.0|09.1
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|Watts|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-|Comments
01|00293|01:00.0|01:42.3|326.6|31.0|143.4|164.0|09.5|
02|00294|01:00.0|01:42.1|328.9|30.0|164.4|171.0|09.8|
03|00295|01:00.0|01:41.6|334.0|30.0|161.9|173.0|09.8|
04|00308|01:00.0|01:37.4|379.0|33.0|167.6|178.0|09.3| full
05|00296|01:00.0|01:41.4|336.0|30.0|168.2|176.0|09.9|
06|00296|01:00.0|01:41.4|335.2|30.0|168.4|177.0|09.9|
07|00295|01:00.0|01:41.7|332.7|30.0|167.6|177.0|09.8|
08|00309|01:00.0|01:37.0|383.7|34.0|171.5|180.0|09.1| full
09|00295|01:00.0|01:41.5|334.4|30.0|169.2|177.0|09.8|
10|00294|01:00.0|01:42.2|328.3|30.0|168.7|176.0|09.8|
11|00296|01:00.0|01:41.5|335.2|30.0|169.9|178.0|09.9|
12|00310|01:00.0|01:36.7|387.5|35.0|172.6|181.0|08.9| full
13|00293|01:00.0|01:42.4|326.1|30.0|170.2|177.0|09.8|
14|00294|01:00.0|01:41.9|330.3|31.0|167.1|177.0|09.5|
15|00293|01:00.0|01:42.3|326.6|31.0|167.9|177.0|09.5|
16|00307|01:00.0|01:37.6|376.1|35.0|172.4|180.0|08.8| full
17|00290|01:00.0|01:43.5|315.5|31.0|169.4|176.0|09.3|
18|00290|01:00.0|01:43.6|315.2|31.0|169.0|176.0|09.3|
19|00291|01:00.0|01:43.0|319.9|30.0|166.6|175.0|09.7|
20|00295|01:00.0|01:41.7|332.8|33.0|169.6|177.0|08.9| full
Happy with that. I think I was slightly slower than last week but this was less than an hour after dinner. From number 12 on it started to be hard.
Jan 3 2016
Woke up and wrist was better than yesterday, and improving during the day.
I am really wondering what caused this episode. The start is clear. I slipped on ice and instinctively broke my fall with my arm, thus landing my wrist on concrete. Probably caused some serious sprained wrist. As I started to relax in the evening, the healing process set on, causing swelling and inflammation.
Then I played a card game (Dominion) with my sons. I have a very strong suspicion that holding the cards in my painful hands didn’t help.
The next part of my theory is that training regularly actually helps speed up the “repair” of the damage. The body is used to micro damage and starts to repair as soon as possible. As soon as the swelling started to reduce the vicious pain disappeared and life became bearable again.
I now can feel that the wrist has gone through something. It is slightly stiffer and bigger than my other wrist, and making a fist is slightly painful. But otherwise it is fine.
My family’s theory is that I overreacted on Friday and showed some very fine acting behavior. 🙁
Anyway, I felt I could try a 3×20 minute. Normally I do a 4x20min in the weekend, but I had already done a 4×20 earlier this week, and I am already above my training hours targets for this week. Plus the wrist. I decided to dial up a 3×20 min and abort it if there would be a problem with the wrist.
Temperature in my rowing basement was 7 degrees inside, dropping to 4 degrees during the row, and -8 outside. Relative humidity around 40%.
Workout Summary - Jan 03, 2016
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|Watts|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|14977|60:00.0|02:00.2|201.6|22.4|159.0|171.0|11.1
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|Watts|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-|Comments
01|04989|20:00.0|02:00.3|201.2|22.3|151.5|162.0|11.2|
02|05003|20:00.0|01:59.9|202.9|22.5|161.3|169.0|11.1|
03|04986|20:00.0|02:00.3|200.8|22.6|164.1|171.0|11.1| 1.2 mmol/L
The power seemed to come easily today. Although my average heart rate is one of the highest of all the similar rows since the end of November, and heart rate drift wasn’t small either, I found it very easy to hold 200W. Perhaps the low temperatures helped.
Let’s see what this does to my “injured” wrist, but I bet I will be able to row the erg race coming Saturday.
Jan 2 2016
I had an interesting evening:
7pm – wrist starts to be painful (while playing cards)
8pm – wrist so painful I am afraid I will faint from the pain
9pm – see 8pm. In bed.
10pm – pain gets more numb but still prevents me from sleeping. I move to the living room to watch TV
2am – I wake up in front of the TV, wrist better. I go back to the bedroom.
8am – waking up with a stiff wrist but pain level is bearable
I am carrying the arm in a sling to give it rest. In the morning I wanted to decide whether or not to have it X-rayed today. This morning, I decided to postpone that decision until Sunday or Monday. It will be easier to visit a doctor on Monday anyway.
I have little pain when pushing or pulling the hand straight, but a lot of pain when doing fine motorics, like buttoning buttons, eating with knife and fork, and opening a tube of toothpaste. I think the wrist is heavily bruised, but not broken. The swellings and pain are from inflammation, which is part of the healing process.
I went to the rowing club. Tried two pulls on the concept2 and gave up. A 2:45 pace gives me wrist pain. May try again tomorrow.
The plan was a 30 minute row and weights. I ended up doing 35 minute of gentle spinning on an indoor cycle and then did the weights that I could do, which was mainly core strengthening business.
Jan 1 2016
Typing this with my right hand only, as my dominant left hand is a bit painful. Today was our traditional New Year’s row. We took a quad and a single and rowed on the part of the lake that wasn’t frozen.
Whille carrying my sculls to the water I slipped and fell, landing on my bum and lower left arm and wrist. Nothing serious, I thought, and was happy to escape without breaking anything. I rowed for 6 km and then did an erg workout. No problems.
Had a nice time at the club, drove home and prepared dinner.
I fell at 2pm and at 7pm the pain in my wrist started. Quite heavy pain, even when the hand is resting. If it doesn’t get better tomorrow, I will have it X-rayed.
Here are the pics. I am in the single.
Jan 7 2016
Another set of ultra short intervals
This time it is Romana’s patented training: 3 sets of 5×30 seconds at one minute rest. Five minutes rest between intervals. I did a 20 minute warming up with stroke bursts as a, well, a warming up. I ended with 10 minutes of cooling down.
As I am still playing with the PainSled app, I forced myself to program all this as a variable interval workout on the PM3 screen, which was quite tedious to do. RowPro is good for that. If I wasn’t playing with the tool I would have done the warming up and cooldown as “just row” and the 3×5 minutes as regular 30″/1min rest intervals (and then do them three times).
Tomorrow: Rest Day. Perhaps a few race starts.
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 5 • Tags: concept2, erg, OTE, rowing, training