Dec 20 2015
6x1500m and year plan
We slept in late and I spent the morning fiddling with my annual training plan, and in the afternoon we had the Christmas party on the rowing club. So I had little time to train. Wanted to do an endurance session and decided to try one of the sessions from the Olbrecht book. It’s a swimming endurance session described as 6x500m at 20 seconds rest. The description also seems to indicate to swim it as 50m fast / 50m slow but I am not 100% sure about that. Anyway, I decided that a good erg equivalent would be a 6x1500m at 20 seconds rest, and to do every fourth 500m at slightly faster (“6k”) pace.
Workout Summary - Dec 20, 2015
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|Watts|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|09000|34:31.6|01:55.1|229.6|24.9|165.4|184.0|10.5
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|Watts|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-|Comments
01|01500|05:47.6|01:55.9|225.0|24.0|153.9|162.0|10.8| fast/slow/slow
02|01500|05:46.6|01:55.5|227.0|24.4|163.2|169.0|10.6| s/f/s
03|01500|05:46.6|01:55.5|227.0|24.4|164.1|172.0|10.6| s/s/f
04|01500|05:50.5|01:56.8|219.5|24.1|166.1|171.0|10.6| s/s/s
05|01500|05:45.6|01:55.2|229.0|25.4|170.3|173.0|10.3| f/s/s
06|01500|05:34.7|01:51.6|252.0|27.2|173.9|184.0|09.9| s/f/f
I should have done this at a slightly faster pace. It felt like a black hole training. Pleasantly exhausting but not too hard. Still it’s a good session to add to the mix. Should be more like a threshold session but I should do it slightly faster. If I do it another time, I should do the slow bits at today’s average and the fast bits at 6k pace. Perhaps I should also do alternating 150m fast and slow.
Year plan
In the past years I have rowed according to an intuitive year plan which I didn’t write down. I would build up endurance during the fall (like this year), use the Christmas vacation for some SB/PB attempts, then work towards the shorter erg tests (5km, 2km, 1km, 500m) during the spring, then prepare for the head race, and subsequently dive into sprint season.
This year will be no different in terms of macro cycles, but I want to try to plan the meso cycles a bit more explicitly. The Olbrecht book has some templates, with the instruction to copy and enlarge them for use. Of course I will use excel instead.
So this morning I looked at the race calendar and tried to build up a logical year plan.
I will skip Masters Worlds in Copenhagen. Instead, my important sprint races will be the Czech Open Masters and Euromasters in Munich. The other important race will be the 6km in Horin in the Men’s LW category. This gives me a distance (“head race”) peak in April and a sprint race peak in July. If I manage to get into Henley Masters, I will row it as well.
The Slovak Championship and the regional races will be training races, with little taper.
This was easy to create. The hard part will be to plan the first few meso cycles. Looking forward to the challenge.
Romana and the girls want to row erg races on the 9th of January and the 30th of January, so I tentatively put them into the schedule. I have to make a confession. When I ignore my Junior/Young Senior career, I have never rowed an erg race. As a junior I dreaded the compulsory erg testing that we had to do with rowing association officials noting your time.
Looking at the results from the first round of the Czech Indoor Rowing cup, I guess I will be about 30 seconds behind the winner. But if I accompany Romana and the girls to the venue, I might just as well row the race, right?
The draft year plan in a bigger font:
Dec 21 2015
Olbrecht Style Meso Cycle Plan
I tried to go through the recommendation from Olbrecht’s book to plan meso cycles based on my annual plan. Everything beyond January is just penciled in and will need to be refined based on test results and available time.
I started by putting the main events (business trips that I am aware of, vacation, and races). The event called “Racice” in week 4 of meso cycle IV of the Preparation phase is a week long stage at the 2k track in Racice that our club plans in preparation for the 6k race in Horin.
Then I planned the 6 week cycle IV leading to the 6k race in Horin, copying an example 6 week cycle from the book. Then I added the cycles II and III and tried to think about what type of training. It’s a bit a compromise between the test rows that I want to do and the ideal type of training. The gray volume bars are just notional now but I am thinking of it in terms of hours per week.
I still have to fill in the little triangles that indicate the intensity and volume of the individual “quality” trainings (i.e. everything else than extensive steady state La<2.0 training). I will do that only the coming meso cycle.
Here’s a close-up of the first meso cycle.
As you see, a Half Marathon attempt is planned for one of the Christmas days …
Final remark. The plan is not different from what I planned as a “typical” training week in this blog post. All it does is add some guidance for the total volume and for what type of quality sessions I am planning to do. As said, the overall plan still follows roughly what I have been doing intuitively for the past 2 years, but planning it out like this gives a nice feel for where the pain points are.
Training today consists of a bike ride to work and a bike ride home, 2×45 minutes in total of active recovery. Interestingly, even though I classified yesterday’s session as “needs to be done at higher intensity”, I had unusually “empty” legs this morning.
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 2 • Tags: training plan