20190129_152425

Feb 3 2019

Lots of snow

My last blog post was from January 16th, which is a long time ago. On Thursday, the 17th, I did an easy hour of swimming, and on the 18th Romana and I drove to Vienna after work. We slept in a hotel at the airport, and continued to London on Saturday morning. We had a great day in London, and on Sunday I presented at the Rowers Conference 2019. It was a great weekend filled with rowing, but there wasn’t any exercise.

Monday, 21 Jan

I did a warming up, a full out one minute row (because of an online challenge) and then some cooling down, and that was about all I could manage. We had arrived home very late on Sunday evening, and let’s say my working day wasn’t easy either. But as this was the last day to complete this challenge, I did at least that.

Tuesday, 22 Jan

An hour of swimming. Nothing special to record here. It was fun.

In the evening, Romana and I went to a ballet performance in the newly reconstructed Janáček theater.

Friday, 25 Jan

Thursday was somehow too busy to get in the weights session.

I wanted to do an hour at power, i.e. a full out hour effort. I stopped rowing after fifteen minutes. The combination of a travel/presentations weekend with a working week with a couple of social/cultural events in the evenings really messed up with my training plan.

In the evening, we went to a party/ball organized by my daughter Lenka and her school class.

Saturday, 26 Jan

I spent the morning packing for the cross country ski training camp. At 10AM we were picked up by the bus. It took about two hours to drive to the mountains. Then we had to put the luggage on the snow scooter and hike the final part to our hut. All was well.

This is not our hut. This is the parking lot where the bus ended and the hike started
The luggaged continued with this vehicle. We hiked

In the afternoon, I did three 5km loops next to the hut:

Average heart rate 157, max 177. I think it was pretty decent.

A few photos from the training, featuring our head trainer Adam:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Sunday Morning

The kids went to Švýcárna, a small hut at about 40 minutes of cross country skiing from our hut, to drink hot chocolate. I stayed outside and shuttled between Praděd (the highest mountain in the region) and Švýcárna. Here is a picture of me in front of it. You can see that the visibility was pretty low.

Here is a picture of Romana and the girls when I met them on their way back:

Sunday Afternoon

In the afternoon, my daughter Lenka joined me. We skied to Švýcárna, where we had some tea, and then back to the hotel, and we even did the 3k loop below the hotel. It was great, especially because Lenka was really enjoying it.

Monday

The plan was to ski in the direction of “Červenohorské Sedlo” (Red Mountain Saddle) but turn after one hour to be back in time before lunch. We were with the head trainer Adam, our club president Tomas, and a bunch of Juniors. The first part, I stayed with Lenka, then left her behind at Švýcárna, thinking I was far behind the main group. After about one hour, I met some friends, who told me that the juniors were not far ahead of me. By now I was about 60 minutes on skis, but I decided to go for another 5 minutes. That is where I met our head coach, who reported that they had made it all the way to the Sedlo. I turned with them and started the way back.

There is a very long steady climb that slowed us down by a lot, especially because it had started to snow. The group broke up when some people decided to pause half way on the climb. I proceeded and completed the climb, then paused to drink a bit and eat a cookie. Checking the watch, I realized that I had only 30 minutes to make it to the hut or I would be without lunch. So I continued. Conditions were very poor. Lots of new snow, and very low visibility. I passed Švýcárna, doing skating where I could and falling back to classic cross country skiing when the climbing was too steep or the snow too heavy. There were no trails.

I made it just in time for the lunch. The soup was already on the table. I had to sit down in my wet clothes to eat it, but I can report that at least I managed to secure three extra lunches for the poor juniors who were still on the track. All returned safely. All had lunch.

Monday Afternoon

As I had done more than 80% of my daily training load in the morning, I just skied to the Švýcárna hut to have a tea and check some emails. The hut where we stayed was hosting us and a football club, and those 60 kids completely overloaded the wifi network. Švýcárna proved to have reliable and fast free wifi, so I could upload some pictures to Facebook and read a few emails.

Here are a few pictures inside the hut:

Tuesday Morning – Race day

On Tuesday morning, all camp participants did a 5k race. I skied a bit more doing a proper warming up and cooling down. I started as the sixth skier (with a starting order determined by estimated speed), but I passed two guys during the race and ended as fourth overall.

Tuesday Afternoon

Our last day on skis. We all skied up to the top of Praděd and took pictures. Then I skied to Švýcárna, and then back to the hotel, but with a coffee stop at Ovčárna.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The tower and building on the top are actually a hotel and a radio tower. It was built to resemble a starting rocket.

On Wednesday the bus took us back to Brno. It was a great few days with lots of exercise.

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

F75061D7-B44C-4AB0-8940-12D16FABCF31

Jan 16 2019

Hard Work

Monday

The training plan called for an hour of steady state but I gave up after 6 kilometers.

Tuesday

The same weights session as a week ago. I am starting to like it. That probably means that we will get a new session next week.

Wednesday

Romana has already done the session earlier and told me it is short and not hard.

She was wrong. The session is probably really short and light, but not when you are tired from a hard weights session on the previous day, and when you are a bit short of sleep and have a lot going on at work.

chart

2x(3min/3min) with 3min = 1min+1min+1min @ 24/26/28spm

Those were the instructions. Sounds easy.

I counted to twelve. I counted to thirteen. I counted to seven.

I huffed and I puffed.

I moaned, and then it was done. Another workout. I am going to bed early today!

By • rowing • 0 • Tags: , , , , ,

331AC5E7-5F52-48CB-B4EB-12967F262138

Jan 13 2019

Sprints getting longer at shorter rest

Sunday session with the Masters group. We were a smaller core of the bigger group today. Romana was in Prague at the second round of the Czech Indoor Rowing Cup, with Lenka and Dominik, and some of the other Masters also couldn’t come. So it was Martin, Lubka and myself.

The session was one invented by our coach and it is tough.

8x40"/20", 8x30"/30", 8x40"/20"; 5 min rest between series. Stroke rate 35-38

First a 15 minute warming up:
warming up

Then on to the main thing:

main session

Rowsandall.com’s interval editor came in very handy here. It allowed me to simply program the monitor as 8 minute work, 5 minute rest, and then edit the intervals on the site after the workout is uploaded. The alternative is either to use a lengthy process to program varying intervals, or to row it as three short interval sessions and reprogram the monitor in between.

In Rowsandall.com’s interval shorthand, the session is:

(8x(20sec/40sec))/5min+(8x(30sec/30sec))/5min+(8x(40sec/20sec))/5min

This is the resulting breakdown in intervals:

intervals

I am always impressed when it works. After all, I know who hacked it together. The resulting workout summary is as follows:

Workout Summary - media/20190113-1435360o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|08349|39:00.0|02:20.1|159.5|24.9|152.2|181.0|08.6
W-|03610|12:00.0|01:39.7|345.3|33.3|161.1|178.0|09.0
R-|04763|25:30.0|02:40.6|077.6|21.2|148.8|178.0|08.1
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00109|00:20.0|01:31.5|389.6|36.5|092.4|106.0|09.0
01|00103|00:20.0|01:36.8|380.7|34.8|149.4|157.0|08.9
02|00103|00:20.0|01:37.3|376.8|33.7|155.0|158.0|09.1
03|00103|00:20.0|01:37.4|378.8|34.6|147.8|149.0|08.9
04|00103|00:20.0|01:36.7|366.9|33.4|151.6|157.0|09.3
05|00101|00:20.0|01:39.1|369.3|34.1|153.6|158.0|08.9
06|00103|00:20.0|01:37.2|381.6|34.1|148.5|160.0|09.1
07|00103|00:20.0|01:37.4|370.8|34.4|154.1|159.0|09.0
08|00152|00:30.0|01:38.8|349.8|33.5|146.7|163.0|09.1
09|00155|00:30.0|01:36.9|380.6|35.0|158.6|168.0|08.9
10|00154|00:30.0|01:37.4|373.5|34.2|168.7|171.0|09.0
11|00151|00:30.0|01:39.3|361.2|33.4|171.1|175.0|09.1
12|00154|00:30.0|01:37.7|362.4|33.5|164.2|170.0|09.2
13|00151|00:30.0|01:39.2|356.0|34.5|164.4|170.0|08.8
14|00154|00:30.0|01:37.4|365.1|33.6|168.6|174.0|09.2
15|00152|00:30.0|01:38.9|353.4|33.7|166.2|172.0|09.0
16|00198|00:40.0|01:41.0|340.0|32.3|138.3|161.0|09.2
17|00195|00:40.0|01:42.5|310.9|31.6|164.7|170.0|09.3
18|00194|00:40.0|01:43.0|311.1|31.7|170.6|174.0|09.2
19|00195|00:40.0|01:42.7|308.3|31.9|172.1|174.0|09.2
20|00193|00:40.0|01:43.6|307.4|32.1|172.9|175.0|09.0
21|00193|00:40.0|01:43.9|310.4|32.2|173.0|176.0|09.0
22|00194|00:40.0|01:43.3|312.6|32.6|174.7|177.0|08.9
23|00198|00:40.0|01:40.9|331.8|33.8|176.6|178.0|08.8

The first series was eight nice twelve stroke sprints at a luxuriously long 40 seconds rest. The second series was somewhere between 16 and 17 strokes and the end of the rest period started to come a bit too early to my taste. The last series was a never ending list of 22 to 23 stroke sprinting with a few strokes in between to catch your breath. Martin was going through the same pain on the erg next to me. I found it interesting how Martin rowed a few seconds of split faster in the first two series, but in the last one he had trouble following my splits. At least, that is what I think from a few quick glances in the heat of the training.

We ended with 20 minutes of chatting while riding the spinning bikes.

By • rowing • 0 • Tags: , , , , ,

837A9C63-AF3D-46AD-B315-0600B581A998

Jan 12 2019

Nearly Ten Henleys

Friday

After the underwhelming performance of Thursday (I was lucky the schedule called for such a short and relatively light session), Friday was cross training / recovery training day. The schedule talked about 40 minutes of cross training followed by some body weight exercises for twenty minutes.

I just swam for an hour straight. No breaks. Did my 2k of swimming and felt happy about it. I even managed to make it on time for the 9am meeting, but that was mainly the result of knowing some back roads that avoid traffic jams. Or maybe the traffic was lighter than usual.

Saturday: Nearly Ten Henleys

Nearly Ten Henleys is an online event on Rowsandall. It’s not on the schedule that our head coach writes, but I have already decided to add one session per week if possible. What session is better than 21097 meters of erging?

Saturday morning was spent doing some Rowsandall.com related chores. Answering overdue emails, paying the bills, and so forth. I was also not looking forward to the half marathon and basically hung out on the couch until I couldn’t postpone it any more without compromising my plans for the afternoon.

I did a 5 minute warming up and then I dialed up the 21097m and got going. The plans was to hold 200W initially, then start increasing power, aiming for a nice 203W or better average, as was predicted by Rowsandall.com.

PM screenshot

rowing chart

Somehow around the 9 km to go point, the increase the power plan didn’t seem so smart any more. Between that point and the final 2k, I was really struggling. I had to remind myself to row with good posture and to rate up a bit if necessary to keep the splits in the right range. I was sad to see the average power drop back from 203W to 202W and then even, briefly, to 201W. In the final 800 meters I managed to find some energy and rate up to empty the tank.

The cool water tasted deliciously after the row.

I browsed to the workout on Rowsandall.com and did a few quick comparisons with a similar effort a year ago. That effort from December 2017 was the one that caused me to go out so conservatively, because it was a slowing down drama. Turns out 2017 was a few Watts more and under 1:24. I didn’t like that. I liked how easy it was to make these comparison charts:

Power

stroke rate

heart rate

trading work for rate

The final chart shows how I traded Work for Rate when I got tired.

By • rowing • 0 • Tags: , , , , ,

92382376-36F6-4336-B674-621734979C66

Jan 10 2019

Better than nothing

rowing chart

Wednesday

The weights training was only an hour long but it was intense. Four rounds of a circuit

  • Bench pull 60x at 50%
  • Bench press 15x
  • Leg press 30x
  • back swing 15x
  • sit ups 30x
  • Pull Down 40kg 15x
  • lunges 25kg 20x each leg
  • dumbbell pull over 20kg
  • rope skipping 100x

And that four times. The next day I mostly felt the effect of the lunges, bench pull and pull downs.

Thursday

A long day in the office, followed by having to go to my son’s school with my son to talk to the history teacher about bad marks. I won’t further comment it but it was tiring.

Add to that the above-mentioned DOMS and you can imagine how I did today’s session purely on willpower and mostly to avoid embarrassment.

4x(3min+/1min+/1min)/3min at 22/24/26spm surely couldn’t be too hard, right? Let’s say I took it one stroke at a time and had to work very hard to keep Work per Stroke in the acceptable range. According to below plot I succeeded.

was

By • rowing • 0 • Tags: , , , , ,

myimage (8)

Jan 9 2019

After the Marathon

After the Marathon

I took two days off. A planned rest day on January 1, and an unplanned one on January 2. Too busy.

Thursday – Steady State

First a 56 minute steady state row:

After that I rowed a (pretty slow) 100m for the virtual race The Dash, followed by a 5 minute cooling down. The session goals were met.

Friday – Swim

Nothing special, except for the fact that the pool was full. There were a lot of New Year Resolution swimmers. I guess it will be back to normal by Mid January.

It also seemed a bit like a whale convention in the sense that the body size of the “new” swimmers was quite a bit larger than that of the regular swimmers. Also the usual automatic sorting of lanes by swimming speed didn’t seem to work. A lot of overtaking, and my usual 2k took ten minutes longer than usual.

Saturday – Weights

I used the weights room at the club and including a 10 minute warm up and a 5 minute cool down I did 80 minutes of thorough weights and body weight exercises. Pretty happy with that. Proper bench pull, something my local gym doesn’t offer.

Sunday – 5x1500m on tandem erg


Workout Summary - media/20190106-1506330o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|10642|52:30.0|02:28.0|206.6|24.0|158.4|181.0|08.4
W-|07281|27:30.0|01:53.3|242.3|29.4|167.4|181.0|09.0
R-|03366|25:00.0|03:42.8|167.4|18.1|148.6|181.0|04.5
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|01492|05:30.0|01:50.6|256.1|28.7|161.8|176.0|09.5
01|01485|05:30.0|01:51.1|256.4|29.9|169.6|178.0|09.0
02|01432|05:30.0|01:55.3|232.3|28.9|167.1|178.0|09.0
03|01435|05:30.0|01:55.0|232.5|29.5|170.1|178.0|08.8
04|01436|05:30.0|01:54.9|234.2|29.9|168.4|181.0|08.7

A weird session. I did this at the club with a group of other Masters rowers. Romana and I had set up two ergs on slides in a tandem configuration, me on stroke seat. I thought I would be able to go faster on the slides than on the static erg, and that’s how I rowed the first two intervals. Then, I paid for that.

Technique wise I think it was a great session. We rowed in front of a mirror and I could watch Romana’s shoulder completely in sync with mine.

Also, rowing on slides is so much more like on the water rowing, and much more gentle on the back than the static erg.

One of our Masters made a quick video of Romana and me on the erg. Technique critique is welcome. This was not part of the intervals session but filmed during the cooling down (although I rated up a bit for the video).

Here’s two of our lady Masters trying out the tandem:

The lady in stroke seat is Lubica who participated in the Barcelona Olympics. Bow lady rowed at the Moscow Olympics, I believe, but I am not 100% sure. I will have to ask her next time.

Monday – Steady UT1/AT session

This is a rowing machine session that gets you working on the border between UT1 and AT power zones. It’s a bit harder than the usual steady state and a good workout that requires focus.

Row 4×10 minutes with 3 minutes rest. The 10 minute intervals are 9 minutes at 22 spm, 1 minute at 24 spm.

Note that I had some difficulties in the fourth interval.

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

3431EC20-108A-4932-B73E-0A842722285D

Jan 1 2019

The Full 42195 meters

On Sunday afternoon, Dusan Machacek, the president of the Czech Rowing Association, put an event on Facebook. 

The invitation said:

I challenge everyone to end the year in a nontraditional way by rowing with me a full marathon (42195m) on an indoor rower. For those who don’t believe in full marathons, row at least a half marathon…

When: On 31.12.2018 between 10 AM and 4 PM

Where: Wherever your erg is located

Rower: Concept2

Send me a picture of your monitor. Your end time is important, but more important is to finish. I give a bottle of champagne to everyone who finishes the full marathon!

I was on my way to the Janacek Theater to attend the traditional Nutcracker ballet performance when I saw the invite, and I immediately responded.

So on Monday at 10AM I was facing this:

I took a deep breath and started rowing. I was sort of well prepared. I had 1 liter of water, 0.5 liter of “sport drink” (I mixed my own from lemonade syrup with salt added), a towel, some dry clothes, the radio tuned to Radio Krokodyl (‘hit after hit’), the iPhone running Painsled and the iPad running Zwift (using Painsled as the power source) with the Pretzel route (72km with more than 1300m of climbing, which takes about the same time to complete as the rower marathon). I had also prepared by looking up my predicted marathon pace (2:05 pace or 180W) on rowsandall.com.

A few minutes before the race, I had responded to a tweet by Stephen Seiler who shared that he had rode a bike at 202 Watt for 202 minutes. I answered that the geeky rower response would be to row 42195m at 180W in 180 minutes. I didn’t have time to do the math, but I knew 180W is a little faster than 3 hours.

In the first few minutes of the marathon I had fun “solving” this equation using the Performance Monitor. I estimated that 177 Watt would give me a finish time of 177 minutes, so that became the target. (Actually, I solved the equation later and 176.6533 W corresponds to 176.6533 minutes for 42195 m.) The joy of being a data geek.

During the Marathon, I also covered the “Pretzel” route in Zwift. Here’s a screenshot of me at the radio tower summit.

In the first 30 minutes there were a few interuptions to do with the cats. They are afraid of the erg noise but they have to pass it to go outside. I stopped briefly to let Rudi (one of our cats) pass. I also stopped to sip some drinks after each 30 minutes, and that made the whole endeavor pretty easy in the end. I focused on rowing to the next 10k interval, or to the drink break. Also the “company” at Zwift kept it interesting. Now and then I would end up riding with someone else for a few kilometers.

You can see the breaks in the chart. There was an unplanned one just before the two hour mark when the radio stopped playing and I had to plug it in. From about the 1:30 mark I tried to get the average power up to 177W, but after each break it was back at a value around 170.

This chart shows how my “dominant” stroke rate jumped from 22spm to 23spm after around 14km of rowing (second drink break).

This chart shows how I started to feel fatigue at the 30km mark (12km to go). My legs were still OK and I also didn’t have problems with my back. I had a different problem. Blisters.

In the last 6km, time seemed to suddenly go very slowly. I wanted to be ready, really. I let the power drop a bit too often, and in the final 500m I did a little sprint to at least bring my finish time under 178 minutes.

So, after a little under three hours, the erg silenced. I took a picture of the PM, sent off the CSV from Painsled to rowsandall.com, closed Zwift, switched off the radio, drank some water, wiped the erg clean, collected the (unused) dry clothes and my devices, and emerged from my basement.

It was not as hard as I thought. Actually, the first 21km went by surprisingly fast.

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

«< 8 9 10 11 12 >»