Traditional spring race weather. Calm water in the first 150m, then waves. Strong tailwind/crosswind. 

Five singles at the start of the open Men. A funny mix of Masters and 19 year olds, because the real good rowers are seat racing in Prague. 

I came third or fourth out of the starting block. One guy was a length and a half behind immediately. 

I took a look to bow 7 to the right of me.  It’s a good feeling when you see you’re evidently faster. I didn’t have to row harder to leave him behind and be in a comfortable qualifying third place. 

After 1000m the waves became really high but we were three rowing calmly at 28-29spm in front, with several boat lengths of light between us and the boat in fourth position. 

The final 500m was about survival. I think only half of my strokes were ok. 

Final race at 15:52. 

Then a fun race in the eight.  

On Thursday I did a few sessions experimenting with the RIM software. I found that the Stroke Efficiency metric is really sensitive to the calibration.

I did an experiment where I recorded the entire session in 4 parts. Between parts I took the phone out of the holder while not running RIM, waved with it, and put it back in the holder. I believe the only difference was the time I waited while not rowing but RIM already running.

I saw quite big differences in the Stroke Efficiency metric. In the first 2 “parts”, I saw values around 0.4 maximum, and even negative values. In the last two “parts” I saw values above 2 at 20spm. I think these were the “real” values.

This morning I managed to grab the analysis data from the analytics.rowinginmotion.com website using jsfiddle.net and read them into pylab. Here’s an example:

This is just a raw plot of the acceleration data of a few strokes at 30spm. Now it will be easy to compare my rowing model with real data!

The other application is CrewNerd. Also CrewNerd can export acceleration data, but I have yet to experiment with it. Will do in the near future.

But I took a different look at some of my 4x1km data this morning. I exported all 4 intervals into CSV tables, dumped all the data in one table and started playing with pivot charts:

I still have to find a useful plot that enables to draw conclusions from the data. Here is Check vs Speed for different stroke rates:

Data Spaghetti!

No training today. I feel a cold is coming on me, and I will race tomorrow.

Already in the morning it was a beautiful April day. The temperature was already around 10C (and would hit 20C in the afternoon), it was sunny and the lake was a flat mirror.

I took out the single on a steady state row. I was out with Martin and Jiri, two other Masters rowers. We did steady state but we added a few 20 stroke bursts at race pace. Jiri and Martin are 90+ kg guys who pull 6:30 and 6:40, respectively. Still I wanted to outrow them on the single, a new boat type for them.

I noticed I was much faster in the steady state 18spm part of the row, but at race pace Jiri was close. Even though I suspect it was a bit above race pace for him, given how much he slowed down after the twentieth stroke. I happily report that of the 6 bursts I did there was one at 34spm that I really liked. A light catch, a good pull, and keep feeding the boat with more and more strokes. That’s how I like it!

I was using the RIM app to look at technique. I am quite intrigued by the “stroke efficiency” metric (http://www.rowinginmotion.com/stroke-efficiency-explained/) because I see how it correlates with rowing well when I row. At the same time I don’t really understand how it works, and I want to get my head around it.

Well, I was doing 18spm and could effortlessly get my “stroke efficiency” between 4 and 5 meters, which was about 1-2 meters more than on Friday. Did my technique improve so much? I guess the metric is quite sensitive to some subtle effects on the recovery.

What was funny though is that at one turn I fiddled with the phone, and RIM asked me to recalibrate. I pressed “OK” and RIM recalibrated. After that, my “stroke efficiency” numbers were suddenly around 2-2.5. Does the calibration influence the metric?

I don’t have the data, because RIM did to me what it already did on Friday. After 65 minutes of recording it suddenly crashes and I am looking at the iphone start screen. No data recorded. I am wondering if there is a file size limit that it hits, now that I have up to 10 gps locations per second.

Then I spent some time hanging around the club house, helping Romana with coaching and preparing for the boat christening ceremony.

We had 4 club boats and two privately owned boats to be Christened, so it was a big day. Our brand new Salani 2x was one of them. Here are the pictures:

A little explanation of our new double’s name “ORCA”.

Orka is the Dutch word for killer whale, a beautiful animal. As my single is called “Dolfijn” it is an appropriate name for a sister ship.

Orca (with a “c”) is the old spelling. Also, it is the name of AUSR ORCA, the Utrecht based rowing club where I spent very happy years rowing as a student.

“Orca porpoising” by Minette Layne from Seattle, Washington, USA – Single breaching orca (cropped). Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.