20170618_Bilovice_nad_Svitavou_vyletni_restaurace_Sokolovna_okoli_2424

Jul 1 2018

Going to the pub

Today, the rowing club was closed for the annual Long Distance Swimming championship. That was a good opportunity to do some cross training, but instead I just rode my mountain bike to a pub and had a beer:

And then I rode my bike back:

The beer tasted very well.

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aanleggen

Jul 1 2018

Saturday – Fartlek in the single

On Tuesday, I did a weights workout.

On Wednesday morning, I got a couple of vaccinations for my August business trip to India. The vaccine came with the instruction to refrain from exercise and alcohol for three days.

I was planning to disobey and do a light workout on Friday, but got stuck at work.

On Saturday morning I headed to the rowing club to do a 4x2km workout, but I changed the plan. It was pretty windy, so I had to get to the gorge for some flat water. There it is pretty twisty. I decided to do fartlek.

In the low battery electronics section, my oarlock was fine this time, but my heart rate sensor was low.

For the fartlek pieces, I chose a power level and stroke rate that I wanted to hold and then rowed until I did three strokes in sequence under the target level. Three strikes and you’re out, basically.

I rowed with the GoPro camera this time. On the row out, I had the camera pointing sternwards. I wanted to show how beautiful the rowing is in Brno, without disturbing the scenery with my ugly face.

Half way, I found a little pontoon where I could land and turn around the GoPro:

My plan B was to find a shallow part of the river, hop out of the boat, and do a “wet” GoPro change. The dry version was better, although the pontoon was pretty gross (duck poo and other dirty stuff):

Here are some of the Fartlek pieces on the way back:

No romantic video soundtrack this time. I want my readers to hear the wind and my grunts. As you can see, I am still digging deep and that causes general slowness and exhaustion.

I have mixed feelings about this workout. I knew I was tired after a long week, the vaccinations, as well as a short night sleep from Friday to Saturday. I also know that I still have to get used to the new power values (after the Empower bug fix), but I am disappointed by how long I could hold certain power values.

In the afternoon, I took my youngest son Dominik to a couple of exhibitions on the Brno Exhibition Center. First, we visited an ensemble of historic trains used by Czechoslovak Presidents. The Czechoslovak republic was established in 1918, so there are many exhibitions celebrating 100 years of Czechoslovakia.

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Then we visited an exhibition on Space exploration, with nice exhibits from both NASA and Russian space missions. This was a very nice exhibit, starting at the missiles from WW II and before, and ending with the Mars Rover.

Finally, we went to the exhibit of Alfons Mucha’s ‘The Slav Epic‘. The paintings are big and impressive. But I somehow like Mucha’s posters for Nestle products or Sarah Bernhardt plays better

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myimage (4)

Jul 1 2018

Monday – Sprintervals in the single

A great workout in the single. I did, however, copy the instructions from the training plan with a tiny error. Instead of

6x(20″/40″)/5min + 6x(30″/30″)/5min + 6x(40″/20″)

I did:

6x(20″/40″)/5min + 6x(30″/30″)/5min + 6x(20″/40″)

Two thirds of the workout is the same, but I know those 40″/20″ are a beast. Now, it was nice tempo training:

The Empower Oarlock failed miserably. It was just an empty battery. I tried to reconnect through resetting, but that didn’t work. So I have no idea about force, power, work per stroke and stroke length, unfortunately. These were exactly the metrics that I wanted to look at. I was rowing nicely, rating up easily, and I think I was hitting the sweet spot pretty well.

We’ll never know.

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mapka

Jun 24 2018

The rest of the week

After Tuesday’s 3x6min session I packed my travel bag and hopped on a train to Vienna. It was nice to watch the Neue Donau regatta course when crossing the railway bridge. A few days before, Romana and I had had a few great races there.

I took a plane to Brussels and arrived late, tired, and sweaty. I knew I was really exhausted after a long weekend of racing and not taking any rest after it.

I was supposed to do a weights session on Wednesday morning, but I just stayed longer in my hotel bed instead. Actually, I did get up and put on my workout clothes, but then I returned to bed. My body just didn’t feel like it.

A long day of meetings in Brussels, then a flight back to Vienna, where a driver picked me up for the final 2 hour stretch home. I wanted to sleep in the car, but the little chat with the driver turned into a 2 hour long conversation about football (soccer for my US readers), building permits and other important things in life. It was nice.

On Thursday, I had a meeting I was moderating, starting at 8am. That was hard. At the end of the day, I had time for my weights session. Sixty minutes of various weight lifting exercises. Boring, but useful.

Rowing outside, at the end of the day, would have been very hard anyway. It was 35 degrees C.

Friday

Overnight, the temperature dropped by 20 degrees, from 35 to a cold 15 C when I launched my single on Friday morning.

It was very choppy so I rowed up the gorge to the castle, and a little beyond.

All that green is forest. When I go rowing in the morning and go in the gorge, I always feel very lucky to be out enjoying the nature. In the NW most stretch, after I turn and start rowing south again, I see a few higher hills from the Czech Moravian Highlands in the distance, and otherwise I am just surrounded by forest. The city seems very far away.

My Empower oarlock disconnected and wouldn’t reconnect with 3km to go. Only switching off and on the SpeedCoach did the trick. Luckily, I have means to glue together the data from two “workout” files, like I did in the chart above.

I wanted to work on technique but got carried away by the views and it ended up as just rowing for pleasure. Not a bad thing, I guess.

Saturday

The wind had gotten even stronger overnight and we were looking at white caps. Not good weather to do the intensive session that we had planned. Eventually we decided to do it on ergs. We put three ergs on coupled sliders, so I was stroking a 3 person “boat”, with Radka and Romana behind me. The session was a 1km/1km + 500m/500m + 1km, but we changed it to a 4min/4min + 2min/2min + 4min erg session so we could all row in sync.

As this was an unexpected erg session, I didn’t have the connector cable with me. I did record heart rate and the data show that I have been up to 186bpm, which tells you how hard work this session was. 65 minutes of rowing in total, because we did long warming up and cooling down.

This session came from our club head coach and I like it. The final 4 minute was really tough, after only 2 minutes of rest after the 2 minute work interval. Pretty good race preparation.

Sunday

It seemed to be less windy this morning, so at breakfast Romana and I said to each other that we should go rowing, in case Monday turns out to be windy again. Arriving at the lake, it was actually much choppier than we had estimated at home. We really do need that web cam at the rowing club.

We took the double up into the gorge again and I made a conscious effort to stroke at low rate today. It was a great session, although the steering did slow us down a bit. Not a very long session, because we had to be back in time to do some groceries and to be ready for our visitors this afternoon.

We took our visitors to a place to eat and drink a bit, and the guest on the neighboring table was one of the country’s most notorious criminals, who served 23 years of his life sentence for two contract killings in the 1990s (which he has denied being guilty of) before receiving a presidential pardon a year ago, after which he achieved cult status.

I guess it gave some couleur locale to our visitors from out of town.

In other news, my son Dominik stroked a 4+ to a bronze medal at the Czech Championships in the boys 13/14 category:

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myimage (47)

Jun 19 2018

Monday / Tuesday – Steady and hard intervals

Monday

Monday was a hectic day as we had the CEO of my company doing a site visit. My 8 minutes of fame consisted in demonstrating one of our projects in our flight simulator. The CEO was friendly and relaxed, and asked very good questions, so that was good.

At around 5pm, with the CEO back in his business jet and the site happy, I left the office to go to the rowing club.

I rigged my single (the double was already taken care of by lovely Romana) and joined our Masters E pair for a light steady state row.

I rowed up to Rokle, turned around, rowed 100m back and waited for the pair. They passed me and told me they were rowing up to the castle because of the chop.

Chop? What chop?

Allright, I turned again and followed. It wasn’t hard to catch up with them. We turned at Veveri castle and I took the lead in the tailwind. Managed to row about 500m of clear water between me and them, then returned to the rowing club. A nice, light session.

Tuesday

Rowing in the morning before leaving to the airport. I did feel the accumulated fatigue of the race weekend, but decided to push ahead and do the 3/2/1 minute intervals at 26/30/34 spm, the ones that I crashed on recently.

Today there was real chop, so I rowed up towards the castle again.

Right when I wanted to start the first interval, I had a little boat incident. Apparently, I hadn’t entirely tightened my bowside forestay on Monday, and the screw fell out at the first pull at 26spm. I stopped to check and think, and then continued to push on. The forestay was not attached to the boat any more, but it seemed to stay in place, and I knew that in theory the oarlock angle should stay constant without the support of the forestay. After all, I am not that strong. Definitely not a rigger bender.

That’s the theory, but it took a few awkward strokes holding the grip on my bowside arm a bit too tightly before I believed it would work in practice.

I was a bit conservative in the 30spm part of the first interval, but it all worked out well. I turned at the castle, after the first interval, and proceeded to do the second one. Also that one was completed without more drama. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a hard interval.

It starts gently at 26, but already those three minutes start to wear you out. Then you go up to 30spm and there are a couple of things you need to watch:

  • Keep the boat run
  • Keep the Work per Stroke in the right range, not too high, not too low
  • Make sure stroke rate doesn’t drop below 29spm (I do accept 29.5)

And then, after about 60 strokes, when you are already tired, you have to rate up and basically do the equivalent of a 4 minute race pace piece.

On Rowsandall.com, I used the new feature to auto-detect intervals and it worked pretty well:


Workout Summary - media/20180619-0710240o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|10433|56:06.0|02:41.3|141.0|21.8|149.3|187.0|08.5
W-|04294|18:15.0|02:07.6|216.5|27.6|172.3|187.0|08.5
R-|06143|37:51.0|03:04.9|104.5|19.0|138.1|187.0|07.9
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|00074|00:20.2|02:15.6|216.1|27.0|146.4|151.0|08.2
02|01363|05:57.4|02:11.1|228.0|27.1|169.8|185.0|08.4
03|01433|05:59.7|02:05.5|214.8|27.5|172.3|187.0|08.7
04|01423|05:58.2|02:05.9|206.9|28.1|176.3|187.0|08.5

When I completed my training, there was some activity at the club, because we are hosting the rowing event of the Czech Academic Games. There were a couple of good scullers from Prague, former Juniors world championship finalists and winners, so I informed them about our Virtual 2k race, that they could complete while competing. I hope it caught their interests. Nothing stimulates a Brno based competition better than a couple of fast times recorded by some folks from Prague.

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Jun 19 2018

About Large Boats and Small Boats (Race Report)

Sunday. It was going to be a busy day. Here was the program:

9:35 Masters C 4x

10:17 Masters D 2x

12:28 Masters C 1x

I had been drafted to fill a seat in two Donaubund boats. Their regular rower had a bicycle accident and was unable to row. Of course I was happy to fill in, knowing that Andreas Kral and Marko Milodanovic are excellent rowers. I was hoping I wouldn’t disappoint them.

We met at 8am and rigged the boat, a nice Filippi quad. We were up against two boats, who had both entered as C. However, at the start line we would find out that the crew from Salzburg was actually a E crew.

The third crew were my friends from Bohemians Prague. Today, I wouldn’t underestimate them.

It was a pretty heavy headwind. Rowing to the start we did a few practice starts and that was the prep. I had never rowed with this crew, but I think I blended in quite nicely, seated on 2.

Despite being an E boat, the crew from Salzburg was a very serious competitor on the first 500m. That could also be said about the Bohemians crew. For the Bohemians, this classification could actually be extended to the second 500m.

But by solid rowing we were able to push our boat out in front, centimeter by centimeter, pushing against the headwind which made it feel like we were rowing in concrete.

Yes, they made me wear a Donaubund uni

Looking at the picture, with me seated on two, Andreas on bow, Marko on 3, and Alex, invisible on stroke seat, I think I blend in quite well. Phew.

We managed to push our bow ball across the finish line a few seconds before Bohemians. This had been a long and painfully intensive 1000m.

To our surprise, the winning time went to the E crew from Salzburg, because they got a bonus of 11 seconds according to the Austrian handicap system. Well, we still got a silver medal, and we did win the race on uncorrected time.

I didn’t bother taking my SpeedCoach in the boat, so here is just a crude pace chart as measured by my Garmin watch:

Double

Andreas and I could just move our sculls from the landing dock to the launching dock and get our double. We rowed in a nice Filippi belonging to Andreas and Marko, and we pushed off with 9 minutes left to get to the start. Not a lot of time to get together as a double. To make things worse, I had forgotten to drink from my water bottle, which I had left on the dock when we pushed off with the quad.

At the start line, with us in lane 1, I was surprised to see a pair lining up next to me. We were four double and a pair.

The headwind had become even stronger and there now was serious chop. I didn’t know any of the competitors but Andreas told me that it “was doable”, so after the “GO” of the quick start I set off as furious as my body, still tired from the quad race, would allow me. We were all boats in one line but in the second 250m, Andreas and I managed to pull away by about a boat length.

A bit before the 500m mark I asked for a power 20, and we did rate up and tried to pull away further. We were quite unsuccessful in that. I think that the difference with the pair even got smaller.

A pair, in serious chop and headwind, able to pull us in? Well, it turns out that is possible when the rowers are Laszlo Kokas and Attila Strochmayer. The race turned out spectacularly for the fans on the shore, but it was extremely painful to our tired bodies. In the end, we managed to cross the finish line 0.43 seconds before the pair, but to me the true winners are the guys in the pair. Normally, a pair should be a few seconds slower when racing a double. Respect!

Of course, we did happily collect our medals. I am quite happy with this result. We proved to be not slow, even with only 1100m of training together. Again, just a crude pace plot from the Garmin Forerunner.

Laszlo & Attila, the guys with “V8” on their uni

Water & Single

Meanwhile, Romana had raced her double race with Veronika, where they unfortunately finished last, and she was now on the water in a quad.

Romana & Veronika racing the double

I had an hour and a bit to recover before my singles race, and the plan was to rehydrate and eat a healthy bar to get some nuts and sugar in my stomach. The rehydration plan went well. After two races without a sip of water, my mouth was really dry, but I did get my water bottle and drink. The eating a bit part was a disaster, though. Romana had hidden the car keys on a secret place, but I couldn’t find them. So I was walking around the race venue in my Donaubund uni with only a bit of water to drink. I watched Romana race her quad (third place) and then asked her where the keys were. Turns out they were on the exact place where I had looked, but I hadn’t looked well enough.

I ate half of the bar and changed to my Brno uni, and then I launched with only 10 minutes to the official start time. I was lucky that the racing was a bit behind schedule. When I pushed off the dock, I realized that I didn’t have my SpeedCoach with me. This would be an unplugged row.

Six boats had registered for the MM1x C event, but only 5 were at the start. By now I did know the competitors a bit. I was up against Jiri Rysavy from Bohemians Prague (who had beat me in the double and made my life miserable in the quad), Michael Helbig from Graz (beat me in the double on Saturday, DNF because of his partner in the Mix 2x), and two guys from two Vienna based rowing clubs.

Because of the short time after two exhausting races and because of the excitement and less than ideal recovery between the double and the single race (entirely my own fault) I didn’t feel super strong for the singles race. I was actually expecting to finish last, probably with some distance between me and the other competitors. I decided to make the best of it and take this as a training row, focusing on boat run.

It took ages for us to line up at the start in the headwind. The first attempt was good enough for me, but then the guy next to me started to realign his single because he had been blown into the buoys. The second attempt was successful and my race start wasn’t bad.

After less than 10 strokes, I settled down at a stroke rate that felt right. I don’t know the exact stroke rate, but I think I was just below 30spm, perhaps even dropping to 28. I certainly wasn’t pushing it hard.

So, I was rowing in last place, but the surprise was that the others weren’t pulling away from me like crazy. There were two guys in front, about a boat length and a half ahead of me, then there were two boats that were about a length ahead of me, and then me, pushing along at a leisurely 28spm.

The nice thing about rowing in such a tired state is that the dreaded lactate shock after 500m doesn’t happen. You just keep pushing along. By this time I was about a length and a half behind the others and I was focusing on boat run and trying to keep the Distance per Stroke (as estimated) as high as possible.

Notice: No electronics

Passing the 500m mark, I think I was rowing technically pretty well, because I was slowly pulling back into the field. Now, I was only half a length behind Jiri and Michael. I just kept going until I saw the pub in my peripheral vision to my left, which gives you about 150m to row, and then I thought, why not try and pass these two fellows. I rated up and we created a fierce fight for third place.

What? Am I level with them?

Beep – beep – beep.

We were all within one second, but unfortunately that last beep was mine. After a long 4 minutes and 15 seconds.

You know what? Even though I came last, this race in the single really made me happy. I think I showed some solid rowing there, and I found out that at 80% I am able to stay with the field. Now I will start with more training sessions dedicated to 1000m sprint racing, and I should be able to work up my base speed by end of July (Euromasters).

Romana in Argonauten uni, before the race

Romana got to row in place of Mrs Helbig (from the DNF mixed 2x with Michael Helbig) and won a medal in the eight:

Then we had a hamburger and watched some racing, put our boats on the trailer, and waited for our Slovak friends from Piestany to race their Mixed 4x (which they won).

The drive home was fast and without incidents (luckily) and after parking the trailer at the club we were home by 7pm.

Our first attempt to infiltrate the Austrian Masters scene has been really successful and I should thank the race organizers and volunteers for a perfect regatta. The only thing that should be improved is the wind direction. Also, big thanks for Natascha Kral (Andreas’ wife) for shooting the great pictures that I used in this blog. You may have noticed that half the pictures in this post (and in the previous one) look professional and the other half look slightly amateurish. The professional looking ones were done by Natascha. Click here to see more great pictures by her from this weekend.

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Jun 19 2018

Tales of the Double (Race Report)

MM C 2x

Saturday morning. Nine am, meeting at the boat. My double partner Vojtech had to get up at 4AM to arrive in time from Ostrava. Romana and I got to the race course by 8AM so we had time for a morning coffee from the Black Dogs coffee company. I am not sure how the black dogs contributed to the coffee, but at least there is a dog in the picture:

There was a pretty strong headwind. Rowing to the start, Vojtech and I did a few 10 stroke bursts, and we did some practice starts which were pretty good.

On the real startline, we were just three boats. The Masters rowing scene in Austria is a bit smaller it seems. There was a Vienna/Graz combination, a boat from Bohemians Prague, and us.

Our race start was a disaster. We caught a semi crab. Not a real hard crab, but the kind where the boat just starts to roll and you can’t row full pressure. We corrected for that in the second stroke, but we were already behind.

In the first 500m, we managed to row to second position, but we led the Prague guys get out too far in the front. I was expecting them to crumble in the second 500m but that didn’t happen. These chaps have been training hard in the winter.

In the end, even the Austrian crew started to pass us and beat us on the finish line.

Talking to the Prague guys confirmed that they have been putting in the hours through the winter, and also, they have done a bit more racing this season than us in Moravia. These were the first kilometers that Vojtech and I rowed together. We are definitely not fast (yet?).

As Vojtech, later that day, proceeded to win the Masters D 1x with ease, it shows that the watts are there on his part, so it is either my lack of power or just bad rowing in the 2x. I hope it is the latter. There is a lot that can go wrong when racing in the double. I do note that in the single, Vojtech has a very short stroke, and we both have to change our rowing quite a bit to row together.

Respect for the chaps from Bohemians!

MMix C 2x

Four boats at the start. The Helbig family from Graz, a crew from Linz (Sames/Nigl-Eder) and a crew from the Vienna rowing club Donau (Bertagnoli/Bandera). And us. Michael Helbig had stroked the MM C 2x which had beat us on the finish line. The others were unknown to me.

Still a pretty strong headwind. But we shouldn’t be a slow crew.

Our race start was terrific. From peripheral vision I knew the other boats were right with us, but I didn’t want to look and just pushed out the first ten strokes, then settled to race pace.

Romana later told me that we were leading, but I wasn’t aware of it. About 20 strokes in, I was dealing with waves coming in from the left (a launch wake that just caught us in the highest lane, not the others, I think). Romana later told me that that was were Graz was passing us. By the time I was checking on the situation, we were in second position, half a boat length behind Graz and leading by half a boat length on Vienna.

I also heard the lady on the Graz bow make some weird noises and I called for a power 20. You can clearly see that moment in the stroke rate data in the chart above.

We passed Graz and they stopped rowing. I mean, completely stopped rowing. DNF. Not sure what was going on there. I suspect that Michael went out too fast for the lady to hold it, and she had cramp or other problems.

Now we were leading and I was eager to build out our lead to something a bit more comfortable. About 25 strokes later, Romana asked me: “Are we going to keep this stroke rate all the way to the finish?”

My first thought was: “That is a pretty long sentence to say with 400m to go, so hell yes!”

My second thought was: “Perhaps she wants us to calm down the pace a bit?”

I think the second thought was the better, so I said: “Calming the stroke rate” and so we did. This great picture was taken in the final stages of the race:

The Vienna crew was more than two boat lengths behind now, so there was no reason to be concerned. In front of the grandstand we did a 5 stroke “sprint” just to show off and that was that.

We went and picked up our medal and then we did a pretty long cooling down row in the cooling down zone. While we rowed the last 2km back to the dock, the wind had calmed down and the water was flat, and we locked in a magical 20spm with a great rhythm. It’s nice rowing with a medal around your neck.

It shows that rowing a double takes practice. Romana and I have done our kilometers together and that paid off.

We went back to the hotel and had a great Italian dinner, where we were joined by Veronika, Romana’s double partner.

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