Another week in lockdown. So, what’s happened.

The Bad and the Ugly

This first graph shows the number of people tested positively on COVID-19 in the Czech Republic. The chart starts on January 27 and ends on March 30. The schools closed on March 10, State of Emergency on March 12 and near complete lockdown on March 16. It’s an ugly graph.

Here is a chart with the number of newly positively tested per day. In the period coverer in the chart, test capacity ramped up from 1000 per day on March 17 to 5000 per day on March 30. This is a hopeful chart. Even more hopeful is the day over day percentage growth of the positively tested.

That’s the black line on the chart (axis on the right), which starts on March 8 and ends today. We’re on the second day of single digit growth.

The bad is that 27 people have died, many are fighting for their life, and we’re expecting the deaths starting to peak. We’re also not at the critical level in the hospitals, where the mortality rate makes a step because there simply is no capacity to treat everyone. I am hoping we can avoid that scenario.

Also in the category “bad” and very sad news is the death of a 48 year old nurse. The story is fragmented, but here is what I understood. She admitted one of the first Corona patients to the hospital, got infected and, without knowing it, probably infected more than 40 other hospital staff. She was put in quarantine and made an end to her life a few days ago. What we also know is that a huge crowd of know-it-alls was badmouthing her on social media, and she took this very heavily. Even though the ministry of health and the hospital leadership stood on her side with the message that she was not to blame, we lost her. These people are working under immense pressure, in a very dynamic environment, and should not be judged by people who don’t understand their jobs. Everyone makes mistakes and wrong decisions unknowingly. The news made me angry.

More sad news is that heroin addicts are now without heroin. This is going to lead to additional deaths.

There doesn’t seem to be too much positive news.

So here is one positive picture. It was taken from the center of Prague, and it shows the snow covered Giant Mountains in the background. Yes, that’s a visibility of 140 to 150 kilometers. The cold winter weather combined with very low levels of pollution have made the sky so clear.

Working Out at Home

So, that puts all that is following into perspective. Nothing sad or heroic will follow. Just a Masters Rower working from home, trying to do his daily routines.

On Thursday, 26 March, I did Eric Murray’s 10x1min/1min session.

Unfortunately, BoatCoach stopped recording after a few intervals, so here is the warming up and the first part of the workout:

Here is the workout summary as copied from the PM:

Workout Summary - media/281ddb1e44-20200326-154801-dummy_workout_templateo.csv
--|Total|-Total----|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time-----|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|04347|00:20:00.0|02:18.0|184.8|29.9|190.5|269.0|07.3
W-|02900|00:10:00.0|01:43.4|313.1|29.9|190.5|269.0|09.7
R-|01463|00:10:00.0|03:25.0|056.6|29.9|190.6|269.0|04.6
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00285|01:00.0|01:45.3|300.1|30.0|162.0|162.0|09.5
01|00284|01:00.0|01:45.6|288.2|29.0|165.0|165.0|09.8
02|00286|01:00.0|01:44.9|294.3|29.0|269.0|269.0|09.9
03|00287|01:00.0|01:44.5|297.4|29.0|268.0|268.0|09.9
04|00288|01:00.0|01:44.2|300.5|29.0|170.0|170.0|09.9
05|00288|01:00.0|01:44.2|309.7|30.0|169.0|169.0|09.6
06|00292|01:00.0|01:42.7|322.7|30.0|172.0|172.0|09.7
07|00290|01:00.0|01:43.4|316.2|30.0|175.0|175.0|09.7
08|00291|01:00.0|01:43.1|319.4|30.0|175.0|175.0|09.7
09|00309|01:00.0|01:37.1|382.5|33.0|180.0|180.0|09.4


It was good. I may have been able to go a little faster even. I was thinking 1:44 was a good 2000m pace, and according instructions did the first 6 intervals slightly slower, intervals 7, 8 and 9 at that pace and interval 10 to empty the tank. In the 1min/1min genre of workouts, I am frankly used to doing more intervals.

But it was a sweet little workout.

On Friday, I did a land workout. A week ago, it was squatting and jumping that dominated the workout. This time, it seemed heavy on core work. But overall, it was a bit lighter. It was beautiful weather, so I took some pictures of my improvised gym:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

On Saturday, I was supposed to do a threshold ergometer workout, but I just did a walk in the forest with Romana instead. Escape the cage. We kept social distance.

On Sunday, I did the Eric Murray steady state work (4×8 minutes):

It was a nice and short workout:

It stung a little bit in the end, but not as much as today’s steady state workout:

5km @ 18 SPM, 4km @ 20 SPM, 3km @ 22 SPM, 2km @ 24 SPM, 1km @ 26 SPM.

As you can see, I started the 2km at 24 SPM, but dropped to 20 SPM after 500m. I just didn’t like it that my heart rate was so high. I like my steady state to be rate (and heart rate) limited. This workout was a little too much at the end. Anyway, I got some good meters in here. It was cold weather. In the morning, it had been snowing, but when I rowed there was some sun. When there was a cloud in front of the sun, I found it a little chilly, but in the direct sunshine, it was a little warm. Well, you can’t have it all. It’s good to be outside.

I spend about 14 hours per day looking at this:

As many of you, my only contact with my coworkers is through a screen. It sucks.

But it’s a lot better than all the bad stuff at the top of my post.

Monday

A rest day.

Tuesday

I did one of the steady state sessions of the SAHRC (Stuck at Home Rowing Club). It was nice and sunny weather, but cold. I rowed on the static erg on my terrace.

The session was 4 rounds of the Concept2 “Darts Game“. It’s a fun game that rewards stroke to stroke consistency. I settled for 20 SPM and a very easy 2:05 pace, but in each round I found myself gradually speeding up. My high score was 14250, and I am determined to improve on that. You get 50 points when you hit the bull’s eye, and each game is 300 strokes. I felt failure with every stroke that was 25 points. To make things worse, the 25 point strokes seemed to come in pairs.

It’s a great way to achieve total focus, though. And I needed that. My day job is in the Aerospace sector, and that’s not a fun industry to be in right now. I talk to a lot of people who are in very tough situations. It does help to put in perspective the personal impact and the impact on my group of people, but it’s still tough sometimes.

This is the chart. That is four rounds of darts games. The high score (14250) is the last one. You can see where I lost points on the other rounds. A bit worried about my heart rate being so high. Morning pulse is a stable value between 45 and 50 beats per minute, though. So I think I am OK.

Wednesday

Another tough day in “the home office”. I am starting to forget what my “office office” looks like. Luckily, I managed to set out a 2 hour window for some daylight exercise.

The original plan was to do an interval session on the erg. However, just 30 minutes before my exercise window, my new trail running shoes were delivered:

These are “Hoka One One Torrent“. So I had to take them for a spin. “Time to Fly” is the Hoka slogan, and that inspired me.

I am hesitating to write about running outdoors. I know that in some countries even that is forbidden now, and I know how jealous I get when I see people posting about their rowing on lakes and rivers. However, the current lockdown seems to be effective, and no stricter measures were taken (so far), so we are allowed to go out “for fresh air” (with no range specification) as long as we cover nose and mouth and keep 2 meters distance from other people. The following photos were taken during the run and they were typical, so you can see I complied:

Something went wrong with the GPS tracking in the first half of the run, so I only have the track for the second half:

When I returned home, my youngest son was doing his body weight workout on the garage roof / terrace. I tried to take a picture of him in action, but he refused, so this is the only photo I got:

The featured image above shows a sculpture in my town Brno. It’s in front of the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic. The official name of the statue is “Justice” (as in something that is really hard to grasp). Locals also use the name “Debt Collector”. My daughter took the picture of the statue which is now wearing a face mask.

Still pretty sore after yesterday’s run and Friday’s body weight circuit.

I spent the entire morning in my Home Office doing some planning for next week and running some reports and doing calculations for revised plans for quarters 2 to 4.

After lunch, I sat down on the erg, while Romana was doing some body weight exercises. I decided to erg outside despite the cold temperature (around 0 degree). Sunshine and light snowing alternated during the session.

First, I did a warming up with some speed bumps. Then I dialled up a 4 minute time trial to submit for the Virtual Race that we have set up on Rowsandall.com.

I didn’t pull this at 100%. My legs are still empty from the workouts of the previous days.

After that, it was time to set the monitor to the 2 minutes on / 4 minutes off session.

After 6 intervals, I called it a day. I didn’t feel too well (my inner hypochondriac) and I reasoned that with the 4 minute intervals I had had enough work time for today. I did a 2k cooling down while the snow was getting more intense, then wiped down the ergometer and put it into the garden shed.


Workout Summary - media/31abb5d09c-20200322-141329o.csv
--|Total|-Total----|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time-----|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|07501|00:36:00.0|02:24.0|146.0|21.7|148.3|177.0|09.6
W-|03286|00:12:00.0|01:49.5|266.7|27.6|159.4|176.0|09.9
R-|04219|00:22:00.0|02:36.4|084.5|18.6|142.7|176.0|09.3
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00554|02:00.0|01:48.4|267.1|29.6|150.9|171.0|09.3
01|00547|02:00.0|01:49.8|265.6|27.7|161.7|173.0|09.9
02|00545|02:00.0|01:50.1|261.4|27.2|161.9|174.0|10.0
03|00542|02:00.0|01:50.7|268.1|27.0|161.8|176.0|10.0
04|00552|02:00.0|01:48.8|267.2|27.0|159.5|176.0|10.2
05|00548|02:00.0|01:49.6|270.7|27.0|160.8|176.0|10.2


That’s all for today. I didn’t set a single step outside my property. But I have to admit that being an introvert, I don’t have too much problems with that.

In a way, I am also happy that the weather got worse. I have a brand new single at the rowing club. It’s still wrapped in plastic and I haven’t rowed a single meter in it. As our rowing club is closed, I will not be able to row any time soon, but thinking of our beautiful flat lake in nice weather would make me very sad.

After a week with the entire group on home office we are getting the hang of it. We have made Friday and Wednesday “focus days” with only two checking in meetings, and nothing else. Our group had started coordinating so enthusiastically that we were all doing long hours. The only problems were problems with the cellular network and some VPN hickups.

On Friday, I did the Stuck At Home Rowing Club body weight workout. It was a squatfest. It started with 10×15 deep squats. I held a towel in my hands above my head. This really helps you making “honest” squats. The squats were already harder than I thought. They were followed by 5×1 minute of Bulgarian Squats. We have a garden bench which was ideal for it.

After that, it was squat jumps with hands touching the floor. Then alternating press-up burpee and lunge jumps. Finally sit-ups, and planck. The whole session took about 50 minutes, not counting time for warming up and stretching. I didn’t do it at a too high pace, taking enough rest between sets.

This morning, I went for a run. It’s not entirely clear if you’re currently allowed to go running, but the restrictions do allow you to go for a walk to walk the dog, or just to get a little bit of fresh air “in the neighborhood of your home”. I decided that even if I was heavily infectious, by running in a forest I wasn’t going to be spreading anything. I did make sure to cover my nose and mouth when passing people and during the bits of the run where I was on the streets and not in the forest.

On the first street corner, I passed a police car, and I wasn’t stopped. So I guess it was clear.

I do fully understand why we are fighting the spread of the Corona virus like this, but sometimes I am a little nervous about living in such a restricted atmosphere. In this country, I am afraid that some populist politicians might like the restrictions a bit too much. Both the Czech prime minister as well as the president are not above scoring some cheap political points. Well, I don’t want to make this a political blog, but let’s not forget the freedoms we all had until very recently, and let’s work hard to bring them back when it is safe to do so.

Here is a picture of the trail. The forest was really this empty. On the 12 km run, I think I saw 10 people. Most of them small groups of people who obviously were just outside to get some fresh air. Here is my Strava log of the run:

On the long climb, there is a fresh water well:

When you take a closer look, you notice the drinking cups:

They are there for people to drink the water. You fill the cup from the well, drink the water, and then wash the cup in the stream. I guess, that’s not such a good idea right now.

It was a nice, slow run, but I did feel quite sore after yesterday’s circuit.

After lunch, it was my turn to “risk my life” and go do groceries. It’s my least favorite part of the lockdown.

The store was quite empty compared to a normal Saturday. Still, some products are sold out.

No oranges! No toast! Well, grapefruits and normal bread will have to do.

As you can see in the pictures, we’re all wearing face masks and trying to avoid each other. It’s pretty depressing. Thank god for the self scanning concept.

Or actually, session 1 “3×20 minute steady state”, but it’s the second session from the weekly menu that I do. More about the session below.

The Situation

Some stability! After a week of increasingly strict measures, the government gave us some time to breathe. Yes, we had some new recommendations and measures, but they were small additions or explanations of the big ones.

For example, wearing a face mask in public transport and in stores is mandatory. There is a shortage of face masks, so they explained that we can make our own ones. Instead of 90% protection they give 70% protection, which still slows down the spreading of the virus. Talking about protection. I wear a face mask to protect others. It’s the other people’s face masks that protect me.

It’s also interesting how, in the course of two days, it has become weird to NOT wear a face mask.

Here I am in my home made face mask:

It is still not entirely clear if we are allowed to go for a run in the forest, but people are doing it (and keeping a distance from others) and I don’t see this being commented badly.

The Workout

The workout was a steady state rowed as a rate ladder. Three intervals of 20 minutes, rowed as

4 minutes at 19 spm

3 min @ 20 spm

2 min @ 21 spm

1 min @ 22 spm

1 min @ 21 spm

2 min @ 20 spm

3 min @ 19 spm

4 min @ 18 spm

I had the erg outside again:

I moved the erg to the other terrace to have a view on the blossoming tree and to be out of the sun. It’s a very nice, sunny day and the temperature was around 17 degrees in the shadow when I erged.

Here is the workout chart:

This heart rate response is quite normal for me. Perhaps slightly higher than I expected, but still within the bounds. I will have difficulty doing the 40 minute at 75% of max HR session and I am considering to replace it with a run in the forest.

I am also happy to see a few of the SAHRC Facebook group members jumped on the Rowsandall.com training tracking. It’s nice to see this chart turning more and more green every day. (The purple is someone who did a much longer body weight session than I planned.)

Keep up the good work, SAHRC!

Or actually, session 3, but more about that later.

The Situation

First a quick update on the situation over here in the Czech Republic. We went to bad in a partial lockdown, to wake up in a pretty complete one. Yesterday, we were still allowed to be outdoors in and gather in groups of less than thirty people.

Today, we are only allowed to go out to

• Get to and from work
• Do groceries (one time per day, only one person from each household)
• Take care of relatives
• Short ventures outdoors (walking the dog, maybe also a run in the forest but that is not entirely clear).

All shops except supermarkets, pharmacies, drug stores and pet stores were already closed, just as all fitness centers, wellnesses, hotels, restaurants, hairdressers, and so forth … We’ll all have interesting hairstyles in a few weeks.

You have to wear a face mask every time you go out.

And a whole lot of other measures I won’t bore you with.

I had a great work-from-home day. Frankly, I have spent too much time following the news over the weekend, and today I followed my self-imposed media hygiene rules:

• Check news sites at regular times, no more than three times a day
• Limit news reading to three trusted websites. Verify important information through government portals.
• Never read the readers comments

Also, with my group we have established a daily fifteen minute video conference, where I flow down news from the crisis team, and I do a roll call. Today, it was hilarious as we were admiring each others’ work from home setup, kids were disturbing the meeting, etc. Where I work, we do a lot of teleconferencing, but we usually don’t use video. Today, we made a point of switching on the video and I was very happy to see the faces of my colleagues.

Stuck At Home Rowing Club

My friend and rowing data nerd Greg Smith (read his blog Quantified Rowing) and I were discussion Europe being in various states of lockdown and other parts of the world going in lockdown soon or having experienced a lockdown. Greg had the idea of establishing a Facebook group for rowers stuck at home: Stuck At Home Rowing Club. We established the group and posted about it on a few social media. Since then it has gone viral. During my evening and morning, large groups of rowers joined the group. I am very happy about it.

The purpose of the group is to share photos of our home workout setup and to work along a common training plan. We have a program with 6 sessions per week. You don’t have to do all of them. You can also do your own sessions and talk about them.  You can read more about how it works here: https://analytics.rowsandall.com/2020/03/15/welcome-to-the-stuck-at-home-rowing-club/

We hope that this group (as similar initiatives that have sprung up across the internet) will provide the necessary motivation to keep us exercising over what may be a few weeks (or longer?) of being stuck at home with an erg.

My Workout

The plan for this week is shown in the table above. Instead of starting with Session 1, I decided to start with the fitness assessment, a hard 20 minute test. Instead of rowing in my basement, I decided to use the warm weather and row outdoors. This basically being the only moment of the day where I was out, I better get my exposure to direct daylight and fresh air:

Yes, that’s an old Model C fitted with a new PM5. It serves its purpose very well. Having it outdoors, I did notice that I might give it a good cleaning.

I started with a 20 minutes long warming up:

Then it was time for the main event. I was targeting 230W but I set a Pace Boat to 235W.

It was pretty hard, and with 10 minutes to go I decided to give up hope of passing the Pace Boat. Actually, there were a few moments in the row where I had to turn back the power a bit. With all the exposure to Corona related information I have become a bit scared to go full out.

I was also worried that I would end up gasping for breath so hard that the neighbors would think I had the disease …

So I relaxed a bit. Then around the 6 minutes to go mark I used a few strokes to push the Display button to switch from pace boat view to the regular view, showing split pace and meters rowed. In the end I managed an average power of 229 Watts. Good enough. At least I will show improvement at the end of the lockdown. 😉

After that I did an easy 20 minutes cooling down and that was all.

Yesterday, I skipped training for a long forest hike with Romana.

It was gorgeous weather. It was also great to enjoy sunshine and nature among all the Corona craziness. We talked mostly about the situation, of course, but it’s great to be outside and see nature about to go from winter to spring.

This morning, Romana and I went out in the double.

It was pretty windy and choppy on the lake, so we rowed out to the castle. There were some people outside, but fewer than I expected. We met a few other rowers at the club. We were saying that we’re lucky to be a small rowing club, so we don’t have lots of people crammed in a small space, and can work around the limitation of 30 people easily.

Out on the water is really getting you out of the constant news flow.

Back home we had a lunch and then we sat down to check the latest news. Well, it seems we’re going to be stuck inside for a while. Most probably, the Czech government will decide this afternoon to announce a quarantine for all its citizens. This means that you’re only allowed to be outside to be on your way to or from work and you’re not allowed to deviate from the shortest route. Shopping for groceries will of course still be possible, but limited to one member of a family once per day. No idea how that is going to be implemented but I guess we’ll find out on the evening news.

Currently the Czech Republic has 214 confirmed cases and 0 deaths. The Czechs are taking the strictest measures very early on during the outbreak. On the other end of the spectrum, in my home country The Netherlands, with over 1100 confirmed cases and 20 deaths, they are not even thinking about closing the schools, and don’t even attempt to test everyone. Time will tell what was wise. All I can say is that  the firm measures were shocking and stressful initially but then one gets used to it, and there is clarity.

I am lucky to have a Concept 2 rower at home and to be able to do my job from home. I guess I will be on a diet of ergometer sessions now. I am NOT looking forward to it but I guess that is less important now. On Rowsandall.com, I have created the “Stuck at Home Rowing Club” for anyone in the same situation, who is interested to do home confined workouts remotely. Just register for Rowsandall.com and ask to become a member of this rowing group.