May 5 2018
Friday – a hard 6k
Wednesday – Thursday
I traveled to Brussels on Wednesday. No training.
On Thursday morning I did an hour of weights in the hotel fitness. I wanted to go at 6am, but the hotel has changed the opening times to 7am. It’s not good. Now I had to share the weights room with some chatty Dutchmen who occupied the stations but didn’t do much, and I had less time after the session to get ready for my meetings.
After an interesting meeting, I headed to the airport and traveled home. Arrived at 8pm.
Friday
A morning row, because the afternoon would be busy with calls. Also, the forecast said that the wind would be less strong in the morning.
After 2km of warming up, I noticed I had forgotten to start the SpeedCoach. Bummer.
After 5km of warming up, I turned and got ready to start. The lazy bastard that I am had decided to row this as a 6k without a turn, starting under Veveri Castle, rowing back to the lake, then crossing it and finishing at the south end. I would avoid the turn and I would get to row this with tailwind on the lake part.
Here’s the row’s chart:
And the summary:
Workout Summary - media/20180504-0700510o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|06000|25:54.0|02:09.5|224.2|26.5|172.9|183.0|08.7
W-|06000|25:54.0|02:09.6|224.2|26.5|172.9|183.0|08.7
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|183.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|01000|04:28.6|02:14.3|232.9|26.2|146.7|176.0|08.5
01|01000|04:17.5|02:08.8|228.5|26.3|176.8|178.0|08.8
02|01000|04:16.0|02:08.0|228.5|26.8|178.3|179.0|08.8
03|01000|04:15.6|02:07.8|218.3|26.1|177.9|180.0|09.0
04|01000|04:20.7|02:10.3|211.2|26.1|177.9|181.0|08.8
05|01000|04:16.2|02:08.1|225.5|27.8|181.0|183.0|08.4
Not sure why the summary claims my first 1k to be so slow. I checked the pace a few times (on my Garmin Forerunner) and it was around 2:09. Perhaps the first turn slowed me down.
The power bumps and valleys in the first 3k are really turns. Same with the power dip around 4.5km in.
The average power is a bit lower than I am used to, but that is mainly due to the fact that until this day, I was looking at inflated power numbers. A bug in the NK SpeedCoach that gave me about 9% more power than I deserved. So, in terms of my “old reference”, this was around 240W, which I think is good for a training row after business travel.
A 1k cooling down, a quick boat wash and shower and then I had to hurry to the office.
May 6 2018
Saturday – Steady State and RiM test
Interesting conditions. When we arrived, the lake was pretty choppy, but it calmed down while I prepared to row. Then, during the row, the chop became gradually worse. I actually enjoyed it and tried to row stably in all conditions.
I was also test driving RiM (Rowing in Motion) on Android. RiM is an app developed by Johannes Rudolph. RiM measures boat acceleration and allows you to analyze the dynamics and efficiency of your boat. The last time I used this app was in September 2015, so we have two entire seasons between data collection. Here’s a chart:
And here are is another chart, looking also at 30spm:
The legend:
And some metrics:
Interesting that the Catch Slope (for the 30/31spm strokes) has become less steep over the two years, but the catch duration has shortened. The catch duration is the time during which the boat decelerates at the catch. So, my catches have become a bit less hard and thus the boat decelerates less. That would be a good development and something I have been working on. The question is whether the differences are significant, and whether these two small samples are characteristic.
This also shows some of the weakness of analysis based on picking a number of strokes. One needs an underlying model of what is going on, linking the metrics at different stroke rates to one underlying stroke characteristic, and monitor the metric continuously over time, for every stroke. The question is, of course, if a 20spm stroke has a similar characteristic as a 36spm stroke. I think good scullers adapt to the different boat speed and boat dynamics.
Anyway, I’d love to hear where these metrics are in comparison of some of my readers, if they use RiM as well.
In the final 15 minutes of the row, I switched off RiM and used the phone camera to record a sternward view of the chop. Here’s a little video compilation:
The practice start at 12 minutes into the row was liked by rowsandall.com with the following email:
Given that I am now on 10% lower power values and I haven’t corrected the old ones, that is a nice way to tell me that that start wasn’t bad at all. It’s not unimportant what happens in the first 10 seconds of a race.
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: lake, OTW, rowing, rowing metrics, single, steady state, training