It’s been a long time since my last blog post. More than four months!

I have been silent for a long time, because it was a bit hectic at work, there was a lot of work on the rowsandall.com site, and finally I prioritized actually doing the training above blogging about it. As you can see from the chart above, I have been pretty OK in sticking to my plan. The blue bars are a “fuzzy” total of my activity, while the orange bar give the volume that was planned. I say “fuzzy” because I haven’t yet found a satisfactory way of adding up an hour spent lifting weights to an hour spent on the erg.

So the weakest week in terms of plan vs execution was the week before Christmas, starting December 16th. I remember why that was. There was some work on rowsandall.com that was too much fun to do (because it involved learning a new programming skill) and I skipped a training or two to finish that work.

The top week in terms of volume was a when I spent four days cross country skiing in the Jeseniky mountains.

As you can see, the weather wasn’t great, but in contrast to the lousy winter in Brno there was  snow, and I got in a lot of training minutes at base building pace.

Since then, I have been looking forward to getting on the water again, and last Sunday was the first opportunity. We went out in a quad.

We took it pretty easy, doing some technical drills and easy rowing at 18spm. Half way the row we had to paddle back to the dock because one of the sliding seats got stuck.

And that outing, dear readers, now seems ages ago, because it sometimes seems that nothing is the same any more.

I live in the Czech Republic, and the Italian Alps are a popular, relatively close-by, destination for spending the spring holidays. In the past few weeks, four waves of skiers have started to return from the Alps, and at the same time the first cases of COVID-19 have started to pop up.

On Tuesday, the government closed the schools. In the evening, I did a 4x2km session which I interrupted.

I was too tired and stressed out after a day of continuously changing news.

On Wednesday, I restored my rowing happiness with a rate laddered Steady State row:

Thursday was a cruel day. First, we woke up with the travel ban to the USA. Around 2pm, the government announced the state of emergency, started closing the borders and announcing a whole series of other measures to slow the spread of the Corona virus. I spent the day reading up on the most important information, then helping track down our colleagues abroad and making sure they were able to get home somehow and in time.

On Fridays, I usually go to the gym to do a weights session. However, all gyms are closed. So I went for a 20 minute run followed by a 40 minute body weight circuit. That was the plan. The execution was 30 minutes of running and a 30 minute body weight workout at home.

As you have understood, we currently have everyone who can work from home, work from home. This morning, we woke up with the news of further measures. Everything is closed, except supermarkets, drug stores, pharmacies, and I think news stands.

I guess most readers of this blog in Europe are in similar situations or will soon be. I am happy to say that most people here seem to take hygiene very seriously and, after the first day of denial, anger, confusion, and fear, are compliant and disciplined. I went for groceries this morning. There were a lot of people (scary!) but everybody was well behaved.

I met a rowing friend who is injured. He ruptured a muscle during a forest hike. He had been through a phase of high volume training and then went for a walk. He slipped on some ice, and ruptured his muscle doing that. We chatted about how that could happen. The verdict is that he hadn’t done enough stretching after those intensive sessions.

You gotta do your stretching folks!

On October 16, I did a nice steady erg workout.

I didn’t really watch the pace or power, and just rowed until I had completed the Big Loop in Zwift Watopia.

Then, on the 17th, I jumped in a mixed eight crew. We did one 3k that vaguely resembled a push:

I wanted October to be the month where I gradually build up stamina for long steady state rows, but my friends in the eight seem to think that a training isn’t effective if you don’t go above 24 spm.

On the 18th, I did a strength workout.

On the 19th, I did another training in the mixed eight. This time it was cut short because some of our crew members were trainers and had to be back on time. We had launched late because of the late arrival of some of our crew members.

So I went to the erg room and added a 30 minute steady state:

The hiatus after a few minutes was when I realized I was rowing in silence, only hearing the bangs from the weights room, so I got up and added some music to the mix. We have a few new ergs on the club, so it was nice to have a PM5 and a nicely tuned brand new Concept2 erg to row on.

On Sunday, I went for a glorious sunny fall afternoon run in the woods:

It was a pretty slow run, but I enjoyed it very much.

On Monday, 21 October, I wanted to go sculling in the single after a long time. I was looking forward to see power data on the water again. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to move my SpeedCoach from the charger to the rowing bag, so I was stuck using heart rate and the Garmin Vivoactive 3 for pace. It was a 60 minute steady state session, nothing special to report.

Then I had three very hectic days at work, and I didn’t work out until Thursday’s weights session.

Amsterdam

In May, we had hosted a Masters 8+ crew from the Amsterdam rowing club De Hoop. On Friday, October 25th, it was our turn. We took a plane to Amsterdam, settled in our hotels and had a nice dinner at Brasserie Keyser. On Saturday morning, we headed to the rowing club for a training on the Amstel river. I am not going to bore you with the data, because this was more a sightseeing outing than anything else. I was thrilled to be back on my old training grounds, so from 2 seat I had a lot of information to give to the rest of the crew (and the cox).

• To the right, you see the Royal Philips Electronics Global Head Office
• To the right, rowing club RIC
• Utrechtse Brug bridge, rowing clubs Skoll, Poseidon, Willem III, etc

Here’s some pictures:

In the afternoon, I showed the group Amsterdam, and we ended in a restaurant that I had booked, on Rozengracht:

On Sunday, we had another nice row on the Amstel. This time the coxswain, my son Robin (right front on the photo above), explicitly asked 2 seat to shut up and row:

In the afternoon, we (the Roosendaals) left the group to visit the Van Gogh and Millet exhibition at the Van Gogh. We were joined by my parents, and it was a very nice afternoon.

On Monday (a holiday in the Czech Republic), we visited the Amsterdam zoo Artis. In the evening, we flew back to Prague. What then followed was quite absurd:

• 10PM plane landing in Prague
• 10:45 I depart from the long duration parking lot in Prague and drive to Brno
• 1:30AM Arrive home. I start packing for a business trip
• 1:45AM (Tuesday) I am in bed and falling asleep.
• 4:45AM Alarm clock
• 5:00AM The driver picks me up and drives me to the Prague Airport

I could have prepared this better, but I didn’t want to let Romana drive the Prague – Brno stretch alone after a long weekend. So be it. I slept pretty well on the ride to Prague and on the Prague-Frankfurt flight.

Later that Tuesday, I took the flight from Frankfurt to Addis Abeba. Arrived in my Addis hotel around 11pm local time (UTC +3, 9pm Prague time).

Tuesday morning was meetings at the customer’s site, but I was three after 3pm and didn’t have a flight out until midnight. So I got a taxi driver to show me some places in Addis. Turns out the best pictures I took were random snapshots out of the taxi window.

I forgot to throw some sports clothes in my bag when I was packing at 1:30AM. It was a pity, because I was on Entoto hill, a place where the Ethiopian runners train frequently. Also the hotel had a weights room (although I didn’t check out if it was any good).

Head of Prague

I returned home on Thursday afternoon and sat down to clean up my Email inbox. Friday, my only day in the office of this week, also turned out to be a long day, so when I arrived home at 7pm I didn’t have the energy to do an erg session.

On Saturday, I had to get up early again. This time our mixed 8+ crew took the 6:13 train to Prague. Well, 5 of our crew and three reserves. Our stroke man had to face a sudden mixed crew rowing embargo imposed by his wife, our 7 seat had back problems, and our 6 seat had already bailed out a few weeks ago.

We had a fun race, but the results weren’t so great. Well, it was a nice hard distance training. Here’s  a picture of us trying to enter the U turn, being chased by a girls eight.

The Prague Head is a nice race mainly because of the great atmosphere. Crews are coming from Italy, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Croatia and Serbia to compete, and everybody is mainly racing for the experience of rowing in the middle of Prague.

Here we are at the pre-start.

This was a long blog post to lead up to this embarrassing picture of my performance vs the plan for October:

Of course, the last week is not complete. I intend to sit down to erg today. Also, I did some of the rowing in the eight only with the Vivoactive to record heart rate, and it just won’t correctly record a heart rate above 120 bpm. Also, I had put in a highly ambitious plan of training load.

I am now going to write my plan for November and December. I think I should plan a training load of around 300 for the first week and then build up by about 5% per week.

By the way, this chart is one of the new functionalities on Rowsandall.com. I developed a proprietary algorithm to compare apples and oranges. Training sessions can be planned by distance, duration, or training load (Training Stress Score based on power, or TRIMP based on heart rate). Through some data analytics I was able to get estimates of TSS from workouts that are recorded only as time and distance. It’s not going to be exactly correct, but it is pretty good when you are trying to look at cumulative training load and compare it to the plan.

On Saturday, October 5th, I did a short but very nice training in the eight. It was raining lightly but the water was super flat. Unfortunately, some of our crew arrived really late, and because we had some of the youth trainers in the boat, who had to be back on time, the row was restricted to 8 kilometers.

On Sunday, October 6th, it was time for the 6k head race in Uherske Hradiste (“UH”). This was going to be a busy day. First, I would race the 6k in the single, at 2pm. Then we would be back at the start for a race in the double at 4pm. Jiri Rysavy, a sculler from the club Bohemians in Prague, asked me to race the double with him.

Eduard and I arrived in UH around noon. I was immediately called by Jiri. We took an old wooden Empacher 2x out of the Moravia Rowing Club boat house, sculled it to the other side of the river, and put it on a trailer to take it to the start area, six kilometers upstream.

After that, it was time for Eda and myself to drive to the start. We found our singles in the grass and prepared them for the race. A short warming up run, and then some waiting in the car. It was interesting weather. A cold wind, a tailwind, but otherwise sunny weather.

I did a 3km warming up row:

here

You can see from the big differences between the upstream bits and the downstream bits that the current was quite a factor on this day.

There were five single scullers competing in the Masters field, of different ages. I was most nervous of Jiri. He is pretty much the same speed as I. I was the last starting in the Masters field, so I wouldn’t see any scullers behind me.

The plan was to row around 230W and stay close to the middle of the river to make maximum use of the current.


Workout Summary - media/20191006-1926040o.csv
--|Total|-Total----|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time-----|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|06284|00:26:54.7|02:08.5|208.0|25.9|000.0|000.0|09.0
W-|06000|00:23:47.1|01:58.9|229.4|27.1|000.0|000.0|09.3
R-|00286|00:03:08.1|05:28.8|045.9|17.1|000.0|000.0|05.4
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|01000|03:47.0|01:53.5|244.0|27.3|000.0|0.0|09.7
02|01000|03:55.4|01:57.7|242.9|26.6|000.0|0.0|09.6
03|01000|04:01.1|02:00.5|216.0|26.6|000.0|0.0|09.3 - turn
04|01000|03:59.4|01:59.7|227.2|27.0|000.0|0.0|09.3
05|01000|04:01.7|02:00.8|226.3|27.2|000.0|0.0|09.1
06|01000|04:02.5|02:01.2|221.1|27.9|000.0|0.0|08.9


There is a big turn to starboard at the 3km point, which lowered the power average for the third kilometer (I have my Empower oarlock on the starboard side). I pretty much managed to hold the power and was happy with 27spm. Any lower spm would mean that I was rowing a too heavy stroke, and higher spm were reserved for the final kilometer.

I did have the feeling that Jiri, who had started 60 seconds before me, was going about the same speed on the straight bits, but I seemed to make way on the turns. I think he was trying to cut the turns. This is not a smart thing to do, as the river flow is significantly lower when you get closer to the bank.

The wind was mostly cross wind, with a tailwind component initially, but there were stretches where it felt more like a headwind.

Otherwise the water was flat and I was enjoying the row. I love these longer races.

As I crossed the finish line, the speaker announced me as the winner!

I was extremely relieved. Looking at the results later, I saw that I had won with quite a big margin. Made my day.

There was not a lot of time to rest on my laurels though. After I landed and received congratulations from my opponents, I quickly prepared my single for transport, and then Eda and I hopped in the car with Jiri and his wife, who brought us back to the start. Eda to pick up my car, and Jiri and myself to race another race.

We were all pretty exhausted from the 1x race, and we were sculling in a pretty bad boat. The pitch angle on port wasn’t set right and the boat turned to port side. Jiri and I had never sculled together. Did I say we were quite tired from the race in the single?

Fortunately, our opponents Jiri Ertel and Vojtech Cernak, were rowing 60 seconds behind us and it was clear that we were rowing away from them. Six kilometers of huffing and puffing later, we crossed the finish line in a time that was 90 seconds faster than that of our opponents. A second win.

In the mean time, Eda had already prepared everything for transport, but we had to wait for Vojtech and Jiri to get their trailer from the start area. So I changed to dry clothes, and then it was time for the medal ceremony.

There were many prizes. Medals, cups, bottles of burčák, and more. (I got a pair of Nordic Walking poles.)

After that happy event, Eda and I hopped in the car and towed our trailer back to the rowing club in Brno.

On Monday, I used the lunch hour to get my single off the trailer. And as the weather was really beautiful, sunny, and with a mirror flat lake, I did a short steady state row before going back to work.

On Tuesday, I did a pretty nice weights session.

On Wednesday morning, I got my Yellow Fever shots (for an upcoming trip to Ethipia) and the warning to take it easy with working out, for at least a week. On the same day, I hopped on a train to the airport in Vienna, flew to Brussels, and spent the entire Thursday in meetings there.

On Thursday evening, I joined a group of friends in the Funky Monkey bar in Brussels, to raise a glass to the life of a recently deceased friend and colleague. It was at the same time a sad and a happy event. He died at the much too young age of 61, and very unexpectedly.

I am still taking rest to let the Yellow Fever vaccin do its work. It was interesing to monitor my resting heart rate, which shot up by 10 beats after the shot, and is now gradually coming down to normal values.

Tuesday

I managed to get to the lake in time for a row before sunset. It was pretty choppy on the lake, but in the gorge it was nice calm and flat water. I had a 4x1000m (with short breaks) planned as a head race preparation. The idea was to go slightly faster than head race pace and work on lightness. I tend to hit the “right” power values at a too low stroke rate when fresh, but then later in the race it gets difficult to rate up. Better to find the lighter stroke straight from the start.


Workout Summary - media/20191001-1726080o.csv
--|Total|-Total----|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time-----|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|12682|01:09:08.7|02:43.6|151.4|21.6|148.6|185.0|08.5
W-|04035|00:17:06.2|02:07.2|239.4|26.9|173.7|185.0|08.8
R-|08653|00:52:02.9|03:00.5|122.5|19.8|140.3|185.0|07.8
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|01021|04:18.0|02:06.4|231.2|25.4|172.3|179.0|09.4 - tail wind
02|00999|04:20.2|02:10.3|235.6|26.4|174.0|183.0|08.7 - head wind
03|01029|04:15.2|02:04.1|247.3|27.4|172.7|184.0|08.8 - tail wind
04|00987|04:12.8|02:08.1|243.8|28.3|175.8|185.0|08.3 - head wind


That was actually pretty intense. I was surprised by how high my heart rate went at 240 Watts. So once I was done I paddled the three kilometers home really easy.

Wednesday

I woke up feeling sore from the 4x1km workout, but I had a supervised weights workout scheduled first thing in the morning. I decided not to complain to my weights trainer and just do what she told me to do.

She had a pretty heavy session in store. But I was doing fine. I think I only did fewer repeats than expected on the squats, and I completely collapsed on the plank pushups and plank. The combined effect of the 4x1km workout and the weights session.

I will take a day off tomorrow, then a light steady state / technique session on Friday, followed by trailer loading. I will rest again on Saturday, and on Sunday I will row two 6k races. First in the single, then get back to the start immediately and repeat the 6k in the double. All competitors in the double are doing it like that, so it’s going to be an even playing field.

Sunday

The weather was so beautiful, it would be a sin to not sport outdoor. So a bike ride:

It was great fun. First, from home to the village of Lelekovice. In Lelekovice, a nice climb started:

This was the climb between 5 and 8km in the elevation profile. At the top, there were some nice forest trails down to the village of Vranov:

And then the big drop down to Sebrov-Katerina:

Then some gradual up and down to Lipuvka, and after that I tried out a new bike path leading gently downhill to Kurim:

Ninety minutes of bliss. I wasn’t fast, but I think an average heart rate of 145 beats per minute is a good workout on the bike. With a maximum heart rate achieved of 183 and a 10 minute interval with heart rate above 175 it was perhaps more of an irregular interval workout than steady state.

Monday

Stormy weather, so ergometer instead of On-The-Water rowing. I took it easy, putting more weight on finishing a full hour on the boring erg than achieving a certain power score:

Monday

No training. I need to change this as of next week. It’s nice to devote the Monday entirely to work, but I am seeing an increase in business travel in the near future, so I will need the Mondays for training.

Tuesday

An interesting morning at the rowing club. I tested the Randall foils. I have written an extensive report about it here.

Wednesday

Business travel to Prague. I took the 5:48 AM train.

I had an interesting meeting at the U.S. Ambassador’s residence in Prague. Then, as a substitute to exercise, I hiked from Prague 6 Dejvice to the center. So more than an hour of hiking. I took the 5:20 train back to Brno, but unfortunately, about 20km before Brno the train stopped. The train had hit a person, and they announced a 2 hour delay  because the police were investigating the accident. After about 30 minutes I left the train, walked back to the nearest train station and took a stop train to Brno. I was in bed quite late.

Thursday

I had to do an erg session late in the evening, because it was the only time left. After about 30 minutes I gave up. My heart rate was too high and I didn’t feel very well rested. There was also an issue that was nagging me. I had been checking the financial situation of Rowsandall.com and the numbers didn’t add up. After the row I found the culprit. I had forgotten to check the PayPal account.

Friday

A pretty heavy weights session. Making progress on deadlifts and squats. The session ended with Plank and Plank to Push-up, which killed me completely. Happy though to have completed such a heavy session. In the week after WRMR I had too much accumulated fatigue to really go up with the weights.

Saturday

On Saturday, I did the first (and last) 6k trial before next week’s 6k race. I did it on our lake, and I used the blades with the Randall foils. My body was hurting from Friday’s weights workout.

The idea was to hold 220W and let the stroke rate sort out itself.

Turns out this was a bit too ambitious. I was pretty pleased to see the tailwind splits around 2:07 at 25spm, but when I turned around for the headwind 3km, the struggle started. On the positive side, I managed to fight off the handle down demons and kept pushing until the end, even though there were stretches where I was looking at a 2:20 split and really feeling like giving up.

I didn’t give up and completed the row.

I guess it wasn’t so bad, comparing it to a similar workout from two years ago:

Sunday

It’s another of those great, sunny September Sundays. This morning, I did some planning for next year’s rowing camps, then we went to the museum. The Technical Museum has an exhibition about the beginnings of sports in Brno.

That yellow boat in the back is a 2011 Empacher single, weight 65 to 75kg, and it’s the boat that won the 2012 London Olympics. Owned by the Czech Rowing Federation. I would love to try out that boat.

Most of the artefacts at the exhibition are from our rowing club. We got reprimanded by the guards for touching the artefacts. This was funny of course, because we were standing around boats and things that are normally lying around in our boat house and our repairs shed, so we touch and manipulate with them regularly.

For this afternoon, I have the choice of going to the rowing club to row the single, go out on the bike, or to row a steady state erg session. I think I will do the bike. It’s nice to do some cross training. I will go sculling tomorrow.

On Monday, I unloaded the boats from the trailer and gave them a good wash.

On Tuesday, I drove to Prague, which took me more than three hours. I checked in to the hotel and then took the walk from Strahov to Kampa Island. Here’s a picture I took on this 30 minute downhill walk.

There was some rain coming from the west, looking by the clouds. I had a very nice dinner in the restaurant Kalina Kampa.

On Wednesday, I spent the entire day in Jenec, presenting at a Drone conference:

The picture shows me before lunch and before I destroyed my tie by spilling the contents of a profiterole all over it. Petroleum ether came to the rescue, luckily.

No training on Thursday. It was another day of presenting, this time at the home base.

So after all the Linkedin-fame, Friday was a day for a workout.

To ease into training again.

My strength trainer totally got the point. An easy session, not too hard. You bet. I don’t know what she made me do but I felt it for two days afterwards. Just some deadlifts, squats, bench presses, cable rows, and other exercise.

On Saturday I did the first row after WRMR. A steady state in the single. I rowed up to beyond the castle and back:

It was a gorgeous row. The only problem was that I had forgotten my SpeedCoach at home. This always happens after a regatta. I have my rowing kit in the wrong bag, or I have to charge it, and I forget to put it in my standard rowing bag. Well, at least I had heart rate data from the Polar arm belt, and stroke rate and pace data from the Garmin watch.

Today, the weather was gorgeous. I had originally planned to go swimming, but with the sunshine and the nice autumn temperatures (18 to 22 degrees and sunny) I decided that a bike ride would be more like it.

I rode up to Vranov and back through mostly forest trails:

Here’s an example of a nice trail:

Going down through the forest, I didn’t take pictures. Actually, some places were so steep that I got off my bike and hiked.

I made a stop in the village of Lelekovice and a beer in a pub garden. It was nice to sit in the sun, listen to the silence, and gaze at the forest.