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Jun 4 2017

Primatorky 2017 – Masters Eight race report

 


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Saturday, June 3. 7pm.

Four boats at the start of the first race of the Masters 8+ program of this most prestigious of Czech eights races.

Watch this video to get the atmosphere:

And two random pictures to show where we race, in the middle of Prague:

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But first, let me go back a year. In this post, I describe how we missed the start call of the race because we couldn’t hear it through the loud engine noise of a big boat next to us, how we came in second place, immediately filed a protest and got a re-row, which we didn’t row in the end.

Regular readers of this blog will know that this year’s preparation wasn’t ideal. Only in this week did we manage to get in two trainings in an almost complete crew. So we considered ourselves outsiders. This was even the spirit of our pre-race briefing. We gathered around the boat and talked about rowing clean and not going out of the start like madmen. The race lasts for three minutes and in the final 400m, past the railway bridge, there will be ugly water, and you need to have some energy left to row clean and not lose too much speed in the waves. Don’t wake up the carps sleeping on the bottom of the river! That wasn’t our motto for the race

This year, we would just enjoy the races. Romana and I left Brno at 12:30, arrived in Prague a bit over two hours later, and it was so hot that the smartest thing to do was get a big glass of lemonade and retire to the couch in the back of the CVK Praha club house. I also downloaded this race’s official App and filled out my race predictions. I liked that, a cool new innovation. You basically predict the winner of each and every race, and you get 4 points if “your” crew wins, and one point if they become second. I had no chance of winning of course, because I had missed predicting all of Friday’s racing and half of Saturday’s. But it is still fun, and the scores are updated live. Betting with virtual money.

After that, I slept for an hour and a half, on that couch in the back of the CVK Praha club house. Then I got up, and we did the warming up with the rest of the crew.

So, at 7pm, we lined up at the start. To the left of us, Blesk. To the right of us a Blesk/CVK Praha combination in lane 3 and Pardubice in lane 4. Blesk were looking very confident.

Our start wasn’t as clean as some practice starts had been, and I think I was off a fraction of a second in the first three strokes, but then we caught on and got going.

After the start, the plan was to do 15 strokes at high rate, after which we would lengthen and settle for race pace. I listened to the cox counting the fifteen strokes and I focused on the stroke’s blade and the back of the guy in front of me.

After the fifteen strokes, I dared a quick look out of the boat, and I immediately saw all boats more than a length behind us. Wow!

So now we all focused on lengthening and we succeeded to do so. In fact, we found a lovely rhythm and we kept rowing away from all the others. By the time we arrived at the railway bridge, we had a length of light between the boats. There were two instances where we raced through motorboat wakes but we managed to do that pretty well.

Under the railway bridge, Ludek shouts: “One minute to go!”. He always shouts something there.

Even in the very choppy water we kept our distance to the other crews. Blesk started a final sprint. I slammed my blade into a wave twice, but we managed to stay together.

Crossed the line.

First. I think the carps were still sleeping.

Waited for the others to cross the line. Shouted three cheers for our opponents.

Rowed to the medals dock.

Got our medals.

Rowed back to the Rower’s Island.

Took a group picture.

Shower.

A beer. Some food.

Two hour drive home. Which we filled talking about this 3 minute long race.

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And the results:

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I also include the results of the other race. The boat that was trying to draft me came in second place:

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So we were by far the fastest crew of all Masters 8+, 14 boats if I also count the G and H race, who were of course a bit slower than the younger crews.

All in all a very nice race!

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Jun 3 2017

Friday morning – Rowing Nirvana

A 6:30 AM row before work. Steady state. Through the gorge/canyon, towards the castle and beyond. Steady state, playing with technique and rates 18, 20 and 22spm. I am also playing with Kinomap which is an app to sync video with your ergometer rowing. Potentially interesting to spice up boring OTE steady state rows coming winter.

Kinomap syncs with Strava and adds the map of your virtual row to Strava. Not sure if you also compete on the real segments. That would be  a little unfair, because OTE you go a lot faster than on the water. Kinomap also exports basic data as ErgData does (stroke rate, distance, time, pace, power) so I will probably make a filter so people can use Kinomap data on rowsandall.com.

I made two videos, a short Warming Up and a long one of 48 minutes that I called Bird Song. Feel free to use them on your erg. I turned the GoPro around so that you have the same view as the rower (although from a slightly lower point of view). Here is a short preview. I have added canned bird song, because the GoPro was unable to capture the tweeting concert from the forest. There sure was a lot going on on that forest’s Twitter accounts:

And here is an accelerated run through the entire 48 minutes row. It takes only 12 minutes. The 48 minutes one is a great calming, hypnotizing video, though. I can look at the puddles forever.

Can you imagine how energized I arrive at the office after spending 80 minutes in such an environment?

The row itself was almost identical to the one on Thursday, although slightly shorter. The graph only shows the 48 minutes “middle” part. I recorded warming up and cooling down to different SpeedCoach sessions.

And a few box plots to compare Friday’s session with comparable sessions of the past months:

Pretty happy with the rowing.

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Jun 1 2017

Thursday – Long and Steady Morning Row (birds singing)

This was a great row. The lake was a little choppy but all the canyon part was very flat, oily water. The birds were singing in the forest. It was 20 degrees C at the start of another tropical day.

I did 3min@18spm/2min@20spm/1min@22spm and just kept repeating that until I arrived at the little waterfall in Veverska Bytiska, where I turned around, did two minutes of rest to arrive at a multiple of three minutes on the elapsed time, and started again, repeating until I was 400m away from our dock.

And here are a few pictures to compare this workout with similar ones:

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Jun 1 2017

Wednesday – High Rating Eight

Out in the eight again. I felt guilty for arriving 5 minutes late, but one guy came an hour late. So it was a short training.

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This plot is a merger of Garmin data (heart rate, GPS location) with stroke rate and pace from the SpeedCoach.

We did a couple of 30 second intervals with 1 minute rest. Four of them in tailwind, from a rolling start, and four of them in headwind. We also did a race start plus 30 seconds.

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We were almost able to hit the prescribed stroke rates (34, 36, 38 and 40 in each series) and the paces were nice. Sweep rowing is nice for a change. A simple short stroke. Just one oar to hold on to. Much less complicated than sculling. I also enjoyed going at much faster paces than in the single.

Our strokes fall apart slightly in the last part of the recovery, just before the catch. For the rest it is fine. If the entire crew were fit, we would be a contender for the win. The problem is that half of the crew thinks they have to pull holes in the water, so they will waste all their energy on the first 300m, creating enormous puddles. After that, we will be in survival mode.

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May 30 2017

Roeicorvée

Roeicorvée. 

Corvée is the Dutch word for drudgery and roei is row, so roeicorvée would be rowing drudgery.

I wanted to row late in the evening, when the temperatures start to drop from the high of 30C. However, by the time I wanted to drive to the rowing club, the sky was black and the weather forecast looked like this:

Not so good, in other words. So I opted to row the steady state session on the erg. Roeicorvée. It was a good decision. The hailstones were the size of golfballs.

Kinomap

One of my Strava followers had talked about Kinomap. This iOS app shows you footage of rowing while you are pulling on the erg. I thought it would make the erg less boring so I installed it on my iPad and rowed the first 2k with it. That is, I played the only video of a 2k effort that was available on the free version and rowed while it played, covering s little over 2400m while looking at some single sculler on a brautiful lake. 

For data capture, I had Painsled running in the background, but connecting Kinomap through BlueTooth actually threw out Painsled, as I discovered after the row. Bugger. 

But Kinomap syncs automatically to Strava, except that it didn’t transfer heart rate data from the PM5. Here is the workout after import to rowsandall.com from Strava:

So I tried to look at pricing of Kinomap but couldn’t find a way to subscribeor find any pricing info on Kinomap’s website or in the app. I thought about connecting Kinomap through the USB cable (using the connector cable for the iPhone) but the connector csnle is very short and I had no way to support the iPad next to the PM. 

So I rowed another 30 minutes of rowing drudgery, wiped off the sweat from the handle, my hands snd my face, dialled up a 5k and rowed on. Here are the PainSled plots. These ones are missing SPM values because Painsled has corrected a typo in the CSV column header (stokes instead of strokes) without informing the developer at rowsandall.com. I will fix that asap. 

All really slow as you can see. Tomorrow: another row in the eight. 

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May 30 2017

Two pieces for a Masters Eight

 The temperatures have increased to above 30 degrees C, but luckily we were rowing in the evening.

It had been s hectic day. After a four hour drive back from Racice, we found our poor cat in distress. It had injured its tail and during the twelve hours it had spent alone, it had sprayed blood all over the house. So instead of relaxing in our garden we took care of the wound (which was not easy, as is evident from the claw marks on my arms) with help of a rowing friend who lives nearby and is a vet. On Monday we visited him in his office for a check, some injections and antibiotics, as well as a cap to prevent the poor animal from biting its painful tail again. 

So when I  arrived at the rowing club, my rowing friends were still discussing the European Championships, but I had already moved on to another world. 

Anyway, we are racing the eight coming weekend so it is time to get to business. The training plan prescribed 1500m pieces at 26spm but the crew wanted to add a race pace piece. The compromise was one 1500m and one 750m. 

I gave the SpeedCoach to the cox because his CoxBox Mini doesn’t show stroke rate. I told him to not touch any buttons on the SpeedCoach and started its recording when we still had the boat in slings. Unfortunately I forgot to switch the screen to distance, so the cox had only elapsed time and stroke rate. He managed well and just did the pieces by estimated distance from landmarks. For the 1500 that was easy: from the 2k start to the Lodni Sporty club house. For the 750 it was a bit more difficult. 

But rowsandall.com can deal with that. Sitting on 2 seat the SpeedCoach didn’t record my heart rate. However, I was using the Garmin watch to capture that. After the row, I imported the Garmin data through Strava to rowsandall.com, uploaded the SpeedCoach data and did a data fusion merging the NK pace, SPM, and distance data into the Garmin workout.

Then, I used the Interval Editor and the interactive plot to determine the start and end times of the pieces and here is the result:

Workout Summary - media/Fusion_20170530-085321.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|10490|58:03.0|02:46.0|189.8|28.6|134.5|181.0|06.3
W-|02303|07:21.0|01:35.7|389.6|29.2|169.9|181.0|10.8
R-|08189|50:42.0|03:05.7|146.8|27.5|127.5|181.0|08.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|01504|04:56.0|01:38.4|359.1|26.7|167.4|174.0|11.4
02|00799|02:25.0|01:30.7|451.6|34.2|174.8|181.0|09.7

 

Ignore the power data. It’s a conversion from pace using the equation for the Concept2 erg and when you’re in the eight it overestimates the power. I will update the site to do a better power estimate for OTW rows. 
 

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May 29 2017

How I became a Boat Builder

No training this past weekend. Instead, I attended the European Rowing Championships in Racice. Because of my website rowsandall.com I managed to obtain an accreditation so I could go backstage as well. Although “Rowing Software Developer” is not a category that FISA understands yet. It took a long time to decide what my accreditation would be, and in the end it became “Boat Builder”:

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I found that quite funny. Another fun detail was the name of the bus company that took care of the shuttle traffic from the car park to the racing venue:

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In Czech, “sad” means “orchyard”, so for local people there is nothing strange about this name. On Saturday, I spent most of the time “backstage” and had a few good discussions about rowing data and how you can use data to make fast boats. At least that is how I came to explain my badge to people who knew me (thanks Greg for making the link). It did make me shy to hang out around the Empacher and Filippi tents, though. Here are a few pictures from Saturday:

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Notice the rowsandall.com brochures …

I spent minimum time on the grandstands but I did see the Dutch men’s eight sprint to secure their place in the finals.

On Sunday I had much more time to enjoy the racing. I watched all the A finals, spending more than 6 hours in the baking sun on the grandstand. There are plenty of reports in the media about the results, so I will just highlight what I enjoyed:

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My club mate Milan (on the right) winning Bronze in the LM4-!

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Eat Crickets! Milan again.

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And Milan again (stroke seat).

Who doesn’t love Irish rowing (mainly for their hilarious post race interviews – the drop of whiskey they gave us before the race, I threw up just now!):

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The Czech ladies winning the gold in the W2x. I was expecting the Dutch to win but being on the grandstand when the Czechs were winning was great:

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As you can hear from the video the noise from the sold-out grandstands was huge. Add to that 500.000 viewers of the live TV broadcast in the Czech Republic, and you can imagine it was a great weekend for Czech Rowing.

And we hadn’t even seen Ondrej Synek beat Damir Martin in front of a home crowd!

And of course watching the eigths racing in front of Rip mountain.

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Today: Back to training. An evening session with the eight.

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