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Apr 27 2017

Thursday morning – 36 intervals in the single

From a rowing technology blogger’s standpoint this was really a session I was looking forward to.

It wasn’t to be. Sometimes the NK SpeedCoach’s user interface drives me crazy. I am 100% sure that I have recorded the row, but somehow I have managed to delete it on the  device, perhaps when I switched it off. Anyway, when it was time for me to sync the unit with the PC, I was surprised to see no new session.

It’s really a pity, because this morning’s session was:

6x(6×15 strokes “on”/10 strokes “off”)/5min, with the 15 “on” strokes at 26, 28, 30, 32, 34 and 36spm.

The idea was really to learn (again) to row at high stroke rates and to transfer boat feel and stroke efficiency from the 26spm all the way up to 36spm.

I set the SpeedCoach to show power, stroke rate, effective length and wash during the row and all the time I was looking forward to doing the data analysis. I wanted to see how wash and effective length, as well as work per stroke, would hold up at the higher rates, and uncover other hidden information from the data.

So if I want to row a 1k race at 320W and 32spm, probably all my strokes should be around 10W/spm, i.e. I should row the 26spm bit at 260W, the 28spm bit at 280W, etc. This is what I tried during the row.

It was a cold and rainy morning. Four degrees C, and something between snow and rain when I drove to the rowing club. When I launched, the rain had stopped, and it turned out to be a gray and cold but fantastic morning.

The swallows were heaving breakfast, and it was a joy to see them. At these temperatures, they fly just above the waves, about the same height as a rower’s blade between strokes, and they are such fantastic flyers. I really enjoyed how efficiently they glide through the air, only occasionally reverting to high wing frequency flying, when hovering to catch insects or gaining speed in headwind conditions. I made a mental link to my rowing, doing the 26spm as the swallow glides and the 36spm as it hovers.

As said, I failed to save the session on the SpeedCoach, so you will have to do with the pictures from the Garmin watch, imported through Strava. Strava magically added some power values through a biking/running plugin, so you shouldn’t take those too seriously (although the values are pretty good). The SPM values were all over the place but that is because the Garmin tried to measure running cadence.

Sets 1, 3 and 5 were rowed in tailwind. Sets 2, 4 and 6 were rowed in headwind. As the sets progressed, I became better and better at hitting the right Power values and I think I learned a lot from this session, even though it almost feels like I didn’t do it, not having any data.

With the swallows and all, definitely a session I enjoyed a lot. It was hard, it wasn’t short, but it was 100% worth it.

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Apr 27 2017

Wednesday – a row in the coxless four

Wednesday is our Masters evening. Of course the Masters rowers of our rowing club do more trainings, but on Wednesday at 6pm we gather and row in the eight.

On this particular rainy and cold Wednesday evening, the turn-up was 5 rowers, and a sixth one called us at exactly 6pm, saying that he was “just now” leaving office. That office being just 45 minutes away in the peak hour traffic. 🙁

To at least do something that resembles rowing in an eight, we decided to pick a coxless four. The fifth guy decided to stay on the erg and wait for the sixth guy.

I rowed in bow seat, and the rest of the crew consisted of Martin “Krocan” (=Turkey), Petr “Bulda” (=Bulldog) and Michal “Míša” (=Bear). So we had a rich representation of the animal kingdom.

The boat was an old Empacher 4-, and we lost 15 minutes because we had to replace the shoes so that Bulda would fit into the boat.

I didn’t really fancy rowing on the bow seat, but I guess being the lightest of this crew (with 75kg, compared to Bulda’s 113kg), it had to be me. I like practicing my sweep rowing, but it takes more of my mental effort to do it well, compared to sculling. You can imagine that I did not have the need to also turn around every few strokes and scan the lake for upcoming traffic. Well, so be it.

All our boats are foot steered from the stroke position, so at least I didn’t have to do the steering. And Míša is one of our rowers who can steer our lake with a blindfold, so the course was always right and I just had to watch out for the traffic.

This was a technical training, so we did a lot of drills.

Some of the drills involved rowing with stops at various places. You can see that the SpeedCoach didn’t really understand that.

It was cold and rainy, but we did make a lot of progress during this short outing. It was fun to row something else than a single, and it had been a long time since I last rowed a coxless four.

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Apr 25 2017

Masters: Pacing a 1000m single scull row with a power meter

So according to Rowperfect, I am “on a mission to find the optimal pace when doing head races”. I liked that. I like being on a mission.

I am already on the next mission. The 1k sprint season is starting. Since the head racing, I have lost some fitness, mainly due to me not putting in the required training volume. Work. Other stuff.

So, I don’t know exactly where I am, fitness wise. A week and a half from now I will row my first Masters 1k race in the single. It would be good to have a few tries in before that. And now that I have a power meter, I can use it to help me pace the race.

Here is my line of thought:

  1. Start with the erg power value as a guideline. I estimate my current erg power for a 1000m (around 3:20 time) to be between 325W and 350W. On the water, everything is slower, so the race duration is longer, so I expect to end up a little lower. However, it is not given that the Empower Oarlock power values correspond exactly to the erg power. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.
  2. If I go out too fast, I will finish slow. If I go out too slow, I should sprint to the line to get the power average as high as possible.
  3. Make use of all of rowsandall.com’s data analysis power to find out as much as possible about how I did that initial 1k.
  4. Next time, row at the average power I achieved and use the lessons obtained in 3 (hopefully).

I made use of a gap in my schedule, after lunch and before the evening conference calls. It was a warm afternoon, a slight drizzle, 15 degrees, and flat water. Only a light wind, which turned out to be a headwind for my 1k.

I did a 3km warming up including two practice starts and a few 10 stroke bursts:

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At that point I was in the buoyed 2km track, about 800m from the finish line. I mentally prepared myself for “a lot of red” (referring to the power and heart rate plots), dialed up a 1k on the SpeedCoach and got into starting position.

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Workout Summary - media/20170425-150809-Sanders SpeedCoach 20170425 0311pmo.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|01000|04:00.0|02:00.2|319.3|30.2|175.4|184.0|08.3
W-|01000|04:00.0|02:00.4|318.5|30.1|176.1|184.0|08.3
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|184.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00100|00:22.9|01:54.6|365.1|33.0|140.6|167.0|07.9
01|00100|00:23.9|01:59.5|339.1|30.0|170.6|172.0|08.4
02|00100|00:23.5|01:57.4|341.9|29.9|175.0|178.0|08.5
03|00100|00:24.0|02:00.1|328.9|30.0|179.9|181.0|08.3
04|00100|00:23.9|01:59.3|326.2|30.0|181.8|183.0|08.4
05|00100|00:24.0|01:59.9|321.1|30.2|182.8|184.0|08.3
06|00100|00:24.1|02:00.3|311.2|30.0|183.1|184.0|08.3
07|00100|00:24.5|02:02.5|294.0|29.8|182.4|183.0|08.2
08|00100|00:24.9|02:04.7|287.6|29.5|181.8|183.0|08.2
09|00100|00:25.2|02:06.1|276.6|29.1|181.0|182.0|08.2

So yes, I went out too fast. But I did obtain an average power value, and it’s 320W. As usual in a 1k row, around the 500m mark things started to fall apart. I really had trouble keeping the stroke rate at least above 30spm (where I should be at 32spm in a couple of weeks), and in the slight headwind everything just became very sluggish. I was happy though that the total time was not too far from 4 minutes. Usually, in April, my 1k OTW time is around this, and today it was into a headwind.

Below, I will add some detailed discussion of the various other metrics.

I paddled the 350m to the finish line of the 2k course, turned the boat, and continued in a light “steady state” row. During that steady state row, I did two 250m pieces, just for the fun of it, to test how 320W of power would feel at 32spm. I did one piece in tailwind where I saw 1:55-1:56 pace, and one in headwind where the pace was around 2:00.

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Detailed analysis

bokeh plot (14)

Catch angle seems high. When I first started rowing with the Empower Oarlock, I was worried about the short catch angle. Perhaps I have no the opposite problem? It seems to be an artifact of the sprint pace. The average over the entire outing is 66 degrees catch, 41 degrees finish. What you can also see is that as I got tired in the second half of the test, I shortened up on the finish. Here’s the “stroke profile” plot:

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I did not watch “Wash” numbers, and not having rowed a lot in the single lately, I am a little behind on my “mission” to improve my “wash” numbers. I think I could do better on this value. Here is the story of “wash”:

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Yep, it became a sad story after 700m.

Work per stroke varied quite a lot during the row. The mean value was 648J (which is high), while the 25% and 75% boundary was at 593J and 678J respectively. So that means that more than 25% of the strokes (about 30 strokes) were at more than 678J, and about 25% of the strokes were below 593J.

For head racing, I wanted to be around 550W, and I think that is even a good value for sprint racing. At least, that’s my hypothesis, still to be confirmed. For now, I note that I should rate up and lighten up.

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This graph (above) of power and average drive force vs time is the embarrassing one. Of course the start strokes were strong, but then I brought it down to what I thought was a good value of just under 350W, but in the headwind, after 500m, you can see exactly where the wheels came off and I reduced the average drive force, shortened up at the finish, and brought the entire power down. At this point in the race, I was looking at my power values and I didn’t know what to do. (Unfortunately, I had no additional metrics to see. Being “smart”, I had set one of the bottom screens to distance, not realizing the SpeedCoach defaults the other bottom screen to distance as well when doing pre-programmed pieces. I wish there was more control of that. I would like to set it exactly as I want it, not as NK thinks I want it.)

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Oh well, I also dropped the rate in the final 200m. Booh, Sander!

Here are the two “250m” pieces that I did afterwards.

bokeh plot (20)

 

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Of course these were shorter pieces, but they did feel better. I think I have a plan for my upcoming 1k race.

Also, I am still impressed by how incredibly useful these metrics are in analysing what happened, and how, if you put in a little thinking, they guide you to what is hopefully a better plan to attack the next 1k piece.

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Apr 22 2017

Rowing a (coastal) Lite Boat! Fun? You bet.

The races had been cancelled, but I drove to the rowing club anyway, hoping that the wind would not be strong enough to prevent me from crossing the lake and then row in the canyon. The canyon can be windy as well, but the waves never reach oceanic sizes.

Here is the lake when I arrived at the club. I thought it would be just rowable.

 

When I got out of the dressing room, the wind strength had increased and the waves were much higher. I had an idea. Why not take out our new “Golem”?

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This is the Golem:

“The most famous golem narrative involves Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the late 16th century rabbi of Prague, also known as the Maharal, who reportedly created a golem to defend the Prague ghetto from antisemitic attacks and pogroms. Depending on the version of the legend, the Jews in Prague were to be either expelled or killed under the rule of Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor. To protect the Jewish community, the rabbi constructed the Golem out of clay from the banks of the Vltava river, and brought it to life through rituals and Hebrew incantations. The Golem was called Josef and was known as Yossele. It was said that he could make himself invisible and summon spirits from the dead. The only care required of the Golem was that he couldn’t be active on the day of Sabbath (Saturday). Rabbi Loew deactivated the Golem on Friday evenings by removing the shem before the Sabbath began, so as to let it rest on Sabbath. One Friday evening Rabbi Loew forgot to remove the shem, and feared that the Golem would desecrate the Sabbath. A different story tells of a golem that fell in love, and when rejected, became the violent monster seen in most accounts. Some versions have the golem eventually going on a murderous rampage.”

I didn’t go on a murderous rampage. At our club, “Golem” is the name of our new LiteBoat. It was thus named because of the sturdy design of the boat, compared to our racing singles.

LITEBOAT-Vague02-e1487584794212

liteboats

So I took the LiteBoat. I needed help to prevent it from being thrown on the dock by the waves, but when I finally launched, it was big fun.

I did a quick circle in one of the choppiest part of the lake to check that everything was OK and then I took off for a longer row. Rowing this boat is hard work and you go slow, but still it resembles rowing quite well. It is like rowing in a single with a strap around the boat, or sitting on an erg with a very high drag factor.

Well, the erg comparison is actually quite off. Being outside on the waves, with the wind blowing through my hair, and the boat sometimes rising during a stroke and then falling on the water with a stomping sound was quite exciting and definitely a three dimensional affair, compared with the one-dimensional erg.

Here is how slow I went:

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It seems the SpeedCoach didn’t always pick up the stroke rate correctly in the wavy environment.

First, I rowed in the headwind to the north end of the lake. Then I turned around. Turning around is a very funny experience in this boat, if you are used to turning a single or a quad. The first time I did it, I nearly spun two rotations. Because the boat is so short, there is very little resistance to turning, so when you are pulling as hard as I do when you turn a single, you get yourself into a spin.

This turning behaviour was also funny when you end up on the top of the wave. Sometimes the boat and me would glide off a different side of the wave than I expected, turning the boat at the same time.

Well, after I turned (and did another turn at my maximum boat turning speed, just for fun, with some anglers watching me in bewilderment), I rowed to the south end of the lake, where the waves where the highest. In the tailwind I managed a “fast” pace of 2:50 per 500m. I did some tests at 27 spm (which was about the fastest I could row this boat) to see where that would bring me.

The final stretch from the south end of the lake, back to the rowing club, was great. In a full headwind and with big waves, it was fun to try to anticipate how the boat would pitch, roll and yaw. I got really wet but it didn’t matter. I was extremely happy.

After 50 minutes I returned to the club. I did a short erg cooling down and that was that. This is big fun. I think I would really enjoy real coastal rowing. The waves on the sea must be even higher.

Here is a short video from the LiteBoat manufacturer that shows how it can be rowed on the Sea by beginners:

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Apr 22 2017

Friday: Mixed Quad

Wednesday

No training. I flew to Amsterdam. KLM had two surprises to me. The first one was a one hour delay.

The second surprise, a nice one, was that they offered me a glass of champagne to celebrate my birthday. It was interesting, to sit in Economy class and being the only one drinking champagne from a real glass (as opposed to a plastic cup).

Thursday

Hotel room workout. Then a full day of conference, ending at Airport Valkenburg with a drone demonstration.

During the day I received a call from one of our coaches. The spring races in Brno had been cancelled, because of a weather forecast promising lots of wind and wind gusts over the weekend.

KLM had another nice surprise for me. A one hour delay, which is not cool when that means you arrive at 23:30 in Vienna, from where it is a 2 hour drive home.

In bed at 1:50am.

Friday

Up after just a few hours of sleep. I was wondering if I should do a workout at all. Left home for work an hour later than normally, and in the last minute I threw my rowing clothes in the trunk. Not good. The drive to work took 45 minutes instead of the usual 15 minutes.

It was a long day. Our monthly operations review, which is a four hour marathon session, and this time it was planned right over lunch. The pizzas arrived when it was my turn to present my Department’s results. So, 45 minutes later, I ate cold pizza.

Around 3pm I was really tired. I drove to the rowing club. I didn’t really fancy a workout, but I had to drive there anyway because Romana is in Racice with Iva to row the trials, and I had to pick up my boys from their rowing training.

Arriving at the club, there were two of our older Masters ladies, and Martin, and they were looking for a fourth person so they could row a quad. I offered help. We rowed up to the castle because there was a lot of chop. When we returned to the lake, there was slightly less wind, so we did a few hundred meters more on the lake.

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Apr 18 2017

5x1500m fail in the cold

The plan was to row a 5x1500m on the water, first thing in the morning.

This plan didn’t survive the time I needed to scrape the ice off my car windows. The North Pole has decided to send its weather our way. Temperatures are around 0, windy, with icy rain, hail, and other nice stuff. Snow is expected for tomorrow.

The official training plan for the Masters in our club has a light week, but I have decided that training properly is more important than performing on coming weekend’s races. So plan B was to do the session indoors and compare with a similar workout of a few weeks ago.

First, I needed to reinstall Painsled. My “beta tester” version had expired, so I had to download the “ordinary” version. This involved going upstairs to tell my son to stop downloading videos.

After a 2k warming up I started the main session. I set it up as a “ReRow”, with my previous session as a pace boat.

I managed to follow the pace boat for the first three intervals. At the start of the fourth interval I saw that my pace boat was getting faster. I was now chasing a 1:50 average.

After 1000m, the wheels came off.

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The only nice thing about it is that I have the workout compare functionality on rowsandall.com to see this happening in real life. Unfortunately, the last time I rowed this with my defect Wahoo Tickr, and the heart rate values were not reliable.

I bet they were lower than today, though. I think the first graph tells the story all too well. Too much red in the third interval …

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Apr 17 2017

Monday: A nice row in the double

It was a holiday today.

After lunch, we convinced ourselves that despite the nasty weather (rainshowers, temperature 6 degrees) we should go to the rowing club and check out the lake. In the worst case, Romana and I could do a joint row on connected ergs on sliders.

It turned out that the water was too flat to resist. And when we arrived at the lake, just after 3pm, it was not raining. Romana and I went out on the double and it was great. Great beyond what data can capture. We rowed steady state and technique exercises, and we were really focused on bringing the 2x together.

In the end it resulted in what I think was pretty good boat speed.

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