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Apr 9 2017

Friday: Travel to Hořín and reconnaissance row

I traveled with the other rowers in the minivan that towed the boat trailer. We left Brno at 1pm in rainy weather. It rained a lot during the 4 hour drive.

Arrived at Vranany, the village that is closest to the start of the race, and where the boats are stored on a muddy field where the canal splits off from the Vltava (Moldau) river. It was about 6 degrees, but it was dry.

I rigged my single and launched for a quick row to check the conditions. A strong tailwind in the race direction. I did 15 strokes at race pace on the start of the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th kilometer.

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You can see from the difference in pace that the wind was quite strong.

When I was ready with my row, the second wave of our rowers launched (some of us share boats). I instructed Iva to do 10 to 15 stroke intervals in the tailwind direction. She has more technique problems in tailwind conditions.

I waited in the minivan for the second wave of rowers to return. Then we had to drive to the finish area in Hořín and park the trailer among the other trailers, which involved some manual trailer manipulation in heavy rain.

It was 8pm when we arrived in the hotel. Luckily, I had anticipated this and prepared some sandwiches, so I didn’t have to go to the restaurant for a 9pm dinner. Instead, I had one beer and then I went to bed.

I weighed 71.8kg when going to sleep. I usually weigh in after my morning bathroom visit around 200-300g lighter than before going to bed, so all was fine, given the 72.5kg weigh-in limit.

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Apr 7 2017

Thursday: Head Race Prep done Indoors

I rushed from work early to be in time for the loading of our trailer and get in the last serious OTW workout before Saturday’s race.

The lake played one of its famous tricks. Today it looked really like the high seas. I took a picture of our new club car, but I don’t think the waves are clearly visible. Believe me, they were big enough to make any outing just dangerous.

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So I started to prepare my boat for transport, when the head coach came around telling me that he had to exchange my rower’s registration card for a new one and the Czech Rowing Association hadn’t copied the expiration date from my old car to the new one. So, before Saturday’s race I had to get a signature and a stamp from a doctor. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to start the race.

I had planned to do a full sports medical test, but you have to make an appointment well in advance for that. Now I was stuck. I called my GP and she agreed that she would sign. Not having visited a doctor for treatment in years, I guess she was fine.

Then I went home and got ready to do the race prep workout on the erg.

Funny. My PM5 wouldn’t connect to Painsled wirelessly. I switched to ErgData. Same thing. ErgData gave me a -56dB warning. It would connect for a second, and then it would drop the connection. Not sure what is going on here. Is the Bluetooth broken on my PM5? I found the iConnect cable and set it up with the cable.

The workout was:

Warming up

3000m @ 22spm

5 minutes rest

3000m rowed as 1000m @ 24spm, 1000m @ 26spm, 500m @ 28spm, 500m @ 30spm

Cooling Down

On the Static Erg, I decided to lower the stroke rates by 2.

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Workout Summary - media/20170406-1815230o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|07136|29:55.0|02:05.8|191.9|21.8|161.1|184.0|10.9
W-|06000|23:53.0|01:59.5|203.9|21.9|163.3|184.0|11.6
R-|01137|06:01.0|02:39.0|112.7|20.1|144.6|184.0|07.7
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|03000|12:23.4|02:03.9|180.8|19.9|154.0|162.0|12.2
01|01000|04:01.0|02:00.5|204.4|21.9|164.8|171.0|11.4
02|01000|03:49.6|01:54.8|228.7|24.1|174.8|178.0|10.8
03|00500|01:50.3|01:50.3|255.9|25.9|179.5|181.0|10.5
04|00500|01:49.4|01:49.4|255.9|26.6|182.5|184.0|10.3

Today: Travel to Horin, the race venue, and a quick row.
Saturday: 6km head race in the single

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Apr 4 2017

Head Race Prep Rate Ladders – and: To Program Workouts or not to Program Workouts?

Most on-the-water rowing electronics units (SpeedCoach, CoxMate) and smartphone apps (CrewNerd) offer programmable workouts. This looks attractive for complex interval workouts. You don’t have to keep an eye on time or distance, and in the resulting report your sets and intervals are clearly marked. It also eases up the processing after the row.

There are also disadvantages, though. The first one is that programming the workouts in the app/unit is a hassle and it is prone to errors.

If you are coaching a group of boats doing the same workout, you would have to make sure that they all start at the same time, and, in case you are doing distance based intervals, you have to hope that the recorded GPS or impeller distance will remain similar between the units in the various boats.

And even when rowing single, you sometimes have to abandon a workout because of traffic, because you are running out of lake, or other reasons. Finally, if you want to set up your unit/app in such a way that it shows other parameters than time or distance, you have a problem (unless the app has audio signals, such as CrewNerd).

It just takes away the much needed flexibility.

So, lately I have started to just record everything as a “just row”. I start recording when I push off the dock, and I finish recording when I arrive back at the dock. This gives me the maximum flexibility, but I do need two devices for some workouts (to see time and distance on the Garmin, when the SpeedCoach is set to stroke length, power, stroke rate, and work per stroke). The other problem is that it makes it a bit more work to figure out when the intervals start and stop, when I want to create a workout summary, like this one:


Workout Summary - media/20170404-104046-Sanders SpeedCoach 20170404 0741amo.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|11114|57:54.0|02:36.3|183.3|22.2|157.8|186.0|08.6
W-|08523|40:42.0|02:23.3|200.5|22.6|160.2|186.0|09.4
R-|02598|17:12.0|03:18.6|109.0|19.1|142.5|186.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|01855|10:00.0|02:41.8|156.6|18.0|137.4|150.0|10.3 - WU
01|01118|05:00.0|02:14.1|201.6|22.2|161.1|167.0|10.1 - tail
02|01019|04:50.0|02:22.4|224.5|23.8|170.0|175.0|08.9 - head
03|01178|04:56.0|02:05.6|244.0|26.1|174.6|181.0|09.2 - tail
04|01106|04:58.0|02:14.7|248.4|26.9|179.7|186.0|08.3 - head, w coach
05|01191|04:54.0|02:03.5|266.0|28.2|178.5|185.0|08.6 - tail, w coach
06|01057|06:04.6|02:52.5|125.8|18.9|146.8|163.0|09.2 - CD

I do have to mention that tidying up an interval summary from a “just row” workout is one of the advanced features of rowsandall.com. The interval editor allows you to “insert” the intervals after the fact. It takes a bit of time to figure out what exactly the durations are if you didn’t exactly stick to the script of your training plan, but it is worth it.

This training was 5x5min/4min at 22,24,26,28 and 30spm. During the fourth interval I caught up with our head coach training one of our men in the single. This guy was doing the 24spm while I was doing 28spm. So I shortened the break between interval 4 and 5 and after 2.5 minutes did the 30spm next to the guy (rowing the 26spm).

He did beat me. I am also convinced that if I want to row the head race at 30spm, I should lighten up my stroke much more. I don’t think I will row faster than a 240W average, coming Saturday. Still, at 30spm, I find it incredibly difficult to keep the Work per Stroke and the Power in the right ball park. In the beginning, I just push too hard, and towards the end of the set, I get fatigued and am working below the average.

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In the fourth interval, I was struggling a bit with the coach launch’s wake, until the coach noticed, and waited for me to pass him. This was great, because he gave me some valuable feedback on my rowing. Basically, when I get tired, my chest collapses on my knees at the catch, whereas I should be pushing my belly button to touch my upper legs. So in the final 30spm interval I tried to work on that (and keep up with the guy doing 26spm), which resulted in going out at around 300W. After 2 minutes, I got presented the bill for that. Had to rate down and “survive”, which unfortunately also meant that my “fatigued rowing technique” was clearly visible (too curved back, head not held straight). It is also clearly visible in the metrics plots:

You can very clearly see fatigue in the plot of Work per Stroke and Average Force. I am just not fit enough to keep that 300W effort for that long (at the end of a workout).

Well, that was a very useful workout. And if had “programmed” it, I wouldn’t have had the flexibility that I had today and I wouldn’t have got the coaching.

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Apr 3 2017

The Wahoo is dead!

The training plan just said: “12km steady state at 20spm”. I decided to do rate ladders with a 20spm average. It’s almost the same but gives a few short sections with a higher stroke rate, just to get used to that head race pace.

I trained in the morning and I was a little time pressed, so when I discovered that the Wahoo Tickr didn’t pair with the SpeedCoach, and also not with the Garmin, I didn’t go back to the locker room to get the new Tickr X, but just pushed the boat off the dock and rowed without the heart rate belt.

It was pretty windy, so there is a lot of difference between the two rowing directions on the lake. In the last ladder I did a ‘head race start’ and tried to find that “light” stroke at 29spm. I think I am still rowing a bit too heavy.

Work per stroke is a bit higher than on my last 6k trial, in the high rate pieces.

I wonder why the Tickr was dead. I recently replaced the battery. Probably, Saturday’s issues with the SpeedCoach were also due to a low battery on the Tickr, so I will revert to my new Tickr X for the rest of the week. Except for Saturday’s race. I will row that one with an unmeasured heart.

Tomorrow: 5×5’/4′ at 22, 24, 26, 28 and 30spm.

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Apr 1 2017

Friday & Saturday – Storm

Friday

I had to drive to Prague for a few meetings (and a business lunch). The Friday traffic was so bad that I lost an hour on the way back. Also, I had a dinner appointment. Life is hard.

So I just did a 6k in the double. The lake was a bit choppy. It was a very sunny and windy spring day. Temperature around 22 degrees. Trees are starting to blossom.

I saw this guy in the office park in Prague. One of the highlights of the day

Saturday

The plan was to do a 6k on the water. The clever guys of our club did that at 8am, before the wind starts.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make that. I was quite tired after a week of travel, and wanted to sleep in a bit. Also, Iva, one of Romana’s girls who has a chance of rowing a good result next week, had a party on Friday evening, and didn’t want to row early.

The plan was that we do a 2x3km (a 6k with a quick turn). Iva would start 2 minutes ahead of me. I would row 2 minutes behind her and try to catch up.

All kinds of things went wrong:

  1. Having traveled, my heart rate meters and running watches are in the wrong bags. On Friday I rowed without a strap, because I couldn’t get the SpeedCoach to sync with the Tickr. Today, I rowed with the Tickr (the sync problem was just me not getting the English of the SpeedCoach user interface – with more blame to me than to the SpeedCoach) but it was misbehaving, getting stuck on constant values – or perhaps it’s the Tickr/SpeedCoach combo.
  2. There was a strong wind. I set out on my single to check the waves, leaving Iva at the dock. I actually returned and advised her not to row. I didn’t want to be responsible for her rowing in these high waves, and it definitely wouldn’t be a good race prep.
  3. There is a lot of debris in the lake. Branches and pieces of wood taken by the melting snow in the Czech/Moravian highlands.

Sometimes, I don’t take my own advice, so I set out in the single, struggled through the part of the lake with the highest waves, and sailed on a tailwind to behind the castle. By the time I arrived there I had a few cm of water in the boat.

I also had this annoying problem where the Empower Oarlock magnet was slowly rotating. About 10 degrees per 5km. Enough to be visible. (After the row I discovered that the entire pin was rotating. It wasn’t tightened enough. So that was easy to fix.)

At the 6k point I turned around and got ready to row at least the 4k river part at head race pace.

The first 1k was extremely hard headwind. The kind that feels like you row into a wall. Every time I squared my blades, the wind pushed very hard.

After a bit more than 1km, the SpeedCoach lost contact with the Oarlock. It was still showing the oarlock icon to indicate there was a connection, but the power, effective length and work per stroke fields were not updating.

I stopped and reset the SpeedCoach, then continued. After a minute or so of battling into the head wind, the SpeedCoach stopped updating the data from the Oarlock again. This time I decided that I was going to get some training effect and not fuzz around with electronics, so I just continued to row.

There was a point where my cap blew off, so I had to return and grab it from the water.

It wasn’t really a head race preparation row. I couldn’t get above 24spm in the head wind. At some of the points 22spm was the max.

I stopped for a drink just before leaving the gorge and going on the open lake.

During the headwind struggle through the north part of the lake I had a few waves that reached until half way my back. I was completely soaked. The water in my single was up to the top of the seat reals. On every stroke I managed to get some water floating out of the boat, but then a few strokes later a massive wave would go over me and I would be swamped again. As the boat was low in the water with all the extra water, I had even more difficulty rowing. Luckily, a single cannot sink, so I struggled and struggled and just kept going slowly, at 15-17spm, until I reached the dock. The wind was now so strong that I asked help to carry the single back to the boat house.

 

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Mar 30 2017

Dream on, Sander & Rowsberry Pi

How many times have I made this mistake? Many times.

Actually, I was fully aware that I was making this mistake when I made it. But I guess this is how I am wired. I was going to try anyway.

This is the failure mode:

  1. Go on a business trip
  2. Return late in the evening
  3. Have a busy day at work catching up with all the stuff of running a research department
  4. Plan to row an erg test (a 6k this time) in the evening
  5. Fail

Our coach wanted us to row the spring 6k test a week ago, but I was in Racice rowing on the water. This week I was on a business trip. Today I was doing item 3 above, with on top of that a key meeting where I had to announce a major course change to a project team, as well as two technology demonstrations to our CTO. So it was quite a busy day,

Oh, and I hadn’t slept too well. Some stuff related to growing up children that kept me awake. I guess the usual stuff parents go through.

But I still wanted to give the 6k a try (and at the same time record a time for the 5142 meters CTC challenge). So I dialed up a 6k.


Workout Summary - media/20170330-2015100o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|06000|24:10.0|02:00.8|203.8|24.0|163.9|178.0|10.3
W-|06000|24:10.0|02:00.9|201.9|23.9|163.9|178.0|10.4
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|178.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|01500|05:32.6|01:50.9|254.5|26.6|166.2|178.0|10.2
01|01500|06:15.8|02:05.3|187.8|23.8|161.4|178.0|10.1
02|01500|06:09.1|02:03.0|188.0|22.7|163.1|168.0|10.7
03|01500|06:12.7|02:04.2|182.9|22.7|165.0|170.0|10.6

So you can see that I gave up after 2000m and made this an ordinary steady state row.

Well, I guess I will always dream.

Rowsberry Pi

Talking of dreaming. The Rowsberry Pi is going well. I have a quickly hacked version that logs my workouts automatically and sends each workout to a configured email address when you press the Menu button on the PM.

Rowing with the iPhone running Painsled, it was kind of cool to see emails coming in immediately after I pressed the menu button.

This project is now officially Open Source and it lives on Github. One developer has joined me and is doing a fine job of decluttering and refactoring the code.

The end goal should be an easy to use software that you can burn to a microSD disk and use with a Raspberry Pi. The software should be used as a datalogger, and will then be expanded to be much more than that.

Any rowing Software developers skilled in Python out there? Come and join the effort. I guess this is a dream project in a way … so if you like to do things that can’t be done, and you are a rower … come join!

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Mar 29 2017

Wahoo! Hotel room fitness

Tuesday evening: Business dinner. It was quite late when I arrived back in my hotel room. In the morning, I snoozed the alarm and prioritized an additional hour of sleep over a full workout.

Still, I was interested to explore use of my new Wahoo Tickr X heart rate strap in combination with the iPhone and a hotel gym/hotel room.

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First I headed to the gym on the 8th floor. It was very hot in the gym, but I grabbed a treadmill and opened the Wahoo app.

But which app? Wahoo has an entire suite of apps but to me they all seem to be very overlapping in functionality. First I tried “Wahoo Fitness” but I couldn’t even get the app to connect to the Tickr X. It saw the Tickr, but it got stuck on “connecting”. I tried Wahoo RunFit, with the same result.

Only when I stopped recording on my Garmin Forerunner watch, I succeeded in pairing the strap to the phone. That was a bit disappointing. With the SpeedCoach and with CrewNerd, I was able to successfully pair with the phone through Bluetooth and with the Garmin through ANT+.

Now I had the RunFit app open so I continued on the RunFit. I wanted to see the special running metrics that I was promised, stride rate and running smoothness. The values were “–“. Only when I picked up the phone from the treadmill and held it in hand, was I able to get some parameters. Apparently this works with the motion sensors in the phone, not the motion sensors in the strap.

It was very hot and I also wanted to do some strength exercises, so I headed back to the hotel room.

I changed the RunFit app to the “7 minute workout” (again, I struggled a bit with the connection but succeeded in the end), and got started.

But this was fun! I am the type of “athlete” who has no difficulty to run or row for hours, but I do have issues doing circuits or strength training on my own. I need supervision there. The iPhone gave me instructions, and using the motion sensor in the Tickr X counted the number of push-ups, lunges and other exercises. Also, I think the 7 minute circuit is a nice mix of body weight exercises. (The only think you need is a chair). I did the circuit twice, before I had to get ready to go to my meetings. In the second round, the app reminded me of my best effort (from the first round). I really feel the iPhone voice giving instructions and counting the repeats with me was enough “supervision” to get me to do these circuit trainings properly.

What was also neat was a color coding on the phone. The app background was blue if you did the exercise “so-so” and green if you did it better (deeper push-ups, less body movement during plank, etc). I like that.

I was excited to see sharing functionality with Strava in the FitRun app, but unfortunately it only syncs heart rate and time. I was hoping that the number of repeats for the different exercises would at least be captured in the Notes section.

Here are a few screenshots:

The March CTC effort (a full out 5143m on the erg) is at risk of not being done. It will depend on how Thursday goes, but as we have a visit of our CTO, so I have little hope of carving out time and being rested enough to do the CTC.

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