Feb 23 2017
Power at 17spm
Today’s workout was another interesting one:
5x(6x15strokes on / 10 strokes off)/5 minutes rest. Drag 145. Stroke rate 17spm
My Masters team mates warned that this is a “very heavy” workout. So after another long day at work, I went down to my erg cave. Tired, but curious.
I did a 1500m light warming up without any fast strokes. Then set the drag to 145 and started a “Just Row”.
After the first interval I took a piece of paper and wrote down a row of numbers 1 to 5 and another row of numbers 1 to 6. Then I took two coins and placed one on the 1 in the top row and the other one next to the 1 on the bottom row.
After each 15 strokes “on”, I moved the bottom coin to the next number.
The only way for me to count the number of intervals and sets. Counting to 15 and 10 was hard enough.
Here are some stroke stats:
Pace-wise, I paddled the 10 strokes at a very light pace, and the “on” strokes got down to 1:54, but usually were between 1:56 and 1:58. It took about 10 strokes in each set to get below 2:00 pace.
It wasn’t very hard, and I was surprised how fast the first 10km passed. Perhaps I was doing something wrong? Perhaps I should pull harder?
Doing the flex charts I made an interesting discovery. The average/peak force was unusually high for me. Normally it is around 0.56 or 0.57. Today it was significantly higher at 0.62. Most of the following plots are made on rowsandall.com by selecting only the strokes below 18spm:
Not sure about this workout. Let’s see. Either I did it wrong, or I wake up tomorrow with a 10% increase in leg strength.
Feb 25 2017
Friday – cycling / Saturday – planning
Friday
Cycled to work and cycled back.
Strong headwind in the afternoon (and a slight tailwind in the morning).
I also installed PyRow on a Raspberry Pi and rowed 100m on the Concept2 erg to test it. It worked flawlessly through the USB interface and a short CSV file was the result. So I have another small project, to adapt PyRow to record more metrics and produce a CSV file compatible with Rowsandall.com. If I get them interested, I want to involve my sons in the project. The Pi is ideal to show how a computer is built, and how computers communicate.
PyRow also shows the strength of open source. I was up and running in 15 minutes, and I have plenty of ideas to implement, which will flow back to the original PyRow, and thus can be of use to many other people.
Well, so far it’s just ideas.
Saturday
Also just an idea, so far, is the following:
Today we had our annual member’s meeting at the rowing club. My club, CVK Brno, has two locations. The lake venue is where we have most of our boats, the club house, the erg room, and where we train.
We also own the original venue on the Svratka river, a few kilometers downstream from the lake. There is the original club house, which is now rented to an outdoor clothes store, and a few old hangars. In the summer, we rent the garden to a company that commercially exploits dragon boats.
The entire area around the river is interesting. There are a few rowing and canoe club houses (some of them abandoned). One of the main ring roads, a tram line and the river fight for space:
The city council is now making serious plans to revitalize the whole area, and the club has to decide whether to hop on this boat or not. Here is one of the plans, putting the traffic and the tram partly in a tunnel. Our club house is in the top of the image, before the bend in the river.
Here is a visualization seen from the north, with our club house among the other historic club houses to the left of the small bridge in front of the picture.
This is how the road and tram are almost pushing into the river today. The river is on the right. The road is too narrow and is one of the main problem points with long traffic jams every day, so it has to be widened, but between the river and the hill there is almost no place. So that is why they are talking about a tunnel.
One of our ideas is to renovate the old club house, depicted below on an old photo, and turn it into our main place to do land training. There would be a gym with ergs, bike trainers, and treadmills.
Talking of old club houses, next to our club house is an even older rowing club house, which is now abandoned.
The picture is from the early 20th century, and now the building looks like this:
Not a very good shape, but this building is under monument’s protection, and one of the ideas is to make it into a small museum about rowing.
All of this are really plans for the coming 5-10 years, and they are just visions, and nobody knows what is really possible, but if we make the wrong decision now, we may not be part of the planning, and an opportunity may be lost.
Actually, tomorrow I plan to row from this location.
The lake is still frozen and it looks like it will take another month before the last ice is gone. So this morning I mounted my new Empower Oarlock and did all the calibrations, and then I prepared the single on the trailer. Tomorrow, I plan to move the single to our river venue and row from there, until the ice thaws on our lake.
By the way, the mounting and calibration of the oarlock too no more than 30 minutes, and I had to check on the great YouTube instruction video only once.
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 13 Comments • Tags: cycling, OTW, rowing, training