Oct 30 2016
The Octuple
Saturday
A rest day after a quite intensive week. We visited one of the caves in the Moravian Karst (basically the hills starting at the end of our street, where I do most of my running). The Moravian Karst, a small region of 25x4km, has more than 1100 caves, of which 5 are accessible for non-speleologists. The others are either closed for humans or only accessible for professional speleologists.
This was one of those easy and comfortable cave visits with a guide. Still it was impressive.
Sunday
The training plan called for running, and I really should start to do more running. There is a 10k on 17th November that I want to participate in.
But today there was a better idea. We managed to get eight people together to row in our club’s Octuple, a sculling eight. There was strong wind and quite a bit of chop, so despite the fact that our coxswain didn’t show up, we decided to go into the gorge towards the castle and back. We fixated the rudder and took off without a coxswain, turning the boat into a coxless octuple, or, in rowers’ shorthand: the “8x-“.
It was an interesting experience. Of course the maneuvering of the boat was difficult, and in a few of the river’s sharp turns we had to row half slide strokes and even stop to turn the boat.
I stroked the beast, so my view was not very different from rowing in the single.
https://www.strava.com/activities/760435132/segments/18626169771
Somebody took a picture, but he hasn’t posted it yet, so I have no images of this fun outing, except for the heart rate plot from rowsandall.com:
Nov 1 2016
Tuesday – 60 minutes Steady State and Stroke Metrics
Steady State was on the menu, and in a lighter form, because this is an easy week. On my commute, I read Greg Smith’s blog about his 4×20’/1′ rest plus stroke metrics session, so I tried to show exactly the same stroke metrics plots for my 60 minutes row. I didn’t take exact 1 minute breaks, but rowed a “Just Row” and took small drinking breaks. Also, I had to interrupt my row a few times (esp in the first 10 minutes) to fiddle with the radio.
My steady state rowing is not at “10 Watt per SPM”, but roughly 15 Watts below that, so at 18SPM, I row 165-170W, etc.
Power versus stroke rate:
My plot is a bit more fuzzy than Greg’s. I seem to be driven to 19SPM at these power levels. 19SPM is like a magnet, and I lacked the concentration to try and hit the prescribed stroke rates better.
Drive length:
On this parameter, I seem to be more constant and in a narrower band than Greg. Now, a metric where I will be significantly weaker. Peak and Average Force:
Interestingly, my average force is much closer to Greg’s than my peak force. A slightly negative correlation, although not as strong as on Greg’s plot. This may be something to do with drag factor and average flywheel speed as well.
Finally, Work per Stroke:
Again, the plot is strongly influenced by me gravitating towards 19spm. This was also one of my rows where I was hitting a higher Work per Stroke than on average. Here is a plot of my rows for the month October:
Here
I have capped the data at 23SPM to filter out the hard distance rows. Here is the same plot with today’s data included:
To the left, and upward!
It was fun to do this. As the author of rowsandall.com, I spend more time programming additions to the site than using it for data analysis. And when I do use it for analysis, I can’t help but think of the way the data are flowing through the different pipes and filters:
There are still many good ideas to implement on the site, so the work is not done!
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 2 Comments • Tags: concept2, erg, metrics, OTE, rowing, steady state