Mar 25 2016
A quick blog between the shower and loading the trailer.
The workout was 45 seconds “on” / 1 minute rest. Again I focused on a “light” catch and a clear, clean tapdown which works wonders to get up the stroke rate. In the final 6 intervals I played a bit with the stroke rate to get down to head race stroke rate.
Took a video but I will not get to processing it before the weekend.
Quite happy with the paces achieved.
Mar 24 2016
Our group is staying in two bungalows at the 1500m mark. The boys are sleeping in one bungalow, and the girls, one trainer and myself in the other bungalow. The boys bungalow is a bit unlucky. On Monday, the first boy got a mild stomach flu, so he stayed in bed on Tuesday. He was better on Wednesday, but then the next guy had the same symptoms.
I went to bed at 10pm on Wednesday evening. Some time between midnight and 1am I woke up because somebody was knocking on the door of our bungalow. It was Lubos, my single sparring partner of this week. He had a terrible, unbearable earache and wanted to see a doctor. So I get my clothes on, found the nearest hospital in the navigation app and we drove to nearby Roudnice nad Labem.
They couldn’t help us there, because they had no ear/nose/throat doctors on the night shift. They explained that by saying they’re a small hospital, and told us to go to Prague or Ústí nad Labem. Both were about a 30 minute drive so I settled on Prague. Bigger city, probably bigger hospital. Lubos was in great pain.
We arrived in Prague and quickly found the night sister on the ENT ward, who woke up the doctor. Otitis Media, was the verdict, probably as a result of a cold. The doctor punctured the ear, which gave immediate relief, and gave Lubos a recipe for antibiotics, which we picked up at the nearby night pharmacy.
We were in and out of the hospital within 30 minutes. Back at the rowing center at 3am. It took me another hour to get to sleep again, and then I slept until 7.
Lubos kept apologizing, but I don’t know what for. He was in great pain and he was helped. It was an interesting excursion and the problem was quickly solved.
Anyway, it means I will have to train alone, because Lubos obviously has to rest. But that’s no problem now. A few more rowing clubs have arrived, including an interesting Swedish group. I chatted with them after the training. They are a mix of national squad members and club rowers who are staying three weeks in Račice. Some of them will compete on the head race in three weeks.
The morning session was 16k of steady state. I made it more interesting by rowing it as 2k intervals with a 1 minute rest, and doing rate ladders 18/20/22/20/18 per 2 minutes.
The afternoon session was 10k of technique. Romana cycled next to me for 2k and I did what she told me to do. Then I repeated that. I stopped after 8k. Good enough.
Perhaps I should have gone to a pub or a night club in Prague. 🙂
Mar 24 2016
Tuesday afternoon. A technique session. I did the whole variety of technique exercises.
Wednesday morning. I looked on the wrong data in my training plan, so instead of a planned steady state session, I did my first ever “ANP” (Anaerobic Power) session. This is one of the four training types from the Olbrecht book. It is supposed to be at >100% of race intensity, short bursts with short rest. The overall training volume is short and it is usually followed by a long, low intensity steady state. That looked quite close to what we rowers do quite frequently, namely “10 strokes on / 10 strokes off”. So I decided to do 4km of 10 strokes on/10 strokes off, followed by steady state. Here is the data:
After that a long teleconference with Brussels. My partners are just one subway stop from the Maelbeek station, so you can imagine the emotions. Everybody is OK, luckily.
I didn’t have to go to Brno, because our Brussels based customer canceled his business trip, for obvious reasons. Being really tired from the intense training, I decided to go and explore the region. Visited the old (12th century) Rotunda church on the legendary mountain Říp (the climb was a 30 minute brisk and steep climb, so I count it as a short recovery session) and visited the town of Mělník.
Mar 24 2016
There is very little distraction here in Račice, so I had some time to play with a python based data analysis tool that Greg Smith (from Quantified Rowing) developed for his Painsled CSV files.
I have slightly rewritten it to better match my workflow (sorry, Greg), but more importantly I have added a TCX Parser that parses my CrewNerd files. It took me some time to get up to speed with parsing XML. First time I worked with the lxml package and I needed to learn the syntax of “xpath”, which was greatly complicated because my network connection broke down on Wednesday morning.
Anyway, I succeeded in writing something that converts a TCX file to a “painsled style” CSV file and here is Tuesday morning’s workout in a first crude graph. I need to smoothen the pace graph (probably by a running average) a bit to get the noise level down. Also, I need to calculate useful stuff like meters per stroke etc. The colorful bar graph produces some strange red spikes during the interval part. Not sure what that is.
But for that I am on common ground. No problems to work with the data once I have them.
Update
The moving average thing took me 5 minutes. Updated graph:
Mar 22 2016
Here’s an overview picture of the area around the watersports center in Račice. 
In the foreground you can see the river Elbe. In the top middle of the picture there is a funnily shaped mountain, the legendary mountain Říp:
According to a traditional legend, first recorded by the ancient Czech chronicler Cosmas of Prague in the early 12th century, Říp was the place where the first Slavs, led by Forefather Čech, settled. The land was named after the leader. In the 16th century, the legend was revived by Václav Hájek of Libočany who claimed that Čech was buried in the nearby village of Ctiněves and, later on, by Alois Jirásek in his Old Bohemian Legends from 1894.
On top of the hill there is a romanesque rotunda of Saint George, which is one of the oldest buildings in the Czech Republic. It is for the first time mentioned in 1126, when Soběslav I, Duke of Bohemia to commemorate his victorious Battle of Chlumec where he defeated Holy Roman Emperor Lothair III, have rotunda repaired and extended by the western circular tower. The present appearance of the rotunda is the result of a purist reconstruction from the 1870s. Inside the rotunda, there is a stone sculpture by the renowned contemporary Czech artist Stanislav Hanzík (1979) – The Good Shepherd, that symbolizes the arrival of Czech ancestors to the country and the beginning of the Czech history there.
Near the rotunda there is a tourist hut that was built in 1907 that still serves travellers today. In accordance with the patriotic spirit of the time, a wooden plate is mounted on the hut wall that says “What Mecca is to a Mohammedan, Říp is to a Czech” (Czech: “Co Mohamedu Mekka, to Čechu Říp”).
As you can see, the canal is in a turn of the river, quite a dead end, so there is nothing here except for the rowing center. Silence. The only thing you hear is the birds sing and the sounds of rowing: splashing and coaches shouting instructions. Our accomodation is spartan, but clean. No radio. No TV. So it’s just rowing, meals, and work … True living like a Monk. After breakfast I worked for two hours, then I went for my morning training, followed by work, lunch. Now I am writing this. In the afternoon I will go on a technique outing. Followed by dinner, then quiet reading … and bed time.
The training of this morning was 20×30″/60″ rest. Given the 2km length of the canal, there has to be a slightly longer break for turning the boat after every 6 or 7 intervals. Lubos and I decided to do 3x2km as 30″/60″ rest.
Again, side by side in singles. It’s really great. Again, Lubos was surprised that this Masters rower was able to keep up with him. I was doing 30-34spm and he was significantly higher.
Another CrewNerd/excel tool annoyance. I had programmed 30″/60″ intervals. Of course, at the end of the straight 2km, I had to press “stop” to allow for more time to turn the boat. It looks like the heart rate remains constant during that rest interval. Well, I can use a few hours in my rowing monastery to migrate to a python based environment to create nice tables. For now, here’s the plot from the Garmin:
So in the end we did 19 intervals. The last interval was a shorter one, because we were approaching the finish line. So we did “red buoys until finish line” which was about 20 seconds. I like this workout. The interval is 15 to 17 strokes, which is long enough to focus on technique. The rests are long enough to recover and keep the focus on technique, which for me, at these rates, is “light” touch, don’t force it in the water.
The sprinty stuff was followed by 4km of cooling down. Almost 13km in total. Three “swimming pools” plus a few extra meters rowing from lane 1 to lane 6 and back, and between the finish line and the docks.
| Tstart_ | Tstop__ | Dist_ | Time_ | Pace__ | _SPM | avg HR | max HR | DPS | Remarks
| 00:00.0 | 13:49.0 | 02195 | 13:49 | 03:08.8 | 18.8 | 143 | 165 | 08.5 | WU
| 13:49.0 | 14:19.0 | 00132 | 00:30 | 01:53.9 | 31.3 | 137 | 161 | 08.4 | tailwind
| 14:19.0 | 15:19.0 | 00205 | 01:00 | 02:26.1 | 19.8 | 159 | 164 | 10.4 |
| 15:19.0 | 15:49.0 | 00133 | 00:30 | 01:52.7 | 30.5 | 163 | 169 | 08.7 |
| 15:49.0 | 16:49.0 | 00200 | 01:00 | 02:29.7 | 19.5 | 164 | 171 | 10.3 |
| 16:49.0 | 17:19.0 | 00133 | 00:30 | 01:52.7 | 31.4 | 165 | 172 | 08.5 |
| 17:19.0 | 18:19.0 | 00199 | 01:00 | 02:30.8 | 19.8 | 167 | 174 | 10.1 |
| 18:19.0 | 18:49.0 | 00134 | 00:30 | 01:52.3 | 31.6 | 167 | 172 | 08.5 |
| 18:49.0 | 19:49.0 | 00197 | 01:00 | 02:32.3 | 19.1 | 168 | 174 | 10.3 |
| 19:49.0 | 20:19.0 | 00134 | 00:30 | 01:52.3 | 31.8 | 168 | 173 | 08.4 |
| 20:19.0 | 21:19.0 | 00188 | 01:00 | 02:39.6 | 18.7 | 166 | 174 | 10.0 |
| 21:19.0 | 21:49.0 | 00133 | 00:30 | 01:52.9 | 31.3 | 167 | 174 | 08.5 |
| 21:49.0 | 24:38.0 | 00337 | 02:49 | 04:10.5 | 19.2 | 160 | 175 | 06.2 | turn
| 24:38.0 | 25:08.0 | 00122 | 00:30 | 02:03.3 | 30.2 | 153 | 166 | 08.1 | headwind
| 25:08.0 | 26:08.0 | 00170 | 01:00 | 02:56.1 | 18.7 | 163 | 168 | 09.1 |
| 26:08.0 | 26:38.0 | 00122 | 00:30 | 02:03.3 | 30.3 | 166 | 173 | 08.0 |
| 26:38.0 | 27:38.0 | 00171 | 01:00 | 02:54.9 | 18.5 | 167 | 175 | 09.3 |
| 27:38.0 | 28:08.0 | 00119 | 00:30 | 02:06.5 | 29.8 | 167 | 172 | 08.0 |
| 28:08.0 | 29:08.0 | 00182 | 01:00 | 02:44.5 | 19.4 | 168 | 173 | 09.4 |
| 29:08.0 | 29:38.0 | 00124 | 00:30 | 02:00.5 | 30.1 | 169 | 174 | 08.3 |
| 29:38.0 | 30:38.0 | 00173 | 01:00 | 02:53.9 | 19.0 | 169 | 175 | 09.1 |
| 30:38.0 | 31:08.0 | 00126 | 00:30 | 01:59.4 | 30.4 | 169 | 174 | 08.3 |
| 31:08.0 | 32:08.0 | 00169 | 01:00 | 02:57.6 | 19.5 | 170 | 176 | 08.7 |
| 32:08.0 | 32:38.0 | 00122 | 00:30 | 02:03.3 | 30.5 | 170 | 175 | 08.0 |
| 32:38.0 | 36:25.0 | 00324 | 03:47 | 05:49.8 | 22.0 | 164 | 177 | 03.9 | turn
| 36:25.0 | 36:55.0 | 00129 | 00:30 | 01:56.2 | 34.5 | 140 | 163 | 07.5 | tailwind
| 36:55.0 | 37:55.0 | 00197 | 01:00 | 02:32.1 | 19.7 | 163 | 166 | 10.0 |
| 37:55.0 | 38:25.0 | 00136 | 00:30 | 01:50.0 | 32.8 | 168 | 174 | 08.3 |
| 38:25.0 | 39:25.0 | 00191 | 01:00 | 02:37.0 | 19.4 | 170 | 176 | 09.8 |
| 39:25.0 | 39:55.0 | 00132 | 00:30 | 01:53.6 | 31.4 | 170 | 175 | 08.4 |
| 39:55.0 | 40:55.0 | 00186 | 01:00 | 02:41.0 | 18.8 | 170 | 177 | 09.9 |
| 40:55.0 | 41:25.0 | 00133 | 00:30 | 01:53.1 | 31.4 | 167 | 174 | 08.4 |
| 41:25.0 | 42:25.0 | 00181 | 01:00 | 02:46.1 | 18.9 | 169 | 175 | 09.6 |
| 42:25.0 | 42:55.0 | 00132 | 00:30 | 01:53.3 | 31.0 | 167 | 174 | 08.5 |
| 42:55.0 | 43:55.0 | 00188 | 01:00 | 02:39.9 | 20.0 | 170 | 176 | 09.4 |
| 43:55.0 | 44:25.0 | 00135 | 00:30 | 01:50.7 | 32.8 | 171 | 177 | 08.3 |
| 44:25.0 | 45:25.0 | 00180 | 01:00 | 02:46.6 | 20.1 | 172 | 178 | 09.0 |
| 45:25.0 | 45:55.0 | 00112 | 00:30 | 02:13.9 | 29.9 | 173 | 177 | 07.5 |
| 45:55.0 | 10:03.0 | 04295 | 24:08 | 02:48.6 | 19.2 | 148 | 177 | 09.3 | cooling down
Summary:
dist_____|time_____|_pace___|_HR__|_SPM__|_DPS|comment
2195_____|_13:49____|_3:08.8|143|18.8|8.5|warmup
2441_____|_09:30____|_1:56.7|164|31.2|8.2|Main set
4295_____|_24:08____|_2:48.6|148|19.2|9.3|Cool down
3640_____|_22:36____|_3:06.3|166|19.7|8.3|rest meters
12572____|_10:03____|_2:47.2|155|19.8|9.1|_Total
At lunch I heard about the horrible stuff that happened in Brussels today. Metro station Maalbeek and the airport are places that I travel through numerous times per year. I do hope that none of the people I work with was on that metro or in that arrival hall. Here in Račice, the birds sing on in the silent woods.
Mar 21 2016
The drive to Račice was uneventful, as it should be. A bit more than 280km. Of course the famous Czech highway D1 with it’s concrete panels made me slow down a bit. Luckily they are working on the road and the segments with panels are fewer and fewer.
Mini pictures from the event and Lenka’s afternoon training:
It was a cold 8 degrees C. We’re not training here for the nice weather. We’re here because there are fewer choppy days than in Brno, because coaches can conveniently ride a bike next to the rower instead of having to steer a launch, and rowers can nicely row in lanes and don’t have to worry about oncoming traffic.
And I am here because I am the trailer tow car driver. And because I sort of took a week off to be with the kids. Sort of. Need to be back in Brno on Wednesday afternoon and Tuesday morning, to take care of some work related business.
I did a 4x2km row, together with Lubos. He’s pulls a 6:34 erg and is a first year senior rower. I am a 42 year old slow Masters rower. Still, I managed to get him tired on this 4x2km, which we rowed in 25/26 spm.
|Dist_|Time_|Pace__|_SPM__|avg HR|max HR|DPS|Remarks
|02221|15:41|03:31.8| 18.6 | 135 | 166 |07.6|WU
|02000|08:28|02:07.0| 24.9 | 167 | 175 |09.5|2k tailwind
|00124|01:59|07:58.8| 16.6 | 148 | 174 |03.8|rest
|01999|09:24|02:21.1| 24.9 | 173 | 179 |08.5|2k headwind
|00139|01:59|07:07.7| 17.0 | 158 | 178 |04.1|rest
|01999|08:38|02:09.5| 25.2 | 173 | 179 |09.2|2k tailwind
|00143|01:58|06:53.3| 15.9 | 153 | 177 |04.6|rest
|01999|09:28|02:22.1| 26.3 | 174 | 178 |08.0|2k headwind
|02176|14:09|03:15.1| 17.1 | 137 | 178 |09.0|CD
Summary:
dist_____|time_____|_pace___|_HR__|_SPM__|_DPS|comment
2221_____|_15:41____|_3:31.8|135|18.6|7.6|warmup
7997_____|_35:58____|_2:14.9|172|25.3|8.8|Main set
2176_____|_14:09____|_3:15.1|137|17.1|9.0|Cool down
0406_____|_05:56____|_7:18.3|153|16.5|4.2|rest meters
12800____|_11:44____|_2:48.1|156|21.0|8.5|_Total
The wind was quite strong, but there was relatively mild chop, especially when compared to our home lake.
At 4pm, a meeting notice jumped up on my iphone screen. I didn’t want to stop to click it away, because I was happily (well – slightly out of breath) rowing next to Lubos. Here’s the Garmin plot, because I want my readers to see the final push in the fourth interval:
I was rowing well. Romana commented only that my blades are slightly too deep, so I tried to work on that. Otherwise the stroke rate was light and easy to hold. My heart rate was high but sustainable. A good workout.
Oh, and Strava thinks the rowing canal is a meadow:
Mar 26 2016
Back home: 2x3km and easter traditions
The trip home was uneventful, luckily. Here’s a picture of our trailer ready to hit the road.
Before we left, I took a final picture of the canal. Empty because of lunch time.
We had become used to the mirror flat water. We were spoiled.
Today’s training was a 2x3km “at head race pace”. After a full week of rowing, I am looking forward to Monday’s rest day, but this one had to be accomplished.
We headed to the rowing club, prepared the boats, and headed for the water. Romana and the girls took it to the castle, to avoid the chop. I hesitated, but then I decided I would row on the choppy lake.
The goal was to row a 2:13 or faster average and at least 27spm. I didn’t manage to row higher than 26spm in the first 3km (tailwind). In the heavy chop the stroke rate went down and I couldn’t even get my heart rate up.
A two minutes rest and then battling into the headwind. I had done the tailwind section in 2:08 pace, so I didn’t want to be slower than 2:18 in the headwind, and I had to work hard to achieve that. Still, I am glad I gave myself that pace target, because it gave me an incentive to keep going, even on tired legs. Even managed to get the stroke rate up to a decent 28/29 spm in the final 1000m (counting strokes).
Oh, how we’ve been spoiled on the mirror flat water in Račice. I will upload a video soon to show you.
Here’s the same picture, but instead of distance I have time on the horizontal axis.
In the cooling down I started to accelerate because I wanted to stay ahead of Romana and Lenka in a double.
After the session, I went to our lake shore with the boys to collect young willow branches.
On Monday, we will celebrate a special local Easter tradition.
You can buy the whips in the supermarket, but the idea of course is to make them yourself. This is the idea:
Our end results were quite good. Actually better than this picture, because we did the handle part from willow branch and not with tape. The boys did most of the work themselves.
Tomorrow, I will do a nice outing in the double with Romana. Then we’ll switch on the TV in the club house and watch The Boat Race.
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: OTW, rowing, single, training