Rowsandall

Feb 7 2016

Sunday Steady State: 2x30min

The plan was 4x20min. The plan was also 9 hours of exercise this week. I am 60 minutes behind the plan.

Still, I decided to just do 2x30min. There were 2 half hour sessions planned on RowPro which I rowed. I need the company to get motivated. Somehow doing 4x20min solo doesn’t appeal to me in this part of the season.

Rowed the two intervals as Wolverine Plan L4 intervals to survive the boredom, doing 20spm, 22spm, and 24spm. Definitely lower than the 200W today. This has to be a light training. After 2x30min at 185W, I measured Lactate at 1.5 mmol/L. If I had ventured above 200W, I would definitely be at too high lactates.

OTW for next weekend is starting to materialize. We have to repair the dock on our river club site, and transport a few boats, which is a 10 minute drive with the trailer. Judging from text message today, there seems to be enough people who want to row, so I think we can organize the transport and repair works for Friday, and row OTW for 3 days.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 1 • Tags: concept2, erg, OTE, rowing, steady state, training

Feb 6 2016

Hill Run

Today I was responsible for the girl’s training again. It’s fun to do. Romana had a running training planned for them, but gave me explicit instructions to do “something else”, to spice up the training a bit.

No problem.

I asked them if they would like to row in the front, and promised them an “unforgettable” training.

The session is not so hard, but the anticipation makes it epic. There is certainly a quite strong mental edge to this run. Luckily, it is in very beautiful nature.

From the rowing club you run 1km, with some warming up exercises. Then some stretching. And then you run up the hill to Rozdrojovice. It’s about 1.5km but the average grade is more than 10%, with sections that are above 20%. For the girls, who didn’t know this route, it may have seemed endless, but they battled their way to the top.

On the top, we turned left, on a dirt path that drops back to the lake again. Some places are quite steep. We basically ran fartlek, slowly first to get the heart rate down, then slow and fast as the terrain allowed.

You pass places with a certain “genius loci”, like this owl spring with nice fresh water, which was a good stop on the way back up. On the way down the girls were moaning constantly. “Ooooh, we have to run up this hill.”

At the lake, we turned around and did the hill in intervals. We would run for 2-3 minutes, then walk until the girls heart rates had dropped back to 150 bpm. It’s amazing how they go above 200 bpm easily.

I felt a bit like a slave driver, but I think the uphill part was less intense than the girls feared. The water from the spring tasted wonderfully fresh.

All the time the sun was shining, birds were singing, dogs were barking. In summary, a very nice run.

https://www.strava.com/activities/487036643

This is what we did:

This is how the girls talked about it afterwards:

They were proud they did it and perhaps we will do it again. It’s a nice session and I do believe it helps you row faster.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 2 • Tags: hill run, running, training

Feb 5 2016

Sprintervals Friday

I did this workout on January 15 and it is my evolution of 20x1min on / 1 min off. I used painsled and the PM3 and rowed with the January 16 row as a pace boat. The goal was to beat the pace boat every time, as well as do every fourth one full out. The fun part was that I didn’t remember the paces from last time. During the first few strokes of each interval, I looked at the pace boat pace, then tried to row each stroke one second faster. So, if the pace boat was at 1:43.5, I would row a series of 1:42 strokes.

So I did it, but intervals 17 to 20 were hard.

All good. Tomorrow, a running training with the girls. Thinking of adding some hill fartlek to the mix.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 2 • Tags: concept2, erg, OTE, rowing, sprintervals, training

Feb 4 2016

3x20min and longing for water

Took an easy day today. I had some stuff to do in Jundrov, so I left the office around lunch time.

Jundrov is the part of town where our “river” club house is. I had some time before my next appointment, so I walked along the river for 15 minutes.

It’s a nice stretch of river, about 2.5km is rowable. I bit narrow and there are many turns, but in contrast to our lake it isn’t frozen.

Our club house is on the lower left of this picture. I could store my single there for a few weeks but it would have to be outside. The club house is OK, but the boat house has a bad roof and is generally in bad shape. Actually, before the winter we took all the old boats to the lake to conserve them in case the boat house would fall in a winter storm. So I would have to store my single outside, and I am really not comfortable with that. Perhaps I could do it in a weekend, just have a few boats there for 3 or 4 trainings over 2 or 3 days.

Then I went to the lake location of our rowing club to row my 3x20min. I just had enough of doing it in my basement. Wanted to see some people, hear the gossip, and work out in the club erg room. I put the erg on sliders and it was nice.

Still, the winter is really long. Now, when the weather turns almost to spring, the longing for real rowing is strong. In a few days, the winter may come back though.

https://www.strava.com/activities/485889133

After that, Romana and I went to the cinema. There was a nice Polish movie Ida. Beautifully filmed and a moving story.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 2 • Tags: concept2, erg, OTE, rowing, steady state, training

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Feb 1 2016

February CTC test – fail

Perhaps I should have scheduled a rest day but this week’s work schedule works out better if I take the rest day on Wednesday. So I planned the Pete Plan waterfall for today.

Then I checked what this month’s CTC is: A 3x7min at 5 minutes rest, with standing starts. Decided to do that one. It’s shorter. 🙂 But, I don’t like time based intervals. 🙁

I wanted to try 1:49.0 pace but it was hard from rep 1. I managed 1925m so I decided to copy that for rep 2 and then max out in rep 3. I was naive. I managed rep 2 but it was harder than rep 1. Then I missed the start of rep 2 by 2 seconds, so I was looking at lousy average pace which I slowly tried to get back to 1:49.0.

Thousand meters into the third rep I almost HD’ed, then dropped pace to 1:55-1:58 for 600m, only to take it up again in the last minute to at least get the distance over 1900m.

Unfortunately, my notebook went into sleep mode during the second rep. The reason, I discovered later, was that I didn’t push the plug into the power socket deep enough.

Here’s the data I have.

Some more pictures have surfaced from the race.

Also, the Czech rowing site Veslo.cz published an interview with our recordman Jiri Pfeifer:

I translate a few interesting bits:

How did the race go?

“The race in Pardubice went according to expectations. After a relatively fast 500m I found myself in second place behind Jan Vesecky, who started in a younger age category, so no stress. I tried to hold an average of 1:35, which I succeeded in at a stroke rate of 28-29spm. I expected that at this pace I would gradually come closer to Jan, just as in the December race in Hostivice. At the start of the last 500m my average pace was 1:35.2, and I thought: You cannot spoil such a well opened race. I tried to ignore the pain and only concentrated at getting the average pace under 1:35. I felt tired from Tuesday, but I tried not to think abouot that. In the end it was more a question of willpower than fitness. In Hostivice, I didn’t know I could row 6:20.5, but now I really wanted to go under 6:20.

Your time was indeed faster than the 6:20.5 that you mentioned. Then, your time could not be an official record because of your birth year (1966). So did you look for a revanche? You must have been disappointed in December.

Yes, I was disappointed in December, because I was allowed to start in the 50-59 age class. I had no idea that I would not qualify for a record. If I had started in the 40-49 age category, then I would know I could not change the record (5:46.1 by Vaclav Chalupa).

[…]

My record will surely fall soon. Next year, Vaclav Chalupa will be 50, and we shouldn’t forget the president of the Czech Rowing Association, Dusan Machacek, who is also from 1966 and will definitely try to break my record.

[…]

What is your profession? Do you have other hobbies?

I own a transport company. I have no time for other hobbies. I train in the morning, then quickly to work, and if I don’t come home too late, I do another training before going to bed.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 2 • Tags: concept2, ctc, erg, L2, OTE, rowing, training

Jan 31 2016

3x20min with a big grin

After yesterday’s race I drove to a “vinoteka” to buy some bubbles to celebrate. I got a Riesling sekt made by a winery about 25km south of Brno, who, in contrast to the big Sekt brands, use the bottle fermentation process. Nice wine to celebrate a PB.

This morning we drove home from Pardubice. I enjoyed the pleasure of updating my nonathlon 2k score (+2 points, yay!), sending a PB notice to the Free Spirits board and entering my score on the concept2 site. Sure I am going to enjoy every minute of a new 2k PB.

During today’s 3x20min row I kept bringing back to mind moments from yesterday. Like this nice fight between two guys in one of the Junior’s heat. With 500m to go the guy on the right is leading. The one on the left wins, though. I filmed them for 30 seconds, then I stopped and just watched the fight. The guy on the left gets his virtual bow ball in front of the other guy with 3 strokes to go.

Today I did a 3x20min, using Painsled to capture the data. It turned out to be a “Watts come easy” day and I had no trouble to hold the score above 200W. In fact, I tried to row 5000m exactly for each 20 min interval. I guess positive race experiences also helped, because in the end I measured 2.0 mmol/L lactate after the 3rd interval.

Average heart rate 165 bpm. Stroke rate between 21 and 23 spm. Distance covered 15001m (5000, 5001, 5000).

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 1 • Tags: concept2, erg, OTE, rowing, steady state, training

Jan 30 2016

Pardubice – 3rd round Czech Indoor Rowing Cup

This weekend, Romana’s brother, my brother-in-law Tomas, organized the 3rd round of the Czech Indoor Rowing Cup.

It was the first time he organizes an erg regatta, so you can imagine the nerves. As Romana’s girls were starting early, we arrived on time. Early enough to catch a bit of nature almost in the middle of the town:

The race was ready to be started. First races were the adaptive categories. They were also the test case. There were some delays because the printer didn’t work, and the jury was a bit slow in figuring out the winners in the various adaptive categories, but in the end all was well and winners could be decorated.

tomas — Tomas nervous before the start of the race

zdravotnik — First aid guy – later on the day he would get scared as hell seeing people faint after their race

race1 — Race erg ready. We had to put one black Concept2 among 11 gray ones

The sports center was much newer and nicer than in Neratovice, and the changing rooms and toilets were perfect. On the downside, the air was much much dryer. Some rowers are sensitive to this, and not everyone was able to show his or her best performance.

CVK Brno girls arriving at venue:

Then it was time for the girls 15/16 to row. Lenka rowed 5 seconds slower than her PB, and Iva 10 seconds. Lenka has been ill so I consider it a good row. Iva was super nervous and still wants to row below 8 minutes, but the nervousness actually makes her slower.

Lenka after the race:

Some random shots from other races throughout the day:

Klara, rowing in the 17/18 age group, was rowing her very first erg race. She started rowing in September and managed a good 8:26.

Then it was time for me to change clothes and get ready for my race. I did a 6k Fletcher-style warming up. Then it was time for the main event.

Big focus on Jiri Pfeiffer, from my rowing club, who wanted to beat the Czech record for the 50-59 year age category.

I wanted to be faster than in Neratovice but didn’t know if I had it in me. Also quite nervous about the higher temperatures and dry air.

Went out with ten hard strokes and saw 1:39 when I opened my eyes. Immediately back to 1:44-1:45 pace which I had no trouble holding in the first 500m. Saw the occasional 1:46, but mostly solid 1:44 and 1:45. Second 500m was no different. I even mixed in a few 1:43s. With 1000m to go I did ten hard strokes, which turned out to be 1:42-1:43, but then I got into trouble. I saw more and more 1:46 and Romana behind me had to cheer quite a lot to get me back to 1:44-1:45 pace. With 600m to go I had to count strokes. Then with 500m to go I started counting again. With 250m to go I finally got over the hard bit and started to wind it in. My average pace at that point had dropped from 1:44.0 to 1:44.2. Rating up and even pulling 1:41 and 1:40 strokes, I managed to get it down to 1:40.0 with 5 strokes to go. I pulled as hard as I can and prayed I could see the average pace drop even more, and in the 2 final strokes I saw 1:43.9 average pace.

A new PB of 6:55.6. My splits were 1:44.0/1:44.0/1:44.6/1:43.0. Here are the official results:

Pretty good race. I beat only 2 guys in my heat of 9, but who cares. Another PB!

Jiri Pfeiffer did set a new 50-59 Czech Record in a PB of 6:19.8. In my age group I got beaten badly by Vesecky and Nevrala. Funny, I beat Nevrala in the single and Romana and I beat him and his partner (who won one of the Masters Women races) in the mixed double by 2 lengths. 🙂

Anyway, a third place is a podium place, and even though there are scores of people who beat me in this, I thoroughly enjoyed getting a medal, a kiss from the young lady on the left, and some other goodies:

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 7 • Tags: 2km, erg, OTE, PB, race, rowing

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Sunday Steady State: 2x30min

Hill Run

Sprintervals Friday

3x20min and longing for water

February CTC test – fail

3x20min with a big grin

Pardubice – 3rd round Czech Indoor Rowing Cup

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