Jan 29 2016
6×10 min, treadmill, elliptical, pedaling, treadmill, elliptical, pedaling.
Boring as hell. Watched the traffic jams at the intersection of Waterloo and Louise from the 23rd floor.
Sweaty business.
I didn’t leave the building but the Garmin thought otherwise. Le Confucius on the map is where I had dinner last night. Excellent Chinese food.
Jan 28 2016
Back in the hotel relatively early after a day full of 30 minute meetings at various places in Brussels’ European quarters.
The schedule asked for sprint workouts and I was wondering how to do them. In summer I would find a hill or stairs in Brussels to run on, but traveling light in winter means that you are stuck to indoor exercising in the hotel gym.
Then I realized that my hotel has 26 floors.
So, I did:
I started the watch five minutes into the warming up.
The stairs running was interesting. There are three emergency stairways in the hotel, one at each end of the corridor and one in the middle. The middle one is really a metal cage hanging on the side of the building, wind blowing through it. It also has these metal staircases with holes in it.
I am not so brave with heights, so this was bad.
Luckily the ones on the front and back end of the building were completely inside. You can imagine how this looks. Concrete and pipes. Dust. Cigarette butts. No need to say more. The five floors up / five floors down routine turned out to be quite close to 30″ active / 60″ rest. First set between floors 10 and 15, second set between floors 18 and 23 (cleaner) and the final set was a special one, all the way from the ground floor to the 25th floor, with 30″ passive rest instead of running down stairs. 
The other people in the gym were quite surprised when I entered the gym through its emergency exit.
Tomorrow: steady state in hotel gym. Fly to Prague.
Jan 27 2016
Tuesday
Fly to Brussels and a late dinner with a customer.
Wednesday
Putting together a set of important documents to be delivered in Brussels, deadline Thursday 11AM.
We delivered it today at 3PM. The biggest panic was the search for the stamp with the word “ORIGINAL”. The fun part was the initialing of each and every page of the original:
After that the work was done and as everything went smoothly and I didn’t have any more meetings, it was time to get back to the hotel and do a workout.
This hotel has a nice fitness on the 23rd floor, with a view on the inner ring road.
Did a mini hotel gym triathlon (threadmill, ellyptical, bicycle 10 minutes each) and then a weights workout. I chose the weights such that 5 repeats was a challenge and did 3 sets of 5 on each station.
Tomorrow: Meetings meetings meetings, then figuring out how to do a sprinterval workout in a hotel gym.
Jan 25 2016
The 5k isn’t a distance I row frequently. I live in a country where all the endurance tests are a 6k. There is always more reason to do a 6k, and the 5k seems too close to do a separate attempt. One could then also do a 7k or a 4k or a 3245m row and keep records of personal best times.
But the 5k is on the list of nonathlon events, so once a winter I row it. And because it is this month’s Cross Team Challenge, I had to do it in January. And because I will be out of town for business for the rest of the week, I had to do it today.
I wasn’t sure about the strategy. My PB was 18:26 and I feel I can go faster. On the other hand, I spent a lot of time snow shoveling and speed skating over the weekend, so I guess my reserves are quite depleted. I decided to aim for a PB anyway, and the plan was to negative split to something between 18:16 and 18:26.
I set up pace boats at 1:50 pace (18:20), 1:51 (18:30) and a final, slow one at 1:52 pace (18:40) to have something to keep behind me in case I would go bust. That’s how certain I was.
Ended up rowing a length behind the fast pace boat, a length ahead of the second one. Tried to create light between me and the 1:51 boat and not lose too much on the 1:50 one. The plan was to then push on the gas in the last 1500m and get the average down to close to 1:50, row right through and finish a bow ball in front of him.
Reality was different. With 1500m to go I started to push, then with 1000m to go I couldn’t hold 1:49 and started to see the occasional 1:52. I decided to back down a bit and just stay ahead of the 1:51 pace boat. With 500m to go the predicted end time was oscillating between 18:25 and 18:26. That gave me enough energy to push at least a bit and get 18:24 on the predicted end time.
Workout Summary - Jan 26, 2016
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|Watts|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|05000|18:24.9|01:50.5|259.5|27.0|175.7|183.0|10.1
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|Watts|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-|Comments
01|00500|01:50.7|01:50.7|257.9|26.6|151.7|169.0|10.2|
02|00500|01:51.0|01:51.0|256.1|26.0|170.1|172.0|10.4|
03|00500|01:50.6|01:50.6|258.9|26.6|174.2|176.0|10.2|
04|00500|01:50.6|01:50.6|258.5|26.6|176.3|178.0|10.2|
05|00500|01:50.0|01:50.0|262.6|26.7|178.5|181.0|10.2|
06|00500|01:50.4|01:50.4|259.9|26.6|179.8|181.0|10.2|
07|00500|01:50.3|01:50.3|261.1|27.2|180.5|181.0|10.0|
08|00500|01:49.7|01:49.7|265.3|27.4|181.2|182.0|10.0|
09|00500|01:51.0|01:51.0|256.2|27.6|181.8|183.0|09.8|
10|00500|01:50.6|01:50.6|258.7|28.8|181.6|183.0|09.4|
In the first graph you can see very well the short pace dips around 11 and 13 minutes. That is a sign of trouble.
Happy with the result. Still believe I can go faster when well rested, but I will leave it at this attempt.
Romana registered me for a 2k erg race coming Saturday. I will be up against our club’s fastest Masters rower. He rowed a 6:20.5 2k in December and wants to repeat it now that he is 50, to set a new Czech record for the 50-59 category. I will be flying home on Friday after a week in Brussels, so we’ll see what the 2k brings me.
Jan 24 2016
I may be jeopardizing my planned 5k attempt for tomorrow, but when it’s possible to skate, I will skate.
It had been snowing on Saturday afternoon, so I had to start from scratch making my oval. I made it a bit longer than yesterday. An hour of hard work. Temperatures are up and the snow is wet and heavy.
But the end result was ok. A little narrow which made it difficult to take over the slower skaters. I also made one of the turns a bit too sharp so I had to make it wider.
When the work was done, I did about 4o minutes of just circling. The rest of the lake was difficult to skate on with speed skates. Too heavy snow.
100 minutes of aerobic exercise.
Some pictures I took of the boys:
Oh, and the ball was great. We were home at 2am and we had a very good time.
Tomorrow: A 5k. Only opportunity to do it before the end of the month.
Jan 23 2016
Yes, I am talking ice thickness. On Friday it finally reached a thickness that is considered safe by the local police (and I have no reason to have a different opinion). Here’s a picture that Romana took on Friday afternoon, when I had to work:
That is Czech rowers playing ice hockey, the number two sport (after football/soccer) in this country. Perfect black ice, unfortunately covered by a thin layer of powder snow.
Hockey is not a very Dutch sport. We go crazy on speed skating. This stuff:
Well, Stefan is doing a 1000m sprint in the picture above. I am more passionate about this:
Global warming doesn’t help, but when the canals and lakes freeze in The Netherlands, it is great. You can skate from village to village and spend the entire day on the ice, doing 50 to 100km. Locals set up food stalls on the ice.
Back to the Czech Republic. Of course I had skating fever, so I couldn’t wait and we drove down to the lake immediately after breakfast.
Put on the skates and skated away … bliss. It’s like rowing, you never unlearn it. Also the feeling is similar to rowing, you push and glide, push and glide, and you can get into a great rhythm.
Spent the first 30 minutes wiping a crude 400m oval clean of snow. Locals quickly discovered it and started circling with me. A bit annoying that about one third of the people skated the oval in clockwise direction!
Clockwise direction. That’s very dangerous. You bump into people. It’s like going down the highway in the wrong direction.
The oval was OK but there was an entire lake to explore. So I skated up to Rokle, then to Lodni Sporty, back to our rowing club. A few more loops on the oval, then to Lodni Sporty to greet some friends who were preparing a hockey field for a match at noon. Back to the club.
I wanted to take pictures but I left the camera in the car. It was snowing lightly and the light wasn’t very beautiful.
After 20km I stopped. I was worried a little that this would be too light training. It felt so effortlessly. Walking up the hill to the car, I noticed that my legs were tired anyway.
I was very surprised seeing the heart rate levels reached during the skating:
Not bad.
Tomorrow again. Then temperatures will rise, so next weekend will probably not be safe to skate.
Jan 30 2016
Race prep different
Morning: meetings in Brussels and a late, quick lunch (Japanese ramen). Then to the airport and fly to Prague. Train to Pardubice. Dinner in train (Hungarian goulash soup with dark bread, it turned out to be a soup day).
Picked up at the station by Romana and immediately taken to race venue to build it up. My brother in law is the organizer. I was still in work clothes (suit and tie) but started to haul chairs immediately. I left the unloading of the truck with concept 2 ergo meters to the others.
Laid cables. Replaced batteries. Left at this stage:
The IT folks were still getting the race software to run at that moment. I think they were there until midnight.
Racing on Saturday afternoon.
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 1 Comment • Tags: concept2, race prep, rowing