Friday – remaining ranking distances

In the morning, during short breaks from finalizing this year’s performance assessments for my group, I worked down a long checklist to release and publish about the latest and greatest on rowsandall.com.


Here are some articles about the new Ranking Functionality:

  1. Tutorial article for the ranking functionality
  2. Long read discussing some of the statistics behind the functionality

After that, I took the train home. Before going to the erg basement, I visited the Honda dealer close to my home. We’ve been contemplating getting rid of one of the cars (Romana’s Skoda Fabia), keeping only one as a “family car”. The idea would be to get a scooter for those rides around our town that cannot be done on the bike.

A typical round that I do in the OTW season is

  1. Home – work (15km)
  2. Work – Lake (18 to 25km depending on the route)
  3. Lake – Home (12km)

A scooter would save fuel and usually be faster through the traffic. I still have to get used to the idea though. The issue for us Masters rowers is that we still believe we look like this:

While the reality is this:

Anyway …

The workout for the day wasn’t really a workout. After Thursday’s rest day, Friday was meant to be both a confidence booster (for Saturday’s 2k erg race) and a way to get two of the remaining ranking distances out of the way. So I did:

  • 2km warming up
  • 500m at target power 430W or higher
  • 2km rest paddle
  • 100m full out
  • 2km cooling down

I managed the 500 in 1:33.4, which is a nice score. As you can see from the chart, power was oscillating between 440 and 460W, and it started to drop when the wheels came off in the final 150m.

Then I did a 2km paddle followed by a 100m at a slightly higher drag factor, which I managed around 600W. This resulted in the following series of ranking pieces rowed this season:

The only piece missing is a standalone 1 minute effort, which I will do soon.

The other interesting thing is that the 500m piece looks like the best of the series. The 100m piece average is below 600W because it takes too many strokes to get up to 600.