Sep 2 2019
Another week of Preparation
Monday, August 26
A rest day.
Tuesday, August 27
A steady state row in the double. I actually had to record it on the Garmin watch. In the morning, I had left for work feeling tired and with an upcoming cold. Some afternoon/evening meetings magically got canceled, so I decided to go to the rowing club, asking Romana to bring my uni. We hopped in the double but just did a short steady state row.
You can ignore the heart rate measurements. The VivoActive is very bad with rowing, as I guess is the case for any wrist worn optical heart rate sensor. The other charts show a cool feature of Rowsandall.com. Our “math and physics engine” (sorry Best Bike Split) is able to take the weather data and create an estimated power chart. The downside is that if the weather stations aren’t accurate, like in this example where they reported a stronger wind than there actually was, the data may be off.
Wednesday, August 28
A weights workout. My weights trainer was back from vacation, so this was the first supervised session in a while. Everything hurt a lot more after it. The watchful eye of a coach helps me going a bit deeper in these sessions.
Thursday, August 29
On this day, I did the session that was originally planned for Tuesday: 2x(7x1min/1min)/5min. I did this session in the single and was happy to receive an automatic notification from rowsandall.com telling me that this had been a session where I was performing close to my current measured performance limits.
Workout Summary - media/20190829-1931030o.csv
--|Total|-Total----|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time-----|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|10607|00:58:12.7|02:44.6|156.9|22.0|151.6|184.0|08.3
W-|03668|00:14:17.4|01:56.9|320.0|32.2|167.0|183.0|08.0
R-|06954|00:43:56.7|03:09.6|103.9|18.7|146.6|183.0|08.5
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
03|00276|01:02.4|01:52.8|333.4|32.1|151.5|166.0|08.3
04|00270|01:02.5|01:55.6|315.9|32.4|165.7|176.0|08.0
05|00262|00:59.0|01:52.8|341.2|32.4|169.1|179.0|08.2
06|00283|01:04.6|01:54.0|339.9|32.4|172.5|181.0|08.1
07|00270|01:01.5|01:53.9|340.4|33.1|173.0|182.0|08.0
08|00265|01:01.6|01:56.4|324.9|32.2|173.4|181.0|08.0
09|00238|00:56.6|01:58.9|319.1|31.7|169.2|178.0|08.0
10|00235|00:57.6|02:02.6|299.5|31.2|156.8|171.0|07.8
11|00240|00:57.4|01:59.6|310.4|31.2|168.4|176.0|08.0
12|00235|00:54.8|01:56.6|314.7|32.8|171.0|178.0|07.8
13|00247|00:57.2|01:55.7|298.1|32.4|172.3|179.0|08.0
14|00230|00:53.4|01:56.0|319.3|32.4|168.6|179.0|08.0
15|00218|00:53.4|02:02.7|282.2|31.4|168.3|176.0|07.8
16|00254|00:59.1|01:56.2|337.8|33.6|174.5|183.0|07.7
You may notice that the durations are not exactly one minute long. That is because I rowed this as a “Just Row” on my SpeedCoach and just monitored the workout time myself. Then I used the automatic interval detection on rowsandall.com to detect the intervals.
Note that the wind messed with my splits.
Friday, August 30
Romana and I rowed the double again. It was an extremely hot Friday afternoon, hot and humid. We decided to reduce the 3x2km session to 2x2km. Simply because it was too hot. And the lake was full of various floating vessels, from paddle boards to inflatable things, wind surfers, sailing boats, and others.
Saturday
Another row in the double with Romana. A nice technique session.
After that, it was time for me to prepare the rental singles for the upcoming rowing camp. It was another very hot day. Here is what I started with:
Here is the result after three hours of work:
All boats were rigged and thoroughly measured. Empower oarlocks installed and calibrated. Three Wintechs and a Fluidesign. After that I walked over to the nearest beer stall (never far away in the Czech Republic) and had this nice refreshment:
Sunday, September 1
Kazi came, my partner in the double on the WRMR. We did two short sessions.
The first session was warming up, followed by 750m/4min + 500m/4min + 250m in 32, 34 and 36spm. That went pretty well.
Workout Summary - media/mailbox_attachments/2019/09/01/9943497142174d7b9721746f0e25d0a9.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|-Avg--|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|-SPM--|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|02603|13:57.7|02:50.1|000.0| 27.5 |151.0|178.0|08.2
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|-SPM--|AvgHR|DPS-
02|00750|02:45.8|01:50.6| --- | 31.5 | 163.0 |08.5 - headwind
04|00500|01:42.6|01:42.7| --- | 34.0 | 164.0 |08.5 - tailwind
06|00250|00:51.0|01:42.0| --- | 37.0 | 149.0 |07.8 - headwind
The after lunch (and a beer) session was steady state and technique.
Jan 5 2021
November, December and year overview
Year Overview
Did anyone have a normal training year this year?
Of course not, but allow me to summarize what was different for me:
So how does this year compare to other years in terms of training. Here’s a screen shot from the Strava/Elevate App data:
The absolute top years were 2016 and 2017. Those also happen to be the years in which I did play a lot with lactate measurements, and I put in pretty long indoor rowing steady state workouts during the winter. It’s actually my goal to get back to that level, as these were also the years in which I won the most races.
Looking at the total number of hours, 2020 was pretty similar to 2018 and 2019. One could say that without travel and without having to commute between work and how, I could have put in more training hours. But I guess these were reduced by having fewer races to prepare for (zero, actually) and the energy I put into starting my new job and moving internationally. Also, in the first half of October, I was in quarantine with my family, so I couldn’t go out to train. Let’s look at the year in detail.
So, on average, I was working out 5 hours a week, but in “good” months, I was doing closer to 6 hours. That means that if I could stick to only “good” months, I would be able to get 50 more hours of training in in 2021. So that should be my target (as well as finally competing in some races again)!
The other things I notice when looking at those charts: I thought I did much more swimming in the beginning of the year, but it is actually just a few sessions in January and February. After June I haven;t done much indoor rowing. I did more cycling over the summer months. I am making good use of the mild winters here, closer to the North Sea, and getting in a large amount of on-the-water rowing instead of erging, which I very much enjoy. My rower is in a storage until February, and unless we get some real winter weather, I have no intention of taking it out of storage.
A final way to look at the year is through the performance chart. The Performance Manager is based on scientific literature on modeling human performance. A good description can be found here. You can see that I did a pretty good build up of fitness from January to the end of April. Actually, the second half of the first lockdown, when we were allowed to row OTW in singles again, was pretty good. From that moment on, I had some stress with finishing my old job and onboarding for my new one, moving house internationally, etc, and I am happy with every workout I got in. I completely stopped training when I was quarantined. After that, it has been a gradual build-up, taking a mini break around Christmas, and now looking at how to continue building my fitness. I think the most gains are to be had from making the workouts a little longer, not by adding more training days.
November and December
Much of November and December, I have been on a simple schedule. I start the week with a run, then a weights session, and close it off with one or two OTW sessions during the working week, a long row on Saturday (mostly in the single) and a technique row on Sunday.
They closed the gyms in the middle of December. That made sense from a Corona perspective, but I am missing the weights sessions. The gym I go to was already pretty empty (there was a maximum number of visitors), and I cleaned my hands and the machine before and after every exercise.
Some random photos from my runs and rows:
By sanderroosendaal • OTW, pictures, Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: 1x, 2x, OTW, rowing, steady state