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Jun 15 2019

Morava Race

It’s been a hectic and very exciting period, and that’s the reason my last blog post was from May 25th. Here’s a very quick run through the sessions starting on May 27th.

May 29th session 1: Weights. On Monday I was too tired, and on Tuesday I was too busy to workout. I do pretty heavy weights sessions, so I think this was a pretty heavy one.

May 29th session 2: Row in the 8+. One of the few preparation sessions we had for our short season. If I remember well, it was choppy. BoatCoach was misbehaving. I thought I had set it to splash guard, but it switched off during the row. The map also showing me taking a jump to North Africa during one or two strokes. It surely didn’t look like I was visiting the Sahara. It was more choppy, wetter, and less coordinated.

On June 30, I drove to Racice to pick up the boats for the camp. Here are Daniela and Dave from Czech Concept2/Wintech/NK:

May 31st: A quick row in the double. We simply ran out of time. It wasn’t very intensive, but it was a pleasure to row the double with Romana.

June 1: Morava Regatta on our home lake. Kazi and I rowed the heat of the men’s 2x. We came in fourth place . It wasn’t a very good race, and we expected to not proceed to the finals. It turns out our time was better than the winner of the second heat, and we qualified for the final on Sunday. We are trying to race faster crews in preparation for the Masters Worlds, so this was good. It was unfortunate that we couldn’t deal with the wakes from the umpires launches and that we couldn’t steer a straight course.

Sunday June 2: Our final race on the double. We were bold and did something you should not try at home: We changed some rigging parameters on our boat just before a race.

And off we were to the final:

We raced a much better race this time, and managed exactly the same time as on Saturday, but this time we

  • rowed in a headwind (as opposed to Saturday’s tailwind)
  • managed to pass another crew which is always a great feeling

Here are some charts comparing the Saturday and Sunday races:

Looks pretty similar, but we had a tailwind on Saturday, and it all felt much more controlled on Sunday.

On the same day, my youngest son Robin (on the right in the picture below) won his heat and final in the boys 4+, and can now call himself Champion of Moravia.

My final race of the weekend was a 2k in our Masters eight. We raced better than we had ever rowed in a training and managed to win a bronze medal.

The picture shows our crew on the right, the winning Men’s crew from our club in the middle, and Lodni Sporty Brno taking silver on the left. There was a little competition going on of funniest pictures on the podium. We weren’t very good. I liked our Juniors 8+:

I took a quick shower and then it was time for the camp to start …

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Oct 14 2018

Saturday Race Day: Head of Prague

We arrived in Prague at 8am. Actually, we were the first to order coffee at the bar of the Prague rowing club Blesk (“Lightning”). Coffee and cake, and then getting our boat ready for the race.

Again, we were competing in the Mix 8+ category. No age restrictions, so we were up against combined Juniors crews as well as other Masters crews. For us, the Head of Prague is more a nice autumn experience than a “must win” race.

We had great fun rowing up to the start and enjoying the fine, sunny autumn weather along with 50 other eights waiting for the first boat to start.

We had some difficulty in the middle part of the race. Some tourists on a motor boat were going on in the middle of the river, at about the same speed as us, and for about 1500m we were surfing on their wake. I think we took about 100 Liters of water in that stretch. Sitting on 6 seat, both my oarlock and the stroke’s were under water a couple of times and we got a good share of cold water.

Then, “The Turn”. Our club president cheering on the bridge gaves us a 6 out of 10, with most other crews being slower but some remarkably faster.

The Roosendaal’s were well represented in our crew, named “Zrejme Dobrej Oddil” (= “Apparently a good club”). Romana rowed in 4, Sander on 6, and Dominik (13) was our coxswain. I think the following 10 minute video captures the race atmosphere well:

The video was my first experiment with a GoPro chest strap. I think that a head mount will be better next time. The main protagonists of the video are coxswain Dominik and our stroke man and walking encyclopedia of Czech Rowing Martin “The Turkey” Krocil.

My heart rate monitor had some issues in the first part of the race. Otherwise the stroke rate and pace is accurate.

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Jun 7 2018

The Practice That We Shouldn’t Have Done

Yep, a final practice in the eight before we defend last year’s win at this event:

Here is what happened:

  • Two of our crew couldn’t attend because of work, so we rowed with 2 reserves
  • The traffic situation was hopeless and one of our crew hadn’t paid attention to that, or isn’t using the right route planning app, and arrived more than 30 minutes late
  • Our stroke had his birthday and was expected home at 7:30 pm for his party, so we didn’t wait for the guy who was stuck in traffic, chartered an additional reserve on the spot and set off for a very short practice
  • Because of all that, everybody was lightly irritated, and I guess also a bit nervous for Saturday’s race
  • It was pretty windy and very choppy
  • We were in the Wintech with an unexperienced cox and no cox box, so we were going in all directions, the boat was unstable, and in bow we couldn’t hear anything and had no clue what was going on
  • I didn’t have my SpeedCoach GPS with me and there wasn’t a good way to attach the phone running BoatCoach to the Wintech, which mainly affected the stroke rate data.
  • One of our reserves caught a major crab causing his oar to slam into his front stay and bending it. (We managed to bend it back after the session.)

Looking at the chart, I think we did 3×30 strokes/30 strokes in the 2k course, and then a few practice starts.

Let’s pretend this session never happened. We are the eight that doesn’t practice.

Saturday, 7pm. Race Time.

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May 31 2018

The Eight That Doesn’t Practice Again

Wednesday – Eights Day

As we have a 2k race on Sunday and as we are defending our Primatorky win on Saturday June 9th, it was time to continue not practicing. 🙂

This time we didn’t do a 4x4min/5min with the 4 minute interval being 1min/1min/1min/1min at 24/26/28/30spm.

I am still in “recovery mode” and planned to do only light UT2 workouts this week, so I broke my recovery plan for the sake of the team.

In a few days, I will also launch the “Brno 2K” 2 months of virtual racing on rowsandall.com. Here’s a poster I had designed for it:

The QR code links to this article explaining the principle of virtual racing in Czech and English.

This evening I am going to put up the posters on the notice boards of the two rowing clubs. It makes me a little nervous. I hope this catches on and a few people are going to participate, but as always when you stick your head out, it’s a scary thing.

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Jun 4 2017

Primatorky 2017 – Masters Eight race report

 


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Saturday, June 3. 7pm.

Four boats at the start of the first race of the Masters 8+ program of this most prestigious of Czech eights races.

Watch this video to get the atmosphere:

104. Primátorky – pátek 2. června

A jaký byl první den 104. Primátorek? Podívejte se na video ze včerejšího úvodního závodního dne, který byl ve znamení závodů handicapovaných veslařů, žákovských kategorií a Univerzitních osem. Program pokračuje dnes rozjížďkami a finálové klání vypukne už zítra, v neděli 4. června! Přijďte zafandit na náplavku Rašínova nábřeží, nebo sledujte ČT sport či si nalaďte Český rozhlas – Radiožurnál !

Posted by Primátorky on Saturday, June 3, 2017

And two random pictures to show where we race, in the middle of Prague:

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But first, let me go back a year. In this post, I describe how we missed the start call of the race because we couldn’t hear it through the loud engine noise of a big boat next to us, how we came in second place, immediately filed a protest and got a re-row, which we didn’t row in the end.

Regular readers of this blog will know that this year’s preparation wasn’t ideal. Only in this week did we manage to get in two trainings in an almost complete crew. So we considered ourselves outsiders. This was even the spirit of our pre-race briefing. We gathered around the boat and talked about rowing clean and not going out of the start like madmen. The race lasts for three minutes and in the final 400m, past the railway bridge, there will be ugly water, and you need to have some energy left to row clean and not lose too much speed in the waves. Don’t wake up the carps sleeping on the bottom of the river! That wasn’t our motto for the race

This year, we would just enjoy the races. Romana and I left Brno at 12:30, arrived in Prague a bit over two hours later, and it was so hot that the smartest thing to do was get a big glass of lemonade and retire to the couch in the back of the CVK Praha club house. I also downloaded this race’s official App and filled out my race predictions. I liked that, a cool new innovation. You basically predict the winner of each and every race, and you get 4 points if “your” crew wins, and one point if they become second. I had no chance of winning of course, because I had missed predicting all of Friday’s racing and half of Saturday’s. But it is still fun, and the scores are updated live. Betting with virtual money.

After that, I slept for an hour and a half, on that couch in the back of the CVK Praha club house. Then I got up, and we did the warming up with the rest of the crew.

So, at 7pm, we lined up at the start. To the left of us, Blesk. To the right of us a Blesk/CVK Praha combination in lane 3 and Pardubice in lane 4. Blesk were looking very confident.

Our start wasn’t as clean as some practice starts had been, and I think I was off a fraction of a second in the first three strokes, but then we caught on and got going.

After the start, the plan was to do 15 strokes at high rate, after which we would lengthen and settle for race pace. I listened to the cox counting the fifteen strokes and I focused on the stroke’s blade and the back of the guy in front of me.

After the fifteen strokes, I dared a quick look out of the boat, and I immediately saw all boats more than a length behind us. Wow!

So now we all focused on lengthening and we succeeded to do so. In fact, we found a lovely rhythm and we kept rowing away from all the others. By the time we arrived at the railway bridge, we had a length of light between the boats. There were two instances where we raced through motorboat wakes but we managed to do that pretty well.

Under the railway bridge, Ludek shouts: “One minute to go!”. He always shouts something there.

Even in the very choppy water we kept our distance to the other crews. Blesk started a final sprint. I slammed my blade into a wave twice, but we managed to stay together.

Crossed the line.

First. I think the carps were still sleeping.

Waited for the others to cross the line. Shouted three cheers for our opponents.

Rowed to the medals dock.

Got our medals.

Rowed back to the Rower’s Island.

Took a group picture.

Shower.

A beer. Some food.

Two hour drive home. Which we filled talking about this 3 minute long race.

bokeh plot (84)

And the results:

primatorky1

 

I also include the results of the other race. The boat that was trying to draft me came in second place:

primatorky2

 

So we were by far the fastest crew of all Masters 8+, 14 boats if I also count the G and H race, who were of course a bit slower than the younger crews.

All in all a very nice race!

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May 24 2017

Pretty good session in the eight

As Greg correctly pointed out, combining big boat rowing with a job is harder than combining it with a single. Today was no exception.

My boss was out of town, so I had to moderate a 5pm to 6pm conference call with our headquarters in Phoenix. I also had a training in the eight from 6:30. So I would either have to tell the crew that I come late or find another way. Left the office at 4pm. Made it throught the traffc with just 10 minutes to spare and set myself up in one of the bedrooms at the rowing club.

All good, except that the juniors switched on the music in the gym just below this room. And to make matters worse, two rowers started a loud discussion right in front of the window. At least the US colleagues took it with humor and content-wise the review was fine.

There was a lot of wind on the lake and especially in the first 30 minutes of the outing we were in big waves. There is just 45 minutes of rowing recorded, but we spent another 20 minutes of “discussion time”. We basically rowed up and down the quietest part of the lake doing 25 stroke and 50 stroke “race pace” pieces and practicing starts. It was better than I expected and there was real progress during this hour.

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May 24 2016

4x1500m in the eight

Today’s training was a 4x1500m in the eight, each 1500m rowed as 500m @ 24spm, 500m @ 26spm, 500m @ 28spm. The rest time was roughly five minutes, measured as “paddle a bit, stop eight, turn around, drink some water, go”.

I forgot to start CrewNerd so I don’t have stroke rate data. So, after the row I synchronized my Garmin Forerunner using the phone. The data were immediately pushed to Strava, and I used Rowsandall.com’s import from Strava to generate the plots.

I could show them to my team mates in the locker room. 🙂

http://rowsandall.com/rowers/workout/151

The only thing is that my data smoothing is a bit of overkill for the super accurate Garmin Forerunner data.

The site on rowsandall.com is now open for all users. Just register and try it out!

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