ANC

singlevsdouble.jpg

Aug 28 2017

Monday – Speed work in the double

A short training in the evening. When I made it to the rowing club after work, Romana had already rigged the boat and cleaned it after transport.

Going into the taper for Bled, I wanted this one to be an intensive but short training. I chose my beloved 45″/R75″ format. I personally think our boat moving skills are good, but Romana is unsure about some of the technique changes I have made. Due to rowing with the power meter and analyzing the metrics that the Oarlock has revealed, I have been making gradual changes in my technique, and the issue is that Romana hasn’t changed with them, as she was not rowing for a few weeks in June/July due to back issues.

After a 2k warming up with some 10 stroke bursts, we did 6 intervals. After the fourth one we had to do a quick turn because there was too much traffic ahead. Paddle boards, wind surfing, sail boats, and a pair from the other rowing club, who are also preparing for Bled. Actually, that ladies’ pair was rowing in the wrong direction, against the traffic pattern. I did point that out to them after we had completed our intervals. Told them a crash would have damaged two boats and ruined our plans for the World Masters Regatta.

Here is the summary:

#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-SPM-|-Pwr-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|00200| 00:45 |01:52.5| 33.3| 000 | 140 | 166 | 8.0
02|00209| 00:45 |01:47.6| 33.3| 000 | 164 | 175 | 8.4
03|00206| 00:45 |01:49.2| 34.7| 000 | 162 | 173 | 7.9
04|00211| 00:45 |01:46.6| 33.3| 000 | 165 | 174 | 8.4
05|00189| 00:45 |01:59.0| 32.0| 000 | 168 | 176 | 7.9
06|00195| 00:45 |01:55.3| 33.3| 000 | 165 | 176 | 7.8
Workout Summary
--|01210| 04:30 | 1:51.5| 33.3| 000 | 161 | 176 | 8.1

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After my “friendly” chat about the traffic pattern, we turned around and rowed a “500m” against the pair. Actually, we were leading by several boat lengths after about 400m when Romana had enough of constantly turning around to check the position of paddle boarders, pedalos, sailing boats, and wind surfers, and we continued to row slowly.

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I had put the Quiske sensor on Romana’s scull. So here are some charts, from all the 45″ intervals as well as the 500m.

When I put the sensor on the scull, Romana joked that she hoped that I wouldn’t remove her from the selection based on her rowing data. Of course, I praised her great rowing style. (And I don’t think there is anything wrong with these curves.)

What is interesting is to compare the scull horizontal/vertical angles of a stroke between the single and the mixed double. I don’t realize it any more, but we do row a shorter stroke, as Romana is a bit shorter than I am. And here are the data:

single vs double

The outlier curve is me in the single.

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Aug 6 2017

Saturday: Sprintervals in the double – minus one GoPro camera

Friday

Another heat wave day. I decided to cross train, cycle to work (15km) and, after only half a day of work, cycle home (15km), which was a good endurance workout in the heat. I took the afternoon off and did some work around the house, helped by my son Dominik.

I didn’t know the route through the city center is shorter:

Saturday

We drove to Pardubice, where we celebrated my youngest son’s eleventh birthday at my mother-in-law’s place. Big lunch. Then coffee with birthday cake. Then unwrapping of gifts, followed by a refreshing hour of splashing in the pool.

At 5pm, my brother-in-law Tomas and I, as well as my daughter Lenka and her boyfriend took off to the University rowing center in Pardubice (where Tomas is coaching). Tomas and I took a double, and Lenka and Vasek would row a quad with two Pardubice student girls.

I fitted the double out with my GoPro camera, because I wanted to film this workout.

Then we were busy getting the girls (+ one boy) out on the water, and in the hassle I forgot to put on my heart rate belt. I only noticed that after the row.

I also forgot to record the cooling down on the SpeedCoach (because I was pretty exhausted by the time we started the cooling down). So for the entire row, I only have the Garmin Forerunner recording:

The workout was great. The only minus was that we got terribly waked three times by a waterskier. Normally water skiing happens on a lake not far from Pardubice, but this guy decided it was a good idea to do water skiing.

I also noted that Stand-Up Paddle boarding has reached Pardubice. There was a SUP rental station 500m upstream from the rowing club, so there we would row through about 15 paddle boarding beginners. Exciting!

One of the wakes must have washed my GoPro off our front deck. We ended the row without camera. It’s a pity I don’t have the footage, because it was a good workout and we wanted to look at some technical flaws. I am not too depressed about losing the camera. I was a very early adopter of the GoPro, so I am due for an upgrade! 😉

The workout was 2x(8×45″/1:15″)/5min. The 8 intervals were chosen to fit nicely into the 4km stretch of river that we rowed on. It was an interesting experience. There were intervals where Tomas was perfectly in sync with my rhythm, and there we hit 35spm easily with good pace. But about half of the intervals were “miss”. We were slightly out of sync, which means that the boat suddenly feels heavy, you have difficulty getting the stroke rate up, and about 20 seconds into the interval you feel the lactate rush to your legs.


Work Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-SPM-|-Pwr-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|00206| 00:45 |01:49.2| 32.0| 000 | 000 | 000 | 8.6
02|00222| 00:45 |01:41.3| 33.3| 000 | 000 | 000 | 8.9
03|00217| 00:45 |01:43.6| 33.3| 000 | 000 | 000 | 8.7
04|00226| 00:45 |01:39.5| 36.0| 000 | 000 | 000 | 8.4
05|00210| 00:45 |01:47.1| 33.3| 000 | 000 | 000 | 8.4
06|00218| 00:45 |01:43.2| 33.3| 000 | 000 | 000 | 8.7
07|00215| 00:45 |01:44.6| 33.3| 000 | 000 | 000 | 8.6
08|00219| 00:45 |01:42.7| 34.7| 000 | 000 | 000 | 8.4
09|00205| 00:45 |01:49.7| 32.0| 000 | 000 | 000 | 8.5
10|00198| 00:45 |01:53.6| 32.0| 000 | 000 | 000 | 8.2
11|00204| 00:45 |01:50.2| 33.3| 000 | 000 | 000 | 8.2
12|00201| 00:45 |01:51.9| 34.7| 000 | 000 | 000 | 7.7
13|00183| 00:45 |02:2.9| 30.7| 000 | 000 | 000 | 8.0
14|00189| 00:45 |01:59.0| 32.0| 000 | 000 | 000 | 7.9
15|00220| 00:45 |01:42.2| 36.0| 000 | 000 | 000 | 8.1
16|00227| 00:45 |01:39.1| 36.0| 000 | 000 | 000 | 8.4
Workout Summary
--|03360| 12:00 | 1:47.1| 33.5| 000 | 000 | 000 | 8.4

Power courtesy of Strava (not accurate)

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May 18 2017

An exercise in fading

Wednesday

I did a short outing in the double with a new rower. I heard about this new colleague who had been an excellent rower in the past. Talked to him and got him enthusiastic to try rowing again.

The caveat. He had a severe motorbike accident 8 years ago, has an arm and shoulder full of titanium, and has spent 100% of his energy on working since then. This was his first row since the accident.

It was a fun experience. The guy clearly knew what he was doing, but he will need a few rows to get back his former level of technique. Also, he was quite exhausted after just the warming up. I guess that calibrates my level of fitness. It’s a good reminder. Sometimes I think my fitness is dropping, but I guess I am always far from the absolute minimum.

By the way, it is my experience that base fitness comes back very quickly with bodies that have been exposed to intensive training when they were young. If you have such a body (which I do), congratulations!

Thursday

A morning row. I was supposed to take the bag with boat and scull covers to the club, because Romana wants to ride her bike this afternoon, and she would prepare the boats for transport to Hodonin, where we will be racing, coming weekend.

At 6am I am capable of getting up, getting my rowing bag and my work stuff, get a rudimentary breakfast in my stomach, and drive to the rowing club. At the last traffic light before the club, I realized I had forgotten the bag with boat covers. Oh well. Romana will just remove the riggers this afternoon, and I will have to come earlier to put the shells in the covers and load them on the trailer.

I forgot to read my training plan, so I headed over to the announcement board to read the Juniors/U23 training.

My training plan called for 6x250m/2′-3′ pause. The U23 training plan called for 4x start plus 15 strokes, plus 2x500m/500m, with the first 500m at 30spm, and the second one at 35spm.

I liked that. So, I did it.

The warming up plus a 2k with 4 practice starts followed by 15 strokes:

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The end of the practice starts brought me to the finish line of the 2k course. I rowed back to the start, focusing on technique. So that brought me to 5k of distance covered.

Now it was time for the 500s. Here is the result:

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The first 500m was performed well. The second one, I don’t know. I probably hit too high power values for this one, and I faded dramatically. Looking at the metrics charts below, I am not pleased with how the effective length drops in the second half of the second interval. It was really a dramatic exercise in fading.


Workout Summary - media/20170518-0735410o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|01500|06:28.0|02:09.5|245.8|27.1|165.0|186.0|08.6
W-|01000|03:46.0|01:53.5|328.3|31.9|177.4|186.0|08.3
R-|01000|05:06.0|02:33.4|150.3|21.4|150.7|186.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|00500|01:55.8|01:55.8|312.2|29.9|175.5|182.0|08.7
02|00500|01:51.2|01:51.2|345.2|34.0|179.3|186.0|07.9

And a few charts with comments:

I also had fun looking at the lack of improvement in my metrics over the past weeks. No conclusions yet, except that it was fun to do it and I am glad rowsandall.com gives the opportunity to use this type of charts to monitor your athlete’s (lack of) progress. I filter away all strokes marked as “rest” and I also took the liberty to remove all strokes below 450 Joule per stroke, as they are either (unmarked) rest paddle, technique work, or short stroke exercises.

Tomorrow: Boat trailer loading. Boat trailer drive to Hodonin, then a mixed double row with Romana.

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May 11 2017

Two rest days and a hard session (lactate, lactate!)

Monday was a travel and tourism day, and tuesday was a very long day at work, and after the long weekend I was behind on a couple of important work related duties, as well as evening conference calls with final reviews of some project proposals, so I had to skip training. I didn’t mind much. I think a 2 day gap now and then, when life and work get in the way, is actually quite healthy and definitely not detrimental.

This also gave me a motivation to do a really hard training, although I chickened out of what our head coach had posted on the training plan board:

2x(7×50″/10″) @ 34-36 spm, 5 minutes rest between the 2 sets

That is like 30 strokes “on”, 3 strokes “rest”, for 7 minutes, at a stroke rate that I cannot hold for 4 minutes. Driving to the rowing club, I was thinking of what to do with these instructions. I was also curious to see how many of our Masters rowers would turn up on this Wednesday and what boat type I would row.

Turns out that through back injuries, work related duties, business travel, we had 4 rowers of our eight, plus 1 younger guy who rows with the Masters group occasionally. The issue, however, was that that one guy is not comfortable rowing a single, and one of the others is not a sculler. He only rows sweep. I got a little impatient when we hadn’t decided after 25 minutes so I announced that I would go in the single (which would also enable me to row my own session). The sweep rower Bulda teamed up with Krocan to take a pair, and the remaining two got out in a double.

We have the full Albano lanes out because of the International Youth Regatta of coming weekend, so I wanted to do 2x”something intensive at high stroke rates” in the 2k course. My training phase prescribes ANC training, which is short intervals with rest, and many of them, to get the body to produce lactate (as fuel, which I will condition the body to use in the subsequent phase).

[amazon_link asins=’B00O5Y4FXA’ template=’ProductAd’ store=’rowingdata-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’d9b314bd-3613-11e7-8a0e-454df77c6fc6′]

After 2k of warming up, I stopped to fiddle with my HR strap. I had the feeling that it was too lose and that I felt the strap on my back creeping down slowly. So I tried to adjust it back, which led to it snapping. The Wahoo Tickr straps connect with snap fasteners to the sensor “pod”. They call it the “two-snap” connection which is easy to get on and off. Well. It snapped. Under two layers of clothing (because it was cold), with me being in a single on cold water.

So I removed the upper part of my uni, clamped the scull handles between my belly and my legs, and tried to use two hands to snap on the HR strap. Initially, I failed, and I ended up holding only the sensor, with the strap being somewhere under my clothes, and discovering that my left blade had turned and was now perpendicular to the water, in flipping position. I corrected that, and proceeded to struggle. In the end I managed to snap everything back on and get my clothes in order as well. Without flipping.

Krocan proposed 20 strokes “on”, 10 strokes “off”, and that seemed a very good compromise. At this point, I was incorrectly remembering the training schedule and thinking that there were 3 series of 50″/10″, so I agreed with his proposal, thinking that we would 3 full 2k distances of them.

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It was nice to row this next to the pair. I called out every eigth stroke of the paddle and grunted after the 20th (final) stroke of each interval. I managed to beat them by about a length over one entire 2k course. Looking at the graph, I see we did only 7 intervals per 2k. It felt more like 9 or 10. Anyway, after the first (headwind) and second (tailwind) 2k all three of us were so worn out that we couldn’t think of doing another series. So we just rowed the final 2k at steady state pace, followed by a cooling down.

During the intervals, I saw how I achieved fewer and fewer Watts as the intervals went on. Here, I am trying to see if that is a result of reduced force, length, stroke rate, or both. Stroke rate is excluded. You can already see from the overview chart above that the stroke rate didn’t drop. Here is a look at peak and average force.

 

In the these two plots, you can see that the effective drive length also drops, especially as I am shorter on the finish. I focused on not tapping down too late, because I noticed a very strong effect on “wash”, and also it makes it easier to keep the stroke rate high.

The next plot shows the same, but with effective drive length (taking into account slip and wash) instead of total drive length. I am running my effective drive length at 85% of total drive length. I would be interested to see the values of other people.

I also added a plot of the result, Work per Stroke, for the “on” intervals.

Here are some typical values according to Nielsen-Kellerman, compared to a summary for my “on” strokes. The values closest to my stroke are indicated with the colored cells. I guess I am just lacking in power and strength.

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Apr 27 2017

Thursday morning – 36 intervals in the single

From a rowing technology blogger’s standpoint this was really a session I was looking forward to.

It wasn’t to be. Sometimes the NK SpeedCoach’s user interface drives me crazy. I am 100% sure that I have recorded the row, but somehow I have managed to delete it on the  device, perhaps when I switched it off. Anyway, when it was time for me to sync the unit with the PC, I was surprised to see no new session.

It’s really a pity, because this morning’s session was:

6x(6×15 strokes “on”/10 strokes “off”)/5min, with the 15 “on” strokes at 26, 28, 30, 32, 34 and 36spm.

The idea was really to learn (again) to row at high stroke rates and to transfer boat feel and stroke efficiency from the 26spm all the way up to 36spm.

I set the SpeedCoach to show power, stroke rate, effective length and wash during the row and all the time I was looking forward to doing the data analysis. I wanted to see how wash and effective length, as well as work per stroke, would hold up at the higher rates, and uncover other hidden information from the data.

So if I want to row a 1k race at 320W and 32spm, probably all my strokes should be around 10W/spm, i.e. I should row the 26spm bit at 260W, the 28spm bit at 280W, etc. This is what I tried during the row.

It was a cold and rainy morning. Four degrees C, and something between snow and rain when I drove to the rowing club. When I launched, the rain had stopped, and it turned out to be a gray and cold but fantastic morning.

The swallows were heaving breakfast, and it was a joy to see them. At these temperatures, they fly just above the waves, about the same height as a rower’s blade between strokes, and they are such fantastic flyers. I really enjoyed how efficiently they glide through the air, only occasionally reverting to high wing frequency flying, when hovering to catch insects or gaining speed in headwind conditions. I made a mental link to my rowing, doing the 26spm as the swallow glides and the 36spm as it hovers.

As said, I failed to save the session on the SpeedCoach, so you will have to do with the pictures from the Garmin watch, imported through Strava. Strava magically added some power values through a biking/running plugin, so you shouldn’t take those too seriously (although the values are pretty good). The SPM values were all over the place but that is because the Garmin tried to measure running cadence.

Sets 1, 3 and 5 were rowed in tailwind. Sets 2, 4 and 6 were rowed in headwind. As the sets progressed, I became better and better at hitting the right Power values and I think I learned a lot from this session, even though it almost feels like I didn’t do it, not having any data.

With the swallows and all, definitely a session I enjoyed a lot. It was hard, it wasn’t short, but it was 100% worth it.

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Dec 20 2016

Dirty Dozen and One More

Another week where I allow myself one Anaerobic Power workout. Today, I repeated the 13×45″/1′ workout of last week. After that, I did something special to capture stroke power curves, but more about that in the next blog post.

Here are the rowsandall.com plots for this workout. It was hard work. Somehow, I didn’t have the energy to go deep.

The workout editor has a little difficulty getting the averages right for these short intervals. On the PM5, I saw around 220-225 meter for the full 45 seconds, so I believe below statistics are underreported.


Workout Summary - media/20161220-1850090o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|05159|22:45.0|02:12.3|241.0|26.4|164.6|179.0|08.6
W-|02796|09:45.0|01:44.6|335.1|29.2|163.8|177.0|09.8
R-|02376|13:00.0|02:44.1|141.1|23.5|166.5|177.0|02.5
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|00228|00:45.0|01:38.5|341.2|30.8|138.5|162.0|09.9
02|00215|00:45.0|01:44.9|333.4|28.7|161.6|170.0|10.0
03|00214|00:45.0|01:45.2|348.6|28.6|166.8|174.0|10.0
04|00218|00:45.0|01:43.0|348.8|29.6|164.3|174.0|09.8
05|00217|00:45.0|01:43.8|347.3|29.3|164.0|175.0|09.9
06|00216|00:45.0|01:44.3|336.7|29.8|165.0|175.0|09.7
07|00223|00:45.0|01:41.1|342.2|29.4|169.1|176.0|10.1
08|00220|00:45.0|01:42.2|322.2|28.9|167.1|175.0|10.2
09|00209|00:45.0|01:47.6|307.7|28.2|165.2|173.0|09.9
10|00216|00:45.0|01:44.2|339.3|29.3|167.0|175.0|09.8
11|00209|00:45.0|01:47.8|321.2|29.2|167.0|174.0|09.5
12|00207|00:45.0|01:48.6|316.9|28.2|166.6|174.0|09.8
13|00205|00:45.0|01:49.9|351.3|29.8|167.2|177.0|09.2

However, a week ago I had more than 200m less, so apparently I worked harder today!

Click on the images to open the gallery. Also, according to the images, I did 15 Watt more.

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IMG_1166

Dec 12 2016

Mixing in some ANC

ANC Today:

No, not this ANC

I am starting a 3 week mini meso-cycle, substituting one steady state session for an interval session. ANC stands for Anaerobic Capacity. Short intervals at 2k speed or faster, with enough rest to recover and not make it a hard distance row. The idea is that you row at a pace that is hard but sustainable for a large number of these intervals, and you can go faster if you want (but you don’t want to).

First, I did this month’s CTC:


Workout Summary - media/20161212-201119-sled_2016-12-12T20-02-36ZGMT+1.strokes.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|02492|10:01.0|02:00.7|271.4|30.3|166.4|179.0|08.2
W-|01537|05:00.0|01:37.6|371.9|31.9|166.2|179.0|09.6
R-|00955|05:01.0|02:37.8|115.5|27.5|167.5|179.0|07.2
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|00151|00:30.0|01:39.3|352.6|33.1|127.8|158.0|09.1
02|00205|00:40.0|01:37.6|371.2|31.5|165.8|172.0|09.7
03|00256|00:50.0|01:37.7|373.8|32.7|170.7|177.0|09.4
04|00307|01:00.0|01:37.7|373.5|30.7|173.1|179.0|10.0
05|00257|00:50.0|01:37.3|379.2|31.6|171.9|178.0|09.8
06|00205|00:40.0|01:37.6|374.5|31.9|170.8|176.0|09.7
07|00156|00:30.0|01:36.2|370.0|32.6|168.7|176.0|09.6

The graphs:

That CTC was not enough for a full training, of course. So after picking myself up from the floor, I dialled up a 45″/1min time based interval workout and set off. The first interval was actually the hardest.


Workout Summary - media/20161212-2005230o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|04630|22:45.0|02:27.4|224.7|26.9|164.1|180.0|07.6
W-|02559|09:45.0|01:54.3|317.3|29.5|163.2|178.0|08.9
R-|02082|13:00.0|03:07.3|131.5|24.6|166.0|178.0|01.6
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|00220|00:45.0|01:42.1|305.4|30.3|144.5|161.0|09.7
02|00211|00:45.0|01:46.4|312.0|29.1|161.8|168.0|09.7
03|00213|00:45.0|01:45.6|322.9|29.1|164.6|171.0|09.8
04|00212|00:45.0|01:46.2|314.7|28.6|164.6|172.0|09.9
05|00207|00:45.0|01:48.9|321.3|29.5|162.1|172.0|09.3
06|00216|00:45.0|01:44.1|316.9|29.3|166.6|174.0|09.8
07|00216|00:45.0|01:44.0|311.2|29.0|165.1|174.0|10.0
08|00217|00:45.0|01:43.7|333.4|29.8|166.6|175.0|09.7
09|00208|00:45.0|01:48.0|313.5|28.7|165.7|174.0|09.7
10|00210|00:45.0|01:47.0|314.7|29.3|164.1|175.0|09.6
12|00213|00:45.0|01:45.5|331.0|30.6|162.2|176.0|09.3
13|00214|00:45.0|01:45.1|336.7|30.8|169.2|178.0|09.3

Interesting to see that I am much higher in work per stroke on this workout than on the steady state.

It was nice to row this. When I closed my eyes during the workout, I could imagine being in my single and racing in Munich, first 10 strokes out of the starting pontoon. That memory also made me sit up straight and pay attention to rowing a good “OTW” stroke and rhythm.

A good workout.

Tomorrow: Steady State.

This week is supposed to be a heavy week, but I already know now that it will be difficult to do the planned training time, with a business trip in the middle of the week.

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