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:
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:
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.
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
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 4 • Tags: ANC, ANC training, double, river, rowing, sprintervals, training