concept2

volvo-p1800s-roger_moore1319548312

Feb 22 2016

A hard day / waterfall

The day started in an interesting way. I woke up at three, and couldn’t fall asleep again. Some work related issues, and such.

Drove to work early. Control light on dashboard alerted me that my headlight needed replacement.

Fine. I wanted to test that new Volvo shop in town anyway. This would be a nice simple thing, to check them out, and casually get a quote on some bigger repairs that I need to do.

I was welcomed by a “easy on the eye” blonde young lady. Offered coffee and some Swedish pastry. Got to admire a beautiful white Volvo 1800S in the showroom:

volvo-p1800s-roger_moore1319548312
Yes, this car

The friendly head mechanic took my car keys and promised to change the bulb in 10 minutes.

I waited 30 minutes. He came back to apologize. The light wouldn’t work. They were checking the cabling. Had already tried exchanging the left and right bulbs and other parts.

I agreed to leave the car there and they gave me a lift to work. Again, I casually mentioned the planned repairs and that I was interested in a quote.

A busy day at work. Lots of meetings. I didn’t drink enough water and too much coffee.

End of the day I called the shop. They apologized lengthily, saying that it was a mystery. The mechanic had spent the entire day trying to figure out what was wrong, but couldn’t find the culprit.

I need the car repaired soon. Should I pick it up and drive to the competition? Decided to give them one more day. See how they cope. I hope my car is not a training project for an unexperienced mechanic.

The session was the dreaded 3km/2.5km/2km waterfall. I have mixed results on this one. The door in my erg room has a record of a 1:51.0 average on slides (and on the rowing club, with people walking around behind my erg). The last session (this fall) was a 1:52.9 average. Decided to go for improving that. An “uninspired, grumpy Monday” approach to the session.

watervalspmwaterval

Averages were 248W/249W/250W for the 3000/2500/2000m respectively. That boils down to a 1:52.0 average (according to the PM) and a 1:51.9 average according to my spreadsheet.

It was hard work, but it wasn’t impossible. I think about this session as a “longish 6k with breaks” so I kept telling myself that pulling 1:52 was slower than my recent 6k. That helped me through the hard parts.

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3x20min_histo

Feb 21 2016

Sunday: 3x20min

Saturday

The plan was to do some running training. This was a work day at the club. At 9, a few members would take our new dock out of storage. Then there would be a window of two hours during which there would be some preparation work for only a few people, and then we would be building our dock.

It turned out differently. The turn-up was so high, that it actually made sense to do some garden work in the “forest” behind our club house. So we cleaned up plastic bottles, cigarette packs, and other junk that people throw over our fence, then collected dead wood and leaves. That turned out to be a two hour quite physically heavy exercise. Sort of a very long circuit training. Raking the leaves on piles. Putting the leaves in big bags. Hauling the bags around the club house, empty the big bag on a big pile. Start again.

The two hours training window was filled with this exercise. At least we got our job done.

Then we concrete arrived and we could start building the pontoons. Unfortunately, everybody was busy and nobody was taking pictures. We bought very nice Easyfloat pontoons from Belrive, three two by six meter pontoons, each weighing 243kg and with a buoyancy of more than 2000kg (150 kilo per square meter). Here’s a picture from the easyfloat website, to give you an idea:

vlot.JPG

The work proceeded amazingly quick. Last week, we have built two concrete “cubes” for the ramps. As we approach our water from a very steep hill, we had to build ramps leading to the dock. Because we are on reservoir with varying water levels (winter level being 6 to 10 meters lower than summer levels, and plus or minus one meter easily during the rowing season), the entire design had to allow for the different water levels. The way this was  designed left very tolerance for misplacement of the ramps. Luckily, everything turned out to fit with millimeter precision.

Now we only have to wait for the water level to rise. From Friday to Saturday, we measured a 40cm rise. We have another 3m to go. That meant we could build the dock with dry feet, but we have to wait one or two weeks to start using it. I guess we wish for rainy weather. The dock is now resting on pillars which we built from old car tyres.

I am so much looking forward to rowing from a normal, low dock. Our old one was a horrible steel and barrels construction that scratched boats, and was way too high for launching a single.

Sunday

A 3x20min on the erg. I had planned for a 4x20min session, but I measured 1.9 mmol/L after 3x20min at 195W, so I called it a day. It’s supposed to be a light week.

3x20min.jpg

3x20min_histo.jpg

Funnily, until the start of the third interval, I had the feeling I was OK and would do 4 intervals. Then, in the beginning of the third interval, I had difficulty holding 195-200W without going to too high perceived effort. That improved during the interval, but resulted in the mentioned relatively high lactate level (my target is to be between 1.2 and 1.5 for these sessions).

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6km1

Feb 19 2016

Testing continued: end of winter 6k

Here’s my training plan. At the top you can see the dates. Then a the macro and meso cycle (numbered in roman numbers), then a crude bar chart indicating training volume in hours per week. The area with the different numbers refers to the number of sessions of different training types. Finally there is a row with races, and at the bottom the tests and PB attempts.

plan.JPG
Training plan detail. From top to bottom date, meso cycle, training volume, training type, tests.
Early November, I did some testing:

  • 1 minute
  • 6k
  • 2k

Then, early December I did the 2 speed Lactate test. This week I am repeating the 6k and 1 minute test. Next week, the 2k and the 2 speed test. This 6k test is an indicator of how I come out of winter training, endurance wise. Also, the next to mesocycles will aim at improving my 6k, culminating in the Hořín head race over 6k on April 9.

Originally I wanted to do this 6k on Thursday. However, a full out 6k is a difficult test. In my opinion, there is a huge mental component to it. The 2k starts to hurt and then you have to survice a few minutes of pain. The 6k wears you out. In the beginning you don’t notice it. Then you slowly start to lose form and posture. And suddenly you find yourself thinking: “This is going to be impossible.” You check the monitor and you see:

  • 9 minutes gone (so roughly 13 minutes to go still)
  • 2400 m rowed (not even half way!)

That’s when you need to be on top of your game mentally. You have to continue pulling the paces you were supposed to pull, until you can start sprinting. That’s when the hard part is over.

The problem was, I wasn’t sure I was up to it mentally. On Thursday evening I wasn’t. The row was too close to dinner. I was tired after a long working day. It was too close to the end of a business trip, and I had DOMS from Tuesday’s strength training. So I just rowed through the 6k at slow pace, with a few bursts at PB pace here and there. Session total: 10k

Today, it had to be different. Unfortunately, I had a difficult night. Went to bed at 11pm. Something woke me up at midnight. Then something woke me up at 3am. I don’t know about other people in my age, but to me waking up at 3am is the worst scenario. I have real difficulty falling asleep again, usually falling asleep at 5am. Then, the alarm clock at 6 is very cruel, leaving you feeling lousy for the rest of the day.

On top of that it’s the period of the year when we have to do performance discussions. Luckily, I have been able to build a well performing team, so for me this shouldn’t be so stressful this year. Still, it is draining.

Luckily, I was able to stop early and row this row at 3:30pm, an ideal time between meals. Did a 2k with speed bursts. Started my favourite rowing SoundCloud playlist, and set up a few pace boats in RowPro. My row from November, a 2014 row which was a PB back then, and a 1:51.2 quick pace boat, which turned out to be quite prophetic.

Here’s the colorful graph:

6km1.jpg

6km2.jpg

And here are the raw data:

Workout Summary - Feb 19, 2016
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|Watts|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|06000|22:13.1|01:51.1|255.3|27.1|175.1|184.0|10.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|Watts|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-|Comments
01|00500|01:51.4|01:51.4|253.0|26.4|148.8|164.0|10.2|
02|00500|01:52.1|01:52.1|248.5|26.2|167.3|169.0|10.2|
03|00500|01:51.8|01:51.8|250.3|26.3|170.7|173.0|10.2|
04|00500|01:51.9|01:51.9|249.9|26.3|173.4|174.0|10.2|
05|00500|01:51.4|01:51.4|252.8|26.4|175.8|177.0|10.2|
06|00500|01:51.2|01:51.2|254.9|26.5|177.2|179.0|10.2|
07|00500|01:51.1|01:51.1|255.0|26.5|179.1|180.0|10.2|
08|00500|01:50.7|01:50.7|258.0|27.1|180.1|181.0|10.0|
09|00500|01:50.3|01:50.3|260.6|27.2|181.0|182.0|10.0|
10|00500|01:50.3|01:50.3|260.6|28.3|182.0|183.0|09.6|
11|00500|01:50.5|01:50.5|259.1|28.2|182.5|184.0|09.6|
12|00500|01:50.2|01:50.2|261.3|29.4|182.1|184.0|09.3|

In November, I rowed a 22:28.3, and my heart rate was in the red from 10 minutes into the row (average 177 bpm). Today, I rowed a (personal best) 22:13, and my average heart rate was 2 beats lower.

Here’s the comparison in power vs time:

6kmcomparison.jpg

The fall row was also after a long working day, so I am not sure if the graphs show an improvement in endurance or an improvement in mental fitness. I tend to believe it’s the former.

My PB calculator tells me I should be able to row around (or slightly under) 22:10. I believe that. In the coming 6 weeks I shall improve my 6k performance, OTW and OTE. I may sneek in a 6k hard distance training session just to see if I can do it.

Tomorrow will be a work day at the rowing club. We need all our “strong men”, and then a few weak lightweights like myself to build our new dock. Very exciting. That doesn’t mean I will go OTW from tomorrow on. There will still be some work to do on the dock after tomorrow.

For now, I will celebrate a PB improvement from 22:19.4 to 22:13.1. More than 6 seconds!

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1mintest

Feb 17 2016

Trabant to Ferrari part 2

Monday

Flight to Brussels. Sit in hotel room to prepare meeting. No training. Rest day.

Tuesday

Before work, I spent an hour in the hotel fitness. A thought crossed my mind: How many marathons have I run on these two treadmills in this particular hotel? Difficult to estimate. I ran for 20 minutes, then did a 40 minute strength session, partly exercise machine, partly body weight.

Tough negotiations at which I cannot say anything. Except perhaps that I personally managed to stall the negotiations for 4 hours. I won’t say what I think about the outcome. Mystery, mystery.

Dinner in Brussels with my sister. We had a good time.

Wednesday

Up at 4AM to catch the flight home. A long day.

Despite travel tiredness and noticable DOMS in shoulders, legs and arms from yesterday’s strength training, I decided that today was the day I would repeat the 1 minute test I did in november, described in this post. Here’s the graph from back then:

anaerobicpowertest
November Sander

Here is the graph from today (blue curve today, dark green curve November):

1mintest.jpg
February Sander

Here is a table comparing the results:

tabelletje.jpg

The targets are from the “Rowing Faster” book and are an age-corrected range for lightweight male rowers. Still at the bottom of the range. Somehow my “peak power” has decreased, although I think it is more an artifact of the November test, where I basically hit 611 W in the first stroke and then dropped to 550W in the next stroke. Today, I started low (500W and then brought it up to 550 and held it for ten strokes. After about 30 seconds the two curves are suspiciously close. One could even call them “identical”.

Improved the average power by 17W. Not sure how significant that is. The drop off times and value are influenced quite a lot by the peak power. Perhaps I did the test wrong today. Not sure. Looking purely at the graphs, I think I should conclude I am slightly better in terms of “average power over first 10 seconds” and the overall level of the curve is significantly higher in the first 30 seconds.

Next test for this week: A full out 6K. Should be a PB attempt.

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3x20min

Feb 14 2016

End of the volume week

Friday

The girls did a circuit training using their own body weight. I put an erg on sliders in the weights room so I could check them a bit.

I rowed for an hour, randomly interrupted to give instructions to the girls, or just to get some water.

Tired after a long, heavy week. Still, on the slides, my pace is 1 to 2 seconds per 500m faster in these steady state rows, than on the static erg.

vrijdag.JPG

Saturday

I was looking forward to this training. Some running with the girls. They would do a 4x3min with light jogging in between, and for me it would be a light jog all the way. Both were wearing heart rate monitors. It was interesting to see the differences. Girl A, the slower runner, albeit with better running technique, reaches 195 bpm while chatting during the warming up, and reached 205 bpm on the first interval. Girl B, the faster runner – but with worse technique, she wastes a lot of energy in up-down motions – had difficulty getting her heart rate above 165bpm in the first interval, and reaches 175 bpm in the subsequent intervals. A case of sprinter vs stayer … girl B prefers the longer distances and has difficulties to start fast. Running 2-13-2016, Heart rate.png

Just fifty minutes.

Sunday

I decided to do only 3×20 minute of erging (vs 4×20 minutes). I would fulfill my training plan with that and my body is really longing for a rest day now. Did a 1402m warming up, so I could put some score on the 2016 Carole McNally memorial CTC, then 3x20min. I didn’t force the average to 200W, but let it evolve naturally.

3x20min.jpg

Added a stroke histogram to my Painsled spreadsheet, just for fun. The left graph is just the 20 minute intervals. The right one includes the warming up, cooling down, and rest periods.

Here are the stats, from the same spreadsheet:

stats.jpg

Heart rate was low on average. I am keeping track of lactate at 60min vs average heart rate and perceived exertion. All rows are between 190 and 202 W on average.

Left graph is heart rate vs Lactate. Not really a trend visible. The right graph is my subjective perceived exertion. It is a little suspicious because I write down this number already knowing the result of the lactate measurement … still I try to be honest and think about the number during the row, before I know the result. This measure correlates a lot better with the lactate measurement.

Next week: Low volume, a 1 minute test and a 6 km PB attempt. Tomorrow a rest day: Hurray.

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CPchart

Feb 11 2016

Take me to the river … No

Romana is still ill (she calls it recovering), so I rowed my training at 4pm at the rowing club, so I could help the girls with their training.

I also took a look into the boat house, because I knew my trailer was parked behind the parts for the new dock. Just wanted to make sure I had a plan for Friday – take boats to the river day. That’s when I discovered that the new dock parts are pretty heavy. You need at least six strong men to move one part, and there are many of them.

We’ll be building the dock next week, so I decided to wait another week. It would be hard to organize a group of six strong men at such short notice, even if a rowing club has high concentrations of strong men. Old strong men have day jobs and family commitments. Young strong men have an important erg race coming Saturday so will not be willing to help.

This was the moment where I should have used my brain and reorganized my micro cycle plan. I had a sprinty interval session planned for today, just because I wanted to spend Friday to Sunday fine tuning technique on the river …

After yesterday’s 30 minute intensive row, a light endurance session would have been ideal, and now that the OTW plans were canceled, I should have just done that.

Instead, I stuck to the plan …

Good thing about rowing in the erg room is that there are always rowers walking 0r standing behind the erg, and with me that has a very healthy effect on my splits. I needed that today …

intervals HR.JPG

Average pace of 1:40.2. Last week I did the same session with an average pace of 1:39.3.

I have been playing with free software called Golden Cheetah. It’s a desktop program to keep training logs and analyse the data, just like SportTracks, which I use as my central tool.

Golden Cheetah is very power oriented, so if you have many sessions where you don’t have power data (OTW rows, cycling, running), it’s going to be of less use for keeping and analysing all your data. I loaded all my painsled data plus some selected erg tests into it, just to play. One of the plots I did was the following:

CPchart.png

So horizontally it shows the interval length in minutes on a log scale, and vertically (erg) power. The solid blue line is the best effort the program found in my training data. So, for example, at the edge of the “Z7” and “Z6” zones, you can see that I have done a full minute at just under 400W. This was from the 1 min on / 1 min off session on January 4. Actually, the entire “Z7” part of the curve is from that session. The red curve is my 2k erg test from November 15. The dashed blue line is a (pretty bad) fit. I guess that with more data the fit will become better and the whole thing could become a kind of a pace predictor. Reading about their model, I discovered that it’s a more sophisticated version of what I did in this blog post.

Nice, but I will stick with SportTracks and using excel to do pace predictions from my SB/PB rows.

When I drove home and switched on the car radio, they were playing “Take me to the river” by the Talking Heads. Not kidding!

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the30minspm

Feb 10 2016

Lactic Acid once or twice?

Tuesday

Bike ride home from work (45 minutes), then 45 minutes of strength training. I have pretty low heart rates during the bike ride, but I still feel my hamstrings the next day. Interesting.

Wednesday

My next race is the Czech Long Distance Championships on April 9. It’s a 6km head race in Hořín, just north of Prague, and I will be starting as a lightweight in the open category. My training schedule is geared to that race. I am now in the second (heavy) week of a 4 week meso cycle, after which I start a 6 week meso cycle leading up to the race.

I am slowly starting to mix in sessions that Olbrecht calls “Aerobic Power”, aimed at improve the use of the Aerobic path way or, in other words, the percentage of VO2max that can be held during a hard long distance row. The guidelines are:

  • Around the race distance
  • Short rest (5 to 15 seconds) and rowed around race pace
  • Results take long to materialize, so start at least 6 weeks before the (long distance) race

For rowing, I think hard distance workouts and things like 2x4000m or 2x3000m with 1 minute rest (for turning the boat) would qualify perfectly. Alternatively, time based intervals with short rests could be done, with longer rests in the beginning, and shorter rests closer to the race date. I have quite good results from doing a weekly 2x3000m OTW, with a 1min rest for turning in the weeks before a head race.

Today it was going to be a single 30 minute. And to make it more interesting, I was going to make it a PB attempt. A year ago, I managed a PB of 7986 meters, so this time I was going to attack the 8km barrier.

Still, the hamstrings were a bit tired. This is a heavy week. Well, so be it. The 30 minute trial is not a super important test for me, even though it is quite often used as a test of lactate threshold heart rate.

First, a 15 minute warming up:

30minwu.jpg

Then on to the main event. I was hesitating between flat pacing at 1:52.5 and negative split, starting at 1:53.5. In the end I decided to flat pace (just as a year ago). I set up a pace boat in RowPro at 1:52.5 and also loaded my PB row of a year ago.

It is amazing how much time is left of a 30 minute row when it starts to hurt.

In the beginning I was pulling away from “2015 Sander” and the pace boat, rowing about a virtual length and a half in front of them. Then “2015 Sander” started to accelerate and took the lead. However, I knew that “2015 Sander” had a crisis in the third quarter of this row, so I let him go. He was never more than 10 meters ahead of me. In the mean time, as my average pace was 1:52.2, I allowed it to drift up a bit to 1:52.5, then tried to pull away from the pace boat.

In the final 10 minutes I had to revert to mental tricks to make time go fast. I alternated focus points:

  • 1 minute sitting straight
  • 1 minute long, strong pulls,
  • 1 minute on rhythm

That helped and I needed it until 1 minute to go, seeing more 1:53 strokes than 1:52 strokes. Pace boat was 5 meter behind me, “2015 Sander” had dropped a few more meters and was 17 meters behind me.

Only in the last minute was I able to get the pace down and pull 1:51. No real sprinting.

With 2 seconds to go I passed the 8000m mark and couldn’t help but shout “Hey!”.

the30min.jpg

the30minspm.jpg
Workout Summary - Feb 10, 2016
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|Watts|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|08007|30:00.0|01:52.4|246.5|26.8|176.8|183.0|10.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|Watts|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-|Comments
01|01337|05:00.0|01:52.2|247.7|25.8|162.2|174.0|10.4|
02|01337|05:00.0|01:52.2|247.7|26.2|175.8|178.0|10.2|
03|01334|05:00.0|01:52.4|246.3|26.6|178.1|182.0|10.0|
04|01331|05:00.0|01:52.7|244.7|26.8|180.1|182.0|09.9|
05|01332|05:00.0|01:52.6|245.3|27.0|181.7|183.0|09.9|
06|01336|05:00.0|01:52.3|247.2|28.4|182.1|183.0|09.4|

That hurt! But it’s a new PB, and a >900 nonathlon points row.

I didn’t measure lactate, because I couldn’t imagine pricking my finger after such a hard row, but from the pain and from my lactate curves it must have been way above 10 mmol/L. Would be interesting to test it next time.

So, filled up with lactate I cooled down for 15 minutes.

30mincd.jpg

Then a quick shower and prepare lunch. I am working from home today and lunch was leftovers and a glass of beer (because of the PB). The leftovers were potatoes, sauerkraut and a sauce based on duck stock and oranges. Quite tasty. We have quite good sauerkraut in Brno, the famous Tuřanské Zelí:

agro_brno-turany_turanske_kysane_zeli
Sauerkraut
1464622_944958598918655_6141574013365351703_n.jpg
Brno Tuřany, where the stuff is produced

I was reading about the stuff during lunch. Turns out it is extremely healthy stuff:

  • Source of Vitamins B, C and K
  • Low in calories
  • High in Calcium and Magnesium and a source of fiber, iron, copper, magnesium
  • Full of beneficial bacteria

On top of that, it has a pH of 3 and is full of lactic acid. Not sure if that is good, when I already had my own produce in my muscles, but who cares. It tastes good, and seems to be excellent food for lightweights.

Final thought: I rowed 8km at an average pace that was identical to my 6k test in the fall. That doesn’t sound too bad, given that I am doing a 6k test next week.

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