concept2

mapka

Jun 24 2018

The rest of the week

After Tuesday’s 3x6min session I packed my travel bag and hopped on a train to Vienna. It was nice to watch the Neue Donau regatta course when crossing the railway bridge. A few days before, Romana and I had had a few great races there.

I took a plane to Brussels and arrived late, tired, and sweaty. I knew I was really exhausted after a long weekend of racing and not taking any rest after it.

I was supposed to do a weights session on Wednesday morning, but I just stayed longer in my hotel bed instead. Actually, I did get up and put on my workout clothes, but then I returned to bed. My body just didn’t feel like it.

A long day of meetings in Brussels, then a flight back to Vienna, where a driver picked me up for the final 2 hour stretch home. I wanted to sleep in the car, but the little chat with the driver turned into a 2 hour long conversation about football (soccer for my US readers), building permits and other important things in life. It was nice.

On Thursday, I had a meeting I was moderating, starting at 8am. That was hard. At the end of the day, I had time for my weights session. Sixty minutes of various weight lifting exercises. Boring, but useful.

Rowing outside, at the end of the day, would have been very hard anyway. It was 35 degrees C.

Friday

Overnight, the temperature dropped by 20 degrees, from 35 to a cold 15 C when I launched my single on Friday morning.

It was very choppy so I rowed up the gorge to the castle, and a little beyond.

All that green is forest. When I go rowing in the morning and go in the gorge, I always feel very lucky to be out enjoying the nature. In the NW most stretch, after I turn and start rowing south again, I see a few higher hills from the Czech Moravian Highlands in the distance, and otherwise I am just surrounded by forest. The city seems very far away.

My Empower oarlock disconnected and wouldn’t reconnect with 3km to go. Only switching off and on the SpeedCoach did the trick. Luckily, I have means to glue together the data from two “workout” files, like I did in the chart above.

I wanted to work on technique but got carried away by the views and it ended up as just rowing for pleasure. Not a bad thing, I guess.

Saturday

The wind had gotten even stronger overnight and we were looking at white caps. Not good weather to do the intensive session that we had planned. Eventually we decided to do it on ergs. We put three ergs on coupled sliders, so I was stroking a 3 person “boat”, with Radka and Romana behind me. The session was a 1km/1km + 500m/500m + 1km, but we changed it to a 4min/4min + 2min/2min + 4min erg session so we could all row in sync.

As this was an unexpected erg session, I didn’t have the connector cable with me. I did record heart rate and the data show that I have been up to 186bpm, which tells you how hard work this session was. 65 minutes of rowing in total, because we did long warming up and cooling down.

This session came from our club head coach and I like it. The final 4 minute was really tough, after only 2 minutes of rest after the 2 minute work interval. Pretty good race preparation.

Sunday

It seemed to be less windy this morning, so at breakfast Romana and I said to each other that we should go rowing, in case Monday turns out to be windy again. Arriving at the lake, it was actually much choppier than we had estimated at home. We really do need that web cam at the rowing club.

We took the double up into the gorge again and I made a conscious effort to stroke at low rate today. It was a great session, although the steering did slow us down a bit. Not a very long session, because we had to be back in time to do some groceries and to be ready for our visitors this afternoon.

We took our visitors to a place to eat and drink a bit, and the guest on the neighboring table was one of the country’s most notorious criminals, who served 23 years of his life sentence for two contract killings in the 1990s (which he has denied being guilty of) before receiving a presidential pardon a year ago, after which he achieved cult status.

I guess it gave some couleur locale to our visitors from out of town.

In other news, my son Dominik stroked a 4+ to a bronze medal at the Czech Championships in the boys 13/14 category:

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myimage (26)

Apr 25 2018

Monday – Hay Fever Steady State

It’s been warm weather for a few days, and it hasn’t rained much. Also, all trees are in bloom. Finally, Monday saw a change in pressure and wind direction.

For Hay Fever guys like me, that means taking precautions. A daily sniff of nose spray, and at high risk days also a tablet.

I forgot all that and just hit the road unprepared.

In the afternoon, I had to run some errands (bank, notary, post office), and I used the public transport, so I spent some time in trams and buses with open windows.

By 6pm, my immune system decided it was time to go into full emergency action against the pollen dose.

Painful, inflamed eyes and nose, feeling tired, etc.

It is hard to do a training in this state. Energy wise, I felt like even a light steady state would be too much. But, I also know that actually doing the exercise helps reduce the symptoms. As soon as I start sweating a bit, the symptoms seam to ease.

So I did just that. An hour of steady state on the erg. It was hard in the beginning, but I gradually got into it, and the symptoms really did ease up. Glad I did exercise.

I was rowing the session on Painsled, connected to Zwift for some virtual company. I let Zwift chose random courses for me. This time it was two loops in some city environment, with a few short cobblestone climbs in the second half of the loop, which really helped me to get through the entire hour. The nice thing about rowing on Zwift is that the loops give you some kind of “completion point” which keeps you going until you have reached it, as opposed to allowing yourself to stop erging at a random point.

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Apr 11 2018

Tuesday Erg Day

It was too windy to row, so I did a 75 minute erg workout. Used Zwift and rode the “hilly course” (or something like that).

Zwift ride

Longer rows with PainSled and Zwift are a bit problematic, data-wise. So you get two charts.

steady state

Zwift steady state row

Nothing surprising in the stroke metrics:

stroke work chart

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Mar 18 2018

Sunday – All worked out well

All worked out well.

I planned a “hard 6k” for Saturday, anticipating that I would be able to do it on the water, in the single. So, although it was supposed to be a hard 6k, I never intended it to be a full out one, this being my first or second OTW row of 2018.

It all worked out differently. It snowed on Saturday, and I decided to do the Steady State workout on my erg in my basement, and move the 6k to Sunday, when a small group of our Masters rowers meet at the rowing club and erg together.

I put the erg on slides, to get a bit closer to the OTW feeling, and, admittedly, also because erging a 6k is so much easier on slides. Did I mention that I am considering buying slides for use at home? I found a local guy who can make them really cost effective.

So here is the entire workout

I did a nice long warming up with some speed bumps. It’s easier to rate up on slides, so I found myself doing 40spm for a few strokes. Then, while the rest of the Masters started their 4x8min/2min workout (at 22/24/26/22spm), I started my 6k. The plan was to stick to 1:54 pace for the first 2400m and be careful, but I did see a lot of 1:52 pace, and when I got enthusiastic, even some 1:52 and 1:51.

With the other rowers next to me, I didn’t have difficult rating up in the second half of the row. It’s amazing how much peer pressure helps, although I also think that for a lightweight as me, rowing on slides is a definite advantage.


Workout Summary - media/20180318-1530530o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|06000|22:16.0|01:51.4|253.1|28.7|0.0|000.0|09.4
W-|06000|22:17.0|01:51.5|253.1|28.7|000.0|000.0|09.4
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|000.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00500|01:53.1|01:53.1|237.5|27.1|000.0|0.0|09.8
01|00500|01:53.6|01:53.6|239.5|26.6|000.0|0.0|09.9
02|00500|01:52.9|01:52.9|241.7|27.3|000.0|0.0|09.7
03|00500|01:53.5|01:53.5|240.9|27.0|000.0|0.0|09.8
04|00500|01:52.7|01:52.7|243.0|27.4|000.0|0.0|09.7
05|00500|01:52.2|01:52.2|247.1|27.9|000.0|0.0|09.6
06|00500|01:52.5|01:52.5|245.5|27.7|000.0|0.0|09.6
07|00500|01:52.5|01:52.5|247.4|28.3|000.0|0.0|09.4
08|00500|01:51.4|01:51.4|252.6|29.0|000.0|0.0|09.3
09|00500|01:49.5|01:49.5|265.1|29.8|000.0|0.0|09.2
10|00500|01:48.4|01:48.4|274.2|31.1|000.0|0.0|08.9
11|00500|01:45.5|01:45.5|307.8|35.2|000.0|0.0|08.1

Not a bad workout. Actually a Season’s Best, and pretty close to my PB (of 2 years ago) of 22:13.1.

Here are a few of the flex charts that I found interesting:

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How-To

Rowing in our rowing club’s erg room is always a challenge, data wise. The ergs have PM3 monitors, and no heart rate adapter. To get Painsled to register anything, I need to use the iPhone connection kit plus a lightning to 30 pin adapter to get my iPhone to work with the monitor.

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I do record heart rate separately, using the Polar OH1 optical heart rate belt worn on my upper arm. This heart rate band has a standalong mode, which syncs to Polar Flow, and then to Strava. Then, I can import the heart rate data using the Strava connection to rowsandall.com.

Before I merge the heart rate data with the rowing data, I first glue warming up, 6k and cooling down together on rowsandall.com, as described here.

Then, I go to the Advanced Edit page for the workout and select “Sensor Fusion”:Clicking the highlighted link brings me to a page where I select the heart rate data imported from Strava, and then I get to this page:

I select heart rate, and as I started the heart rate band at the same time as I started rowing, I don’t need to edit the time offset.

If I wanted, I could now split the resulting workout again to get a nice record for my 6k with heart rate, but I didn’t have a need for that.

The sensor fusion, joining and splitting are experimental functions on rowsandall.com, and you have to try which approach gives you the best result. I find that when the workout durations are very different, like today where the OH1 recorded one hour long record, but the painsled workouts where divided in three parts, it is more efficient to first glue together the rows, and do the data fusion with workouts of approximately the same length. That creates a nice workout record for the entire session, which can then be split up again if you want.

For the stroke metrics plots, I used the original Painsled 6k workout, without heart rate data, and just browsed through my defined set of favorite flex charts, zooming in on stroke length and work per stroke using the flex tools. Pretty happy with what I saw.

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C669B298-81C9-4285-AB15-14C4EB2418F8

Mar 18 2018

Saturday – Steady State

The Workout

Just an hour of steady state.

In my optimism, I had planned for a “technique row” OTW for Friday. It was below zero, and I skipped training altogether.

During this erg row in my basement, it was snowing outside. Everything is white, as if we have been set back three months in time.

I used Zwift again (more about that in the how to section below). Here I am riding into the mountains.

How-To

Today, I am riding on Zwift. Don’t panic. Everything is still captured in Painsled. How does this work. You need:

  • An iPhone running Painsled
  • An iPad running Zwift

Here is an example of how that looks:

On the iPad, you will see the iPhone running Painsled as a power meter. Connect to that, and your little cyclist avatar will get the power values from the Concept2. Actually, the power values are upgraded a bit, so while I was doing 200W on the erg, it showed as 235W on Zwift. I guess Rick from Painsled did that to make sure that an average rower keeps up with an average Zwift cyclist.

The fun thing about Zwift is that your ride/row with other people. I used to do that with RowPro, but that was very static. You had to make sure there was a scheduled row, and you had to adhere to the agreed start time. If you were late, you rowed alone. Also, because everybody started at the same time, and people have different rowing speeds, most of the time I ended up rowing my steady state alone, with some crazy fast people in front, and some slower people behind.

Not on Zwift. You basically join when you are ready, and you just see other folks riding along in the streets of the artificial world. You see a guy riding in front of you, close the gap and pass him. Or, you are passed by someone fast, and you pick up the pace a bit to try and stay with him.

As the row is captured using Painsled, at the end of the row, I just mail the workouts to workouts@rowsandall.com.

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myimage

Mar 17 2018

Thursday – 6 x 4 minutes – more threshold training

The Session

6x(1min+1min+1min+1min)/2min @ 22/24/26/28 spm

Interesting training session. It wasn’t too hard, but it was clearly in the threshold power range, and it was a good workout.

A nice and long summary:

Workout Summary - media/20180315-1946080o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|08141|36:00.0|02:12.7|180.9|22.3|158.6|180.0|10.2
W-|06319|24:00.0|01:53.9|237.9|24.9|158.1|179.0|10.6
R-|01838|12:00.0|03:15.9|066.8|17.1|159.6|179.0|95.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00257|01:00.0|01:56.7|209.4|22.8|118.3|133.0|11.3
01|00258|01:00.0|01:56.4|219.8|24.0|148.3|156.0|10.8
02|00268|01:00.0|01:52.0|249.9|25.7|159.7|164.0|10.4
03|00279|01:00.0|01:47.7|277.7|27.3|166.8|170.0|10.2
04|00247|01:00.0|02:01.5|198.8|21.1|139.5|147.0|11.7
05|00260|01:00.0|01:55.4|227.5|24.2|152.0|157.0|10.7
06|00270|01:00.0|01:51.2|253.5|26.1|161.9|168.0|10.3
07|00276|01:00.0|01:48.5|274.0|27.7|171.3|174.0|10.0
08|00248|01:00.0|02:01.1|195.4|22.5|136.3|146.0|11.0
09|00257|01:00.0|01:56.9|218.8|24.4|153.3|157.0|10.5
10|00268|01:00.0|01:52.0|248.7|25.9|164.0|169.0|10.3
11|00279|01:00.0|01:47.5|280.5|28.1|173.7|176.0|09.9
12|00244|01:00.0|02:03.0|202.5|21.8|143.7|152.0|11.2
13|00259|01:00.0|01:55.6|225.6|24.4|158.0|164.0|10.7
14|00269|01:00.0|01:51.3|252.7|26.3|169.8|173.0|10.2
15|00279|01:00.0|01:47.7|279.3|28.1|176.0|179.0|09.9
16|00242|01:00.0|02:03.9|190.8|20.2|141.9|152.0|12.0
17|00260|01:00.0|01:55.3|227.1|23.5|161.0|168.0|11.1
18|00269|01:00.0|01:51.5|252.7|25.4|170.6|174.0|10.6
19|00278|01:00.0|01:47.9|277.3|27.7|176.0|179.0|10.0
20|00247|01:00.0|02:01.5|195.7|21.5|144.2|152.0|11.5
21|00260|01:00.0|01:55.5|226.6|24.4|159.4|165.0|10.6
22|00268|01:00.0|01:51.8|249.6|25.9|170.6|175.0|10.4
23|00278|01:00.0|01:48.1|275.5|28.0|177.5|179.0|09.9

Great. But it is more interesting to look at some charts.

Again, I am slightly increasing Work per Stroke when rating up. Drive length is pretty constant:

That’s about it. Pretty good.

How-To

There isn’t much to add to the how-to sections of the other workouts of this week. I used Painsled on the iPad, connected to my PM5 on a static Concept2 model C ergometer. After the workout, I emailed the files to workouts@rowsandall.com. Once I received the confirmation email, I opened the main session on rowsandall.com.

I opened the workout in “Workflow View”, a configurable page on rowsandall.com. On the left, there is a navigation bar which you can configure to your liking. I have added “Edit Intervals” near the top. That is where I go, and submit “6x(1min+1min+1min+1min)/2min” as the workout description, which nicely separates the rest strokes from the workout strokes and tidies up the workout summary. The original summary auto-generated based on Painsled’s CSV file was pretty good, but as it is stroke based, you end up with intervals that are 3:58 minutes long instead of 4 minutes exactly.

I take a quick look at the thumbnail of the session chart, which was created automatically because I put “chart time” in the body of the email.

The Flex Charts section is interesting. Here, I have thumbnails for all my favorite Flex Charts (which I can define on Rowsandall.com), and by clicking on one of them, I am automatically taken to the flex chart page. I click on the first one and get this:

I have highlighted the navigation buttons on the bottom, which allow me to navigate between my pre-defined favorite Flex Charts. Of course, on each chart I can use the sliders on the left and the toolset to the right of the chart to interact with the data. These charts are interactive!

One of the charts is Drive Length. I use it to check that I didn’t do any wild things in terms of stroke length, such as starting to short slide when things get tough. Today, I didn’t.

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Mar 14 2018

Easy threshold training – does it exist?

Monday

A day off. We had business visitors over and I took them to a restaurant. I needed the rest day. Lots of DOMS after the enthusiastic but unplanned longish run of Sunday, and my HRV data didn’t look too good either. Here you have the data from the HRV4Training app.

Look at the line of colored dots. A drop from 8.0 (which already isn’t a really good value) on Sunday morning to 7.1 on Monday morning.

Unless this is shear coincidence, the HRV4Training app is starting to produce some convincing evidence that it is able to give me a heads up on accumulated fatigue, which is great.

Tuesday

Although I still had DOMS from the running, and I felt tired after a long day of hosting some business visitors, I felt motivated to work out. However, I was aware of the advice that HRV4Training had given to take a light day. The session was:

  • 4x(4min+3min+2min+1min)/2min at 20/22/24/26spm

That doesn’t sound too taxing, and I was even wondering if it is really a threshold session, or more like a “black hole” session, or a slightly more intensive steady state. Well, it turned out that my heart rate got quite high. I was glad that the final 2 minute and 1 minute parts were over fast, and with every interval I had more difficulty holding good form and posture in the 20 and 22 spm bits.


Workout Summary - media/20180313-1925580o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|10856|48:00.0|02:12.6|174.5|20.5|156.9|176.0|11.0
W-|09994|40:00.0|02:00.1|202.5|22.1|157.7|176.0|11.3
R-|00871|08:00.0|04:35.7|034.6|12.7|153.2|176.0|24.1
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00968|04:00.0|02:04.0|180.5|20.2|133.7|146.0|12.0
01|00748|03:00.0|02:00.3|201.2|22.0|154.1|158.0|11.3
02|00514|02:00.0|01:56.6|220.4|23.5|159.9|164.0|10.9
03|00269|01:00.0|01:51.5|251.6|25.9|166.0|169.0|10.4
04|00965|04:00.0|02:04.3|183.3|20.5|145.1|155.0|11.8
05|00748|03:00.0|02:00.3|200.7|22.1|160.4|164.0|11.3
06|00516|02:00.0|01:56.2|222.7|23.9|169.2|172.0|10.8
07|00269|01:00.0|01:51.7|250.6|25.6|172.3|174.0|10.5
08|00966|04:00.0|02:04.2|183.2|20.3|151.0|162.0|11.9
09|00751|03:00.0|01:59.9|203.1|22.2|166.4|169.0|11.3
10|00515|02:00.0|01:56.5|220.9|23.8|171.4|172.0|10.8
11|00267|01:00.0|01:52.3|247.3|25.5|172.7|174.0|10.5
12|00966|04:00.0|02:04.2|182.5|20.3|152.0|167.0|11.9
13|00750|03:00.0|01:60.0|202.4|22.4|167.8|171.0|11.2
14|00516|02:00.0|01:56.3|222.1|24.3|173.3|176.0|10.6
15|00264|01:00.0|01:53.5|239.4|25.6|174.9|176.0|10.3

Looking at Work per Stroke is interesting:

Ideally, in these rate ladder sessions, you should row at constant Work per Stroke, but somehow I was increasing the work slightly at higher stroke rates. Should I have pushed harder at 20 spm?

Wednesday

I managed to motivate myself to make a stop at the pool on the way to work. I hit the water a bit later than normal, around 7:20am, and as I always leave the pool at 8:00, no matter how long I have been swimming, in order to arrive at work at 8:30, today I had only 45 minutes of swimming, or 1500m.

In my hurry, I had forgotten to take a towel, which I discovered while walking to the pre-swim shower. I spent a few seconds hesitating in front of the 28C shower, wondering if I should give up and just go to work. No, I was going to take that 28C shower (fresh) and start swimming, and in the first few lanes I would figure out a plan.

It turned out to be pretty easy. My cloth swimming bag proved to be a pretty effective towel.

How-To

On Tuesday, I took lots of screenshots to explain how I do the data on this workout. Here are the details. First, a picture of my erg basement:

No, that is not a very glamorous environment. It’s a small room in our basement. The black hole in the back is a door, which I open to let in fresh air. In the right corner, on the water pump box, you can see a Raspberry Pi. It is not in use at the moment. An abandoned project.

More important are the box close to the erg, with a radio/USB speaker combo, and the iPad.

The iPad is running SoundCloud in the background with appropriate workout music which is coming out of the radio speakers through the BlueTooth connection. In the foreground, I am running Painsled, which is not yet connected to the PM5. Here’s a series of pictures showing me connecting the Polar OH1 and Painsled:

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You need to repeat these steps at the start of each session.

Now you’re good to go. Start pulling and the iPad with Painsled will show a copy of your parameters. This picture taken during one of the rest periods:

You can use the PM as normal. Each time you press the Menu button to start a new workout or Just Row, Painsled will save the data, but you can safely ignore this and just focus on the PM5.

After the session, it is time to get the data out of Painsled and to Rowsandall, Concept2 logbook, SportTracks and other places.

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There is one thing I forgot to screengrab. In Settings, you must select “CSV file” under the Painsled Export settings. When writing the email, notice that the From address is the one I use for my rowsandall.com account, that the email Subject will be copied as the workout name, and I use email commands to synchronize my data to the Concept2 logbook (“C2”) and SportTracks (“st”), and make a time chart. A few minutes later, I receive the following email:

Now, I can start looking at the workout data on rowsandall.com. Here is what I look at.

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For the swimming session of today, I use the Polar OH1 in standalone mode, and then sync it with the Polar Flow app after the swim. This will get the data on Strava, from where I can import them into Rowsandall.com. The only thing I do is link it to my planned session, and that’s it.

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