Dec 17 2017
Half Marathon – Holiday Challenge – My own site is smarter than I
So the holiday season is nearing and I decided to restore an old tradition: To row all ranking distances during the holiday break, starting at the longest one, and use the results to get an idea of my current shape.
It is also a good way to get some kilometers in the bank (and raise some money for the Concept2 Holiday Challenge).
I do skip the Full Marathon. My behind would hurt too much. I probably would have to skip trainings after it, and I would have to build an entire day around making time for it.
The morning was a bit busy. I had to go to buy a Christmas tree, then carry it home over 1.5km. I could of course have mounted the roof rack on the car and spared myself the walk, but I don’t like to mount the roof rack, and I don’t mind a little walk.
I paid almost 900 Kc (roughly $45) for the tree, which is ridiculously expensive given that the forests around Brno are full of perfectly fine Christmas trees. Some people solve it like that, they go to the forest to illegally get a tree. Not for me. Growing a Christmas tree of the size I bought takes about 5 years, so imagine how the forest would look if we all took our trees there. Coming to think of it, that price was pretty reasonable.
Then another chore. Got rid of the old water closet, which again I did walking, this time with the wheelbarrow. It’s just a few hundred meters, and this time I wanted to avoid any liquids dripping into my car from the old water closet.
Then it was lunch time, and after lunch I finally sat down to sort out the target pace for my Half Marathon. Here’s what Rowsandall.com said, using the Pro Users OTE Erg CP chart:
Well, that was clearly not useful. I haven’t done any longer hard rows recently, so the extrapolation to 21km is far too optimistic.
So this time I used the CP chart on the free version of Rowsandall.com. The difference with the Pro version is that it only uses the official Concept2 ranking pieces that it finds in your workout history. But this time, that was an advantage, because it finds them automatically, and I could set it to look back a little further:
All right, 1:58.1 based on some pretty old rows. My PB pace is 1:57.5, which I also noted down on the piece of paper that I took with me to the erg basement.
After 5 minutes of warming up, I set off. I wanted to row at 1:58-1:59, but the faster pace came easily, and I soon found myself looking at a 1:22:38 estimate at completion, which is my PB. So I decided to hold 1:57.5 exactly …
I shouldn’t have done that, of course. I had to gradually increase the stroke rate from 24spm to 25spm and eventually to 26spm to hold that pace. With 12km to go I was still optimistic, and I started to play number games. As I passed the 12km to go mark at a time that looked like xx:38, i.e. 38 seconds after the minute, I was going to change that time by 5 seconds every kilometer, to finish exactly at 1:22:38. The idea was to get slightly ahead of that schedule and then push.
With 9km to go the pacing got wobbly, and suddenly I started seeing 2:00, and 2:01.
Time to reconsider.
I would have hated to hand down after rowing for so long, so I decided to back off a bit and aim for 1:58.5 average pace.
I backed off too much, and 1:58.5 average pace came with more than 5km to go. I didn’t have the energy to get back to pulling 1:59.
Only on the final kilometer I started to get back to 1:57, then 1:55 to get the final time under 1:24:00.
Workout Summary - media/20171216-1610470o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|21097|83:57.0|01:59.4|205.9|25.1|172.1|180.0|10.0
W-|21097|83:58.0|01:59.4|205.8|25.1|172.0|180.0|10.0
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|180.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00097|00:22.0|01:53.4|206.2|22.9|099.7|107.0|11.6
01|01000|03:55.8|01:57.9|213.5|23.9|152.7|162.0|10.7
02|01000|03:54.9|01:57.4|216.0|24.2|164.2|166.0|10.6
03|01000|03:54.7|01:57.3|216.7|24.1|169.5|172.0|10.6
04|01000|03:54.6|01:57.3|216.7|24.5|171.4|174.0|10.4
05|01000|03:54.9|01:57.4|216.1|24.8|172.9|174.0|10.3
06|01000|03:54.7|01:57.3|216.7|25.2|172.5|175.0|10.2
07|01000|03:55.3|01:57.7|214.8|25.1|173.7|176.0|10.1
08|01000|03:55.3|01:57.7|214.9|25.3|175.7|178.0|10.1
09|01000|03:55.0|01:57.5|215.9|25.6|176.6|179.0|10.0
10|01000|03:54.9|01:57.4|215.9|25.9|176.7|179.0|09.9
11|01000|03:55.5|01:57.8|214.3|25.8|176.5|178.0|09.9
12|01000|03:55.5|01:57.7|214.4|26.0|177.3|179.0|09.8
13|01000|03:56.8|01:58.4|211.0|26.2|177.2|178.0|09.7
14|01000|04:00.6|02:00.3|201.4|25.7|175.5|177.0|09.7
15|01000|04:05.4|02:02.7|189.5|24.9|173.8|175.0|09.8
16|01000|04:04.5|02:02.3|191.5|24.9|174.0|176.0|09.8
17|01000|04:07.3|02:03.6|185.5|24.5|171.8|174.0|09.9
18|01000|04:05.0|02:02.5|190.2|24.8|172.7|175.0|09.9
19|01000|04:08.6|02:04.3|182.9|24.9|171.9|174.0|09.7
20|01000|04:11.7|02:05.8|175.6|23.9|168.6|170.0|10.0
21|01000|03:56.1|01:58.0|214.2|26.9|174.5|180.0|09.5
Here is an interesting chart of Work per Stroke for the row:
Here are some stats from rowsandall.com:
rPower 207.4W
HR drift 10.66%
rScore 117
TRIMP 244
The rPower value basically tells me that I could have held 207W (as opposed to 206W) by rowing flat, instead of holding 215W and then crashing to 190W. This sounds correct to me.
Here is the updated CP chart after including the HM:
And the updated predictions:
That looks more realistic. I think I am able to hold 211W for the Half Marathon, on a good day. The predicted 10k target is faster than my PB. I think I am going to approach this very conservatively, around 90-95% of the predicted 247W, then see how much I have left in the tank with 2km to go. One has to take into account that the predictions are for a full out effort from a fully rested state.
Still not entirely happy with the predictions. I wondered where rowsandall.com takes the data for rowing at 260W for 15 minutes from? It turns out it found those records in the ANP test, but because of a Painsled bug (in Painsled Beta), it didn’t record the power during the 2 minute rest intervals but kept logging the last power value of the work intervals, so that is an overly optimistic number. When I removed that workout from the Ranking Workouts, I got this:
And the following predictions, which I will use for my Holiday Challenge rows:
It is interesting how big a difference there is between my steady state pace of 2:01-2:02 and this HM pace of 1:59!
Dec 19 2017
Swim and Hour of Power
Monday
My last day at work. I have a couple of vacation days to take up, so I can enjoy being free from now to the end of the year. Well, there are a couple of work related things that I’d rather finish before January, but I can do them from home, and I can enjoy prioritizing slightly differently.
I am doing a couple of a holiday challenges. The first holiday challenge is the classic Concept2 Holiday Challenge ($0.02 per kilometer rowed and logged on the Concept2 logbook goes to a charity).
The second Holiday challenge is to get the Christmas presents without visiting a mall. More about that later.
The third holiday challenge is to row a ranking distance every third day, starting with the Half Marathon and working my way systematically to the shorter distances. I did the HM on Saturday.
So Monday was still a day for a recovery training, and I decided to do no rowing. I opted for swimming, a sport that I rarely practice, mainly because I am a super slow swimmer.
So after work I headed to the municipal swimming stadium Za Lužánkami, built in the communist early 1980s.
When I first visited this pool 10 years ago it was in very bad need of maintenance. Now, the pool has been renovated and it is a basic 50m pool, mainly used by people who want to train.
I go swimming rarely, and hadn’t been in this pool for 10 years, so everything was new to me. I figured out that some lanes were reserved for swimming clubs. Then there were a few lanes for the general public, some of which had a minimum swimming speed of 2 minutes per 100m.
The problem was that I was slightly slow for the 2 min/100m lanes and slightly fast for the slower lanes. Anyway, I quickly figured out that 20 pools was achievable in under an hour, so I had my target. I swam 2km, and evening I fell asleep early.
Recovery training.
Tuesday
First full vacation day. In the morning, I worked a bit on a top secret rowing data project. That was fun.
Then I did some groceries. I figured that 9:30 was an ideal time for doing them. Hopefully, the wave of shoppers who wait in front of the store to open at 8am would already have left, and the pre lunch wave would arrive later. Turned out to be a good bet. I managed to get all the stuff I need for ur Christmas dinners, and only fresh stuff is left for later. Oh, and for the wines I intend to visit a local vineyard. No supermarket wine. I note that I visited a supermarket, not a mall. No anonymous place that looks the same all over the country.
Then it was time to head to the center of Brno to buy some Christmas presents, combined with a lunch, and a coffee in my favorite book store. Brno is a smaller version of Vienna, so imagine lots of Christmas markets, a really nice atmosphere. There is also an abundance of coffee houses with good Italian espresso, so everything was good.
Then it was time to row. The Hour of Power, today. After Saturday’s debacle, I made a point of not looking up my Personal Best and row at a conservative pace. Rowsandall.com suggested a range between 207 and 223W, with the higher number being the best I could achieve. As the calculation is based on very few rows, I ignored the upper limit and decided to start off at 207W, which was not by coincidence the average power of Saturday’s half marathon row. I was pretty skeptical I would be able to put in a good effort. I was still pretty sore from the swimming.
All went very well. I was able to gradually increase the pace. Work per Stroke was nice and constant. I think the images and the summary speak for themselves:
The irony is that after the row, I found out I was just 14 meters short of a PB. Just one Watt more and I would have equaled my PB. As a rower at my club used to say, I missed a PB by a “pičí chlup”. Do not google this, just believe me it is a very small margin.
Here is my Critical Power Chart after the row and the updated predictions:
Two easy days, then a 10k.
By sanderroosendaal • rowing • 0 • Tags: concept2, erg, hour of power, OTE, rowing, SB, training