Sep 22 2017
The plan: 8km hard distance OTW
Reality: 30 minutes OTE
I couldn’t leave work early enough, then ended up in traffic jams. Changed plans. Drove home for an hour on the erg.
I was frustrated. After thirty minutes of erging, I stopped to write a work related email. Didn’t resume.
Tomorrow: 8km hard distance OTW.
Sep 21 2017
Wednesday
Back on the erg. This time I was a bit better prepared. For example, I listened to a podcast from the RowingChat series. Catching up with these RowPerfect podcasts, I listened to the episode where Rebecca Caroe was the interviewee.
At one point there is a short discussion about rowing data, and Rebecca remarks that people respond well to small challenges, leading to incremental improvements. YES!! I entirely agree with that. Measuring and trying to improve is a huge motivator. And it can start with simple measures. Even counting strokes on the erg. Or counting the number of strokes you can row with clean blades.
The workout was simple. I did two full sets of 5k, with a roughly one minute break in between. In the last, third interval, I rowed 2.5km at normal steady state pace, and then started to lower the stroke rate. I wanted to generate some data to look at the new Distance per Stroke metric on rowsandall.com.
I noticed that I should clean the erg. The drag factor is a bit low.
So, here are the charts with the nww metric:
Thursday
Rode to work and back on the bike. It was nice weather, and this is a very time efficient way to get 90 minutes of cross training. I am puzzled by the 600m difference between the morning and afternoon ride. It was the same route.
Planning
I have been playing with a new training plan for the coming 12 months. I am going to try out 9 day cycles, as opposed to week cycles. The nine day cycle will enable a very simple ‘rhythm’ of workouts:
Hard/easy/easy/hard/easy/easy/hard/easy/easy
Three of those cycles (plus a few days) is a calendar month, which I plan as training blocks with emphasis on a certain type of training, with a specific goal. The three cycles will be
May 30 2017
Roeicorvée.
Corvée is the Dutch word for drudgery and roei is row, so roeicorvée would be rowing drudgery.
I wanted to row late in the evening, when the temperatures start to drop from the high of 30C. However, by the time I wanted to drive to the rowing club, the sky was black and the weather forecast looked like this:
Not so good, in other words. So I opted to row the steady state session on the erg. Roeicorvée. It was a good decision. The hailstones were the size of golfballs.
Kinomap
One of my Strava followers had talked about Kinomap. This iOS app shows you footage of rowing while you are pulling on the erg. I thought it would make the erg less boring so I installed it on my iPad and rowed the first 2k with it. That is, I played the only video of a 2k effort that was available on the free version and rowed while it played, covering s little over 2400m while looking at some single sculler on a brautiful lake.
For data capture, I had Painsled running in the background, but connecting Kinomap through BlueTooth actually threw out Painsled, as I discovered after the row. Bugger.
But Kinomap syncs automatically to Strava, except that it didn’t transfer heart rate data from the PM5. Here is the workout after import to rowsandall.com from Strava:
So I tried to look at pricing of Kinomap but couldn’t find a way to subscribeor find any pricing info on Kinomap’s website or in the app. I thought about connecting Kinomap through the USB cable (using the connector cable for the iPhone) but the connector csnle is very short and I had no way to support the iPad next to the PM.
So I rowed another 30 minutes of rowing drudgery, wiped off the sweat from the handle, my hands snd my face, dialled up a 5k and rowed on. Here are the PainSled plots. These ones are missing SPM values because Painsled has corrected a typo in the CSV column header (stokes instead of strokes) without informing the developer at rowsandall.com. I will fix that asap.
All really slow as you can see. Tomorrow: another row in the eight.
Apr 18 2017
The plan was to row a 5x1500m on the water, first thing in the morning.
This plan didn’t survive the time I needed to scrape the ice off my car windows. The North Pole has decided to send its weather our way. Temperatures are around 0, windy, with icy rain, hail, and other nice stuff. Snow is expected for tomorrow.
The official training plan for the Masters in our club has a light week, but I have decided that training properly is more important than performing on coming weekend’s races. So plan B was to do the session indoors and compare with a similar workout of a few weeks ago.
First, I needed to reinstall Painsled. My “beta tester” version had expired, so I had to download the “ordinary” version. This involved going upstairs to tell my son to stop downloading videos.
After a 2k warming up I started the main session. I set it up as a “ReRow”, with my previous session as a pace boat.
I managed to follow the pace boat for the first three intervals. At the start of the fourth interval I saw that my pace boat was getting faster. I was now chasing a 1:50 average.
After 1000m, the wheels came off.
The only nice thing about it is that I have the workout compare functionality on rowsandall.com to see this happening in real life. Unfortunately, the last time I rowed this with my defect Wahoo Tickr, and the heart rate values were not reliable.
I bet they were lower than today, though. I think the first graph tells the story all too well. Too much red in the third interval …
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Apr 11 2017
No, not my rowing “career”. Today, I heard that my performance at the LW men Open Czech Long Distance Championship was used as a kind of benchmark. Elite rowers slower than Roosendaal can end their career. Elite rowers who beat me with a too small margin also have a problem.
Interesting.
Today, I am happy, because I ended a few weeks of schizofrenia. On the test server of rowsandall.com, I have been working on updated looks, including a new designed logo.
Every time I went to the “production” version of the site, I was more and more unhappy. I liked the new design more.
Today, the “develop” version has become the “production” version. Rowsandall.com v2.0. Here’s the landing page, including a licensed stock photograph:
And this is the facelifted version of the workouts list:
And more is to come.
Today, I rowed on the erg. I had too much work to do. Also, the wind prediction was very unfavorable, so I didn’t risk. The bluetooth connectivity issue with the PM5 was solved by resetting the iPhone. So, nothing wrong with the PM, but the iPhone had corrupted bluetooth settings after an iOS update.
Today’s workout is from the training plan of our head coach and it was:
3km warming up
3x10min/5min rest, with 10min = 4min@20spm, 3min@22spm, 2min@24spm, 1min@26spm
Cooling down
Workout Summary - media/20170411-1845240o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|09394|45:00.0|02:23.7|188.3|21.8|156.0|180.0|09.6
W-|07623|30:00.0|01:58.1|214.0|22.1|161.7|180.0|11.6
R-|01779|15:00.0|04:13.0|106.8|19.9|146.8|180.0|00.4
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00987|04:00.0|02:01.6|191.6|19.9|143.7|153.0|12.4
01|00766|03:00.0|01:57.5|215.4|22.4|160.8|167.0|11.4
02|00522|02:00.0|01:54.9|230.6|23.9|168.9|171.0|10.9
03|00270|01:00.0|01:51.2|254.8|26.0|173.3|174.0|10.4
04|00965|04:00.0|02:04.4|185.0|19.5|152.3|161.0|12.4
05|00763|03:00.0|01:58.0|212.8|22.4|166.2|170.0|11.4
06|00529|02:00.0|01:53.3|240.2|24.3|173.2|175.0|10.9
07|00272|01:00.0|01:50.2|260.5|26.0|176.8|178.0|10.5
08|00979|04:00.0|02:02.6|193.6|20.3|153.7|164.0|12.1
09|00768|03:00.0|01:57.2|217.1|22.1|169.1|173.0|11.6
10|00531|02:00.0|01:53.0|242.2|24.2|175.5|178.0|10.9
11|00272|01:00.0|01:50.3|260.4|26.0|179.1|180.0|10.5
Interesting workout. I think it would have been more interesting to row it on the water.
Sep 24 2017
On being a prick (a steady one)
Sorry for the title. Couldn’t resist.
I tried to make an hour of steady state on the erg a bit more interesting. On Friday, I had tried to use Kinomap and wasted 10 minutes of precious exercise time trying to revive my Kinomap account. Didn’t work. I think I am going to uninstall Kinomap from my devices. It is never straightforward, and it is always taking more time than I want.
So I dusted off my lactate meter and decided to take measurements every ten minutes. I did a baseline measurement before the row, which gave me a nice 1.2 mmol/L value. That was slightly higher than expected, but OK.
Down to the erg room. Dialed up a 10 minute and rowed. I decided to aim for a 200W average, which is probably higher than I should row my steady state, but I wanted the lactate readings to tell me that. You basically want to see that the blood lactate concentration keeps rising steadily during the entire hour.
The dip after a few minutes is when I decided to stop erging and increase the volume on my radio. I was listening (again) to the BroShow podcast on training planning and the volume was too low to hear anything.
Measured lactate after 10 minutes and got an “Er1” value. Hm. Probably due to me learning to do lactate measurements again after almost a year. I tried with a new strip, and got the same problem.
So I did another 10 minutes.
I did hold 203W exactly. Somehow, 203W is a more attractive value than 200W, because it means that in 10 minutes you cover exactly 2500m (and row at 2:00 pace).
Did a lactate measurement (so this is now 20 minutes into the hour): 1.7 mmol/L. Phew.
So I had the feeling I was going to run out of Lactate strips before the end of the hour, so I dialed up 20 minutes and rowed for 20 minutes, average power 203W:
Heart rate is behaving nicely. Everything was fine. And steady. Fourty minutes done in total. So I perforated my finger another time and took a measurement: 5.6 mmol/L. WHAT?
Well, no time to think. Dialed up another 10 minutes and rowed.
This time the Lactate measurement gave 1.9 mmol/L, which seems more in line. So I had good hopes for the final 10 minutes.
And the lactate meters said … 3.9 mmol/L. Damn! I had one strip left of the set I took down to the erg room. I wanted to use that to measure after a five minute cooling down paddle, but now I used that one immidiately. The result: “Er1” error. Not good.
Well, I guess it was a good steady state session. Probably at a slightly too high power value. From past seasons using the lactate meter, I know that my steady state, stable lactate level is lower than the 2.0 mmol/L that people use. I also know that my feeling of how hard the row was correlated quite well with the lactate readings. So, I tend to conclude that the high values are due to incompetent measuring from my part, and the 1.7 and 1.9 values are correct.
I am wondering, however, if I should order a new set of lactate strips, and row with lactate this winter, or not. The only reliable use I got out of the device was checking my steady state. The other tests gave results that were hard to interpret. Just doing steady state to confirm my subjective feeling of hardness doesn’t seem to give a lot of added value. Lactate is always a measurement after the row, so you cannot use it to adjust the intensity during the row. Especially for steady state, I think it is important to adjust the intensity when you are feeling it is too hard.
Over lunch I watched the Poznan and Lucerne World Cup singles races on YouTube. I am really impressed by Manson’s boat skills at 38spm. He is my favorite for winning the world title in Sarasota, even though I live in the land of Synek. I am also going to cheer for Annika van der Meer (in the Mix 2x Para event) and Marieke Keyser (LW 1x), both from the Netherlands. For the eights, I am neutral. I think the Dutch eight is not good enough (yet) for a big win. But there are a lot of very good heavyweight sweep rowing men in NL. Hoping they can prepare something spectacular for Tokyo.
Oh, and I will cheer for the Czech Women’s 2x, and hoping the Dutch will take silver.
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 2 • Tags: concept2, erg, lactate testing, OTE, rowing, steady state