erg

img_1420.jpg

Apr 7 2017

Thursday: Head Race Prep done Indoors

I rushed from work early to be in time for the loading of our trailer and get in the last serious OTW workout before Saturday’s race.

The lake played one of its famous tricks. Today it looked really like the high seas. I took a picture of our new club car, but I don’t think the waves are clearly visible. Believe me, they were big enough to make any outing just dangerous.

IMG 1420

 

So I started to prepare my boat for transport, when the head coach came around telling me that he had to exchange my rower’s registration card for a new one and the Czech Rowing Association hadn’t copied the expiration date from my old car to the new one. So, before Saturday’s race I had to get a signature and a stamp from a doctor. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to start the race.

I had planned to do a full sports medical test, but you have to make an appointment well in advance for that. Now I was stuck. I called my GP and she agreed that she would sign. Not having visited a doctor for treatment in years, I guess she was fine.

Then I went home and got ready to do the race prep workout on the erg.

Funny. My PM5 wouldn’t connect to Painsled wirelessly. I switched to ErgData. Same thing. ErgData gave me a -56dB warning. It would connect for a second, and then it would drop the connection. Not sure what is going on here. Is the Bluetooth broken on my PM5? I found the iConnect cable and set it up with the cable.

The workout was:

Warming up

3000m @ 22spm

5 minutes rest

3000m rowed as 1000m @ 24spm, 1000m @ 26spm, 500m @ 28spm, 500m @ 30spm

Cooling Down

On the Static Erg, I decided to lower the stroke rates by 2.

myimage (15)


Workout Summary - media/20170406-1815230o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|07136|29:55.0|02:05.8|191.9|21.8|161.1|184.0|10.9
W-|06000|23:53.0|01:59.5|203.9|21.9|163.3|184.0|11.6
R-|01137|06:01.0|02:39.0|112.7|20.1|144.6|184.0|07.7
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|03000|12:23.4|02:03.9|180.8|19.9|154.0|162.0|12.2
01|01000|04:01.0|02:00.5|204.4|21.9|164.8|171.0|11.4
02|01000|03:49.6|01:54.8|228.7|24.1|174.8|178.0|10.8
03|00500|01:50.3|01:50.3|255.9|25.9|179.5|181.0|10.5
04|00500|01:49.4|01:49.4|255.9|26.6|182.5|184.0|10.3

Today: Travel to Horin, the race venue, and a quick row.
Saturday: 6km head race in the single

By • Uncategorized • 5 • Tags: , , , , ,

myimage (9)

Mar 30 2017

Dream on, Sander & Rowsberry Pi

How many times have I made this mistake? Many times.

Actually, I was fully aware that I was making this mistake when I made it. But I guess this is how I am wired. I was going to try anyway.

This is the failure mode:

  1. Go on a business trip
  2. Return late in the evening
  3. Have a busy day at work catching up with all the stuff of running a research department
  4. Plan to row an erg test (a 6k this time) in the evening
  5. Fail

Our coach wanted us to row the spring 6k test a week ago, but I was in Racice rowing on the water. This week I was on a business trip. Today I was doing item 3 above, with on top of that a key meeting where I had to announce a major course change to a project team, as well as two technology demonstrations to our CTO. So it was quite a busy day,

Oh, and I hadn’t slept too well. Some stuff related to growing up children that kept me awake. I guess the usual stuff parents go through.

But I still wanted to give the 6k a try (and at the same time record a time for the 5142 meters CTC challenge). So I dialed up a 6k.


Workout Summary - media/20170330-2015100o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|06000|24:10.0|02:00.8|203.8|24.0|163.9|178.0|10.3
W-|06000|24:10.0|02:00.9|201.9|23.9|163.9|178.0|10.4
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|178.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|01500|05:32.6|01:50.9|254.5|26.6|166.2|178.0|10.2
01|01500|06:15.8|02:05.3|187.8|23.8|161.4|178.0|10.1
02|01500|06:09.1|02:03.0|188.0|22.7|163.1|168.0|10.7
03|01500|06:12.7|02:04.2|182.9|22.7|165.0|170.0|10.6

So you can see that I gave up after 2000m and made this an ordinary steady state row.

Well, I guess I will always dream.

Rowsberry Pi

Talking of dreaming. The Rowsberry Pi is going well. I have a quickly hacked version that logs my workouts automatically and sends each workout to a configured email address when you press the Menu button on the PM.

Rowing with the iPhone running Painsled, it was kind of cool to see emails coming in immediately after I pressed the menu button.

This project is now officially Open Source and it lives on Github. One developer has joined me and is doing a fine job of decluttering and refactoring the code.

The end goal should be an easy to use software that you can burn to a microSD disk and use with a Raspberry Pi. The software should be used as a datalogger, and will then be expanded to be much more than that.

Any rowing Software developers skilled in Python out there? Come and join the effort. I guess this is a dream project in a way … so if you like to do things that can’t be done, and you are a rower … come join!

By • Uncategorized • 2 • Tags: , , , ,

sucessfusion.png

Mar 11 2017

Friday – 18x45sec – and fusion work

In the morning I hit the road early and drove to Prague. On the D1 route through the Czech-Moravian highlands I was surprised by two pretty heavy snowstorms, but I arrived (unexpectedly) on time, because there were hardly any traffic jams into the city.

Had a few meetings in our Prague office, then drove to Andel for a lunch with a few rowers interested in rowsandall.com. It was a very positive meeting, and perhaps some nice side projects result from it. It’s encouraging to see that people see the value of the little toolset I have built in the past year.

This was the blog post on the day I started to look at some Python code in an email from Greg. On March 17th, he had written. “Hey, check this out. I made a python post processor for Painsled stroke files. Still working on the time formats. Thought you’d be interested.”

Well, yes I was interested.

Currently I am working on Data Fusion. I need this because on my rows at the rowing club, I am working with Concept2 ergs with the older PM3 monitor. I have no heart rate dongle for that, so the idea is to capture the PM data with one app and record heart rate with another app. Then fuse the data, which means that I add the heart rate data to the PM data into a new workout. It sounds very simple, but there is some time alignment and interpolation involved. Fortunately, it is easy to get Python and its Pandas package to do this to your data.

Here is one successfully fused steady state workout (3×20 minutes):

sucessfusion

 

Pretty cool stuff.

I did a sprinterval workout yesterday, after an uneventful drive back to Brno. I went to the rowing club and dialed up 45 seconds “on” vs 1:15 “off”. Unfortunately, Painsled didn’t do a very good job at recording the workout. It didn’t record the real power and pace in the “off” sections. Also, I need to replace the battery in my Wahoo heart rate belt. It is showing some weird value swings. Hope it is just the battery.

Here is the resulting plot (after data fusion):

bokeh plot (75)

By • Uncategorized • 3 • Tags: , , , ,

myimage (36)

Mar 9 2017

A long day and a 5x1500m

I started the workout very late. I had a long day at work, trying to cram all the week’s interactions with my people into one day. I will be out on travel tomorrow. Just a day trip over to Prague (2 hour drive). And after dinner, my sons were quizzing me about computers and programming, so I showed them the Sonic Pi program on the Raspberry Pi. It’s a simple integrated development environment to program sounds. A kind of synthesizer software that teaches you to program. One of my sons plays guitar, so he know chords, and soon we were trying to program chords.

Still, I was determined to get a 5x1500m in. I know these workouts are always hard after an exhausting business trip, so I aimed at 1:52 average pace. Somehow, I went slightly faster in the first. I got tired, but I had a good rhythm and just kept going. After the second interval I shifted the stroke rate up a little and that turned out to be a good move. I didn’t have difficulty hitting 1:50 pace consistently, and that in itself was a huge motivation.

So, very glad I finished this workout. And when I look at my scores from 2 seasons ago, when I did a strict Wolverine plan, it’s a pretty good average pace. My fastest 5x1500m from that winter was 1:49.9 pace.


Workout Summary - media/20170309-2010220o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|11142|52:37.0|02:21.7|205.1|25.4|150.3|180.0|08.3
W-|07500|27:36.0|01:50.4|260.6|27.3|158.0|180.0|09.9
R-|03645|25:01.0|03:26.0|096.6|23.6|142.0|180.0|00.2
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|01500|05:32.1|01:50.7|255.5|26.6|152.7|171.0|10.2
01|01500|05:35.6|01:51.9|255.7|26.9|158.0|167.0|10.0
02|01500|05:31.5|01:50.5|260.7|27.5|159.6|175.0|09.9
03|01500|05:30.9|01:50.3|258.9|27.2|164.4|180.0|10.0
04|01500|05:26.5|01:48.8|272.2|28.5|155.3|174.0|09.7

The PM gave an average of 1:50.2. I believe something is wrong with the average reported in the second interval. Also, the heart rate graph seems a little weird. I had was wearing the Bluetooth HR belt and had the feeling the PM was lagging behind. The values on the Garmin watch (connected over the ANT protocol) seemed more reliabe.

And here are the metrics charts. I leave the interpretation as an exercise to the reader. It is quite evident what is going on.

I was also recording heart rate in parallel on the Garmin. I am making progress on Data Fusion for rowsandall.com. I may publish some sneak preview screenshots in a separate post over the weekend. Then we can see if the Garmin recorded different heart rate values.

By • Uncategorized • 1 • Tags: , , , , , ,

ifema.jpg

Mar 9 2017

Tuesday & Wednesday – Steady State

Tuesday

My boss’s phone call woke me up. He was stuck at the airport in Toulouse because of Air Traffic Control strike and couldn’t fly in to Madrid. Suddenly I was the person who had to speak to his contacts and his boss’s contacts.

So that threw my plans out of the door. As my luggage hadn’t arrived on Monday evening (despite Iberia’s promise), I had to rush to downtown Madrid, hit El Corte Inglés for clean shirts, smart pants and a tie, and rush back to the IFEMA, where the conference was held, then find our Government Relations lady and align our talking points.

I really love clothes shopping. Not. My usual style of clothes shopping is already quite close to a covert operation, and this time it was really get in, find shirts, find matching tie, try, pay, get the hell out of there.

ifema

After the prep, it was a whirlwind of meetings, then a reception with a few drinks and lots of discussions. I ended up at my hotel room extremely tired, and even canceled the planned dinner. No time for training.

Wednesday

Dragged myself down to the hotel fitness room for an erg session before breakfast. I was extremely uninspired, dialed up a 10k and started rowing, 2:05 split. After 2.5km I added in a 10 stroke acceleration to spice up things a bit and that seemed to help. So I did the 10 strokes at 1:52 pace every 1000m until 2k to go, at which point I settled for a cooling down.

Not the ideal training but about the maximum possible given the circumstances.

The rest of the was catching up with my own meetings which I had moved out of the Tuesday, and then I caught a flight back home. Arrived pretty late.

Today I am catching up with overdue blog posts, and more importantly trying to catch up with everything at work, because tomorrow I will be on a business trip to Prague, and on Sunday I am leaving to the US for a week. I don’t think I am getting in the required amount of training this week, and definitely not the right intensity. Well, that just comes with my job. I have a cool job, so there I will have to accept the occasional suboptimal training.

By • Uncategorized • 2 • Tags: , , , , ,

3814096_20_z.jpg

Mar 9 2017

Monday: Travel blues & Steady State

 

Every spring I attend the World ATM (Air Traffic Management) Congress in Madrid, Spain. It’s a nice event where the entire industry gathers. A great opportunity to compress in a few days what otherwise could have been endless conference calls or numerous business trips. Also, the chance of nice weather early March is a lot greater in Madrid than in Brno, so there is the additional benefit of feeling the sun on your winter skin during a lunch break.

For the past three years I have stayed in a hotel in central Madrid, but this time I decided to return to a hotel close to the conference venue, because I knew the fitness had a Concept2 erg. Here it is. Do you see the Concept2 erg?

3814096 20 z

At Vienna airport Iberia forced me to check my luggage.

At Madrid, only 10 suitcases arrived on the belt. All the other luggage had remained in Vienna. Great. So instead of heading directly to the hotel and get in my workout, I had to queue more than an hour to fill out my lost luggage form. Iberia promised that the luggage would arrive on the next flight. I didn’t believe them much.

So after I arrived at the hotel, I headed to the shopping mall opposite and bought the cheapest workout clothes I could get. A 3 Euro T-shirt and training shorts. Then I took my iPhone connector kit, heart rate belt, Garmin watch (all of which I luckily had in the small carry-on bag), and headed down to the hotel fitness.

The Concept2 was there waiting for me. Unfortunately, the PM3 on firmware version 82 did not connect to the iPhone. I tried both Painsled and ErgData but no luck. Oh well. The training effect is there even without recording the data, right?

I rowed a 15km of steady state. It was dry and warm and at the end I was very sweaty. I didn’t go very fast.

IMG 1378

I also noted that the poor erg had been idle for a very very long time:

IMG 1380

By • Uncategorized • 4 • Tags: , , , , ,

czechoslovakia1956

Mar 5 2017

Short Intervals & The Rowsberry Pi project

First, a cool photograph that I came across today. It is totally unrelated to the post, but I like it, and I find my “feature image” featuring charts and graphs a bit boring:

Czechoslovakia, 1956

There are five people on the photograph.

Today’s row was the short interval session that I had planned for this week. It is not part of my club’s training program, but I have decided to go hybrid. I have planned out my training periodization and the type of workouts I will do in each period. On Monday, when I receive the coach’s training plan, I will plan out the rest of the week, adhering as much as possible to his sessions, but making sure I remain close to my planned periodization, and thus adding, replacing or adapting sessions where needed. It allows me to join the group erg sessions on the club but still understand what the purpose is of each session.

After lunch, I played a bit with the Raspberry Pi, for the “Rowsberry Pi” project. The idea is to create open source software that can be loaded on a Raspberry Pi, turning it into a low-cost data logger for erg sessions. I started with PyRow and I adapted it slightly to capture some extra stroke stats, like drive length, work per stroke, etc. It took a few iterations to get that to work, so my family saw me running back and forth between the rowing basement and the living room.

The basic idea is as follows:

  1. One or more ergs connect to a Raspberry Pi through the USB cable
  2. The Pi just listens to the ergs. When a workout is programmed and started, it starts recording automatically.
  3. At the end of each workout, the Pi saves the stroke data to a CSV file. If configured with an email address, the workout is uploaded automatically to rowsandall.com. Otherwise, the data are available on a shared drive on the network

It should really be a plug-and-row solution. Here’s a picture of my “test lab”:

The Pi is connected to the network through Wifi, and has a network address rowsberrypi1.local. It is connected to the erg through USB. I still have to manually start the program before each workout, and get the results from the Pi by FTP. So there is still some work to do. Also, the recording of the interval session failed. I manually started the session, then programmed it on the PM. I believe that the Pi thought that the session ended at that point.

So, lots of fun details to get right. But imagine being able to install a few Pis in the rowing club ergroom and just silently log all the data … or have your own Pi for recording sessions while traveling. With the network access, even more can be done. A coach can set up all ergs to the same workout remotely through the network.

So here is  my traditional warming up with a few hard strokes, as recorded with Painsled and processed on Rowsandall.com:

And here are a few quick graphs from excel, from the CSV file produced by the Pi. Same warming up as above:

And here is the main session. I did 15 intervals of 40″ on, 1 minute off:

Finally, I did a 3km cooling down.

By • Uncategorized • 10 • Tags: , , , , , ,

«< 6 7 8 9 10 >»