lake

Jun 24 2017

Saturday: Sprintervals

This was supposed to be a heavy week, but I have the feeling that the weeks of business travel and some stressful work issues are taking their toll. I did no exercise on Friday. Partly because I was moderating a full day workshop on strategy, and partly because I needed some rest. Well, if you can’t do volume, you have to make sure there is some intensity. And that was the plan for today.

Meanwhile in Prague, my son Dominik rowed a 1k race in 4:25, coming last in his heat. In two of the four heats, he would have been third and qualified for the semifinals of his National Championships (for 12 year olds).

This morning, we decided to row at 8am. A bit earlier than usually on Saturday, but necessary with this hot weather. The water was great. Mirror flat. A good day to work on race pace and above by doing sprintervals.

I decided for 45 sec sprints, long enough to get into a rhythm and feel how the boat moves, long enough to correct some errors, but short enough to be manageable. I also decided on 1:15min rest, long enough to make sure I would do each interval with maximum focus. A five minute break at the turning points, and you have a 3x(6×45″/1:15)/5′ workout. I also decided to row this at 30/32/34/36/34/32 spm, to make it more interesting.

Work Details #-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS- 01|00191| 00:45 |01:57.8| 29.3| 152 | 168 | 8.7 02|00193| 00:45 |01:56.5| 32.0| 168 | 176 | 8.0 03|00199| 00:45 |01:53.0| 33.3| 171 | 180 | 8.0 04|00202| 00:45 |01:51.3| 34.7| 173 | 182 | 7.8 05|00199| 00:45 |01:53.0| 32.0| 173 | 181 | 8.3 06|00195| 00:45 |01:55.3| 32.0| 166 | 177 | 8.1 07|00189| 00:45 |01:59.0| 30.7| 159 | 170 | 8.2 - wake 08|00196| 00:45 |01:54.7| 33.3| 170 | 178 | 7.8 09|00202| 00:45 |01:51.3| 34.7| 172 | 179 | 7.8 10|00207| 00:45 |01:48.6| 36.0| 173 | 181 | 7.7 11|00196| 00:45 |01:54.7| 33.3| 175 | 181 | 7.8 12|00187| 00:45 |02:00.3| 32.0| 173 | 177 | 7.8 13|00190| 00:45 |01:58.4| 30.7| 157 | 168 | 8.3 14|00193| 00:45 |01:56.5| 32.0| 169 | 177 | 8.0 15|00196| 00:45 |01:54.7| 33.3| 171 | 178 | 7.8 16|00200| 00:45 |01:52.5| 36.0| 176 | 182 | 7.4 17|00202| 00:45 |01:51.3| 34.7| 172 | 182 | 7.8 18|00196| 00:45 |01:54.7| 32.0| 171 | 179 | 8.2 Workout Summary --|03533| 13:30 | 1:54.6| 32.9| 169 | 182 | 8.0

In the first series of 6, I rowed a bit too much on power. I corrected that in the second series. I got waked in the first sprint of the second series, but for the rest it was great. Tapping down was good today and reaching high stroke rates was thus very easy.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: lake, OTW, rowing, single, sprintervals, training

Jun 24 2017

Thursday: Steady State

Instead of rowing in the morning, I had breakfast with the kids. This means I had to row at the end of this hot summer day. When I drove to the rowing club, the thermometer in the car indicated 33 degrees C. The schools are not closed yet, but there are no more exams, so many people are going to the lake to swim and get some coolness.

I put plastic foil over the damaged part of the hull, then put strong, watertight tape around the edges, and finally on top, almost like a gauze. There is no way for water to get into the structure now. The real repair will be done on Monday or Tuesday.

I just rowed steady state, with a couple of interruptions for swimmers and small boats. I was pretty tired after the long row on Wednesday, so I stayed very low in power.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: lake, OTW, rowing, single, steady state

Jun 16 2017

Good workout despite still tired from travel

Thursday was a long working day with lots of long and difficult meetings. Having been in the US for 10 days, a couple of local things piled up, and I had to take care of them. I arrived at the rowing club at 6:45pm. Just as on Wednesday, it was another nice, sunny, windless day.

The workout I wanted to do, despite being very tired, still jetlagged, etc, was a 3x2k with 5 minutes rest, OTW.

Leaving the changing room, I remembered I wanted to replace the battery in my oarlock. But I didn’t want to return to my locker, open it, go through my bag to find the spare batteries, and I decided to risk it without replacing the battery.

It was also getting pretty late, and my son would be waiting for me to drive home after the training. He has (his age group) National Champs a week from now, and this week they are doing two trainings per afternoon/evening.

I decided to compromise on the warming up, doing only 1k. Then I aligned at the start of our 2k course and set off.

According to my CP plot on rowsandall.com, my 100% 2k power is 270-280W, assuming a duration of 8 to 9 minutes (or 500 to 550 seconds). I decided that rowing the 3x2k at 85-90% of that (230-250W) would be a good target. I was still suffering from business travel tiredness, and I have experience that the risk of handing down in such a situation is real.

The empower oarlock kept losing connection and reconnecting. Only during the second interval, I lost connection about 500m in and it didn’t reconnect, as the red graph above shows. In terms of stroke rate and pace, the rows looked as follows:

I was scared to look at the Heart rate data, because I feared high values. Indeed:

Still, I think it was a good workout. Despite rating higher in every interval, my effective length stayed pretty constant, even getting longer as the training progressed.

Also, the average power was around 250W (roughly 90% of max over 2k) and I didn’t have problems finishing the workout.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 1 • Tags: hard distance, lake, OTW, rowing, single, training

Jun 16 2017

Wednesday – Thursday: crossing the pond, then cruising the lake

Wednesday

No training. Departed from Atlanta in the evening, arriving in Paris CDG at 10:30am, then a (delayed) flight to Vienna and a drive to Brno. As my entire family was on the rowing club, I went there directly.

Took the single for a short (low expectations) paddle. Things were great. Somehow the single felt really light. Perhaps the water has warmed up a bit. Perhaps it is the lighter rigging of my boat compared to the boats in Atlanta.

A couple of spikes on the Power graph. The Empower Oarlock disconnected and reconnected a few times during the row. I used a borrowed SpeedCoach, with a lower battery level. Also, I think I need to replace the battery in the Oarlock.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: lake, OTW, rowing, single, steady state, training

May 30 2017

Two pieces for a Masters Eight

The temperatures have increased to above 30 degrees C, but luckily we were rowing in the evening.

It had been s hectic day. After a four hour drive back from Racice, we found our poor cat in distress. It had injured its tail and during the twelve hours it had spent alone, it had sprayed blood all over the house. So instead of relaxing in our garden we took care of the wound (which was not easy, as is evident from the claw marks on my arms) with help of a rowing friend who lives nearby and is a vet. On Monday we visited him in his office for a check, some injections and antibiotics, as well as a cap to prevent the poor animal from biting its painful tail again.

So when I arrived at the rowing club, my rowing friends were still discussing the European Championships, but I had already moved on to another world.

Anyway, we are racing the eight coming weekend so it is time to get to business. The training plan prescribed 1500m pieces at 26spm but the crew wanted to add a race pace piece. The compromise was one 1500m and one 750m.

I gave the SpeedCoach to the cox because his CoxBox Mini doesn’t show stroke rate. I told him to not touch any buttons on the SpeedCoach and started its recording when we still had the boat in slings. Unfortunately I forgot to switch the screen to distance, so the cox had only elapsed time and stroke rate. He managed well and just did the pieces by estimated distance from landmarks. For the 1500 that was easy: from the 2k start to the Lodni Sporty club house. For the 750 it was a bit more difficult.

But rowsandall.com can deal with that. Sitting on 2 seat the SpeedCoach didn’t record my heart rate. However, I was using the Garmin watch to capture that. After the row, I imported the Garmin data through Strava to rowsandall.com, uploaded the SpeedCoach data and did a data fusion merging the NK pace, SPM, and distance data into the Garmin workout.

Then, I used the Interval Editor and the interactive plot to determine the start and end times of the pieces and here is the result:

Workout Summary - media/Fusion_20170530-085321.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|10490|58:03.0|02:46.0|189.8|28.6|134.5|181.0|06.3
W-|02303|07:21.0|01:35.7|389.6|29.2|169.9|181.0|10.8
R-|08189|50:42.0|03:05.7|146.8|27.5|127.5|181.0|08.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|01504|04:56.0|01:38.4|359.1|26.7|167.4|174.0|11.4
02|00799|02:25.0|01:30.7|451.6|34.2|174.8|181.0|09.7

Ignore the power data. It’s a conversion from pace using the equation for the Concept2 erg and when you’re in the eight it overestimates the power. I will update the site to do a better power estimate for OTW rows.

Edited with BlogPad Pro

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 2 • Tags: eight, lake, OTW, training

May 26 2017

Steady State in rough and not so rough conditions

Thursday evening

A quick steady state row in the single. It was very rough out there but rowable on the north part of the lake:

Friday Morning

A data drama! First, I forgot to switch on the recording on the SpeedCoach during the warming up, missing the first 2.5km. Then, half way through the row, the SpeedCoach screen flashed “Memory Full” at me. I remained calm, thinking that there would be another hour of recording left. Nope. The SpeedCoach memory fills up quickly when you use the Empower Oarlock. Missing the final 5km of the row.

Today’s conditions were pretty interesting. Mirror flat, dreamlike, in the north part, and a small ripples in the south part. The ripples were of the unpredictable kind, so they added a little bit of challenge to the rowing. It was fun to work on technique, trying to perfectionize some aspects of technique on the mirror part, then trying to take that to the unsteady part.

For the rowsandall.com demo in Racice, I had ordered a new tablet computer online, with a store that has pretty good next-day delivery and a pick-up facility very close to the rowing club. The promised delivery time was 8:00 AM on Thursday but they missed that and the order stayed in the “preparation” state. This morning I drove to the pick-up facility. While I was driving, they sent me an email with apologies and telling me that they would deliver on Sunday evening. No way. I went in and canceled the order.

Then drove to a brick-mortar store to quickly get a decent tablet, which proved to be harder than I thought. The good old brick-mortar stores are mainly just showrooms and when you tell the personnel that you want to buy a certain type, they walk you to a terminal where they fill out an on-line order for you.

In the end I found the only place where I could wave my credit card and just take the device with me, so I ended up buying an Apple Ipad Mini 4. I would have preferred a slightly bigger screen, but OK.

Talking about the screen of this thing, this made me go for the Apple products in the end. I am looking for a device to demo rowsandall.com, and it better look good when I show it to people. The iPads are really shining here.

[amazon_link asins=’B016PW4NX6′ template=’ProductAd’ store=’rowingdata-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’4cf4fc2a-4206-11e7-ae05-bdf0b600eaa3′]

Coming Weekend

No training! I am off to Racice:

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 1 • Tags: lake, OTW, rowing, single, steady state, training

May 25 2017

A bunch of hard 250m intervals

The wind was strong and the water was very choppy, but I didn’t want to shy away from rowing high stroke rates in the chop. You never know what the conditions will be on race day.

The official training plan (from our club’s head coach) asked for 2x(4x250m/250m)/5min. I decided that I would do three sets of four. The prescribed stroke rate was “Race SPM+2”, and I decided that that would be 34spm. I wanted to row each 250m as the respective 250m segment in a 1000m race, so the first one from a standing start and the final one with a desparate push to the finish line. Race simulation on a chilly and rainy Thursday morning. I had the entire choppy surface of the lake for myself.

Pushed off the dock and rowed to the end of “Rokle”, where the water was a bit flatter. After the row, I discovered that I had not switched on the SpeedCoach for this 2.5 km of warming up. This always upsets me a bit. 2500m of unrecorded rowing!

On the SpeedCoach, I programmed the workout as 8x250m with no rest. When I got ready to start, I noticed that I had already moved 3 meters and the clock was ticking. Must have been the wind. So I set off and rowed. The final 100m of the first 250m is in a slight turn to starboard, so I was recording lower power on my (starboard) Empower oarlock.

This first set was done with tailwind. I forgot to focus on anything, except the final sprint in the fourth interval.

Workout Summary - media/20170525-081041-Sanders SpeedCoach 20170525 0734amo.csv --|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg --|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS --|02015|09:13.0|02:17.3|243.0|27.5|166.5|182.0|07.9 W-|01007|03:47.0|01:52.8|325.3|32.8|169.6|182.0|08.1 R-|01009|05:26.0|02:41.9|149.0|21.5|163.3|182.0|09.2 Workout Details #-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS- 00|00257|01:03.5|02:03.4|331.8|32.4|153.9|176.0|07.5 01|00250|00:54.6|01:49.2|324.7|32.2|173.6|179.0|08.5 02|00250|00:55.1|01:50.2|322.9|33.3|175.3|179.0|08.2 03|00250|00:54.1|01:48.2|320.7|33.3|178.0|182.0|08.3

The second set of intervals was in headwind. After the first set, I noticed a ship steaming towards Rokle, so I decided to do the first two intervals in front of our rowing club. Worse chop and stronger wind, but no need to be on the alert for potential collisions. One of my club mates made a very wise remark yesterday: “The more tired you get, the more important it is to keep the technique perfect.” It is true, when the drive force starts to diminish, you get tired, your posture gets a little less strong, and the decline in boat speed keeps increasing.

Workout Summary - media/20170525-081203-Sanders SpeedCoach 20170525 0747amo.csv --|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg --|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS --|02000|10:42.0|02:40.7|226.6|26.7|168.3|183.0|07.0 W-|01000|04:09.0|02:04.6|317.0|32.8|171.4|183.0|07.3 R-|01000|06:34.0|03:17.0|129.2|20.2|164.9|183.0|08.5 Workout Details #-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS- 00|00250|01:05.3|02:10.6|332.1|32.7|158.3|178.0|07.0 01|00250|01:01.9|02:03.8|320.2|32.2|175.1|181.0|07.5 02|00250|01:00.7|02:01.4|315.0|32.8|176.9|183.0|07.5 03|00250|01:01.4|02:02.8|299.9|33.5|176.0|182.0|07.3

The final set of intervals was in tailwind. I started them at the same point as the first interval. After the second set of intervals I was of course tired, but I judged that I should be able to finish another set.

Workout Summary - media/20170525-081256-Sanders SpeedCoach 20170525 0801amo.csv --|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg --|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS --|02000|09:31.0|02:22.9|219.0|27.6|167.3|180.0|07.6 W-|01000|03:44.0|01:52.1|307.5|33.8|169.8|180.0|07.9 R-|01001|05:47.0|02:53.7|120.6|20.8|165.0|180.0|08.8 Workout Details #-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS- 00|00250|00:56.5|01:53.0|320.9|34.7|156.7|174.0|07.6 01|00250|00:56.1|01:52.2|310.6|33.0|174.8|179.0|08.1 02|00250|00:56.1|01:52.2|295.6|33.8|173.0|177.0|07.9 03|00250|00:55.5|01:51.0|302.9|33.5|174.8|180.0|08.1

I finished the workout with a 2 km paddle in the most choppy part of the lake.

All in all it was a good workout. I was happy that I managed to get the stroke rate up (at the cost of a slight reduction in finish angle, I am afraid). It was hard work to stay technically together in the windy and choppy conditions, and it was also hard work get the power output in the desired range.

I am trying to get in another workout at the end of the day. I will spend the coming weekend in Racice (where I did the training camp in the spring) to attend (not compete, of course) the European Rowing Championships, so I need to get my training load in before Saturday.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 1 • Tags: chop, lake, OTW, rowing, single, sprintervals, training

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lake

Saturday: Sprintervals

Thursday: Steady State

Good workout despite still tired from travel

Wednesday – Thursday: crossing the pond, then cruising the lake

Two pieces for a Masters Eight

Steady State in rough and not so rough conditions

A bunch of hard 250m intervals

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