NK Empower

The clouds looked like they contained either rain or snow, but luckily they were just very threatening.

The training plan said “45 minutes of swimming”, but I went to back to the single again. Moved my footstretcher sternwards to try and get a bit more catch angle. Feels heavy.


Workout Summary - media/20170301-185315-Sanders SpeedCoach 20170301 0421pmo.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|10552|55:58.0|02:39.1|150.1|20.5|156.7|179.0|09.2
W-|10552|55:58.0|02:39.1|149.9|20.5|156.5|179.0|09.2
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|179.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|02200|11:36.3|02:38.2|162.0|19.9|150.8|166.0|09.5
01|02200|11:05.3|02:31.2|159.3|20.9|160.6|176.0|09.5
02|02200|11:47.5|02:40.8|156.6|21.3|162.4|179.0|08.8
03|02200|11:19.9|02:34.5|151.2|20.8|160.1|177.0|09.3
04|01752|10:09.2|02:53.9|116.5|19.3|147.9|164.0|09.0


I set the bottom left part of the screen to “Work per stroke” and left it there. Indeed, technically good strokes on straight bits of the river came in between 450 and 600J. Paddling and turning was below 450J.

Catch angle today: -60 +/- 4 degrees

Catch angleMonday: -58 +/- 4 degrees

Finish angle today: 44 +/- 4 degrees

Finish angle Monday: 45 +/- 4 degrees.

These are median values (not averages). I will explain the reason for that below. Slip and wash nearly unchanges as far as average values were concerned. Two remarks, though:

1. In the first 2km I had catch angle on the display and I do believe I saw values between 60 and 65 degrees consistently. This is also confirmed by the catch angle plot. What is less satisfactory is that the effect went away as soon as I started monitoring a different metric.
2. Looking at slip, I could consciously get the number down to 5 degrees and I like how I was rowing when I achieved that.

The Wash graph is also interesting for two reasons. First, I didn’t monitor “wash” during the row, so you can see a natural spread of finish angles (lean back?) and wash values. It is clear that a better lean back lowers the Wash values (which is better). It is also clear that on the long rows you cannot average over the entire row. The sloppy strokes (paddle strokes) all are biased to low values of finish angle and high values of wash. This distorts the average if you don’t look at a specific interval. The median value of 44 degrees is much more representative.

The two charts above show this well for the slip parameter. I plotted it against Work per Stroke (left) and Power (right). Good strokes are above 500 J per stroke. So that brings me into the slip values of 6-7 degrees. And as said, working on technique brought that down, which illustrates how this tool can help you work on technique.

Here are the overview plots of the workout:

And here is the full set of metrics plots:

Here is the row on Strava: