Aug 23 2016
The Dog Days of Summer
… winter is around the corner. At least in my mind.
It is still summer, and the weather is beautiful, but I am preparing a training plan for the 2016/17 season, which starts with a preparation for a Head Race in the first weekend of October, and after that it will be back to base building, and probably a lot of erging. I am not changing my plan radically from last year, just refined my planning spreadsheet a bit, and planned out the coming 7 weeks until that head race. This week is a freewheeling week, just doing the sessions that I like (and finally get the August CTC in), but after that I will be doing some lactate testing and then it will be steady state and threshold workouts in a 2×3 week mesocycle.
One or two erg races, one in January and maybe one in December. And then an important head race in the beginning of April.
So this week is free form. I have registered for just the Masters 1x in the local races in Břeclav coming weekend, but I will do the sessions that I like and let the race happen without any special preparation.
Today, I left work slightly early to head to the lake. The session I chose was an “intensive Steady State” from the book about Masters Rowing. It was:
4x(4’/3’/2’/1′)/3’Rest @ 20/22/24/26spm
Actually, “das Buch” calls this an extensive endurance session, but I wasn’t entirely sure if that was the right categorization. The plan was to do the session without a paying too much attention to the paces. Just hit the SPM and focus on technique. As I will explain below, I wasn’t entirely successful.
The other thing I wanted to do was play with my new SpeedCoach by running the workout in parallel in CrewNerd and in the SpeedCoach. In the SpeedCoach I programmed it as a 4×10’/3′ rest. In the SpeedCoach GPS 2, you can actually plan out the detailed workout as I did in CrewNerd, but on the water it turned out that I am too unfamiliar with the interface to manage that. Lesson learned. Program workouts on the shore, next time.
I set both devices to “auto/start” at factory settings, and started the workout with a 30 second count down. On both devices, the sessions started simultaneously, or at least the time difference was less than 0.2 seconds (estimated).
Using the power or rowsandall.com, I could compare the workout results from both tools. There was one caveat. It turned out I could pair my heart rate belt only to one device, and as soon as I started CrewNerd, the SpeedCoach automatically lost heart rate info.
Here is the comparison of the “raw” data:
The raw recorded data look a lot more noisy than what the CrewNerd display actually showed in the boat. On the CrewNerd display, the pace values were jumping around by +/- 5 seconds around the more stable value shown on the SpeedCoach. Rowed distance and time were equal on both devices (within 5m for distance). Using the power of rowsandall.com, I smoothed out the CrewNerd data a bit.
I think this shows that the smoothing function on rowsandall.com is very useful, especially if you smooth the data before exporting to sports sites such as SportTracks.mobi or Strava.com, and to the Concept2 logbook.
Here is the comparison plot for SPM:
On the water, I had the impression that the CrewNerd SPM was jumping around a bit more, and the SpeedCoach GPS seemed to react a bit faster to the stroke rate changes. The SpeedCoach display has a SPM resolution of 0.5 spm, so you can actually get values of 19.5 spm or 23.5 spm. Unfortunately, the export to FIT format rounds this to integer values, because of the way Cadence is defined in the FIT format, I guess.
Here is the colorful plot of the main workout:
Pie chart:
I wouldn’t call this a “extensive endurance” session. The way I did it today, it’s more a threshold session. Here is the workout summary:
Workout Summary - media/20160823-180537-2016-08-23-1723.CSV
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|08741|40:00.0|02:14.0|23.0|176.1|180.4|09.9
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|00867| 04:00 |02:18.2|19.5|154.0|160.0|11.1
02|00688| 03:00 |02:10.5|21.7|168.0|174.0|10.6
03|00477| 02:00 |02:05.3|24.1|178.0|181.0|09.9
04|00238| 01:00 |02:04.7|26.2|181.0|183.0|09.2
05|00839| 04:00 |02:22.5|21.3|176.0|190.0|09.9
06|00615| 03:00 |02:25.8|22.4|183.0|190.0|09.2
07|00442| 02:00 |02:14.9|23.2|181.0|184.0|09.6
08|00234| 01:00 |02:06.3|25.4|185.0|187.0|09.4
09|00873| 04:00 |02:17.4|20.8|167.0|175.0|10.5
10|00672| 03:00 |02:13.1|21.8|176.0|178.0|10.3
11|00467| 02:00 |02:08.6|24.0|180.0|182.0|09.7
12|00237| 01:00 |02:06.4|25.0|182.0|184.0|09.5
13|00780| 04:00 |02:33.7|20.0|166.0|171.0|09.8
14|00638| 03:00 |02:21.0|22.7|176.0|180.0|09.4
15|00442| 02:00 |02:15.4|23.6|181.0|182.0|09.4
16|00232| 01:00 |02:08.0|26.2|183.0|185.0|08.9
And the same data from the SpeedCoach:
Work Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|02267| 600.0 | 2:12.3|21.7| 000 | 000 | 10.4 - tailwind
02|02127| 600.0 | 2:21.0|22.4| 000 | 000 | 9.5 - headwind
03|02244| 600.0 | 2:13.6|22.2| 000 | 000 | 10.1 - tailwind
04|02092| 600.0 | 2:23.4|22.1| 000 | 000 | 9.5 - headwind
Workout Summary
--|08730| 40:0.0| 2:17.4|22.1| 000 | 000 | 9.9
Looking at the totals, 10 meters difference in recorded distance. I have to look into why the average pace is so different. The correct average pace is 2:17.4 (SpeedCoach) and 2:17.3 (CrewNerd). I guess a bug fix is needed for my processing of the CrewNerd summary file.
Looking at the graph, you notice there is a lot of red in the second (head wind) interval. The reason is the following. During the first interval, I rowed behind a Lodni Sporty (that is the “evil” 🙂 club on our lake) quad. When I turned, they turned as well, and they passed me during the rest period. About a minute into my second interval, a coach launch speeded from the Lodni Sporty club towards the quad, creating an enormous wake in which I rowed my 20spm piece. By the time I had moved a bit to the right to be directly behind the launch and out of the wake, the quad (and the launch) suddenly slowed down.
I passed them and there was the following conversation between the Lodni Sporty coach on the launch and me:
Me: “What’s your name?”
Coach: “Who are you? I don’t have eyes in my back.”
Me: “Try to have a bit more consideration for other people trying to row a workout.”
Coach: “I told you I don’t have eyes in my back.”
Me: “You are supposed to look around. Like rowers do.”
Coach: Told me something I didn’t understand.
The English translation loses a bit of the sharpness. I used the informal (in French “tu”, in German “du”) form, even though this guy was evidently more than 20 years older than I. In the Czech culture, this is a very impolite thing to do without getting permission from the older person to use the informal forms. My questions were not so offensive, but using “tu/du” instead of “vous/Sie” was.
Anyway, apparently the guy was offended, because he threw me a nice big wake at the start of the third interval. For the fourth interval I took a course passing our club house, far away from his launch.
Feb 27 2017
First Empower Connected Row
So today I had a long gap between a busy first half of the working day and the evening series of conference calls, which was ideal to drive to Pisárky and do a longish outing in the single. This time I did pay attention to switching on the SpeedCoach correctly.
I did three “rivers”, i.e. rowing up to the hydro plant in Komín and back. That is a little over 2km per stretch of river, 4.4km per loop, and the total workout duration was 13km.
Rowing on a river is interesting for me as a lake dweller. There is much more waterfowl and bird life to watch during the row. Except for two mean looking swans that is really a plus. The other difference is how close you are to people walking on the banks. Mothers with prams and small children. People relaxing on park benches. People standing on bridges, just staring at the water. And most of those people smiled at me, which is great.
I played with the SpeedCoach settings. With the Empower oarlock, there is a whole set of new parameters to watch during as well as after the workout. The “classic” screen looks like this:
You set up the top row before the outing, but you can very easily switch what is displayed on the bottom row at the turning points. I was running the Garmin Forerunner in backup mode, so I didn’t need to see heart rate. Here are the settings I chose:
I found the effective drive length a really interesting metric to display during the row. I have to work on my sequencing, and when I do this right, I see that I maintain the effective length well above 85 degrees. When I become lax, it drops quickly. Average power seemed to be more relevant when you do pieces. I couldn’t relate much to the force numbers. I also liked to watch “work per stroke” but it isn’t entirely clear to me how to use it. Perhaps when you do rate ladders, you can try to keep this value constant when you go up the ladder.
Talking about all those metrics, here is what rowsandall.com had to say about correlations. Mind you, this is for a single row and I mainly rowed at 20spm.
Interesting that “wash”, which has to be low, strongly correlates with Peak force, power, drive length, finish angle. The only concern I have here is that with the twisty river, there were a lot of strokes where I was steering. Especially on the turns to starboard, where I row a slightly shorter, weaker stroke with my starboard scull, this may lead to a relatively large portion of “non-relevant” strokes.
Export to Strava, now with real power values:
Here are the big plots:
And here are the metrics plots:
I leave them without comments for now.
Now that I am a first-hand user of the Empower, I already discovered a couple of improvements that I need to implement on rowsandall.com. Also, I am suspicious of the drive length. Probably a small mistake in a calculation I made. I like how the SpeedCoach talks about drive length in degrees and I like the “effective drive length” parameter. To make this maximally effective, I will add these parameters exactly as they are represented during the row. That makes it easier for coaches and rowers to analyze the training and then transfer the lessons learned to the next practice.
Next time I will try out the “skill” screens of the SpeedCoach.
http://www.nkhome.com/rowing-sports/empower-oarlock
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: empower, NK, NK speedcoach, OTW, rowing, single, steady state, training