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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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myimage (21)

Mar 4 2017

Friday – a lot of 500m

This is the mirror post to this one, so I suggest you read Greg’s observation first. The training was 2x10x500m/80″, with 4 minutes between the sets of 10. And with a rate cap of 26spm.

This was on my training plan and Greg agreed to do it as well, so we could test some of the new “team” functionality on rowsandall.com.

I will go straight to the results.

Set 1:

Workout Summary - media/20170303-1700260o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|07000|29:39.0|02:07.1|205.9|24.0|159.7|175.0|09.8
W-|05000|18:40.0|01:52.1|253.1|25.8|161.2|175.0|10.4
R-|02000|11:00.0|02:45.0|098.1|19.8|156.2|175.0|08.8
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00500|01:51.4|01:51.4|245.8|25.6|150.0|165.0|10.5
01|00500|01:52.5|01:52.5|256.6|25.7|158.6|170.0|10.4
02|00500|01:51.5|01:51.5|253.3|25.8|158.2|168.0|10.4
03|00500|01:52.0|01:52.0|257.7|26.3|162.4|171.0|10.2
04|00500|01:53.1|01:53.1|251.3|25.7|160.3|172.0|10.3
05|00500|01:52.6|01:52.6|255.4|25.9|162.0|174.0|10.3
06|00500|01:52.1|01:52.1|248.4|26.1|164.1|174.0|10.2
07|00500|01:52.3|01:52.3|252.0|25.7|165.1|174.0|10.4
08|00500|01:51.5|01:51.5|258.1|25.9|164.4|174.0|10.4
09|00500|01:51.8|01:51.8|252.6|25.8|166.7|175.0|10.4

Set 2:

Workout Summary - media/20170303-1700240o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|07000|29:32.0|02:06.6|206.4|24.2|162.6|179.0|09.8
W-|05000|18:13.0|01:49.4|264.2|26.2|163.7|179.0|10.5
R-|02000|11:19.0|02:49.8|080.8|19.9|160.2|179.0|08.9
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00500|01:50.3|01:50.3|253.2|25.9|154.6|171.0|10.5
01|00500|01:50.1|01:50.1|259.2|26.4|162.0|174.0|10.3
02|00500|01:50.0|01:50.0|261.0|26.2|163.7|174.0|10.4
03|00500|01:50.1|01:50.1|258.1|26.2|162.9|175.0|10.4
04|00500|01:49.9|01:49.9|257.8|26.2|163.6|174.0|10.4
05|00500|01:49.6|01:49.6|265.8|26.2|165.6|175.0|10.5
06|00500|01:50.0|01:50.0|259.9|25.9|164.4|176.0|10.5
07|00500|01:49.7|01:49.7|263.1|26.0|164.6|175.0|10.5
08|00500|01:47.6|01:47.6|276.7|26.2|167.3|177.0|10.6
09|00500|01:46.7|01:46.7|288.0|26.3|168.5|179.0|10.7

And the graphs:

It was a doable workout. On paper it looks very brutal, but I didn’t have any problems rowing it. Hence I accelerated in the second set, by focusing on long strokes.

While rowing, I was wondering how Greg was doing. I imagined 1:44 pace. After we both uploaded our workouts to rowsandall.com, we could compare:

So you can see that we were really close in terms of heart rate and power. On the dynamic, Greg upped the stroke rate a bit.

Here are the metrics plots, just because I have them. Nothing special to observe, except that I did a good job holding length.

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Rowingchat-logo-on-soundcloud

Feb 28 2017

3x20min at the rowing club

I got up very early. We took the 6:07 train to Prague, for another visit to the embassy, this time with the kids, to get the documents for the rest of the family in order. I spent a few hours in the train updating the rowsandall.com site with some advanced filtering of Empower Oarlock data.

The training plan was clear and this is a training I recognize.

3x20min / 4 min rest. Alternate 20 and 22 spm each 2 minutes

I rowed this at the rowing club and the turnout was great. We Masters occupied 5 ergs. Doing the rate stuff in a row of five ergs is interesting when you sync your strokes, as we did.

I was on the erg next to the wall, and I did notice that air circulation is a lot worse there. I am used to my cold rowing basement and I did have a lot of trouble rowing in this hot, humid environment.


Workout Summary - media/20170228-1920230o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|15791|72:00.0|02:16.8|190.0|21.2|000.0|000.0|10.3
W-|14649|60:00.0|02:02.9|189.3|21.4|000.0|000.0|11.4
R-|01146|12:00.0|05:14.1|188.7|21.9|000.0|000.0|00.2
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|04900|20:00.0|02:02.5|190.5|21.4|000.0|000.0|11.4
01|04883|20:00.0|02:02.9|189.8|21.3|000.0|000.0|11.5
02|04866|20:00.0|02:03.3|187.6|21.4|000.0|000.0|11.3

I was the slowest of the lot, but I think I am the only one who knows about a polarized training plan. I tried to explain that this should be rowed at “conversation” pace, but the others wanted to pull faster splits than their neighbors.

I am happy to report that my Sunday hour of updating firmware was successful. I have the full metrics from Painsled now.

No heart rate data. I recorded that separately on the Garmin, but I haven’t finished my Data Fusion functionality on rowsandall.com yet.

Oh and I should mention that you can listen to my on Sunday 8pm UK time, when I will be in the RowPerfect Rowing Chat: https://www.rowperfect.co.uk/rowingchat/

You can also download the podcast afterwards and listen to it later.

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bokeh_plot (15)

Feb 23 2017

Power at 17spm

Today’s workout was another interesting one:

5x(6x15strokes on / 10 strokes off)/5 minutes rest. Drag 145. Stroke rate 17spm

My Masters team mates warned that this is a “very heavy” workout. So after another long day at work, I went down to my erg cave. Tired, but curious.

I did a 1500m light warming up without any fast strokes. Then set the drag to 145 and started a “Just Row”.

After the first interval I took a piece of paper and wrote down a row of numbers 1 to 5 and another row of numbers 1 to 6. Then I took two coins and placed one on the 1 in the top row and the other one next to the 1 on the bottom row.

After each 15 strokes “on”, I moved the bottom coin to the next number.

The only way for me to count the number of intervals and sets. Counting to 15 and 10 was hard enough.

Here are some stroke stats:

Pace-wise, I paddled the 10 strokes at a very light pace, and the “on” strokes got down to 1:54, but usually were between 1:56 and 1:58. It took about 10 strokes in each set to get below 2:00 pace.

It wasn’t very hard, and I was surprised how fast the first 10km passed. Perhaps I was doing something wrong? Perhaps I should pull harder?

Doing the flex charts I made an interesting discovery. The average/peak force was unusually high for me. Normally it is around 0.56 or 0.57. Today it was significantly higher at 0.62. Most of the following plots are made on rowsandall.com by selecting only the strokes below 18spm:

Not sure about this workout. Let’s see. Either I did it wrong, or I wake up tomorrow with a 10% increase in leg strength.

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