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Jun 6 2017

Sunday – Tuesday: erg & travel

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May 30 2017

Roeicorvée

Roeicorvée. 

Corvée is the Dutch word for drudgery and roei is row, so roeicorvée would be rowing drudgery.

I wanted to row late in the evening, when the temperatures start to drop from the high of 30C. However, by the time I wanted to drive to the rowing club, the sky was black and the weather forecast looked like this:

Not so good, in other words. So I opted to row the steady state session on the erg. Roeicorvée. It was a good decision. The hailstones were the size of golfballs.

Kinomap

One of my Strava followers had talked about Kinomap. This iOS app shows you footage of rowing while you are pulling on the erg. I thought it would make the erg less boring so I installed it on my iPad and rowed the first 2k with it. That is, I played the only video of a 2k effort that was available on the free version and rowed while it played, covering s little over 2400m while looking at some single sculler on a brautiful lake. 

For data capture, I had Painsled running in the background, but connecting Kinomap through BlueTooth actually threw out Painsled, as I discovered after the row. Bugger. 

But Kinomap syncs automatically to Strava, except that it didn’t transfer heart rate data from the PM5. Here is the workout after import to rowsandall.com from Strava:

So I tried to look at pricing of Kinomap but couldn’t find a way to subscribeor find any pricing info on Kinomap’s website or in the app. I thought about connecting Kinomap through the USB cable (using the connector cable for the iPhone) but the connector csnle is very short and I had no way to support the iPad next to the PM. 

So I rowed another 30 minutes of rowing drudgery, wiped off the sweat from the handle, my hands snd my face, dialled up a 5k and rowed on. Here are the PainSled plots. These ones are missing SPM values because Painsled has corrected a typo in the CSV column header (stokes instead of strokes) without informing the developer at rowsandall.com. I will fix that asap. 

All really slow as you can see. Tomorrow: another row in the eight. 

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Apr 18 2017

5x1500m fail in the cold

The plan was to row a 5x1500m on the water, first thing in the morning.

This plan didn’t survive the time I needed to scrape the ice off my car windows. The North Pole has decided to send its weather our way. Temperatures are around 0, windy, with icy rain, hail, and other nice stuff. Snow is expected for tomorrow.

The official training plan for the Masters in our club has a light week, but I have decided that training properly is more important than performing on coming weekend’s races. So plan B was to do the session indoors and compare with a similar workout of a few weeks ago.

First, I needed to reinstall Painsled. My “beta tester” version had expired, so I had to download the “ordinary” version. This involved going upstairs to tell my son to stop downloading videos.

After a 2k warming up I started the main session. I set it up as a “ReRow”, with my previous session as a pace boat.

I managed to follow the pace boat for the first three intervals. At the start of the fourth interval I saw that my pace boat was getting faster. I was now chasing a 1:50 average.

After 1000m, the wheels came off.

myimage (10)

 

bokeh plot (13)

 

bokeh plot (12)

 

The only nice thing about it is that I have the workout compare functionality on rowsandall.com to see this happening in real life. Unfortunately, the last time I rowed this with my defect Wahoo Tickr, and the heart rate values were not reliable.

I bet they were lower than today, though. I think the first graph tells the story all too well. Too much red in the third interval …

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Apr 11 2017

Ending Rowing Careers

No, not my rowing “career”. Today, I heard that my performance at the LW men Open Czech Long Distance Championship was used as a kind of benchmark. Elite rowers slower than Roosendaal can end their career. Elite rowers who beat me with a too small margin also have a problem.

Interesting.

Today, I am happy, because I ended a few weeks of schizofrenia. On the test server of rowsandall.com, I have been working on updated looks, including a new designed logo.

Every time I went to the “production” version of the site, I was more and more unhappy. I liked the new design more.

Today, the “develop” version has become the “production” version. Rowsandall.com v2.0. Here’s the landing page, including a licensed stock photograph:

welcome

And this is the facelifted version of the workouts list:

workoutlist

And more is to come.

Today, I rowed on the erg. I had too much work to do. Also, the wind prediction was very unfavorable, so I didn’t risk. The bluetooth connectivity issue with the PM5 was solved by resetting the iPhone. So, nothing wrong with the PM, but the iPhone had corrupted bluetooth settings after an iOS update.

myimage (23)

 

Today’s workout is from the training plan of our head coach and it was:

3km warming up

3x10min/5min rest, with 10min = 4min@20spm, 3min@22spm, 2min@24spm, 1min@26spm

Cooling down


Workout Summary - media/20170411-1845240o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|09394|45:00.0|02:23.7|188.3|21.8|156.0|180.0|09.6
W-|07623|30:00.0|01:58.1|214.0|22.1|161.7|180.0|11.6
R-|01779|15:00.0|04:13.0|106.8|19.9|146.8|180.0|00.4
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00987|04:00.0|02:01.6|191.6|19.9|143.7|153.0|12.4
01|00766|03:00.0|01:57.5|215.4|22.4|160.8|167.0|11.4
02|00522|02:00.0|01:54.9|230.6|23.9|168.9|171.0|10.9
03|00270|01:00.0|01:51.2|254.8|26.0|173.3|174.0|10.4
04|00965|04:00.0|02:04.4|185.0|19.5|152.3|161.0|12.4
05|00763|03:00.0|01:58.0|212.8|22.4|166.2|170.0|11.4
06|00529|02:00.0|01:53.3|240.2|24.3|173.2|175.0|10.9
07|00272|01:00.0|01:50.2|260.5|26.0|176.8|178.0|10.5
08|00979|04:00.0|02:02.6|193.6|20.3|153.7|164.0|12.1
09|00768|03:00.0|01:57.2|217.1|22.1|169.1|173.0|11.6
10|00531|02:00.0|01:53.0|242.2|24.2|175.5|178.0|10.9
11|00272|01:00.0|01:50.3|260.4|26.0|179.1|180.0|10.5

Interesting workout. I think it would have been more interesting to row it on the water.

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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

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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!

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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)

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