OTW

Monday – rest day. Too much work to do to fit in a session without compromising other duties.

Tuesday – first training of the last two intensive weeks of the season. This week and coming week I should get in a decent amount of training, then I will drastically reduce volume, only work on speed and prepare for the Masters Nationals.

Driving to the rowing club, I thought that this may be the last “long intervals” session of the season, but I was mistaken. I have actually planned two of them for next week. I think I should revise that, even though it is straight out of the book.

You can also see that I should have done a 1 minute and a 2 speed lactate test last week. Well, I was in Amsterdam and I didn’t do the tests. Not critical in this period of the year, I think. I don’t need confidence on the erg. I need boat speed and ability to battle through the lactate rush.

I will be taking Thursday and Friday off, so I should take some time to plan the rest of the season in detail.

I was also wondering about the pace. Had I looked at previous sessions, I would have discovered a 4x2km OTW in 2:12 average in April. During breakfast, I searched my blog but didn’t find it. Now, behind the desktop, I found it immediately. So far for web browsing on the smart phone.

I decided to go at 24spm for the 3k, 25spm for the 2.5k, and 26spm for the 2k, work on technique and be happy with an average pace faster than 2:13 (head race pace). These are ideal stroke rates and boat speeds to ingrain my technique attention points. A long reach at the catch, not locking the boat and a strong finish. By not locking the boat I also make time to pay attention to blade depth. Also, the first part of the stroke should be a leg push, followed by a distinct back swing. Please note that these are my personal notes, and I am exaggerating what I need to do in order to come closer to the ideal, which I would definitely not describe as a stroke that consists of two distinct pieces, bum shove, back swing. But as always when you work on technique, you have the feeling you exaggerate. It feels awkward and you have to work hard to achieve even the slightest improvement. Shifting the emphasis a bit more to the back swing makes me finish much stronger than I normally do, which has a distinct effect on boat speed. Today, paces were jumping around a bit on CrewNerd depending on the XGPS160 mood, the wind, the moon phase, and a few other unknown factors, but I had the feeling that I could bring down the splits by 2 seconds by doing a strong finish.


Workout Summary - media/20160621-092013-2016-06-21-0712.CSV
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|11169|51:51.0|02:19.7|22.3|156.6|169.6|09.7
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|02266| 11:15 |02:27.6|18.3|131.0|153.0|11.1
02|03000| 12:54 |02:09.1|24.5|170.0|178.0|09.5
03|02500| 10:27 |02:05.5|25.3|172.0|178.0|09.4 - interrupted
04|02000| 08:36 |02:09.0|26.6|175.0|181.0|08.7
05|01403| 08:39 |03:00.3|16.8|135.0|158.0|09.9


During the warming up, I saw very flattering paces. The water was mirror flat and I didn’t realize that I was rowing in a slight tailwind breeze. Then I turned around at Rokle to start the 3k, and after the first strokes I immediately noticed I was rowing into a headwind. It is funny how you don’t notice with tailwind, then you turn around and you notice the temperature feels slightly lower, there is a cool pressure against your back and neck, and your paces drop. Anyway, I managed to hold 2:09 in this 3k without much problems. Rowing without a mirror, I almost bumped into one of the big tourist boats which was doing a turning maneuver in the final 500m of the 2k course. I only noticed it was there when I finished the interval and looked around. It was 10 strokes away from me.

Must wear mirrors, even in early morning sessions.

During the second interval I counted 5×50 strokes and enjoyed nice paces. At one point the CrewNerd+XGPS160 combo froze. I don’t know how long it took me to notice. I guess a few strokes. I stopped rowing, reset the XGPS160 and picked up again. No negative impact on training effect, but you can see the interruption in the graph.

During the final interval I climbed a bit in stroke rates in the last 500m. Good session overall.

It’s funny the pie chart doesn’t show any “red”. If you zoom into the Interactive Chart on rowsandall.com (here), you can see a tiny bit of red in the last interval:

Tomorrow: Extensive steady state

Thursday: Two sessions, one with 3x(6×45″/1min) Rest intervals, which I am thinking of changing to what our elite guys were doing today: 4×1’15″/1’15” + 5×45″/1′.

After the training I chatted a bit with our elite lightweight sculler, Milan, who has good chances of going to Rotterdam in the LW 1x, for the World Championships for non-Olympic rowing disciplines. We also discussed the differences between Wintech (which he used to row) and Filippi (to which he recently switched). I hope he will qualify for Rotterdam!