quad

2x750b

Aug 25 2015

Tuesday Quad Day (2x750m)

Repeat of this training, 2x750m with 12 minutes rest, first at 34spm, second at 37spm. Then we rowed 2:28 and 2:27. There were a few differences today:

  • Our bow rower has been ill and is still recovering, so he wasn’t pulling very hard, and we would row the distance in a slightly lower stroke rate
  • Today’s temperatures were a pleasant 18 degrees, vs above 30 on July 3.
  • Flat water and no wind today, a slight crosswind back in July.

Warming up with a few high stroke rate bursts. This felt very good. We hadn’t trained together since the Nationals, due to vacation and illness. Then we did two practice starts, rowed to the start of the 2k course, dialed up a 750m with standing start and off we went.

Bowman Tomas had permission to pull half strength. We asked #2 Martin to pull double strength to compensate :-).

|Dist_|Time_|Pace__|_SPM__|avg HR|max HR|DPS|Remarks
|03052|18:24|03:00.9| 21.8 | 135 | 173 |07.6|WU
|00746|02:26|01:37.9| 32.1 | 173 | 182 |09.6|750m
|03059|18:00|02:56.5| 18.9 | 143 | 182 |09.0|rest
|00748|02:28|01:39.0| 32.0 | 173 | 182 |09.5|750m
|02305|12:41|02:45.0| 18.5 | 137 | 182 |09.8|CD

So 2:26 and 2:28 at lower stroke rate. Not bad and it felt good. Perhaps it is a good idea to remind Martin that he has to pull hard ;-).

2x750b

Tomorrow: “Death by lactate”! Was planned for Thursday but my double partner has to go to a seminar, so we have to do it … Wednesday AM.

Coming weekend I will row double and single Masters at regional regatta in Břeclav. Quite an unregular 1km course with a big turn. Good prep for Belgium.

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parovkamix

Jul 30 2015

Tuesday – Thursday

Tuesday

13 km of steady state in the double with Radek. Good steady state.

Wednesday

No rowing.

Thursday

In the mixed quad, but with a substitute for Romana. She’s not feeling well. Minor stomach bug.

We did our patented “special 4x2km” training (see this post, session #2).

It was difficult water. Strong wind. Chop. And lots of swimmers. The temperatures have dropped so the drunk swimmers have disappeared. But we seem to have an invasion of long distance swimmers. Luckily, since a recent incident where a motorboat killed a swimmer, most of them tow a small orange inflatable pillow which makes them much more easy to spot and avoid. Still our bow lady was obviously nervous and checking often and we had a hard time balancing the boat.

Hard work and good technique feedback in the 17spm stretches. A lot to work on, clearly.

parovkamix

I felt slightly weird taking a club boat out with three members of the other club in town.

parovkamix2

The graphs show the 4x2km and the cooling down. Had to reset CrewNerd again after the warming up. It seems I was quite good at hitting the rates, which is great since in the quad the iPhone is at an odd angle and I cannot really look at it without looking down too much at the catch. I used only the audio alerts.

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4x250md

Jul 14 2015

Tuesday: Repeat taper training, in quad

Same training as yesterday, but now in a quad. A bit more wind, 4 Bft vs 2 Bft yesterday. Again 4x250m but this time at a decent stroke rate for the quad: 35-37spm. Which would a challenge in the choppy conditions.

We had Tomas Emr coaching us in the launch, which was good. During the warming up we did 10 strokes on / 10 strokes off at increasing stroke rates (30/35/38/38).


|Start|Stop_|Dist_|Time_|Pace__|_SPM__|avg HR|max HR|DPS|Remarks
|00000|03159|03159|22:38|03:34.9| 23.0 | 130 | 178 |06.1|warming up (part of)
|03159|03400|00240|00:44|01:31.6| 35.8 | 172 | 179 |09.2|250m, tailwind
|04044|04294|00250|00:45|01:30.0| 36.0 | 176 | 180 |09.3|250m, tailwind
|04763|05014|00251|00:47|01:33.8| 35.3 | 175 | 181 |09.1|250m, headwind
|05555|05800|00245|00:48|01:38.0| 35.8 | 176 | 181 |08.6|250m, strong headwind
|05800|11174|05374|32:13|02:59.9| 19.0 | 148 | 182 |08.8|cooling down

The stroke rates are a bit lower than what I saw on CrewNerd during the row. Perhaps because it takes 3 strokes to get up to the right rate.

Coach said the last interval was the best.

Then we rowed in pairs (bow pair, then stroke pair), then we rowed with exaggerated tap-down and hands very low in the boat. Then we rowed unclipped.

4x250md

4x250mc

Romana printed out the list of participants to coming weekend’s Open Czech Masters National Championships in Trebon.

12 participants in the C category single, so for sure two finals. Last year I had 3 hours of sleep before rowing this and came in fourth place, in a race where I didn’t have that little extra. I moved up one category so I have different opponents. I rowed 3:50. I looked up last year’s results for those that participated:

Mitas – 3:41 (-9 sec). A week later in Munich’s Euromasters I was second, only 2 seconds behind him
Milota – 3:55 (+5 sec)
Gwozdiak – 4:15 (+25 sec)
Novotny – 4:04 (+14 sec)

The rest are unknown.

In the B category quads, there are 8 boats, so again two finals. A year ago we won the A category in 3:18. We have one new guy in the boat. The only competitors we rowed against a year ago was the Trebon/Jindrichuv Hradec composite which we beat in 3:37. The guy who is not in our boat rows a composite with an Austrian club. If we draw against them, we will have to beat them, but that will be very hard.

In the mix Masters category C, there are 10 boats, so again two finals. Our “arch friends” Dekanovska/Dekanovsky remain category B. We rowed 3:44.

The winners of last year, Nevrala/Vecerova, who beat us by 0.5 seconds, are starting again.Then there is the Neratovice boat, which rowed 4:02 (+18 seconds), Smichov who rowed 3:44 (0 seconds) but were already C category last year, but with another woman. The rest is unknown.

The Men’s B 2x will be a surprise. We are not particularly good, but I didn’t row this last year.

Exciting!!

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kunka

Jul 7 2015

Monday: Family Quad

kunka

Monday was a bank holiday. We were in Pardubice visiting Romana’s family. My brother-in-law, Romana, Lenka and I went out at the rowing club in Pardubice. We took an old Empacher quad on the river Elbe and did 8km of nice steady-state.

The view on the castle on Kunětice Mountain is quite nice. kunka2

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2x750

Jul 3 2015

Thursday: Warm Quad Training

Last day of the three Crazy Quad Days.

The temperatures were well above 30 degrees C. Brno’s girls, gathered around the lake, were running out of clothes to shed. Yours truthfully had to park 500m from the rowing club, because everybody was gathering there for the late afternoon.

So we weren’t on the water before 6:30 pm and some of were under time pressure. We did a 3km warming up, then a 750m at 34spm, then 3250m rest and finally a 750m that was supposed to be at 37spm.

It was the first time we were running above 30spm for a substantial distance. With all the little boats and swimmers the water was very lively. There was a slight crosswind, and our bow man had to turn around almost every stroke in a desperate attempt to avoid swimmers and drunk people on small boats who have veered into the 2km course.

I wasn’t entirely happy about the sculling. In the first one we were too short, and we had some big wake from a tourist ferry in the middle 250m. We got a bit more stroke length in the second run. But of course in that second run tiredness was kicking in and I wasn’t able to stroke higher than 34spm without severely compromising the rhythm.

|Start|Stop_|Dist_|Time_|Pace__|_SPM__|avg HR|max HR|DPS|Remarks

|01064|01312|00248|00:50|01:40.7| 33.3 | 163 | 180 |09.0|250m
|01312|01562|00250|00:49|01:38.2| 33.1 | 183 | 185 |09.2|250m
|01562|01810|00248|00:49|01:38.6| 32.9 | 185 | 186 |09.2|250m

|02614|02859|00245|00:49|01:40.2| 33.4 | 164 | 182 |09.0|250m
|02859|03106|00247|00:49|01:39.0| 33.4 | 185 | 187 |09.1|250m
|03106|03359|00253|00:49|01:36.9| 34.0 | 188 | 189 |09.1|250m

2:28 for the first, 2:27 for the second. High heart rates.

2x750

After the second interval, we immediately rowed back to the club. I did a 10 minute cooling down on the erg.

Then strolled over to a fish restaurant along the lake to join a work related dinner. Very relaxed evening.

This morning I spent 3.5 hours at the traffic police, to obtain this:
spz 001

The license plate for the new trailer!

No rowing today. A rest day. Bought a big fish to put on the barbecue tonight (Atlantic redfish).

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eva_velesikova

Jul 2 2015

Wednesday for Project 2: Mixed Quad Steady State

It’s quad craziness. Almost every second outing I do is in a quad. But we have to, because some members of our mixed quad are going on vacation, so the next time we meet it will be a few weeks before Belgium.

We did 12km of steady state with catch drills at every turn. steadystatequad

Good session.

Today, the ladies of our mixed quad, my wife Romana and Lubica, will attend the funeral of Eva Velešíková:

eva_velesikova

Eva was a big driving force behind women’s Masters Rowing in Brno. Lubica and Romana have trained and raced with her. As a member of Masters International, a group of women raiding Masters races, she won two medals at Masters Worlds in Varese, in 2013, when she was already diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and told she had 1-1.5 years left. After her husband died, she traveled around the globe, and remained very active, optimistic and energetic until a few months ago. I don’t know her closely but I feel enormous admiration for her.

She passed away last Saturday, when I was out in the mixed quad with two ladies who have rowed with her frequently.

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ctc

Jul 1 2015

Tuesday: CTC & 3x2km in the Quad

I made a promise to Free Spirits and to myself to do each and every CTC this year, and yesterday I almost broke that promise.

This month’s challenge is a nice one: “Row 4810m and record your best time.” The challenge is to find time to erg in the middle of the rowing season. Usually I can rely on the weather to find a good training day to do the CTC, but with races and nice weather, this month was a disaster.

I woke up on the last possible day of the month to do this CTC with the feeling that I wouldn’t do the session in the morning.

Luckily, working from home I was super effective, so in the afternoon I was able to break out for an hour, sit down and do the session. With an OTW training planned for the evening, this wasn’t going to be a super-fast session. I aimed for 1:56 average pace for the 4810m and I wanted to do it in a strongly negative split way. The plan was to start at 2:00 pace and accelerate for each 500m.

ctc

It was easier than it looks on the graph. I managed a 1:55 average split and this way of doing it felt really nice.

Still, I had tired legs afterwards, and only 2 hours to go to the start of the OTW session.

The quad session was great. Three km warming up, then 3x2km @26-27spm but with a race start. Paddle 2km between the intervals.

Hard work but not sprint race intensity. Good session to try out if our stroke falls apart at these medium stroke rates. We held up pretty well. Stroke rate had a tendency to creep up instead of down, and we ended up rowing the final 500m of each interval at 29-31spm. We are a competitive crew. Once we set the time for the first interval, everybody on board wanted to be close to that time in the subsequent 2 intervals.


|Start|Stop_|Dist_|Time_|_Pace__|avg HR|max HR|Remarks
|00000|02897|02897|16:22|02:49.5| 120 | 151 |warming up
|02897|04903|02006|07:13|01:47.9| 173 | 183 |1st 2km
|07129|09126|01997|07:12|01:48.1| 175 | 186 |2nd 2km
|11389|13389|02000|07:21|01:50.3| 176 | 186 |3rd 2km
|13389|14533|01144|07:02|03:04.5| 141 | 179 |cooling down

Heart rates were high again. Apparently I was just having a “high heart rate day”, because the perceived effort wasn’t at all like that.

3x2km

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