race pace

Monday

Tired legs from the Sunday workout and a hectic day at work. I was wondering if I should work out. In the end I did drive to the lake, but about an hour later than planned. I decided to do what was planned. A short, light workout in the single. Main goal: Recover.

As you can see from the pace part of the chart, there was quite a strong wind, pushing me to 2:40 and slower on the warming up and to 3:00 pace on the headwind segment Sirka – Rokle, while speeding me up to 2:20 on the Rokle – Sirka segment and in the cooling down. There was quite some chop. The kind that occasionally breaks on your front stays and splashes your elbows and back. It was fun, actually.

Then a nice chat with the rowers at the club, about the National Championships (Juniors & Open) of last weekend. Our club has done quite well. One of our junior scullers, who wasn’t selected for the National Squad, turned his disgust into energy and took his Filippi to a strong victory in the J18 1x field, winning his heat, semifinal, and final with ease. The second place in the final was taken by another guy who didn’t get selected. We also had a guy in the winning (national squad) J18 4x-.

In the J16 fields, our club won virtually everything on the sweep side. On the girls side (Romana’s team), the results were varying, and disappointing in the final, getting beaten by crews that they beat easily in the heats on Friday. Lenka has just come back from a long illness, so three days of racing is a lot for her, currently. Iva wants to win so bad that she forgets about technique (not her strongest point) and tries to outpower everyone in the first 1k, then dies in the second 1k with people rowing cleaner and longer passing her. Well, she’s 16 so there is time for her to learn how to race.

Tuesday

Out early to get in a workout before heading to the airport. Today’s workout was a 2x(12x35sec/25sec)/6min with a target stroke rate of 30 to 32spm. Short and sweet.

I made a point of rowing strokes with stops during the warming up, focusing on body position during the recovery. This helps me tremendously in approaching the catch on “a stable platform” and getting the most (length, catch efficiency) out of every stroke.

The workout itself was interesting. I had to program it as 30″/30″ intervals, because the SpeedCoach doesn’t take less than 15 second steps. However, I used the final 5 seconds of each rest interval to take to strokes at full power (but lower stroke rate) to get up to speed. That worked out quite well. A 25 second rest is really short! Still, I was able to row well, and only in the second half of the second set (in a headwind) did the rowing start to fall apart – slightly. I think I could have managed a third set, but two weeks to the Championships, I prefer my workouts to be shorter.


Work Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|00134| 00:30 |01:51.9| 34.0| 145 | 161 | 7.9 - tailwind
02|00131| 00:30 |01:54.5| 32.0| 164 | 170 | 8.2
03|00133| 00:30 |01:52.7| 32.0| 165 | 171 | 8.3
04|00134| 00:30 |01:51.9| 32.0| 168 | 173 | 8.4
05|00134| 00:30 |01:51.9| 32.0| 168 | 174 | 8.4
06|00135| 00:30 |01:51.1| 32.0| 170 | 175 | 8.4
07|00134| 00:30 |01:51.9| 34.0| 171 | 176 | 7.9
08|00134| 00:30 |01:51.9| 32.0| 172 | 176 | 8.4
09|00134| 00:30 |01:51.9| 32.0| 170 | 175 | 8.4
10|00135| 00:30 |01:51.1| 34.0| 173 | 179 | 7.9
11|00133| 00:30 |01:52.7| 34.0| 172 | 176 | 7.8
12|00136| 00:30 |01:50.2| 34.0| 172 | 178 | 8.0
13|00132| 00:30 |01:53.6| 32.0| 160 | 168 | 8.2 - headwind starts here
14|00128| 00:30 |01:57.1| 34.0| 170 | 176 | 7.5
15|00131| 00:30 |01:54.5| 34.0| 173 | 179 | 7.7
16|00129| 00:30 |01:56.2| 32.0| 174 | 178 | 8.1
17|00126| 00:30 |01:59.0| 32.0| 175 | 179 | 7.9
18|00127| 00:30 |01:58.1| 34.0| 175 | 179 | 7.5
19|00128| 00:30 |01:57.1| 34.0| 175 | 180 | 7.5
20|00125| 00:30 |01:59.9| 32.0| 175 | 179 | 7.8
21|00126| 00:30 |01:59.0| 32.0| 175 | 180 | 7.9
22|00125| 00:30 |01:59.9| 32.0| 176 | 179 | 7.8
23|00126| 00:30 |01:59.0| 32.0| 175 | 179 | 7.9
24|00137| 00:30 |01:49.4| 36.0| 176 | 179 | 7.6 - tailwind
Workout Summary
--|03147| 12:00 | 1:54.3| 32.9| 170 | 180 | 8.0


Here is the pace and SPM plot from the FIT export from the SpeedCoach:

Here is the same plot from the CSV export.

The SpeedCoach CSV doesn’t denote the “rest” intervals as rest. In fact, it doesn’t contain any strokes taken during the rest at all. I find that quite disappointing, and will urge NK to change that. The FIT at least contains the time stamps, so you can see how the intervals are spaced apart, and it doesn’t fool rowsandall.com into believing that I have rowed a “breakthrough” workout:

Anyway, I was able to contantly push the power above 340-350W.

Some technique related charts. Try to guess where the rowing started to fall apart:

Now, I am sitting at the gate at Munich Airport, waiting for my connection to Brussels.