race preparation

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Jul 30 2018

Final week before EuroMasters

This was a 10 day interval between the Czech Open Masters and the Euromasters Regatta in Munich.

On Monday, July 16th, we washed boats, rigged them and put them in the racks. No training.

On Tuesday, I did a 50 minute weights session.

On Wednesday morning, I went out to the castle on a Steady State row with Eduard.

Nice rowing.

On Friday, July 20, Romana and I did a 2x(6×45″/45″)/5min row in the double.

If I remember well, this was a nice row. I failed to make any notes for this workout.

On Saturday, we rowed “mini sprints” alongside another Masters Mix 2x. These were 7-10 strokes full pressure and high rate, alternated with two minutes rest. High rate is coming together really well now.

On Monday, July 23, we did another session in the double. We should not have done it. It was windy and there was a nasty chop. We just did a few practice starts and short race pace intervals, but the boat was “dead”.

After that, we loaded the small trailer which would go to Hodonin on Tuesday, where our boats were put on the big trailer together with the boats of Hodonin and Uherske Hradiste. It’s more economical to tow one big trailer with boats for three clubs than to arrive in Munich with three half empty trailers.

On Wednesday, we drove to Munich in five and a half hours, checked in to the hotel, and waited for the Hodonin trailer to arrive. It came at 4:15pm, and by then the boat area was already chock full of boats. We found a quiet place in the shade behind the accreditation building:

On Thursday morning, Kazi and I did a quick row in the double, to make sure all was set for our first race on the regatta, the Masters Men 2x in the C category.

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Jun 7 2018

The Practice That We Shouldn’t Have Done

Yep, a final practice in the eight before we defend last year’s win at this event:

Here is what happened:

  • Two of our crew couldn’t attend because of work, so we rowed with 2 reserves
  • The traffic situation was hopeless and one of our crew hadn’t paid attention to that, or isn’t using the right route planning app, and arrived more than 30 minutes late
  • Our stroke had his birthday and was expected home at 7:30 pm for his party, so we didn’t wait for the guy who was stuck in traffic, chartered an additional reserve on the spot and set off for a very short practice
  • Because of all that, everybody was lightly irritated, and I guess also a bit nervous for Saturday’s race
  • It was pretty windy and very choppy
  • We were in the Wintech with an unexperienced cox and no cox box, so we were going in all directions, the boat was unstable, and in bow we couldn’t hear anything and had no clue what was going on
  • I didn’t have my SpeedCoach GPS with me and there wasn’t a good way to attach the phone running BoatCoach to the Wintech, which mainly affected the stroke rate data.
  • One of our reserves caught a major crab causing his oar to slam into his front stay and bending it. (We managed to bend it back after the session.)

Looking at the chart, I think we did 3×30 strokes/30 strokes in the 2k course, and then a few practice starts.

Let’s pretend this session never happened. We are the eight that doesn’t practice.

Saturday, 7pm. Race Time.

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May 22 2017

Friday: Boat transport and a light training

At work in the morning. I took vacation for the afternoon, drove to the rowing club to pick up the small trailer and off we drove to Hodonin.

IMG 1461

The big trailer had already left. This is one of the reasons why we bought our cute little trailer, to help the club get all the boats to these local regattas, where we want even the beginners to race.

There was a strong crosswind driving south over the D2 highway, but otherwise the drive was uneventful. After 50 minutes, we arrived at our destination. The bus with the kids arrived about 10 minutes after us, so we unloading the trailers was done very quickly. Romana and I took the double for a quick spin on the river Morava:

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Romana and I tested our race pace stroke and start sequences. You can see from the pace difference in the first vs the second half that we were rowing on a river. I tried to estimate the wind and stream effects in this plot (using the Physics Department services on rowsandall.com):

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May 4 2017

Mini taper for first sprint race

A 4x250m/250m is my traditional workout during the taper for a 1000m race. It is also the first workout I rowed when I got my SpeedCoach, in July last year, and the exported file from that workout is still one of the test files for rowsandall.com.

So I showed up at the rowing club after work, took my single for a quick spin, and then I prepared the boat for transport to Piestany in Slovakia.

During the warming up I did a few short 10 stroke intervals and test starts, building up the start with one more stroke at a time. First, one stroke. Then, two strokes. Etcetera.

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It was quite choppy, and there were a lot of other boats on the lake. There was a sailing class with lots of sailing boats, and there were people windsurfing. In the end, I decided to do my first two 250m intervals between the buoys of the 2k course, in the headwind. Then turn around and do the other two in tailwind, like this:

map

Here’s the summary:


Workout Summary - media/20170504-175300-Sanders SpeedCoach 20170504 0520pmo.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|01000|03:52.0|01:56.4|338.7|31.9|174.0|181.0|08.1
W-|01000|03:53.0|01:56.5|338.8|31.9|174.0|181.0|08.1
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|181.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00250|01:00.4|02:00.7|343.8|31.4|171.7|179.0|07.9
01|00250|01:02.2|02:04.5|334.2|31.6|175.9|181.0|07.6
02|00250|00:55.1|01:50.3|338.8|32.4|172.7|179.0|08.4
03|00250|00:55.3|01:50.5|338.5|32.2|175.8|180.0|08.4

Pretty happy with the result. It wasn’t nice clean flat water rowing. The chop made me concentrate and I didn’t look at the SpeedCoach display much. There was simply too much going on with the chop and the other traffic. I aimed for 320W average. In the end I managed a bit more.

Here are the metrics plots:

We’re leaving tomorrow afternoon. Monday is a holiday, so we plan to stay in Slovakia longer and hike to this castle, close to the town of Piestany where the races are held:

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Apr 9 2017

Friday: Travel to Hořín and reconnaissance row

I traveled with the other rowers in the minivan that towed the boat trailer. We left Brno at 1pm in rainy weather. It rained a lot during the 4 hour drive.

Arrived at Vranany, the village that is closest to the start of the race, and where the boats are stored on a muddy field where the canal splits off from the Vltava (Moldau) river. It was about 6 degrees, but it was dry.

I rigged my single and launched for a quick row to check the conditions. A strong tailwind in the race direction. I did 15 strokes at race pace on the start of the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th kilometer.

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You can see from the difference in pace that the wind was quite strong.

When I was ready with my row, the second wave of our rowers launched (some of us share boats). I instructed Iva to do 10 to 15 stroke intervals in the tailwind direction. She has more technique problems in tailwind conditions.

I waited in the minivan for the second wave of rowers to return. Then we had to drive to the finish area in Hořín and park the trailer among the other trailers, which involved some manual trailer manipulation in heavy rain.

It was 8pm when we arrived in the hotel. Luckily, I had anticipated this and prepared some sandwiches, so I didn’t have to go to the restaurant for a 9pm dinner. Instead, I had one beer and then I went to bed.

I weighed 71.8kg when going to sleep. I usually weigh in after my morning bathroom visit around 200-300g lighter than before going to bed, so all was fine, given the 72.5kg weigh-in limit.

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sev_pohl

Jan 27 2017

Taper for 2k

Today I did a Taper training as prescribed by our coach.

  • 3km Warming Up
  • 6 times 15 hard strokes, rest 2 to 3 minutes
  • Start+250m at 2k pace
  • Cooling Down

I wasn’t sure if the 15 hard strokes were to be done at a high stroke rate or a low stroke rate.


Workout Summary - media/20170127-1710200o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|08353|36:55.0|02:12.6|190.1|22.9|145.9|172.0|09.9
W-|08353|36:55.0|02:12.6|188.9|22.9|145.9|172.0|09.9
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|172.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|07000|31:15.9|02:14.0|189.4|22.8|144.7|172.0|09.8
01|00250|00:51.4|01:42.7|319.3|29.2|148.8|167.0|10.0
02|01103|04:48.0|02:10.5|162.4|21.9|153.1|168.0|10.5

One thing that I am thinking about a lot is increasing power by stroke rate, rather than by increasing the drive force. I see that in my “power” intervals, I go substantially higher in “Work per Stroke”, which means that I increase the average drive force. A risk of doing that is that your muscle fatigue sets in earlier than aerobic fatigue (if that is a valid term). For tomorrow’s 2k, I want to rate high from the beginning (above 30spm) but keep the power checked at 1:44 pace, at least in the first 1500m.

Here are the charts that show what I am doing:

And here are the Pies:

So a 2k tomorrow, and then packing and on Sunday we’ll go to the mountains for a week of cross-country skiing:

Conditions look great: http://www.jeseniky.net/pocasi-snih#upravene-bezkarske-trasy

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Aug 1 2016

Thursday – Driving to Munich and test of new SpeedCoach GPS Model 2

The drive to Munich was without incidents. We left Brno around 9am and arrived at the regatta course at 3:15pm. The weather was nice and the site was bustling with activity. Romana went off to do her training in the quad and I went to the accreditation to get registered.

 

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Photo by Natascha Kral

Then I walked to the other side of the canal to see Daniela and Dave from Rowline. These guys from Prague were the official Concept2 reps at the regatta, but they also sell NK electronics. I picked up my pre-ordered NK SpeedCoach GPS 2 (and received a 20 seconds introduction on how to operate it) and then proceeded to prepare my single for a row.

The row was a short one. The plan was 3x250m at race pace, with 500m rest. I did a 2k warming up which unfortunately wasn’t captured on the SpeedCoach, because I couldn’t find Just Row in the list of workouts. It turns out you just press the on/off button to get the device ready to record your Just Row and that’s all. This rugged piece of electronics with a simple monochrome display (which is excellent in sunny weather, by the way) works by pressing buttons, in contrast to CrewNerd where everything is done on your phone’s touch screen. I have to get used to that.

At the 2km mark I turned and went into the workouts menu to program my 3x250m workout. That turned out to be pretty intuitive. I like that you can program rest in meters or seconds, whatever you want. I set a 10 seconds countdown, started the workout and waited to see what happened. To be honest I did expect an audio signal at the workout start and end, which didn’t happen. I did the first 250m from a standing start, and looking down at a small screen doesn’t go with sitting in the ideal start position. I am not sure if the clock starts ticking after the end of the countdown or only when it registers your first stroke. Need to look into that. For now it seems that the countdown is more suited to pieces with running starts.

Anyway, I successfully recorded this session. I also was able to look at the session details on the device itself. I liked that.

3x250m / 500m rest – time plot

The graphs were made on rowsandall.com, after I exported the data from the SpeedCoach to a FIT file, which I could upload to Strava, which enabled me to import the data into rowsandall.com. There is something fishy about the data though, so I will need to look into that.

The export of data works through LiNK, an application that runs on your computer. That is nice, but one doesn’t always have a computer at hand, and I think it would be good to be able to sync data to a tablet computer or smartphone directly from the device. Especially for self-tracking athletes, it is quite nice to be able to share workout data immediately through Strava or similar websites.

Here is the session information from the CSV file export:

3x250m

The CSV file export also has a stroke by stroke table with time, stroke rate, pace, and heart rate information. Rowsandall.com cannot yet process this CSV file but I will work on that. Should be straightforward. It’s a pity that GPS coordinate info is missing from that file, though. I will need to look into a way to upload the FIT file to rowsandall.com directly.

So all in all I am happy with the device but I see a few points to improve (in a next firmware upgrade?):

  • Add audio signals – may be hard if there is no way to produce audio
  • Export full data (GPS, Heart Rate, stroke rate, pace) also for the rest between the intervals
  • Add GPS coordinates to the CSV file export
  • Develop a smartphone app to synchronize data from the speedcoach while on the go. (Travel, training camp, etc). Ideally the smartphone app has a feature to connect to Strava, TrainingPeaks, SportTracks, Concept2 logbook

I guess there is work to do to free the NK SpeedCoach data a bit more.

After the row we went off to our hotel, had a dinner and then went bed. Friday – racing day.

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Photo by Natascha Kral

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