river

May 1 2017

Monday: More race pace training

It’s a Labor Day in Europe and in this part that is a bank holiday.

The training plan that the coach sent didn’t take into account the fact that I am racing in 5 days, so I had to improvise a bit. But Thursday’s workout looked interesting.

3x(7x40sec/20sec)/5min at race pace

I woke up into a nice sunny day, but the trees were moving and the wind forecast wasn’t great, predicting 7 to 8 m/s, which on our lake means it may be a bit rough. The forecast was confirmed when I arrived at the club. So I decided to just cross the lake to Rokle and then take the river to Veveri Castle and beyond.

I got a little bit of water in the boat while crossing the lake. I am afraid it didn’t really look like rowing in this part, but the goal was just to cross. It was a little choppy, really:

On the river, I did the workout. I had to improvise a bit. Some of the turns are a bit sharp, so I took the rest instructions as “inspiration” and adjusted the rest and work intervals to suit the turns.

This is a great training. Perhaps I should have increased the stroke rate a little, because it wasn’t as hard as I expected, but this was difficult on the river, with the turns, the wind, and the other traffic.

The need to watch the traffic and steer made it a bit hard to watch “Wash”, but I think there were a few intervals where I had the right emphasis.

The average “wash” value at 28spm and higher is 13.6 degrees, but if you look at the dots (each one being a stroke), you can see that this is skewed a lot by steering strokes and I would argue that I am closer to 12 degrees.

Here are “wash” and “effective length” vs stroke rate. I don’t think it makes sense to look at the averages. Crossing the lake twice, I had to revert to short strokes. There was no way I could do something that looked like rowing in those conditions. Also, after I finished the third interval, I paddled quite lightly, just enjoying the scenery.

And here is the video. I took the FIT file from the SpeedCoach and just did a quick DashWare overlay using the power, cadence and pace values. The averaging causes the metrics to change very quickly at times. Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to overlay Empower Oarlock metrics like slip, wash, catch and finish angle over the video? I guess you would have to do a slightly better job at synchronizing than I did, though:

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: chop, intervals, OTW, river, rowing, single, training

Apr 22 2017

Friday: Mixed Quad

Wednesday

No training. I flew to Amsterdam. KLM had two surprises to me. The first one was a one hour delay.

The second surprise, a nice one, was that they offered me a glass of champagne to celebrate my birthday. It was interesting, to sit in Economy class and being the only one drinking champagne from a real glass (as opposed to a plastic cup).

Thursday

Hotel room workout. Then a full day of conference, ending at Airport Valkenburg with a drone demonstration.

During the day I received a call from one of our coaches. The spring races in Brno had been cancelled, because of a weather forecast promising lots of wind and wind gusts over the weekend.

KLM had another nice surprise for me. A one hour delay, which is not cool when that means you arrive at 23:30 in Vienna, from where it is a 2 hour drive home.

In bed at 1:50am.

Friday

Up after just a few hours of sleep. I was wondering if I should do a workout at all. Left home for work an hour later than normally, and in the last minute I threw my rowing clothes in the trunk. Not good. The drive to work took 45 minutes instead of the usual 15 minutes.

It was a long day. Our monthly operations review, which is a four hour marathon session, and this time it was planned right over lunch. The pizzas arrived when it was my turn to present my Department’s results. So, 45 minutes later, I ate cold pizza.

Around 3pm I was really tired. I drove to the rowing club. I didn’t really fancy a workout, but I had to drive there anyway because Romana is in Racice with Iva to row the trials, and I had to pick up my boys from their rowing training.

Arriving at the club, there were two of our older Masters ladies, and Martin, and they were looking for a fourth person so they could row a quad. I offered help. We rowed up to the castle because there was a lot of chop. When we returned to the lake, there was slightly less wind, so we did a few hundred meters more on the lake.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 2 • Tags: lake, OTW, quad, river, rowing, training

Apr 1 2017

Friday & Saturday – Storm

Friday

I had to drive to Prague for a few meetings (and a business lunch). The Friday traffic was so bad that I lost an hour on the way back. Also, I had a dinner appointment. Life is hard.

So I just did a 6k in the double. The lake was a bit choppy. It was a very sunny and windy spring day. Temperature around 22 degrees. Trees are starting to blossom.

I saw this guy in the office park in Prague. One of the highlights of the day

Saturday

The plan was to do a 6k on the water. The clever guys of our club did that at 8am, before the wind starts.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make that. I was quite tired after a week of travel, and wanted to sleep in a bit. Also, Iva, one of Romana’s girls who has a chance of rowing a good result next week, had a party on Friday evening, and didn’t want to row early.

The plan was that we do a 2x3km (a 6k with a quick turn). Iva would start 2 minutes ahead of me. I would row 2 minutes behind her and try to catch up.

All kinds of things went wrong:

Having traveled, my heart rate meters and running watches are in the wrong bags. On Friday I rowed without a strap, because I couldn’t get the SpeedCoach to sync with the Tickr. Today, I rowed with the Tickr (the sync problem was just me not getting the English of the SpeedCoach user interface – with more blame to me than to the SpeedCoach) but it was misbehaving, getting stuck on constant values – or perhaps it’s the Tickr/SpeedCoach combo.
There was a strong wind. I set out on my single to check the waves, leaving Iva at the dock. I actually returned and advised her not to row. I didn’t want to be responsible for her rowing in these high waves, and it definitely wouldn’t be a good race prep.
There is a lot of debris in the lake. Branches and pieces of wood taken by the melting snow in the Czech/Moravian highlands.

Sometimes, I don’t take my own advice, so I set out in the single, struggled through the part of the lake with the highest waves, and sailed on a tailwind to behind the castle. By the time I arrived there I had a few cm of water in the boat.

I also had this annoying problem where the Empower Oarlock magnet was slowly rotating. About 10 degrees per 5km. Enough to be visible. (After the row I discovered that the entire pin was rotating. It wasn’t tightened enough. So that was easy to fix.)

At the 6k point I turned around and got ready to row at least the 4k river part at head race pace.

The first 1k was extremely hard headwind. The kind that feels like you row into a wall. Every time I squared my blades, the wind pushed very hard.

After a bit more than 1km, the SpeedCoach lost contact with the Oarlock. It was still showing the oarlock icon to indicate there was a connection, but the power, effective length and work per stroke fields were not updating.

I stopped and reset the SpeedCoach, then continued. After a minute or so of battling into the head wind, the SpeedCoach stopped updating the data from the Oarlock again. This time I decided that I was going to get some training effect and not fuzz around with electronics, so I just continued to row.

There was a point where my cap blew off, so I had to return and grab it from the water.

It wasn’t really a head race preparation row. I couldn’t get above 24spm in the head wind. At some of the points 22spm was the max.

I stopped for a drink just before leaving the gorge and going on the open lake.

During the headwind struggle through the north part of the lake I had a few waves that reached until half way my back. I was completely soaked. The water in my single was up to the top of the seat reals. On every stroke I managed to get some water floating out of the boat, but then a few strokes later a massive wave would go over me and I would be swamped again. As the boat was low in the water with all the extra water, I had even more difficulty rowing. Luckily, a single cannot sink, so I struggled and struggled and just kept going slowly, at 15-17spm, until I reached the dock. The wind was now so strong that I asked help to carry the single back to the boat house.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 3 • Tags: head race prep, river, single, training, wind

Mar 28 2017

Monday – Guest row with the double

Arjan is my old training partner when we were both studying in Utrecht and rowing for Orca. He is over in Vienna for a week long conference, decided to fly in half a day earlier and hop on the train to Brno. I picked him up at the railway station at the end of the afternoon and we headed to the lake.

We took the double “Orca” for a tour of the lake. We rowed up to the castle and then crossed the lake. This was a steady state session so we did most of it at 20spm, with an occasional excursion to 22spm. Arjan really enjoyed the scenery. In Weert and Eindhoven they are rowing on narrow canals in an industrial setting, so being in the middle of a forest, in a canyon, between rocks, was quite a change for him.

He also needed some time to get used to navigating on the lake.

Then we went to my place to have dinner, chat a bit, and at in the end I brought him to the last train to Vienna.

This morning the alarm clock rang at 5AM. At 5:30 the driver was already waiting. I hopped in the car and headed to the Vienna airport. I took the flight to Brussels. First time I flew on a Sukhoi SSJ100 aircraft, operated by City Jet for Brussels airlines. Lots of leg space!

Tomorrow morning: Hotel gym workout.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: 2x, double, lake, OTW, river, rowing, training

Oct 16 2016

Saturday – Long, Windy Steady State OTW

I felt guilty for taking an unplanned rest day on Friday, although it probably wasn’t bad to take an additional rest day.

Saturday was a windy day. First time in the single since Tuesday morning. In the mean time, the manufacturer of my boat (mr Růžička from “Roseman”) had come by to fit my single with back stays. Or are they called front stays? They extend from the top of the oarlock to the “front” of the boat (looking in the forward rowing direction, behind my back). Well, what is the forward rowing direction, anyway. To me, forward is the usual direction of motion, with the rower facing backwards.

Anyway, I got a new wing and those stays for free, so I have to tell Roseman’s service is excellent.

It was very windy. The forecast was 4 m/s, and I believe on the lake part of the outing it was just that. Rowing in tailwind, I felt the wind blowing into my face, which means that the wind speed was higher than my 12km/h rowing speed. There were big waves on the lake, so I decided to go up to the castle.

Workout Summary - media/20161016-161625-Sanders SpeedCoach 20161015 0946amo.csv --|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg --|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS --|15242|82:17.0|02:42.0|20.0|156.9|171.0|09.3 W-|15231|82:40.0|02:42.8|20.0|156.5|171.0|09.2 R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|00.0|000.0|171.0|00.0 Workout Details #-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS- 01|01000|05:05.0|02:32.5|22.1|131.9|151.0|08.9 - warming up - tailwind 02|00990|05:00.0|02:31.6|17.7|149.8|154.0|11.2 03|01000|06:16.8|03:08.4|20.8|148.3|162.0|07.7 - remove layer 04|01000|04:33.9|02:16.9|20.1|162.0|165.0|10.9 - tailwind 05|01000|04:39.4|02:19.7|20.5|163.8|166.0|10.5 06|01000|04:50.8|02:25.4|20.9|163.8|167.0|09.9 07|01000|05:38.4|02:49.2|20.3|156.8|167.0|08.8 - turn 08|01000|05:07.3|02:33.6|20.8|166.9|171.0|09.4 - headwind 09|01000|05:06.1|02:33.0|20.7|165.4|167.0|09.5 10|01000|05:17.2|02:38.6|20.1|164.5|169.0|09.4 - strong headwind 11|01000|05:38.7|02:49.3|20.1|161.1|165.0|08.8 - back on lake 12|01000|06:53.2|03:26.6|18.4|154.8|162.0|07.9 - unrowable part 13|01000|06:00.7|03:00.4|19.2|158.5|162.0|08.6 14|01000|05:47.1|02:53.5|19.4|159.1|161.0|08.9 15|01000|05:27.6|02:43.8|19.7|146.8|163.0|09.3 16|00242|01:18.0|02:41.5|18.5|144.8|149.0|10.0

After 6.5km, I was catching up with a big ship, so instead of trying to pass him on a part of the river where I am not supposed to be, I turned around and decided to add an extra lake loop to the end of the workout.

On the river, you are shielded. The headwind was a bit less strong, and there was no chop. Arriving at the lake, I found myself in trouble. The wind has 3000m to get to maximum speed and sweep up the waves. The waves were of the kind that wipe over the stern, and every fourth or fifth wave would dump some water into the cockpit. There was an extra layer of clothes in that cockpit, which I had removed at the end of the warming up, so those clothes got soaked and there wasn’t a lot of bailing going on.

Buoyancy enough, so I decided to not be a Sissy and row all the way to the south end of the lake. After about 1.5km of really bad water, the chop became slightly lower and my motions started to resemble rowing again.

Heart rates were slightly higher than expected and there was some DOMS, especially shoulders and chest.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: crosstraining, lake, OTW, river, rowing, steady state, training

010062000465-jpg597f790f754525f127f8f541612c7bab

Oct 11 2016

Steady State and some memories

Today’s session was planned as 80-90 minutes of steady state, but it wasn’t to be. When I arrived at the club just before 7am, I had some business to do with the head coach, which took more than I expected, so I didn’t launch before 7:30. After the workout, work would be waiting and there was much to do, so I decided to shorten the session to 12km. As the lake was getting choppy, I decided to take the gorge to the castle and back. In this time of the year, that is always a great choice. The trees are now more colored every day, and the water in the gorge is flat and easy to row with less wind than on the lake.

It’s going to be 15 degrees and sunny on Saturday. Maybe I should take some pictures.

This being the first row after a race also meant that things were a bit improvised. Packing my stuff, I had concentrated on getting enough clothes into the bag to have a good choice of layers depending on the weather. That meant that I had forgotten to pack my Wahoo Tickr, which is usually a part of my rowing bag, but was left outside after Sunday’s bike ride. So, no heart rate data today. I estimate it to be the usual steady state stuff, average heart rate somewhere between 150 and 155bpm.

Today I read a nice blog post by Jeff Bolster, Keeping it Simple. I found this piece because of a blog by Göran R Buckhorn on Hear the Boat Sing.

Reading about the rowing boats of the past I was reminded of my mother’s parents, who lived as vegetable farmers in Sloterpolder, a part of the world that has literally disappeared under the post-war expansion of Amsterdam. At my grandparents’ well-attended birthday parties, we grandchildren played in one part of the room while the old people were sharing old memories in the other part of the room. I found the interesting website “Geheugen van West” (Memory of West Amsterdam) which seemed as a continuation of these birthday parties, minus the cigar smoke and the “Jonge” (Dutch gin). The site collects stories from old people in “West” and “pre-West”, and has old documents and pictures.

I am sharing this because rowing boats was an integral part of the Sloterpolder. To get to your house from the public road, you had to row. To bring vegetables to the markets in Amsterdam, people rowed. To go to the library in the city, you rowed. Here are some pictures.

sloterpolder_1946-jpgd9ed62b2d0c131030d6577fdca9a46df — The person on the right is identified as “Piet Sickman”, which is a name I remember from the stories, and some of the Sickmans are my distant relatives. Boy is unidentified.

jan_harte-jpg811612fb111b2f7b157e54a0e656215e — The polder. Amsterdam in the background

het_huis_aan_de_slotervaart_in_sloterpolder-jpg5c48f60d876c211cb53984f7a76afcaf — My parents have some pictures of my grandparents’ house. It looked pretty similar to this one. The greenhouses in the back of the “garden”

The guy on the left is "Ome Han", also a name that rings a bell — The guy on the left is “Ome Han”, also a name that rings a bell, but it could be coincidence as it is a very common name

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 2 • Tags: OTW, river, rowing, single, steady state, training

Oct 9 2016

Hradiště Head Race and a Wooden Eight from 1934

Friday

No training. In the evening, Romana and I made the program for Hradiště, i.e. the instructions where everybody would be at any given point in time. It’s not easy.

There’s a small bus with all the rowers at the start. One by one they do their warming up, get ready to race, and row the 6km race. Somebody needs to bring their shoes and some clothes to the finish, especially when it’s 9 degrees and chilly. Then there’s three singles that are used in the morning and in the afternoon. So at some point in time we have to drive my small trailer from the finish back to the start for those three singles. Then Romana wants to be at the start to help her girls with warming up and race prep. And I will spend the morning on the bike cheering various athletes. One thing is easy. Head coach will be in the big turn half way with his stopwatch, a pen and a note book. He will record all times and give key info to the guys racing, how they stand respective to their competitors.

So our day was planned from 7am to 5pm with 15 minute precision. Well, it’s an important race for the youth. Their 6km OTW time is measured against a standard, and each participant who scores more than 100% will be invited for a 6k erg race and some further testing. If successful, the youth will be part of the “Youth Sports Center” for rowing, and the club will receive state funding for covering training costs.

Saturday

So alarm clock at 6, leave house at 7, drive to rowing club to get small trailer, drive the 70km to Hradiště, park trailer. Then Romana takes the car to the start and I hop on the bike.

My first task was to cycle with one of the juniors, cheer and give steering instructions. Mr Cermak had the luxury of having his parents on the bike, so I chose to bike with Mr Kuncak. (Sometimes the parents’ steering instructions are counterproductive, but Kuncak is our biggest Ace in the juniors field.)

On the right bank you can cycle the entire 6km. On the left bank you can only do the final 3km. I chose to cycle on the left bank with a better bike path, because I didn’t want to spend my race energy cycling through a stubble-field on the right bank. Picked up Mr Kuncak with 3km to go and started cheering and steering. When I passed head coach we got the information that he was rowing in 2nd place with 2 seconds loss to the fastest guy. So I cheered and cheered. Shouted at him to just keep rowing the same 30spm stroke and hoping it would help.

When Mr Kuncak finished, I cycled back to wait for the race of my daughter Lenka. I saw Mr Cermak in passing, with his father cheering.

Had to spend more than an hour on the 3km point. The autumn sun disappeared and I did a few kilometers of cycling around the local villages just to stay warm.

Lenka arrived on our single. I measured the distance to the girl ahead of her. With 1 minute between starts, Lenka arrived 50 seconds behind that girl, so that was 10 seconds to the good. There was a big gap behind her, so a very positive situation to cheer and steer. Lenka was rowing 26spm, but that didn’t bother me as I knew she had been ill a week ago and the 26-27spm reflected her fitness. I think I cheered her through the tough part between 4km and 5km, and then got her rating up in the final km. Today, she told me she didn’t hear me well, and she didn’t understand what she heard. OK, so far for the coaching. 🙁

Mr Kuncak finished third in the Junior’s field, 5 seconds behind our club’s Mr Cermak, who surprised us all by coming second, just 0.5 seconds behind the winner. Lenka finished somewhere in the middle of her field, but her final time was good for a >100% score, which means she is still in the game!

Our club also won the Men’s single, the Boys 15/16 pair, and got a third place in the men’s lightweight single. Because of the points earned for all youth categories and the U23 rowers, this was a huge success in a race with very strong competion.

It was time to return to the small trailer. Three singles (including my single “Dolfijn” which was rowed by Lenka) were prepared. Romana arrived just in time with the car, and we drove to the start, where we unloaded the single, rigged them, and then drove back with the trailer (and some bags with shoes and dry clothes).

Then we took the car back to the start, and it was time for me to get ready for my own race.

Two years ago, I won, with a few seconds lead. Last year, I lost. Mr Polasek gave me 5 seconds. Unfortunately, I had found out during the morning, that Mr Polasek had cancelled. He had a cold last week and didn’t feel like it. At the start, I also found out that the two guys from Ostrava had cancelled. This kind of reduced the tension of the race. My club mate Eduard was the next fastest guy on paper, with me being the fastest. The other participants were three guys from the rowing club in Hradec Kralove, who looked like newbies in the Masters Rowing field, and Mr Bejbl from Brandys, who I estimated to be slower than me.

I found out it is good that I have pre-race routine with a lot of reserve time. Only when I put the single in the water, I found out that I had forgotten to move the footstretcher from Lenka’s position to mine. That is a problem, because one of the nuts is normal one, and you need a tool to unscrew it. Luckily, Romana was still on the bank collecting our slings, so I could get to the car and get the tool. I still had time enough to do a 2km warming up drill on the water.

Here is the full race video:

I made a terribly bad starting stroke, which made me smile and shake my head. Then I was off. After a few start strokes I dropped to my well-tested 27spm and didn’t dare to go higher. I think I made a wise decision. Looking at the power plot, corrected for the river’s current and the headwind, I more or less rowed a flat row in terms of power (Watt).

Pace helped by the river current, but in a slight headwind from 12 minutes onwards.

The guy starting 60 seconds before me was a 68 year old Masters rower. Just a year younger than my father! I passed him in the first kilometer, and then I had enough space to focus on my own rowing. I think I steered well. Perhaps the big turn at the beer brewery was a bit wider than could have been, but the river was really the fastest in the middle. Whenever I got closer to the banks, the pace numbers started to worsen.

After the big turn I was rowing into a light headwind, and I had to tell myself that it was a headwind, and not worry too much about the pace creeping up above 2:00 minutes per 500m.

In the final 1000m I started counting strokes, and in the final 500m I had company of our friend Ludek on the bike, which was very good because it helped me rate up to 28, 29 and then 30spm.

I did a 1km cooling down and when I was taking the single out of the water, I heard the speaker announce the results. I had won!

Second place was for my club mate Eduard.

It took us about 30 minutes to get the boats ready for transport, and then we walked over to the club house to receive our medals:

We arrived home around 8:30pm.

Sunday

Around 2pm we drove to the rowing club. We unloaded the trailer. I washed my single, and then we watched something very exciting.

Our club was founded in 1912, and in the old hangar at the river club house we have a few very old wooden boats. A few of our older club members have made it a project to restore these old boats. Their first piece was a 1944 clinker eight, one of the few left in this part of the world. Today, after more than 50 years, it was the first row for a 1934 clinker eight, a lighter and faster boat than the 1944 one (and made of better quality wood).

This was no easy restoration. A big part of the middle of the ship was rotten and had to be replaced completely.

By the way, 1934 was also in the time when Czechoslovakia, in the middle of a worldwide economic crisis, warmly welcomed German refugees, antifascists and jews escaping Nazi Germani. A bit of a contrast with the political climate of today. 🙁

My workout of today was cycling home from the rowing club. It was rainy and cold, but it was a nice recovery workout:

https://www.strava.com/activities/739596293

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 4 • Tags: head race, OTW, race, river, rowing, single

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river

Monday: More race pace training

Friday: Mixed Quad

Friday & Saturday – Storm

Monday – Guest row with the double

Saturday – Long, Windy Steady State OTW

Steady State and some memories

Hradiště Head Race and a Wooden Eight from 1934

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