rowing

Mar 16 2019

Fanatically OTW

Thursday

A workout that doesn’t look so hard on paper, but after I’d done it I was sure my arms would fall off.

30 minutes of running/cycling. I did both, in the fitness center close to the office.

Then the following:

6 sets of 20 burpees / 20 jerk (20kg), one minute rest between sets

6 sets of 20 squats (12 kg) / 40 boxing punches holding 6kg dumbbell.

Pretty explosive and pretty heavy on shoulders. It was fun.

Friday

I was able to leave work early and arrived at the rowing club at 4pm. I decided to take the single out. It was “nice” weather. A light rain, but it wasn’t too windy. Steady state and mainly technique focus. I used the effective length metric on the NK SpeedCoach/Empower in combination with the Work per Stroke. Returning to the water after a winter of erging, my strokes are a bit too heavy around the catch. Need to lengthen up, lighten up and still get those Watts in the stroke.

You can see in the section between 0:42 and 0:56 how it all came together and I cradually increased the stroke rate to 24spm. Unfortunately, the Empower Oarlock disconnected after 36 minutes and I had to pair it again with the SpeedCoach. After the training, I downloaded and installed new SpeedCoach firmware.

Saturday

The forecast was that the wind would be strong during the night and slow down in the morning, but when I arrived at the club, it was not a calm lake. For a moment, I considered using the LiteBoat coastal single, but in the end I wanted to get more practice in in my own single. I figured that the water would be calmer on the opposite shore and in the canyon.

Here’s how I rowed (short sliding) the crossing of the lake to find calmer water:

The training was 3x2km at 24 spm. As I rowed up into the canyon, I decided to row two intervals into the headwind, and two intervals with tailwind on the way back. It seemed a pity not to do 4 2km intervals, and it was perfectly doable. The tailwind intervals were very enjoyable, and I was happy to see that I could rate up to 27spm in those bits without really getting tired.

Well, I did get tired, but I was having so much fun that I didn’t notice. After lunch, I had to do groceries, and at one point, all I really wanted was to find a quiet part of the store, lie down and rest a bit.

I do have video from the row, but as it’s the start of a new OTW season it’s not perfect. I mounted my GoPro 90 degrees rotated, so instead of a nice wide view, I have a portrait video. Also, I left my Windows computer in the office, and I am still learning the video editing software on the official Rowsandall developer’s notebook, which is running Linux (because developing under Linux is so much easier and the rowsandall.com site itself also runs on a Linux distribution). I haven’t found anything that could replace Dashware to get telemetry data into the video.

While my videos are uploading, I can only show a comparison between Friday’s technique session and today’s choppy, higher rate session:

You can see that I was a bit shorter today, but I find that acceptable given the conditions. Otherwise I think I should be happy with the result.

After the row, I had a nice coffee at the club house, giving me the opportunity to boss around the juniors who were loading my trailer. They are going for a week long training camp on Monday.

It was good to get some good OTW kilometers in the bank.

Edit 1

The first high res video has finally uploaded. The other one will be ready in 40 minutes:

Edit 2

Second video uploaded. Second 2km – headwind.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: 4x2km, choppy, OTW, rowing, single, training

Mar 12 2019

To the radio tower

Friday

Weights training. I had to go for my last shot related to the India travel in the morning. So I did the weights a little lighter than normal.

Went to a concert with my son. In bed after midnight.

Saturday

No training? It depends how you see it. I spent four hours cleaning out the rowing club workshop, where we had stored lots of stuff during the reconstruction of the club house. It was a combination of physical work (lifting boxes, cupboards, boats, and other stuff), with that of an historian (deciding what to keep and what not). We have boxes full of trophies from the 1920s, 1930s, 1950s, and younger. Old coaching related literature, 1930s club house restaurant menus, etc …

Sunday

Erg workout at the club, with some other masters. I went with their workout, which was sort of steady state but with lots of rest and alternating 20 and 24 SPM. Here is the main bit:

There was also a warming up and cooling down and a long stretching session.

Tuesday

On Monday, I had a long day at work with a few performance review with my subordinates. Exhausting. I decided to take a rest day and work on the Rowsandall.com site. Fixed a few bugs. Improved a few things.

The training plan prescribed otw rowing but the weather wouldn’t have allowed that. Windy and wet snow.

Today, the work day was nice and relaxed. It involved a one hour drive to the engine factory in Olomouc for a meeting with the Olomouc site leader. Had a coffee break on the highway on the way back, it felt nice to not be in an office. I returned in time to get some work done in the Brno office as well, so all in all a nice and varied day.

However, since my illness I have difficulty getting back into the rhythm. Had to force myself to go down to the erg basement and row. The erg seems boring and one dimensional after having tasted the OTW feeling again. I decided to dial up the “Mountain Loop” in Zwift (connected to the erg via the PainSled app) and force myself to Row/ride the full loop.

There were lots of people on Zwift, so I ended up riding the way up in a huge group, and stuck with a few guys who were about as fast as I. Riding up to the radio tower I got my heart rate up a bit too high, but it was fun, even though the splits weren’t were I would have liked them to be.

In the screenshots, I am the guy with the black/red striped shirt. In the end the workout was where I wanted it to be in terms of rScore.

By sanderroosendaal • rowing • 0 • Tags: Comcept2, erg, OTE, rowing, steady state, training

Mar 7 2019

60 minutes of bliss and 5 minutes of terror

Monday

Up at 5:30 for transport to the airport. Flight to Paris, then on a (delayed) flight to Casablanca. Check in to the hotel and one local beer tasted before going to the land of nod.

Tuesday

Up early. It was still dark outside. Also, I wasn’t sure where to go running in Casablanca. It was a pity, because exploring new places by running is an excellent way to get more sight seeing out of a business trip.

I headed down from my 26th floor hotel room (magnificent views!) to the gym at the second floor. A typical hotel gym. The training plan prescribed 30 minutes of running which I replaced with 10min/10min/10min of treadmill/elliptical/spinning. After that, the second part of the session looked horrendous:

6x (20x burpee + 20x jerk 25kg)/60″

6x (20x squat 10kg + 40x boxing with 6-8kg dumbbell)

I was under time pressure so I did 6x (20x burpee + 40x boxing). And that was hard! So all in all a session of 50 minutes but I got some work done.

We had a good meeting, and then there was some time for sight seeing. We took a taxi to the biggest mosque of North Africa, right on the beach, and took a few pictures.

Then we took a taxi to the fishing port. We passed “Rick’s Cafe“, then a part of the waterfront that looked like a piece of Monaco transplanted to Morocco. You can see it in the background of this picture.

In the port, we watched the boats getting prepared and leaving. We were at a significant risk of being covered in seagull poop, but we still stood there watching for a while, taking in the aroma of diesel, fish, sea water, and other undefined.

We had great seafood in a nearby restaurant.

Wednesday

Basically spent the whole day making it back from Casablanca to Brno, with stops in Paris and Vienna.

Thursday

Back in the office and lots of things to do. But it was great spring weather and I knew that our local rowers have been rowing OTW since Monday! I needed part of the action, so I left early, claiming to be tired from the business trip and grabbing the opportunity offered by one canceled meeting. Drove home, grabbed rowing gear, went to lake.

The lake was perfectly flat. Took out the single and did a little over an hour of 18spm steady state. I had no need to go any higher. This was a session to work on technique on the water, after a winter stop of three months. Oh, how I enjoyed feeling the boat run between strokes, something that no erg can simulate, dynamic or not.

I must have switched off the SpeedCoach after the warming up. I noticed half way the first “lake” that the SpeedCoach was showing “Ready”. It took a while for me to realize that this was not OK. So the session was recorded as 55 minutes, but I rowed for 68 minutes. I have the Garmin backup data to prove it.

After 40 minutes it started raining a bit, and when I was closing in on the last part, the water got a few wrinkles. I turned at “Sirka” and started the final 1000m back to the rowing club. After a minute or so I heard the wind, and then I felt it. A very strong headwind came up and within 30 seconds the lake turned very choppy. And another 30 seconds later I was rowing in white caps and getting water in the boat. As I caught water, a little later it took just too big waves to completely fill my boat with ice cold water. I saw my water bottle float away but I decided not to go back to catch it. I was only 400m from the dock but I was fearing I wouldn’t make it.

Actually, I turned around to see if anybody was outside on the rowing club who could help me. Nobody there. I swore loudly, but in the wind nobody heard it.

Look at the chart and you see the frightful bit. With 200m to go I was considering to just paddle in survival mode until the wind would die down, but eventually I made it to the dock. There, I found that my shoes had been blown into the water and were nowhere to be seen. Well, the advantage of cold, numb feet is that you can walk without feeling the sharp stones. I had to put the boat in slings and secure it before I could put it in the boathouse, because the wind had slammed the doors shut.

Well, that was quite an unexpected adventure. But it was great to be out on the water again. Here are some of the metrics:

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By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: 1x, OTW, rowing, single, steady state, training

Mar 2 2019

Starting up after illness

It’s been a long time since I worked out. Here’s the chart that tells the story:

On February 14th, I did a normal 60 minute swim session. Nothing to complain about.

On Friday, February 15th, I was heading to my weights session when I noticed something like an upcoming cold. I don’t need HRV measurements to figure out when to take the intensity back. I am blessed with a pretty good feel for the state of my body. I did, however, decide to press on with the session. A weights session is intensive for the muscles, but in my experience it doesn’t worsen an upcoming cold.

On Saturday, I woke up with a very sore throat and a terrible headache. I canceled my session, thinking that a day of rest and a slow spinning or running session on Sunday would get me over it.

On Sunday, I was worse, and I canceled the light exercise that I had planned.

On Monday, I had a 39 degree fever. I should have stayed in bed, but I moved to the sofa and did my work calls from there. There was a major emergency at work that needed my full attention.

Of course that doesn’t help recovery. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I worked from home, still with a fever. On Thursday, I tried to get to the office, but that was a mistake.

I took the weekend after to get more rest and finally climb out of the valley of misery. On Tuesday, I still wasn’t feeling ready for a workout, and on Wednesday and Thursday I was on a two day work related conference that left me no time to work out.

So, long story short, today was the first day for two short workouts. A 30 minute run followed by a 30 minute workout in the rowing club weights room.

The weights room workout consisted of:

Bench pull
Leg press
Bench press
Hyper extension
V-ups
Rope skipping
Jerk
Push ups

And finally a ten minutes of cooling down on the spinning bike.

The stats are pretty depressing, but it was so good to be active again:

There is also some very good news. The ice on our lake is retreating fast:

Tomorrow, I will do a group erg session with our Masters training group.

On Monday morning, I will fly to Casablanca for a customer visit. I’ve never been to Casablanca, so I am looking forward to it. The following video pretty much sums up what I know about Casablanca, but I expect it to be a bit different:

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: illness, rowing, run, trainign, training, weights

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Feb 14 2019

The Naked Rower

Monday

A planned rest day. Note to self. A rest day means going to bed early. Recovery has a lot to do with sleeping well and sleeping enough.

Tuesday

Unplanned “rest” day. I arrived home from work, looking forward to doing a steady state workout. I found the house dark. My daughter Lenka was in bed with a fever. As the rest of the family is out in the mountains (it’s school vacation), she had been alone the entire day.

So I scrapped the training and headed out to the pharmacy. Also had to do the groceries which I thought Lenka had done.

Wednesday

I worked from home in the morning, to make sure Lenka would be taken care of. As I was up pretty early, I had time to do my Tuesday’s workout before my first call.

Nothing special. A bunch of longer intervals rowed at steady state pace. I did however put the Quiske pod under my seat pad and rowed with the Quiske app. I am not going to go into details about the Quiske app, but the essential thing is that it measures your instantaneous handle and seat speed and is able to make recommendations about your rowing style based on that.

The app gives you live feedback on how you are doing versus their ideal style.

I have to say that I would like to distinguish between “technique” and “style”.

The picture above shows the famous classification of rowing styles. You can row any of those styles without technique flaws.

Anyhow, I was curious to see how I would fare. Here was Quiske’s summary after 20 minutes:

So all yellow and one red, nothing green. That isn’t very good, isn’t it? Well, I opened the debate about this with the developers of Quiske. You can read it here on the Rowing Data Facebook Group.

So in this picture you can see a chart of my typical handle (solid) and seat (dashed) speed during a rowing stroke. The table above it gives you the “Virtual Coach” ideal values versus mine. You can see that I am not so far away.

It’s funny to see the data versus how it felt. I am (I think) very consciously working on leg push and a more phased stroke (legs, trunk, arms) but to get the balls green during the row I had to change much more than I thought I would have. It felt very awkward.

With a coach present in the erg room, normally you would get corrections immediately. The Quiske system is great for basement rowers like myself, to get honest and factual feedback.

I would like the Quiske app to be programmable to a certain style, though, as I think coaches should have the option to promote the style they think is best, as opposed to having it prescribed by the developers of Quiske. On the other hand, I understand how labor intensive it is to develop a set of metrics that correctly catch a certain style and quantifies deviations from it (at various stroke rates), so I don’t see this as a major issue. You can always look at the curves directly.

And as my preferred style does approach what Quiske recommends quite well, I am going to use it more often.

The workout was a 3km warming up followed by 20min/3min + 12min/2min + 10min at 20/21 spm:

I seem to be suffering from missing strokes in the data stream. Not sure what is the culprit. This time I was listening to classical “ether” radio, and the only bluetooth connections were between my iPhone and the PM, the OH1 and the PM, and between the Quiske Pod and my Android Phone. Usually I have an additional Bluetooth link between iPad and iPhone (for Zwift) and between the iPad and the radio (for music).

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: concept2, ergometer, in-stroke, quiske, rowing, steady state, training

Feb 14 2019

Sunday – 6 x 5 minutes

This was a 6x5min/3min with the 5 minute intervals being 1 minute at 22 spm, 2 minutes at 24 spm, 2 minutes at 26 spm. It’s one of those semi hard threshold workouts that are not popular among the polarized training disciples, but I figured it would be a good one to do a day after an erg race. More steady state would be a bit boring, and my aching muscles might decide to convince my mind to stop the workout early. More sprintervals would be stupid. I guess it was a good day for crosstraining, but I only had a small time window to work out.

I did a 3km warming up row.

I had difficulty connecting the heart rate belt to the PM or to the phone, and it didn’t occur to me that I could record the Heart Rate on the OH1 arm band as a separate data flow, to be merged with the rowing data later on. I decided that it wasn’t a big loss to not monitor heart rate during this workout.

And here are the other data. Ignore the pace for interval “00”. Some of my algorithms ended up in a weird corner of the data landscape. Power is correct:

Workout Summary - media/20190210-1626390o.csv --|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg --|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS --|10467|47:59.0|02:17.6|167.4|21.6|0.0|000.0|10.1 W-|07766|29:53.0|01:55.5|225.8|24.6|000.0|000.0|10.6 R-|02715|18:00.0|03:18.9|071.0|16.7|000.0|000.0|13.8 Workout Details #-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS- 00|00270|01:00.0|01:51.2|192.0|21.9|000.0|0.0|12.3 01|00514|02:00.0|01:56.7|219.3|24.0|000.0|0.0|10.7 02|00537|02:00.0|01:51.7|238.8|25.0|000.0|0.0|10.7 03|00243|01:00.0|02:03.4|185.5|22.0|000.0|0.0|11.1 04|00516|02:00.0|01:56.2|222.4|24.4|000.0|0.0|10.6 05|00526|02:00.0|01:54.1|239.1|25.9|000.0|0.0|10.2 06|00247|01:00.0|02:01.5|194.3|22.4|000.0|0.0|11.0 07|00509|02:00.0|01:57.9|214.5|23.9|000.0|0.0|10.6 08|00537|02:00.0|01:51.8|251.2|26.2|000.0|0.0|10.2 09|00246|01:00.0|02:01.9|195.5|22.4|000.0|0.0|11.0 10|00518|02:00.0|01:55.9|224.5|24.5|000.0|0.0|10.5 11|00504|01:53.4|01:52.6|244.8|26.3|000.0|0.0|10.1 12|00250|01:00.0|02:00.2|200.9|22.6|000.0|0.0|11.0 13|00520|02:00.0|01:55.3|227.1|24.5|000.0|0.0|10.6 14|00533|02:00.0|01:52.5|245.9|26.7|000.0|0.0|10.0 15|00239|01:00.0|02:05.7|192.0|22.8|000.0|0.0|10.5 16|00518|02:00.0|01:55.7|225.5|24.2|000.0|0.0|10.7 17|00540|02:00.0|01:51.2|255.3|26.6|000.0|0.0|10.1

As said, I didn’t push it too hard, and I still had the feeling I did a decent workout. I did a 1k cooling down to finish the session.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: concept2, erg, ergometer, rowing, threshold, training

Feb 3 2019

Lots of snow

My last blog post was from January 16th, which is a long time ago. On Thursday, the 17th, I did an easy hour of swimming, and on the 18th Romana and I drove to Vienna after work. We slept in a hotel at the airport, and continued to London on Saturday morning. We had a great day in London, and on Sunday I presented at the Rowers Conference 2019. It was a great weekend filled with rowing, but there wasn’t any exercise.

Monday, 21 Jan

I did a warming up, a full out one minute row (because of an online challenge) and then some cooling down, and that was about all I could manage. We had arrived home very late on Sunday evening, and let’s say my working day wasn’t easy either. But as this was the last day to complete this challenge, I did at least that.

Tuesday, 22 Jan

An hour of swimming. Nothing special to record here. It was fun.

In the evening, Romana and I went to a ballet performance in the newly reconstructed Janáček theater.

Friday, 25 Jan

Thursday was somehow too busy to get in the weights session.

I wanted to do an hour at power, i.e. a full out hour effort. I stopped rowing after fifteen minutes. The combination of a travel/presentations weekend with a working week with a couple of social/cultural events in the evenings really messed up with my training plan.

In the evening, we went to a party/ball organized by my daughter Lenka and her school class.

Saturday, 26 Jan

I spent the morning packing for the cross country ski training camp. At 10AM we were picked up by the bus. It took about two hours to drive to the mountains. Then we had to put the luggage on the snow scooter and hike the final part to our hut. All was well.

This is not our hut. This is the parking lot where the bus ended and the hike started

The luggaged continued with this vehicle. We hiked

In the afternoon, I did three 5km loops next to the hut:

Average heart rate 157, max 177. I think it was pretty decent.

A few photos from the training, featuring our head trainer Adam:

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Sunday Morning

The kids went to Švýcárna, a small hut at about 40 minutes of cross country skiing from our hut, to drink hot chocolate. I stayed outside and shuttled between Praděd (the highest mountain in the region) and Švýcárna. Here is a picture of me in front of it. You can see that the visibility was pretty low.

Here is a picture of Romana and the girls when I met them on their way back:

Sunday Afternoon

In the afternoon, my daughter Lenka joined me. We skied to Švýcárna, where we had some tea, and then back to the hotel, and we even did the 3k loop below the hotel. It was great, especially because Lenka was really enjoying it.

Monday

The plan was to ski in the direction of “Červenohorské Sedlo” (Red Mountain Saddle) but turn after one hour to be back in time before lunch. We were with the head trainer Adam, our club president Tomas, and a bunch of Juniors. The first part, I stayed with Lenka, then left her behind at Švýcárna, thinking I was far behind the main group. After about one hour, I met some friends, who told me that the juniors were not far ahead of me. By now I was about 60 minutes on skis, but I decided to go for another 5 minutes. That is where I met our head coach, who reported that they had made it all the way to the Sedlo. I turned with them and started the way back.

There is a very long steady climb that slowed us down by a lot, especially because it had started to snow. The group broke up when some people decided to pause half way on the climb. I proceeded and completed the climb, then paused to drink a bit and eat a cookie. Checking the watch, I realized that I had only 30 minutes to make it to the hut or I would be without lunch. So I continued. Conditions were very poor. Lots of new snow, and very low visibility. I passed Švýcárna, doing skating where I could and falling back to classic cross country skiing when the climbing was too steep or the snow too heavy. There were no trails.

I made it just in time for the lunch. The soup was already on the table. I had to sit down in my wet clothes to eat it, but I can report that at least I managed to secure three extra lunches for the poor juniors who were still on the track. All returned safely. All had lunch.

Monday Afternoon

As I had done more than 80% of my daily training load in the morning, I just skied to the Švýcárna hut to have a tea and check some emails. The hut where we stayed was hosting us and a football club, and those 60 kids completely overloaded the wifi network. Švýcárna proved to have reliable and fast free wifi, so I could upload some pictures to Facebook and read a few emails.

Here are a few pictures inside the hut:

Tuesday Morning – Race day

On Tuesday morning, all camp participants did a 5k race. I skied a bit more doing a proper warming up and cooling down. I started as the sixth skier (with a starting order determined by estimated speed), but I passed two guys during the race and ended as fourth overall.

Tuesday Afternoon

Our last day on skis. We all skied up to the top of Praděd and took pictures. Then I skied to Švýcárna, and then back to the hotel, but with a coffee stop at Ovčárna.

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The tower and building on the top are actually a hotel and a radio tower. It was built to resemble a starting rocket.

On Wednesday the bus took us back to Brno. It was a great few days with lots of exercise.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: cross-country ski, cross-training, rowing, training, XC

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rowing

Fanatically OTW

To the radio tower

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

Tuesday

60 minutes of bliss and 5 minutes of terror

Starting up after illness

The Naked Rower

Sunday – 6 x 5 minutes

Lots of snow

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