Feb 25 2017
Friday – cycling / Saturday – planning
Friday
Cycled to work and cycled back.
Strong headwind in the afternoon (and a slight tailwind in the morning).
I also installed PyRow on a Raspberry Pi and rowed 100m on the Concept2 erg to test it. It worked flawlessly through the USB interface and a short CSV file was the result. So I have another small project, to adapt PyRow to record more metrics and produce a CSV file compatible with Rowsandall.com. If I get them interested, I want to involve my sons in the project. The Pi is ideal to show how a computer is built, and how computers communicate.
PyRow also shows the strength of open source. I was up and running in 15 minutes, and I have plenty of ideas to implement, which will flow back to the original PyRow, and thus can be of use to many other people.
Well, so far it’s just ideas.
Saturday
Also just an idea, so far, is the following:
Today we had our annual member’s meeting at the rowing club. My club, CVK Brno, has two locations. The lake venue is where we have most of our boats, the club house, the erg room, and where we train.
We also own the original venue on the Svratka river, a few kilometers downstream from the lake. There is the original club house, which is now rented to an outdoor clothes store, and a few old hangars. In the summer, we rent the garden to a company that commercially exploits dragon boats.
The entire area around the river is interesting. There are a few rowing and canoe club houses (some of them abandoned). One of the main ring roads, a tram line and the river fight for space:
The city council is now making serious plans to revitalize the whole area, and the club has to decide whether to hop on this boat or not. Here is one of the plans, putting the traffic and the tram partly in a tunnel. Our club house is in the top of the image, before the bend in the river.
Here is a visualization seen from the north, with our club house among the other historic club houses to the left of the small bridge in front of the picture.
This is how the road and tram are almost pushing into the river today. The river is on the right. The road is too narrow and is one of the main problem points with long traffic jams every day, so it has to be widened, but between the river and the hill there is almost no place. So that is why they are talking about a tunnel.
One of our ideas is to renovate the old club house, depicted below on an old photo, and turn it into our main place to do land training. There would be a gym with ergs, bike trainers, and treadmills.
Talking of old club houses, next to our club house is an even older rowing club house, which is now abandoned.
The picture is from the early 20th century, and now the building looks like this:
Not a very good shape, but this building is under monument’s protection, and one of the ideas is to make it into a small museum about rowing.
All of this are really plans for the coming 5-10 years, and they are just visions, and nobody knows what is really possible, but if we make the wrong decision now, we may not be part of the planning, and an opportunity may be lost.
Actually, tomorrow I plan to row from this location.
The lake is still frozen and it looks like it will take another month before the last ice is gone. So this morning I mounted my new Empower Oarlock and did all the calibrations, and then I prepared the single on the trailer. Tomorrow, I plan to move the single to our river venue and row from there, until the ice thaws on our lake.
By the way, the mounting and calibration of the oarlock too no more than 30 minutes, and I had to check on the great YouTube instruction video only once.
Feb 26 2017
Exciting and disappointing at the same time
So I had an exciting morning. I drove to the lake to pick up the trailer with three singles. As you can see, the lake was still frozen and it will take another few weeks before it will be rowable.
We took the singles to the place where our rowing club started 105 years ago, which we still own, even though most of the buildings are in bad need of renovation.
There, it didn’t take us long to get two single ready and we headed out on the water. My first row with the Empower Oarlock, so I badly wanted to record it. Unfortunately, I made a critical mistake. After a few months without using the SpeedCoach, it’s user interface managed to confuse me. Seeing the message “stop”, I figured it was running and recording, and I could “stop” that by pressing the “back” button.
So I happily selected which parameters to watch and went off rowing, already looking forward to taking a critical look at the data.
Unfortunately, as I just found out, you have to set it to “ready” and not to “stop”. All I have is a 27m segment when I was fiddling with the setup! 🙁
Other than that, the row was fun, and luckily I had the Garmin Forerunner running in parallel, so I do have heart rate and pace.
The rowable part of the river is about 2.5km long, between two sluices. It is quite windy.
In the first 2.5km, I selected stroke rate/pace/power/catch angle. I started with arms only, then arms and back, and then to half slide, three quarter and on to full slide. It was fun to watch the catch angle go up. If I remember well, I ended up around 61 degrees.
Power was around 180W. It dropped down to 120 when I was turning to starboard, and went up to 220W when I was turning to port. And as this is a windy river, there was a lot of turning.
At one point, I ran into a thin sheet of ice. Luckily, no scratches on the boat.
At another point, I surprised a few swimmers. I didn’t expect swimmers. I should have known better, with the Czech Republic the world center of cold water swimming. The girls were splashing in the ice cold river while Eda and I rowed by, and only on our second loop they were back on the shore. Amazing!
I experimented a lot with the third and fourth metric to watch, so on the first return leg I looked at slip and average power. Average power stayed at zero. (I know understand why, but it didn’t occur to me then.) Slip was around 4 to 7 degrees. Then I looked at wash and total stroke angle, with wash around 11 degrees, and total stroke angle around 107 degrees, if I remember correctly. And finally, back to power and finish angle. All very exciting. If only I had all the data afterwards. Well, I guess it’s my fault.
It was also fun to watch how my power remained consistently oscillating around 180W, while pace varied with the stream and wind. I am already looking forward to training for the 6km head race and figuring out what power I can sustain over that distance. I plan to spend some time doing that, and then on race day I can just hold that power for 4 or 5km, and then go for it. Having power feedback available during a row is perfect. Really perfect.
I guess only in the turns, the power value can be deceiving.
After the row, I took a few pictures of our river rowing venue.
After the row I drove the trailer back to the lake venue. I took a shower there and replaced batteries and did firmware upgrades on 8 of the club ergs. After that I drove over to the electronics store to pick up a new Raspberry Pi for my little rowing data logger project.
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 3 • Tags: OTW, rowing, single, steady state, training, water