Mar 30 2015
Tapering, weight control and wind
This is a tricky week. In the last week before an important head race, I want to taper. However, I will be competing in the Open LW category, so I need to maintain weight. My current weight is oscillating between 71kg and 72kg and I need to make sure I weigh in at 72.5 in rowing clothes on Saturday around lunch time.
My Sunday evening weight is usually a bit higher than my Friday evening weight. It tells something about the quality of the canteen food at work compared to what my wife or I prepare at home. Anyway, I need to maintain a level of easy, steady state kilometers per day or be very disciplined in my eating. I try the middle road. Be slightly disciplined, and row.
A difficult moment today around 3pm when I was reviewing and approving project proposals before they are submitted. I ate a twix bar.
I felt that chocolate bar in my stomach for hours.
The original plan was to row OTW and do 10 to 12 km of technique, with a few bursts at race pace. I wanted to use the RIM app and use the stroke analysis. Unfortunately, we had thunderstorms and heavy wind and the lake was unrowable.
I was uninspired and tired in the evening but I dragged myself down to my basement and started RowPro. RowPro prepared me with a nice surprise, a welcome screen and a first-user tutorial. All my data had disappeared. I was able to load a January backup of my logbook (there was a today’s version but that was corrupted) but at least I hadn’t lost my collection of custom rows.
To overcome my tiredness and uninspiredness, and because I wanted to do “a few bursts at race pace”, I decided to do a nice sequence of 10 stroke bursts followed by light rowing, shortening the distance between bursts by 200m after each burst, until I would have two bursts after each other, then starting to lengthen again. I miss 100m somewhere. Also, I am now going to play with some math equations to see how I can make this entirely symmetric.
The 10km passed very fast in this way.
Looking forward to Saturday’s race. For those who are registered on Indoor Sport Services, here’s last year’s blog: http://indoorsportservices.co.uk/forum/blog.php?u=11066&b=114285
Jan 7 2017
The showdown that didn’t happen
Friday
With the new users flocking to rowsandall.com in droves, I get a lot of reports about issues. The new users use the site in different ways than the crew of beta testers, and so new bugs are being discovered. One of the bugs seems to have a root cause in the data we receive from the Concept2 logbook for interval workouts. So I did Thursday’s workout with ErgData instead of my favorite Painsled for iOS.
On Friday, I wanted to test the new version 5 of RowPro. I have been an avid user of RowPro, but that ended in March 2016, when I started experimenting with Painsled, and after that the OTW season took off and I didn’t spend much time on the erg. On the Analytics Blog, I wrote a post about applications to capture erg data, so I wanted to test the new RowPro myself.
The idea was to row for an hour, have RowPro and Painsled open at the same time (RowPro through USB, Painsled through bluetooth link), and then compare what Rowsandall.com can do with the data from both apps.
It wasn’t to be.
Not having rowed with RowPro for months, I forgot a few peculiarities of the program. I sat down on the erg, connected everything, programmed a 1 hour workout, and set off.
After six minutes I realized I had forgot to “connect” the Heart Rate belt to the PM5. I had no HR data. So the only thing I could do was stop the row.
In RowPro that means you have no data. When you abandon a row early, it is like if you didn’t row it, even if you stop a 60 minutes row after 55 minutes. It’s tough.
Luckily, Painsled was happily recording data on the side. There is much to be said for data redundancy.
I quickly changed the plan, connected my HR belt to the PM monitor, set up a 10k and set off:
Workout Summary - media/20170106-1710100o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|10000|40:30.0|02:01.5|195.3|21.4|164.8|178.0|11.5
W-|10000|40:31.0|02:01.6|194.7|21.3|164.5|178.0|11.6
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|178.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|01000|04:04.4|02:02.2|188.8|20.0|145.4|158.0|12.3
01|00750|03:01.3|02:00.9|198.0|21.0|158.8|162.0|11.8
02|00500|01:58.8|01:58.8|208.2|22.0|164.3|168.0|11.5
03|00250|00:58.3|01:56.6|221.0|22.9|168.2|170.0|11.3
04|00250|00:58.3|01:56.6|220.8|23.1|170.5|172.0|11.1
05|00500|02:00.8|02:00.8|198.9|22.0|169.0|171.0|11.3
06|00750|03:04.0|02:02.6|190.2|21.0|165.4|169.0|11.7
07|01000|04:09.7|02:04.8|180.0|20.0|162.4|165.0|12.0
08|01000|04:05.1|02:02.6|190.2|21.1|164.7|167.0|11.6
09|00750|03:00.4|02:00.2|201.0|22.1|168.3|171.0|11.3
10|00500|01:56.2|01:56.2|222.7|22.9|172.7|176.0|11.3
11|00250|00:57.0|01:54.1|235.4|24.4|177.0|178.0|10.8
12|00250|00:59.7|01:59.5|206.0|22.5|176.0|178.0|11.2
13|00500|02:02.7|02:02.7|189.9|22.3|171.1|175.0|11.0
14|00750|03:06.1|02:04.0|183.4|21.4|167.2|171.0|11.3
15|01000|04:09.1|02:04.5|181.2|20.6|166.8|171.0|11.7
And in pictures:
I was quite intrigued by the “work per stroke” plot as a function of distance. An interesting case of slacking off on the final rate ladder down to lower rates.
I also did a 2k cooling down row.
Saturday
Normally, Saturday is our regular “club run” day, but today was special. For more than a week now, the ice on our rowing lake is thick enough for skating. Until Monday, there was a perfect black layer of smooth ice, without snow.
On Monday I was still not well, and I did the erg row with video.
For the rest of the week, I was too busy, and still not well.
From Tuesday to Friday, there were frequent snow showers. Luckily, there was a stiff north wind as well, so there was just a thin layer of powder snow on the ice.
I spent 45 minutes wiping a 400m oval. Then I started skating, taking breaks to improve my “Olympic Oval” gradually.
The boys played ice hockey. Some people went on the lake on X country skis. I am going to do that tomorrow.
Here is the Strava summary: https://www.strava.com/activities/823892699/overview
And here is the SportTracks.mobi summary:
You can see from the HR plot that the snow wiping was quite hard work as well. After 90 minutes on the ice I was quite tired. It was also quite cold. When we started, it was -15 degrees C. When we finished, it was “only” 12 degrees below zero.
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: concept2, crosstraining, erg, ice skating, OTE, painsled, rowing, rowpro, skating, steady state