Dec 9 2017
I longed for outdoors activity so I went running. It turned out to be a slow run. The snow had melted, and then frozen again.
I took a new shortcut near the end of the run. That turned out to be a bad decision. I ended up above the road I wanted to get to and the only way to get there was to slide down a very steep slope.
Dec 1 2017
Full day of conference attendance, plus a nagging work related issue back home which made me work early in the morning, have several phone conversations during the day, and return early to my hotel to do some more work.
At the same time, my friend David (who had quoted Tesla in his opening key note speech) and I had a plan to visit the Nikola Tesla museum. I managed to sign us up for the 6pm guided tours in English.
The museum was great and the tour was brilliant. Tesla was really a genius, and I stood in awe looking at his remotely controlled boat from 1898, with two electro motors and a computer! I dare to call a logical “AND” gate a computer. These things are easy for us, who have learned physics and electromagnetism in school, but for those days, this was truly genius.
In the evening, I had the conference dinner at the Belgrade fortress. Spent the evening at a table with some Air Traffic Controllers from Italy and had a great time.
Rolled into bed after midnight.
Woke up too late for a full run. It was raining and the temperature was much higher than on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. I wanted to run to the Save river, then follow the bank, but I
Then I went to the conference again.
For the entire week, I had enjoyed taking the public transport in Belgrade. I liked traveling between normal people instead of sipping through the streets in a taxi, and with the Balkan driving style, the tram was often faster than taking a taxi, and dirt cheap.
This time, I had an interesting ride. The tram stopped in the middle of Slavija square. We all left the tram and crossed a four lane road with cars (me towing a trolley). Waiting for the bus, I noticed that all trams had come to a standstill. Apparently there was no electric power.
After about ten minutes, I was able to take an overcrowded bus 33 to the university.
A few stops later, a ticket inspector entered the bus. My chip card was OK, but there was a problem with one lady. The controller took her out of the bus at the next stop, and that was when I noticed it was Paula, one of my fellow conference participants. Too late for me to do anything. The bus left and she remained there at the bus stop, with an angry inspector, in the rain.
Around lunch time I headed to the airport. I thought I was lucky to have an emergency exit in the Adria Airways CRJ900, but I ended up sitting next to a very overweight, very tall, elderly man. Luckily, I managed to fall asleep, crushed between the man and the window, and the flight passed by fast.
In the train between Vienna and Brno, I made notes for a blog post about Physics and rowing metrics.
Trying to do a week’s worth of work in one day, including one on one meetings with all my subordinates and reviewing their goal plans for 2018. Also, it was my son’s 13th birthday.
So. No. Training.
Nov 28 2017
##Monday
Travel to Belgrade. I missed the 8:35 train from the Brno Reckovice station. The problem is that I live so close to the train station, that I usually leave three minutes before the train arrival. This time it was snowing, and that slowed me down just enough to miss the train.
Well, 8:35 was risk mitigation anyway. Taking the 8:50 train, I still had 10 minutes for my connection at Brno main station.
I took the train to Vienna, connected to the airport. Then I took the Adria flight to Belgrade, which is actually a very short flight.
First time in Serbia, for me. Small airport. Taxi ride to hotel, driving typical Balkan style. I had some work to do, so I spent the rest of the afternoon working in the hotel.
The only exercise was a 20 minute walk into the city center, to find a nice place to have dinner. The hotel restaurant was a bit too posh and expensive to my taste.
##Tuesday
I wanted to go running in the morning, but when I checked my phone, it told me that outside it was -1C, “feels like -6C”. I had purposefully packed warm running clothes because of the opportunity to run in an unknown city, but still it took me another 20 minutes to convince myself, and it turned out to be a very nice run.
I ran down towards the center, then continued to the Belgrade fortress.
In an attempt to get to the Sava river, I ended up running over a tram track for a few hundred meters. When cities are on rivers, especially big ones like the Danube and the Sava, I like to see the waterfront.
Somehow the Garmin Forerunner didn’t track the first half of my row on the map. The distance and duration is right, but I did start where I ended.
I wasn’t feeling cold at all. It was a great run.
Nov 20 2017
On Thursday, I just about managed to do my two meetings, and then I took my team to a nice dinner in Phoenix. We had New Mexican food in Richardson’s, and it was great. The only issue is that we were already quite full after the appetizers. The portions are huge.
On Friday morning, my colleague and I drove to the Desert Vista Trailhead. We had about 40 minutes between sunrise and having to go back to the hotel to have breakfast and go to work. My colleague went on a short hike, and I ran for 22 minutes, then turned around and ran back.
It was still dark when we set off, and I had to use my cellphone “torch” function to avoid breaking a leg on the irregular trail surface. Next time I should remember to take my LED head lamp with me.
Great! Four PRs on Strava. Basically because I hadn’t run this particular trail. It was short, but great!
First time I ran with my new Polar OH1 optical heart rate arm band. I used it in standalone mode. I liked the comment that Polar Flow made after syncing the device:
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I also had the device switched on during the drive back to the hotel, so you can also see my recovery curve there. Note that I had forgotten to set correct maximum heart rate, and this definitely wasn’t Tempo and Maximum training.
Then on to work. Lots of meetings, some of them up in Deer Valley, some of them on the other side of Phoenix, on Sky Harbor Circle, so some zipping up and down the I17 was involved as well. As you can see from the picture above, it was cloudy, and it even rained a bit, but still the weather is great, coming out of Minneapolis (or Brno).
Just before sunset, we managed to get in a hike up to Pinnacle Peak, so that was some light exercise as well, but mainly a way of showing my colleague a little bit of the beauty of Arizona. It is his first time in the US, and we didn’t have time to do much sightseeing, so at least Pinnacle Peak.
Good news. My flight wasn’t as early as I thought, so there was plenty of time to do another trail run. I drove to Desert Vista Trailhead again, but this time I did a loop that I was familiar with.
It was a little faster than I had remembered, so I added a little back and forth on the same trail as Friday to complete at least 60 minutes. It was sunnier than on Friday, but it was colder and more windy, about 15 degrees C.
This is a nice run. It is not possible to run fast in the desert, because of the irregular trail surface, but there are short climbs that get your heart rate up, and the views are great. In the beginning you have a fantastic view of the city of Phoenix, and then you turn a corner and you feel like you are the only person on the planet.
At one point all the birds began to sing, and then they suddenly stopped. Perhaps some morning ritual.
This time I was running with both the Tickr X connected to my Garmin Forerunner and the Polar OH1 connected to the Polar Beat app. I wanted to compare the performance of the two heart rate monitors, and see if there is any downside on using the optical heart rate monitor. Here is a quick comparison chart. I took a TCX from Polar Flow and did the same for the data on Garmin Connect. Those sites are the first destination of the data from the respective devices. Of course I don’t know what data mangling they do, but I thought it was better than downloading both workouts from Strava.
I am quite satisfied with the result. Actually, the Tickr has some problems in the beginning (I didn’t moisten the chest belt before putting it on), and for those first few minutes I believe that the OH1 is more accurate. When you look in detail, you see some slight differences between the two sensors, but on the scale of a workout (and that is what I am interested in) this is negligible. All the features that I am looking for are there (quick rise when running up hill).
On Saturday afternoon I flew back home. First flight was PHX – JFK and it was great. We took a route over Flagstaff and I could see the Grand Canyon, Four Corners, and I recognized all the places we had visited on our RV vacation in the US.
The flight from JFK to Amsterdam was delayed by 2.5 hours, so I suddenly had a long overlay in Amsterdam. I used it to eat some haring. Something you can only get in The Netherlands, perhaps an acquired taste, but it is great:
Then the afternoon flight to Prague, where I discovered that my colleague’s check bag had made it but mine hadn’t, which was interesting given the fact that we had walked over to the transfer desk at Schiphol and made sure that our bags were on the same flight as ours – at least in “the system”.
After a two hour taxi ride I was home at 9pm.
Jun 20 2017
Sunday
Spent the entire day doing data for the Czech Juniors trials. More about that in a separate post over on the analytics blog.
Monday
The first day of an off site workshop with my boss and his leadership team. My boss came over from Toulouse and his team gathered on a wine estate 40km south of Brno.
We had 1.5 hours of free time planned on Day 1, but good discussions took longer, so I sacrificed my exercise. I did have a swim in the pool though but I wouldn’t classify it as a workout. Here is the view from my room:
Tuesday
I had constraines myself during the evening wine tasting tour, so getting up at 5am for a run was not an issue. I set out through the vineyards, up the hill, making a loop around the view tower you can see in the distance on the picture above.
Behind that hill I kept running in a pleasant pace, all the way to the village of Rakvice, where I turned around at the village school. Then I found out that the pleasant running had been mostly downhill, which on the way back was a less pleasant uphill, followed by a few steep places that stung a bit.
The wine growers were at work all the time, in the vineyards. In the heat, they start very early and some of them were returning home by 6am.
I saw a couple of hares, a deer, and lots of pheasants.
Jun 11 2017
Another day where I had to get up at 4am. I didn’t take the I-17 because it was closed over the weekend, but took the 51 instead.
On Friday I was a little concerned as my debit card got declined at two stores in Phoenix, so I spent the evening checking my bank account (healthy as it should be). I know a few stories where colleagues’ card details were stolen and big withdraws made before they noticed.
So I tried to withdraw money from an ATM at Phoenix airport and that worked fine. I guess I will call my bank on monday morning to check what was going on. I just hate it when these things happen, and it always gives me flashbacks from my student years when I was on a vety tight budget and still had to learn to manage a budget. Eating budget pasta without sauce, while training every day …
Anyway, the 7:00 flight from PHX took me to Atlanta in about three hours, also shifting forward time by three hours. So suddenly it was 2pm. Made a quick call home to find out how things had been going on the Morava regatta. Heard stories of wind and extreme chop. My son made it to the final in the single scull and when he beats one guy in that final, he qualifies for The National Championships. Since his win in Hodonin his ego has had a huge boost, so we’ll see how he fares.
First time in Atlanta, not counting connecting at the airport. I was surprised by traffic jams on Saturday afternoon! My hotel is in Midtown. Right across the Fox theatre and quite a nice area.
Arriving there around 3pm I thought about getting in some exercise. Of course, I could hit the hotel gym, but why not find a nice place to run and run outdoors.
It was hot, but the sky was overcast and 30C is not really hot after being exposed to 45C in Phoenix. Strava suggested a place called Cochran Shoals, a run along the Chattahoochee river. According to Google maps that was a 20 minute drive so the choice was easy.
Dialling up Cochran in the rental car’s GPS gave me a 40 minute drive, so I navigated using my 3 lines of noted on the hotel notepad based on Google maps.
About 15 minutes inti the drive my notes proved to be not sufficiently detailed, so I was getting worried. But then I crossed a bridge and saw a shallow river and people on rafts. I knew I was close. Not long after that I found the Cochran Shoals parking.
I wanted to run for at least 10 kilometers. I set off on the hiking trail along the river. After about 15 minutes I reached the other end of the park. I hesitated between returning and potentially doing two loops, and continuing. I continued. First a street with never ending condos, then an area with really big and really nice houses. Thirty minutes into my run, I started to think about returning. I saw a turn to the right ahead, which might bring me back closer to the river, and I had hope of finding a hiking path along the river, instead of running on hard pavement. I turned right, and explored a path along the river, for sbout 1000m, but then found it ended at a gate to a private property, so I had to backtrack. Too bad, but not really a problem. The advantage of being fit is that these setbacks don’t really matter. You know you will finish the run. It will just be a bit longer. And it sure was way better than running on a hotel gym threadmill.
I returned and to make things more interesting, I tried to guess how many of the big residences I would pass before the condos would start. I guessed 20, and I was way off. There were 30 of them, spaced about 100m apart.
After the condos, I entered the Cochran Shoals park again and I took a slightly different route back to the car.
Dec 17 2017
Running / Low Batteries
A busy day! First relaxing after breakfast, then a run. Followed by sauna and rowing club social event.
Romana and I went to the sauna today. I ran to it. About 11 km through interesting terrain. Two big hills. The temperature was slightly above zero.
When I had to set off, there was a light panic.
The Garmin Forerunner was completely discharged.
My iPhone was at 20% battery. I had forgotten to put it in the charger on Saturday evening.
The Samsung phone was fully charged but I had not paired it with any of my HR measuring devices.
The Polar arm belt was low battery. I had put it in the charger on Saturday, but the funky charger thing can also go into a USB socket the wrong way. So no charging.
In the end I managed to remember my password for Polar Flow, and the Samsung seemed to pair with the Polar OH1, so I opted for that combination. Turns out the heart rate was never recorded.
I ran to Maximus Resort, close to the rowing club. Romana arrived by car, with dry clothes. We enjoyed 2 hours of sauna and relax. Then we went to the rowing club for a Christmas get together.
The ice on the lake seems to be disappearing, but still about 70% of the lake is covered, and the pieces of ice are being blown around by the wind.
Tomorrow: Last working day of the year and a light training.
It started snowing.
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: rowing, running, training