Feb 19 2017
I had to stay on the roads. The forest is still not runnable. Ice and snow and icy snow. And mud.
It was a nice run. Originally planned to go out for just 8km, but I always prefer running a loop over running the same way back, so in the end it was almost 13km.
I just threw my running into fifth gear and enjoyed my stream of thought. Rewinding yesterday’s races and some stuff related to the rowsandall.com site.
Feb 11 2017
I won’t go ice skating or XC running on our lake any more. The ice thickness is 50cm (20 inches), but the lake water level has been lowered by a meter. With thinner ice, this usually leads to cracks around the edges, but we were warned that this time there is a huge air bubble under the ice layer. Nobody knows if and when it is going to crack.
I was thinking about that during the run. There must be material strength tables for ice, so in theory we could calculate the load leading to breaking.
The girls had a workout similar to what I did yesterday (short intervals), except that the intervals were 40 seconds instead of 60 seconds, but there were more of them. I checked our trainer’s training program for the Juniors, and noted that the Masters plan is a shortened, lighter version of the men’s Juniors. I might do some of the Juniors trainings instead of the Masters ones, if I feel my training load is too light.
The ergs were occupied by the 10 to 14 year old Boys (including my two sons of 10 and 12), so the girls did the warming up running with me. I sent them back to the rowing club after 10 minutes of running, and continued myself.
We chose the south/west side of the lake, running on paved roads, because these are the only ones free of ice and snow. As the snow has partially melted and then frozen again, it is not really suitable for running. Most of the forest trails have turned into bobsled tracks.
After importing the data to Strava, I noticed a very low average heart rate, and some strange jumps in the heart rate data.
Is it perhaps time to replace the batteries in the Wahoo Ticks? Talking about battery replacement, I have replaced the two “D cell” batteries in my PM5 today, for the first time since I installed the PM5. The PM started to complain that the batteries were low.
Dec 26 2016
Sunday
Just a short 12k on the erg. Related to sports, I spent a considerable amount of time with the Polar A360 that Lenka got for Christmas. It’s a cool watch, with optical heart rate measuring at the wrist, but the first synchronization and actualization takes ages. In the leaflet, they say you can get up and running directly from the Android Polar Flow app. No way. The initial sync and update takes so long that the bluetooth disconnects. In the end I had to do it through the USB cable.
We had quite a lot of snow on Christmas Eve. Robin made a Darth Vader snowman:
On Christmas, temperatures were suddenly much warmer, and during the day all the snow disappeared.
Monday
With Lenka and Iva, we participated in the Christmas run in Syrovice. The girls ran the 5k (one loop) and I did the 10k. As you can see from the pictures, it was quite a muddy event.
You should have seen the girls’ faces when I sent them of for the warming up run. They clearly weren’t happy that they had to run in this mud with their clean pink running shoes and matching running clothes. 🙂
I didn’t have very big plans for this run. I was just there as a chauffeur for the girls, and planned to take it easy. Of course, this plan was discarded when I met Eduard, a Masters rower from my club, at the start line.
I had to finish ahead of him.
Still, I managed to take it easy in the first round. In the muddy ascent through the vineyards, I managed to get a bit ahead of him. With his big posture, he has more difficulty than I taking over in the crowd.
After the muddy vineyards, the run continues on asphalt. During the short climbs I was much faster than the people surrounding me.
The run then loops back towards the village, where you get to run the steps towards the church, a short but pretty steep climb. Then immediately down again, and on to the second loop.
I knew Eduard was somewhere behind me, but I had no idea if he was ten seconds or two minutes behind. That kept me running at quite a high pace. In the vineyards, a couple of runners passed me, and every time I was worried it would be Eda. It wasn’t him. On the asphalt part, I took back the runners who had passed me in the vineyards.
The second time to run the church steps. Now it really hurt, but luckily, after that it’s just a few hundred meters to the finish.
I crossed the line in 42:25 and not long after that I heard the speaker announce the fastest woman. Oh, that’s good! It doesn’t happen very often in running events that I don’t get chicked. 🙂
So, what was supposed to be an easy run may have turned out to be one of my better runs of this winter.
https://www.strava.com/activities/811673254/overview
Dec 17 2016
Time for the weekly running event. It was -6C when we started out, three of Romana’s girls/women and I.
We ran along the lake, and then near the castle we took a right turn into the forest. We had a fairy-tale like view on the castle. Something like this. The trees were frozen as in the picture, but there was no snow on the roof:
Running through the forest, we encountered many deer, which was good because the girls started to be tired and spotting the animals was a good distraction.
Only at that stage I found out that Zdiška had been on the rowing club since 8am, doing an erg training that she had missed during the week. So she did a hard interval workout (the Pete Plan Pyramid) followed by a 14km run. Wow!
We finished the run in good spirits, despite one girl having a painful blister, so all was good.
https://www.strava.com/activities/804288506
For me it was a slow run. Not too long in kilometers, but long in time.
Dec 10 2016
I skipped Friday’s session. I planned to do the Two Speed Lactate Test, but having a cold and not feeling 100%, I thought it was better to relax and skip it.
Being an active rower doesn’t make me immune for these annoying infections, but I have the feeling I do get over them with relatively little drama. I usually have a slight headache and I sniff a bit. I sleep a bit worse than normally. In two days it goes away. This is different to what I observe with colleagues who exercise less frequently.
It’s another method how spending time doing a sport saves you time in the end.
This morning I was feeling better, but I still wanted to keep the intensity low. Also, Romana delegated the girls/women running training to me, so I did a gentle run along the lake. Nothing hard. Chatting. I feel terribly out of touch listening to the girls chatting during the run.
One of the topics that was discussed was working and traveling in the US. I recommended doing a “US Life Guard” training and certification, which they can do locally. I know a few people who did this, spent a month sitting next to a swimming pool in a US hotel (sticking a few plasters) and making enough money to explore the rest of the country.
Our lake is frozen. A thin layer of ice. No rowing.
Running with my little running group, we met a few commercial running groups. There are many people who make money by giving running trainings along the lake. Of course they don’t call their sessions “trainings”, but “clinic”, “workshop”, or something else. Also they don’t go just running, but have a “philosophy” behind it. I had the feeling their coaches/gurus/mentors were trying to figure out if I was a new competitor.
But maybe it was all imagination. Anyhow, it was a nice recovery session.
Dec 3 2016
We’re not at home today. Romana has an event in Hradec Kralove this afternoon. So we drove to my mother-in-law’s place and had lunch there. Then Romana drove on to her event and dropped me off at a point 15km from her parents’ place.
I took a few pictures in the first 5km, until the phone ran out of battery.
It was a 14 km run in total, through a few villages, then along the river Lane, the river Chrudimka through Pardubice town (nice parks) and then home.
https://www.strava.com/activities/792214866
May 13 2017
Friday: A short run
I stayed at work too long, so my window for OTW rowing was gone. I drove home, switched to running gear and set off. It was a nice, warm day, and it was good to be in the hilly forest behind our house, after a long time.
I decided to try out the Wahoo Tickr’s RunFit app, which promises to extract extra running metrics from the Wahoo Tickr X and I was curious to see how it works. Of course, I took the good old Garmin Forerunner 220 as a backup.
I had to make dinner for the family to come back from their race prep (it’s the International Youth Regatta in Brno this weekend), so I didn’t have too much time to run.
The RunFit app was interesting. After every kilometer, a computer lady voice told me “distance x kilometer heart rate 155 pace previous lap 5 minutes 7 seconds”. It annoyed me quite a lot, because the RunFit kilometers were about 100m shorter than the Garmin kilometers. I trust the Garmin more, because it is very consistent with the SpeedCoach, with CrewNerd (running on the same iPhone as the RunFit app) and with other apps. Interesting that an app running on the same hardware can disagree with another app. Funny algorithms. Not enough data smoothing. Something like that. It proves again that doing sports data science is not easy.
After the run, the app offered me the promised stats. Here they are (in screenshot form):
So apart from Cadence we have running smoothness, vertical oscillation and ground contact. So according to RunFit my ground contact was 173ms, and according to this link elite runners are under 200 ms. To be honest, I have no idea whether my running metrics are good or bad (and I honestly don’t care much as long as I don’t get injured while running), and to make matters worse, I don’t trust metrics measured by an app that doesn’t get distance right.
By the end of the run, the Garmin was 1km behind the RunFit app.
When I exported the run from RunFit to Strava, Runkeeper, and TrainingPeaks, I was curious to see if the extra metrics would make it across.
Strava? Nope
TrainingPeaks? The sync didn’t work, so I don’t know
Runkeeper? Nope
So all in all I am not so impressed. I am more impressed by the website VeloViewer, which integrates very nicely with Strava.
http://veloviewer.com/activities/982844482
You can make cool 3D pictures like this one:
There are also a few plots and additional statistics to explore, and everything looks very nice and slick.
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By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 1 • Tags: crosstraining, running