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May 6 2018

Saturday – Steady State and RiM test

Interesting conditions. When we arrived, the lake was pretty choppy, but it calmed down while I prepared to row. Then, during the row, the chop became gradually worse. I actually enjoyed it and tried to row stably in all conditions.

I was also test driving RiM (Rowing in Motion) on Android. RiM is an app developed by Johannes Rudolph. RiM measures boat acceleration and allows you to analyze the dynamics and efficiency of your boat. The last time I used this app was in September 2015, so we have two entire seasons between data collection. Here’s a chart:

5 May 2018 vs September 2015 – 28spm. Click on the chart to see a bigger version.

And here are is another chart, looking also at 30spm:

The legend:

And some metrics:

Interesting that the Catch Slope (for the 30/31spm strokes) has become less steep over the two years, but the catch duration has shortened. The catch duration is the time during which the boat decelerates at the catch. So, my catches have become a bit less hard and thus the boat decelerates less. That would be a good development and something I have been working on. The question is whether the differences are significant, and whether these two small samples are characteristic.

This also shows some of the weakness of analysis based on picking a number of strokes. One needs an underlying model of what is going on, linking the metrics at different stroke rates to one underlying stroke characteristic, and monitor the metric continuously over time, for every stroke. The question is, of course, if a 20spm stroke has a similar characteristic as a 36spm stroke. I think good scullers adapt to the different boat speed and boat dynamics.

Anyway, I’d love to hear where these metrics are in comparison of some of my readers, if they use RiM as well.

In the final 15 minutes of the row, I switched off RiM and used the phone camera to record a sternward view of the chop. Here’s a little video compilation:

The practice start at 12 minutes into the row was liked by rowsandall.com with the following email:

Given that I am now on 10% lower power values and I haven’t corrected the old ones, that is a nice way to tell me that that start wasn’t bad at all. It’s not unimportant what happens in the first 10 seconds of a race.

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Apr 30 2018

Saturday – Fartlek, Video & Stroke Analysis

Friday

I did body weight and core exercise during a 4 hour conference call marathon. There were enough low information density moments that I could listen and “work out” at the same time. It gives a new dimension to “Plank” when at the same time you are following the conversation.

Saturday

I am entering a low volume training cycle, and I didn’t find time to completely plan out each session for this cycle, so I had to improvise a bit. Fartlek, “speed play”, is, for example “sprint all out from one light pole to the next, jog to the corner, give a medium effort for a couple of blocks, jog between four light poles and sprint to a stop sign, and so on, for a set total time or distance” (quote from breakingmuscle.com). I basically allowed myself to play with the boat speed as I felt fit.

Romana was training the girls, but had to jump in a double with a less experienced girl, so she asked me to row with Iva, who was doing 500m intervals. So I rowed with her and coached her by rowing my single next to her and shouting instructions.

And, I recorded all that with my GoPro Hero Session 5 camera.

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Here is the result:

In the video, I am showing my (long) standard warming up drill starting with arms only. Then a (not so well executed) technique drill, then some snippets from 500m intervals, and finally a very short race pace piece.

All in all I am pretty happy with the row. By the way, this was the first real video taken with my new camera.

It’s now a bit over a month since I have started to row on the water again, so time for some analysis.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

I made these charts using the Box Chart functionality on rowsandall.com. Click here to read the tutorial on how to use the Box Charts.

I am not going to make any conclusions based on these box charts now, apart from the things I mention in the image captions. But it show that this is a good tool to monitor progress.

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mapka

Apr 27 2018

Thursday – Short and Intensive

I hesitated whether it made sense to go to the lake. In Brno-Slatina, where my office is, the flags indicated a strong wind. I called Romana, and she reported normal chop, nothing unrowable. When I arrived at the lake, the normal chop had changed to high chop, but by the time I was launching, it was getting calmer again. This was going to be a short, but intensive workout:

2k/4min + 1k/4min + 500m @ 28-34spm

Again, I lowered the SPM by 2 because I row in a single.

The low power section 4 minutes into the first 2k is caused by a turn:

On this map, it’s the turn to starboard just before I row through the “Brněnská přehrada” text (after crossing the boat line connecting U kotvy to Osada.

This is also where tailwind turned into tail/cross wind and I had to turn the single slightly to compensate for being blown into the buoy line. This is what that did to Wash:

A jump from 12 degrees to 14-15 degrees. It confirms my feeling that Wash is very sensitive to water roughness and other external factors.

Drive length and effective drive length were pretty OK, and at least consistent. Intervals 1 and 3 were rowed in tailwind and the middle 1k in strong headwind. I was afraid that would be visible in the drive length (being shorter in headwind), but it isn’t really.


Workout Summary - media/20180426-1735460o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|04604|22:35.0|02:27.2|213.5|25.0|159.2|186.0|08.2
W-|03472|14:35.0|02:06.1|269.3|27.6|165.0|186.0|08.7
R-|01134|08:00.0|03:31.6|111.7|20.1|148.5|186.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|02000|08:22.3|02:05.6|248.5|26.0|157.0|177.0|09.2
01|01000|04:27.1|02:13.5|286.1|28.9|178.0|186.0|07.8
02|00472|01:46.3|01:52.7|325.1|31.9|170.4|184.0|08.3

Pretty happy with the numbers here, considering the strong tail/head/crosswind and chop. I aimed at 26, 29 and 32spm and it seems I succeeded. Pretty hard work but pretty consistent, I think.

Back at the dock after 42 minutes, including warming up and cooling down. That was good, because I did have some accumulated fatigue from earlier sessions this week.

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Capture

Apr 25 2018

Tuesday – The Tale of the Lost Kilometers

This was the day that I really benefited from zipping around town on a scooter, as opposed to being stuck in traffic.

After a few meetings at the office, I had to go to the Medlanky airfield for some flight tests involving drones. This airfield is very close to the lake, so I could fit in a training session after lunch, before going back to the office.

To outsiders, the whole action at the airfield must have looked like a scene from Men in Black, and definitely had conspiracy theory fueling potential. The drones arrived in unmarked jeeps and a minivan. A gang of guys in dark suits and sunglasses jumped out of the jeep, while a bunch of “IT types” jumped out of the minivan. They set up some satellite dish and other equipment, then launched a couple of drones, which didn’t seem to do much. Just hovered around a bit. Then, everything was cleaned up and the group disappeared.

It was a pity I had to go on the business lunch with the Men in Black, because in the mean time the wind had become stronger. I decided to row towards Veverska Bytiska, taking shelter in the river gorge.

The workout was 4x10min (done as 4/3/2/1 minute at 22/24/26/28spm) at three minutes rest. After a 15 minute warming up which brought me past the twisty part of the gorge, I stopped to set up my SpeedCoach. The advantage of the gorge is that there is no chop, but that doesn’t mean it is not windy. To me, the SpeedCoach user interface is not intuitive, and the whole programming took a long time, during which I also had to make correction paddles to avoid being blown onto a rock, and because I wanted to set up the intervals as variable intervals 10min+3min (as the SpeedCoach doesn’t record strokes during the rest). I guess I have high demands in terms of data collection.

Well, in the end I managed to get my SpeedCoach set up and I set off. First interval straight into a headwind, ending close to the castle. Then three minutes of paddling, and the second interval as the SpeedCoach started counting down 10 minutes again. I was a little worried that the interval would take me further than where the river is rowable, but a good stiff headwind helped me there.

As I eased up into the second 3 minutes of rest, I noticed that the SpeedCoach was immediately starting a 10 minute count down again. What the heck? I stopped the SpeedCoach, turned the single, and took a rest of approximately three minutes, then continued.

The third and fourth interval were rowed with tailwind, and I ended up doing the third interval’s 28spm bit in the middle of a sharp turn and the fourth interval ended in the twisty part of the river. Apart from that, everything was fine.

Sixteen kilometers of quality training, what could one wish more?

Of course, I was slightly bothered about my SpeedCoach, which was still running its workout countdowns while I was doing my cooling down. Arriving at the dock, I stopped it. Now, would it save my strokes? Looking at the menus, it seems that the only option I had was to continue rowing until it had finished the programmed workout, or do something that the SpeedCoach called “Cancel Workout”.

I had a moment of panic for fear of data loss, but in the end opted for “cancel workout”. I needed to get back to the office for my afternoon and evening meetings.

After uploading the workout to rowsandall.com, I noticed that I did lose some data. See the map, with the arrows indicating a straight line where my trajectory jumps over the forest. More about that in the How To section below.

Here are the charts for the first and third interval. Notice the funny heart rate jumps caused by the data loss:

First and third interval (data for second and fourth interval is missing)

How To

Used equipment:

  1. NK SpeedCoach GPS 2
  2. NK Empower Oarlock (connected to SpeedCoach through BlueTooth)
  3. Polar OH1 optical heart rate sensor worn on starboard upper arm, connected to SpeedCoach through BlueTooth

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So this is my basic setup in the single. I have a Empower Oarlock on starboard side. This oarlock measures force and oar angle, and from those measurements you get a couple of useful metrics on your SpeedCoach:

  1. Maximum and average force
  2. Work per Stroke
  3. Power
  4. Catch and finish angle
  5. … and more

Look at the chart in the main part of this post. Rowing in strong wind on a windy river, the boat speed was basically an irrelevant parameter. What is important is to compare the power levels for the different intervals. (Although to be honest, power levels would have been better if I had two oarlocks and could measure the average, as during turns the power through one oarlock is not representative to the total mechanical power.)

Having power in addition to heart rate gives a very complete picture of the training.

Today, I used the programmed workouts function of the NK SpeedCoach. As you understand from the blog post above, this is not without risk. The NK SpeedCoach does not record rest data. I think that the default behavior should be to include rest strokes in the data records. It is easy to remove part of the data after the row, but you never get the stroke data back if the hardware didn’t record it in the first place.

How Not To

Here are screenshots of the NK SpeedCoach where I tried to program a 4x10min/3min workout in such a way that I would also capture the data during the three rest minutes.

The mistake I made is that I overlooked the “rest between sets”, which was set to 10 minutes. So that is where I lost 20 minutes of training data.

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Apr 19 2018

Wednesday – 4x2km OTW

Monday and Tuesday – no training. It’s a tough week to find time to train. My parents are visiting. On Tuesday, it was my daughter’s 18th birthday. On Thursday, it will be my birthday.

The weather is great and we visited one of the attractions of Brno, the Villa Tugendhat, a 1930 building by Mies van der Rohe, a famous architect.

Yesterday, we went to the rowing club so my parents could watch the rowing training of their grandsons, and I made use of the opportunity to sneak in a 4x2km/5min. The last time I had done this session OTW was in August.

Interestingly, in warm water and with little wind, I managed a 247W average power and a 2:10.2 average 500m pace.

Today, the workout summary is:


Workout Summary - media/20180418-1525480o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|08000|36:17.0|02:16.1|231.9|26.2|173.2|183.0|08.4
W-|08000|36:17.0|02:16.1|231.9|26.2|173.2|183.0|08.4
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|183.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|02000|08:28.1|02:07.0|238.2|25.6|169.2|179.0|09.2
01|02000|09:39.9|02:25.0|234.4|26.0|173.1|179.0|08.0
02|02000|08:32.5|02:08.1|227.9|26.6|175.5|181.0|08.8
03|02000|09:36.9|02:24.2|227.4|26.6|174.8|183.0|07.8

So a 231W average and a 2:16.1 average 500m pace. It was quite choppy, which usually reduces the power a bit (at same perceived rate of exertion), and the water was colder. So at 93% of the power, compared to last August, I rowed at 96% of the pace. Seems pretty consistent. I was expecting the average pace drop to be larger. I am thinking that water depth is important too. The lake in Trebon (where I rowed last August’s 4x2km) is shallow with a sandy bottom. The Brno lake is deep, with a rocky bottom.

When I downloaded the charts, I was annoyed that I had forgotten that the NK SpeedCoach doesn’t record the rest strokes when you program intervals with rest.

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The slide show shows the technique charts that I found interesting. Catch angle influenced by head vs tailwind and by chop. The same thing can be seen for effective drive length. Wash was gradually increasing during the workout, as I got more tired.

This was a nice, pretty intensive workout. I had fun. It’s nice to row at 26/27spm, 80% of maximum effort, and cover the 8-9 minute effort with confidence. Also, there were sailboats and other scullers out on the water, so I had to pass people and watch traffic, which makes time go by so fast, in comparison with the ergometer.

I am adding to pictures from the weekend, which I forgot to attach to the blog. One of a coach who got towed in on Saturday morning. Engine problems with the launch, on the middle of the lake. The water guards told us he was their first “rescue” of the year. Another picture showing the mirror flat water on Sunday, which quickly became choppy while we were changing clothes. An old trick of our rowing lake.

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Capture

Apr 18 2018

3x(3x2min/2min) in the Single

Romana went out in the double with her partner Veronika and I took the single. I was looking forward to this workout, and a little worried about the prescribed stroke rates:

3x(3x2min/2min)/6min, two minutes are 1 minute at 28spm, 1 minute at 30spm

The coach always writes stroke rates for bigger boats, so for a single we are supposed to subtract 2. Still, I haven’t spent much time at stroke rates above 25spm this year, and the water was a little rough.

It was, actually, ideal weather for the youth sailing regatta happening on the south end of the lake, confining us rowers to its northern half:

A bit of a zig zag course. I warmed up to Rokle (top left on the map) and then on to the start of the 2k course (top middle, close to “Osada”). I did two of the three intervals in headwind (south direction), followed by a turn, and then one interval in tailwind, followed by a paddle back to the start of the 2k. In the last series, I had to change course quite abruptly at the beginning of the second 2 minute interval, to avoid a crash course with some sailing boats, so I rowed the last interval in front of the rowing club, and the cooling down was quite short.

I am pretty happy with the stroke rates I managed, especially given that the charts below seem to suggest I was holding up technique pretty well at the higher rates, despite the choppy water. This is in line with what I felt during the row.

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Apr 13 2018

Crime Scene Investigation

I was hesitating between a morning session and an evening session, but chose to row early because of the weather forecast. When getting to the lake, I had s glorious view of mirror flat water, and sunshine..

A few minutes later, I opened the gate to the rowing club venue, parked my scooter and unlocked the building. Not aware that I had just entered a crime scene.

The locker room was a mess. Most of our members do not lock their lockers, and all the lockers were open, clothes lying on the ground. The window in the weights room was open.

The keys to the hangars were not at their usual place. I still wasn’t connecting the dots. The keys had disappeared over the weekend, and we had replaced all the locks. Probably the keys to the hangars were now stored at a different place? So I went to search them. Then, I discovered that the door to the workshop was open. This was starting to look very suspicious.

Then, the contractor who is doing the renovation arrived. He discovered that most of his tools and equipment had disappeared, and that’s when we called the police.

All the time the lake was extremely rowable, mirror flat and sunny.

The police arrived and we explained the situation. They called the crime scene investigators, who arrived thirty minutes later, along with the club president.

I won’t go into details but by the time the police had done their work we knew we were missing at lest $10,worth of tools (estimate increased significantly in the course of the day as we realized more things were missing), a large TV (new), computers, SpeedCoaches, CoxBox, and whatever valuables members had left in their unlocked lockers. I keep my locker locked, and I have only rowing clothes there.

The thieves had also taken the keys to the club van but the car was still there. I guess they had failed to open the remotely controlled gate. A good thing we have secure tech for that gate, with a record of which member at which time. We did however have to get the van towed back to Renault for a change of locks.

Romana was busy dealing with the insurance.

By 11am I wasn’t needed any more and it was high time to get to the office. The wind had started and the lake was choppy with white caps.

At the end of the working day I was looking at the flags in front of our office and it seemed the wind had gotten weaker, so I took the gamble and rode to the club. One advantage of the safety cameras we will now install is that we will also put up a web cam pointing at the lake, taking the guess work out of my looking at a flag pole 20km away.

The gamble turned out well. During the warming up, the lake was still choppy, so I decided to do the first interval of my 3x10min/3min session in the gorge. That isn’t ideal because it requires a lot of turning which messes up the power measurements and makes it hard to adhere to the prescribed stroke rates (alternating 22spm and 24spm every two minutes) but it was doable.


Workout Summary - media/20180412-1820260o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|10403|54:00.0|02:35.7|172.9|21.7|149.8|176.0|08.9
W-|06360|30:00.0|02:21.5|206.7|23.2|164.5|176.0|09.1
R-|04048|24:00.0|02:57.9|130.6|19.8|131.3|176.0|08.7
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|02215|10:00.0|02:15.4|215.7|22.8|161.8|171.0|09.7
02|02126|10:00.0|02:21.1|204.0|23.4|164.9|174.0|09.1
03|02019|10:00.0|02:28.6|200.4|23.4|166.9|176.0|08.1

First interval was in the gorge with tailwind. The second one was in the gorge with headwind. The final one was on the lake with strong headwind and chop for the first 6 minutes.

rowing chart

I did not make this a very long session, as I wanted to be home in time, so I did the minimum amount of kilometers that would still fit the prescribed session.

Today: Strength Training

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