steady state

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Dec 29 2018

More Steady State

Friday

Luckily my calf injury allowed me to row on the erg, so I spent 75 minutes at steady state pace. To make it a bit more exciting, I did rate ladders, starting at 18spm and up by 2 SPM until 22, then down again. I did the first series at 4 minute intervals, then at 3, and finally at 1. That brings you to 75 minutes (including a short warming up before starting the ladders). It makes the time go by faster.

steady state

After the row we drove to Pardubice to visit my mother in law.

Saturday

Romana, my brother in law and I went to a gym in Pardubice to row another low stroke rate session. This one was a bit shorter and lighter than the Friday one.

steady state

I’m showing only the middle 2x17min minute part, but there was a long warming up and a decent cooling down as well.

In the second 17 minute interval I set the monitor to show the stroke profile and focused on making nice strokes. That was a good focused effort. Happy with the workout.

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Nov 11 2018

An expensive shirt?

In the morning, Romana, Robin and I visited the Sport Life fair in Brno. At the stand of Gogen, a manufacturer of headsets who sponsors Ondrej Synek, there were Concept2 ergs and there was a challenge, for men to row under a 500m under 1:45 and for women to row under 2:00. If you made it you won a T-shirt. Romana and I sat down (in jeans) and Romca rowed a 1:50 and I did 1:32, which brought us to the top of the rankings and we got our shirts.

Not sure it was a good idea. I still had to do a steady state row afterwards, and of course we hadn’t done any warming up or anything.

I bought new hiking shoes and we got Robin a new winter coat. Then we headed to the rowing club, picking up Martin “Turkey” Krocil on the way.

The workout was easy. A 2×25 minute steady state with mild rate ladders (19-20-21-20-19 for the first and 19-20-21-22-21 for the second interval). It all went nicely. It was good to row next to each other. We rowed in sync, and time goes faster and I find myself pulling better scores when in company.

With five minutes to go I suddenly felt a sharp pain in the right side of my lower back. I stopped for a few strokes, then tried to pick it up again, but the pain was too … painful. I guess I am going to take a few days of forced rest. I wonder if the 500m effort without warming up triggered this? The other thing was that in our rowing club erg room, there is a distinct draft over the back when you erg with the window open and the ventilation on.

So it will be a forced rest day tomorrow, perhaps swimming on Tuesday, and then we’ll see. Dang.

Well, I may be exaggerating this. I rarely have any sports injuries, so when something like this happens I tend to dramatize.

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Sep 22 2018

The Water is Dangerous

Thursday

A nice technique row in the double with Romana. The weather was nice with very flat water when we launched. The only issue was low visibility because somebody was burning leaves or grass on the other side of the lake, and the smoke cloud covered a large part of the lake.

We rowed up to Rokle, and then back to Sirka through the middle of the lake and through the smoke cloud. Then we turned at Sirka and rowed back. When we were about 1km from Sirka, we saw the fire brigade rushing towards the lake. I thought somebody had called them because of the guy creating the smoke cloud.

A little later, the rescue service and the police sped across the lake in their speed boats. I started wondering. They sped to an area in front of Lodni Sporty rowing club, but then they moved to the beach around the 1km mark, roughly where we were rowing when we first saw the fire brigade.

A few minutes later, a helicopter arrived at the scene. We continued our technical/steady state row to Rokle and then turned. The beach at the 1km mark was now full of police, ambulance, fire brigade, and the two speed boats. At that time we thought it was a drill.

Not true. We were witnessing desperate attempts to save someone’s live.

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According to the news, a person of about 65 years of age was playing with a remote controlled model airplane. The plane fell into the water, and he decided to swim for it. Which cost him his life. Difficult to guess what happened, but a few meters below the surface, the water is not exactly warm.

Of course we didn’t know anything about that when we were rowing, and we were quite happy with the pace achieved at a relatively light pressure. Did I mention the water was quiet and mirror flat?

Friday

I nice weights workout in the gym. I found a free hour in the afternoon and did a thorough weights session. Increased the weights on some of the exercises.

Saturday

A 2km swim followed by a hot tub. We went to Kurim, where they have a 25m pool. I prefer a 50m pool, but this was a nice workout. The water was nice. It was good to be swimming again, and I got a very good workout.

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Sep 17 2018

Another steady state row – Super Flat Water & Technique study

Another Steady State row in the single. It was beautiful weather. No wind at all. Mirror flat water. Great day to do rate ladders and work on technique.

Paying attention to pace at constant stroke rate I noticed significant speed improvements when focusing on sitting up straight on the catch and making sure I don’t open up the back too early. However, it’s difficult in the boat to check whether the speed gains are because I row at higher Work per Stroke (average drive force, stroke length) when focusing on this or whether I am improving boat efficiency. The following chart seems to suggest it’s primarily a power/length/force thing:

If I look at a measure for efficiency and do the statistics, I find a small positive correlation with:

  • Distance per stroke (logical)
  • Slip (higher value = higher efficiency)

I also find a small negative correlation with:

  • Peak force
  • Peak force angle (i.e. lower efficiency when peak force is closer to the bow)
  • Average force
  • Work per Stroke

I find no correlation whatsoever, i.e. pure random behavior on:

  • Drive length
  • Catch & Finish angle
  • SPM
  • Wash
  • Effective stroke length

It may be that I am pretty constant in drive length, catch and finish angle, but I do think that the stats point towards one thing and that is ramping up the force too fast at the catch. Look at the correlations. Larger slip, lower average and peak force and work per stroke point to a most efficient stroke when I am not pushing too hard. The odd one out here is the peak force angle.

I also used the Quiske pod to measure seat speed and try to correlate that to efficiency. I recorded three full lake lengths, and from each stretch I selected strokes at 20, 22 and 24spm. Here are the charts:

Stroke Rate 20:

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Stroke Rate 22:

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Stroke Rate 24:

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I am glad my strokes are so consistent and all curves look nearly identical, but it doesn’t help with the analysis. Only at 20spm there is a clear difference between the red curve and the two others. The red curve has

  • Lower seat speed early in the drive and a lower boat acceleration early in the drive
  • A shorter period where the seat doesn’t move around the finish

In this chart, in particular the recovery in the blue curve seems inefficient. I am hesitant to look at the boat speeds as I haven’t correlated it to average power yet. I am conscious though that this blue curve corresponds to the first Rokle – Sirka stretch, where I was most fanatical in trying to be slow around the finish (doing a “Drew”). One has to bear in mind though that all this was done at low boat speeds and low stroke rates. At full 1k sprint speed and 35spm the recovery dynamics looks totally different, and both boat drag and seat acceleration are much higher. Still, I am sceptical.

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Jun 19 2018

Monday / Tuesday – Steady and hard intervals

Monday

Monday was a hectic day as we had the CEO of my company doing a site visit. My 8 minutes of fame consisted in demonstrating one of our projects in our flight simulator. The CEO was friendly and relaxed, and asked very good questions, so that was good.

At around 5pm, with the CEO back in his business jet and the site happy, I left the office to go to the rowing club.

I rigged my single (the double was already taken care of by lovely Romana) and joined our Masters E pair for a light steady state row.

I rowed up to Rokle, turned around, rowed 100m back and waited for the pair. They passed me and told me they were rowing up to the castle because of the chop.

Chop? What chop?

Allright, I turned again and followed. It wasn’t hard to catch up with them. We turned at Veveri castle and I took the lead in the tailwind. Managed to row about 500m of clear water between me and them, then returned to the rowing club. A nice, light session.

Tuesday

Rowing in the morning before leaving to the airport. I did feel the accumulated fatigue of the race weekend, but decided to push ahead and do the 3/2/1 minute intervals at 26/30/34 spm, the ones that I crashed on recently.

Today there was real chop, so I rowed up towards the castle again.

Right when I wanted to start the first interval, I had a little boat incident. Apparently, I hadn’t entirely tightened my bowside forestay on Monday, and the screw fell out at the first pull at 26spm. I stopped to check and think, and then continued to push on. The forestay was not attached to the boat any more, but it seemed to stay in place, and I knew that in theory the oarlock angle should stay constant without the support of the forestay. After all, I am not that strong. Definitely not a rigger bender.

That’s the theory, but it took a few awkward strokes holding the grip on my bowside arm a bit too tightly before I believed it would work in practice.

I was a bit conservative in the 30spm part of the first interval, but it all worked out well. I turned at the castle, after the first interval, and proceeded to do the second one. Also that one was completed without more drama. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a hard interval.

It starts gently at 26, but already those three minutes start to wear you out. Then you go up to 30spm and there are a couple of things you need to watch:

  • Keep the boat run
  • Keep the Work per Stroke in the right range, not too high, not too low
  • Make sure stroke rate doesn’t drop below 29spm (I do accept 29.5)

And then, after about 60 strokes, when you are already tired, you have to rate up and basically do the equivalent of a 4 minute race pace piece.

On Rowsandall.com, I used the new feature to auto-detect intervals and it worked pretty well:


Workout Summary - media/20180619-0710240o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|10433|56:06.0|02:41.3|141.0|21.8|149.3|187.0|08.5
W-|04294|18:15.0|02:07.6|216.5|27.6|172.3|187.0|08.5
R-|06143|37:51.0|03:04.9|104.5|19.0|138.1|187.0|07.9
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|00074|00:20.2|02:15.6|216.1|27.0|146.4|151.0|08.2
02|01363|05:57.4|02:11.1|228.0|27.1|169.8|185.0|08.4
03|01433|05:59.7|02:05.5|214.8|27.5|172.3|187.0|08.7
04|01423|05:58.2|02:05.9|206.9|28.1|176.3|187.0|08.5

When I completed my training, there was some activity at the club, because we are hosting the rowing event of the Czech Academic Games. There were a couple of good scullers from Prague, former Juniors world championship finalists and winners, so I informed them about our Virtual 2k race, that they could complete while competing. I hope it caught their interests. Nothing stimulates a Brno based competition better than a couple of fast times recorded by some folks from Prague.

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bokeh_plot(11)

Jun 7 2018

Back at old level? Lots of charts to try and figure that out

Monday

A 45 minute strength workout in the gym close to work. I went after work, which was a mistake. It was too crowded and I had to improvise the exercises because some stations were occupied. Must take breaks from work to work out here, then get back to work.

Tuesday

A long steady state session in the single, and a good one.

I had no difficult holding 180-190W, and the pace was good enough. I tried to work on light catches (and not digging too deep). At the end I did a start plus 20 strokes for fun, and then another 20 strokes around race pace. In the bit between 21 minutes and 33 minutes I was chased by a launch and an eight full of juniors from the Lodni Sporty club, including a fresh European Champion. Not sure what they were doing, but they stayed behind me, and around 28 minutes they stopped for technical discussions.

Catch and finish angle look a little inconsistent, and getting less layback when I get tired.

I was happy with the Work Per Stroke values, having been lower in the “recovery from illness” sessions.

Pretty good length. I am not happy with the average value for Effective Drive Length. In the boat, I saw values around 92 degrees, and yes according to the workout stats the Median is at 90 degrees.

Wash and Slip are in decent ranges, so nothing to worry about.

Box Charts

The rowsandall.com box charts are an underestimated source of insights. Just select a date range, a boat type, and select similar workouts, and there is a lot to learn from the charts that you create. Here is a set of workouts in the single for April, May and early June.

May 13 included a race, and after May 27th is me recovering from illness. You can see how the Work per Stroke value slowly climbs back to normal levels.

The Power values are interesting as well. So, on May 13 I raced, so ignore that session. May 7 was a sprintervals session. I guess the power ranges are influenced greatly by what kind of session you do.

Total drive length. Seems to be increasing slightly over the past two months. So it is definitely not going in the wrong direction.

Interestingly, I cannot say that about the effective drive length. This one seems to be stagnating.

Distance per stroke is an interesting metric for many reasons. One, because it can be measured without the need of specialized equipment. All you need is pace and stroke rate. Second, because it is one of the few ways to look at check and boat run. This one seems to have jumped to consistently higher values since my illness. I guess the slow steady state gave me time to work on the recovery.

Finally, peak for angle, a good way to see where the accent of my pull lies, close to the catch or more towards the finish (better). I see improvement.

Flex Charts

Once you see some trends in the box charts, it is always good to check your theory using the Trend Flex chart. Another rarely used gem of rowsandall.com, if I may say so.

Here, for example, I am plotting the Distance per Stroke vs Stroke rate, each circle being a separate workout, with the lighter circles showing the earlier workouts and the darker ones the more recent ones. That shows that I shouldn’t claim victory too early, as most circles seem to be falling around some “natural” relationship, and all that has happened is that I have been rowing lower stroke rates recently.

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May 29 2018

Monday – Another recovery row & Tuesday – Strength

Monday

A hot day, but it was a holiday in the US so I could go to the rowing club early (because no calls with our US colleagues) so I had no excuse to put in another recovery row.

Before the row, I discussed my training plan for this week with our head coach. He confirmed, that after an absence of almost 2 weeks and illness, it is wise to stay at Steady State for a week. He said I even had permission to do “improper” (his words) steady state. He means: Err on the light side.

Just to see where I stand, I used rowsandall.com to compare Heart Rate response and Average Power for three “Steady State” sessions of approximately the same duration:

The May 5 workout is my “healthy” baseline. Sunday saw a drop from 160W (median Power) to 136W and heart rate up from 145bpm to 157bpm. On Monday, I was at 138W and 146bpm.

I used the Quiske sensor again, but on the other side. I wanted to look at the stroke curve. Unfortunately, I must have slightly misaligned the sensor compared to Sunday, and I didn’t get data I could compare.

I am able to look at total stroke angle though. Here’s a comparison, taking care to compare the same intervals:

It was slightly more choppy on 5/27 than on 5/28. Still, I was a bit longer according to both the Empower and the Quiske sensor. The Empower records a length differnce of 1.5-2 degrees from Sunday to Monday. Quiske, on the other hand, shows a shortening of 3.4 degrees going from the left hand to the right hand. So yes, I take that as a pretty strong indication of asymmetric rowing. I’ll look into this more and see if the picture remains like that.

Here are the charts (blue = Monday, green = Sunday):

Boat Acceleration. Green – Sunday, Blue – Monday
Oar angular speed. Green – Sunday, Blue – Monday

Just as a check, I added a piece that I recorded on Monday, but in contrast to the two recordings I compare above, it was rowed in tailwind conditions (cross tailwind).

Oar Angular Speed. Green – Sunday head crosswind, Blue – Monday head crosswind, Red – Monday tail crosswind

So according to Quiske my right hand gets a little longer in tailwind. Looking at Empower data for the same part of the row, my length doesn’t change compared to the headwind conditions. So does that suggest that I am more assymetric in headwind conditions?

Tuesday

Today, I decided to try out a new, small fitness center that opened a stone’s throw away from my office. It’s literally a 5 minute walk from the moment I drop my pencil to the moment I walk into the changing room. I can say I should really make use of this facility. It has 2 Model E ergs with PM 4 monitor. Here are a few pics of the possibilities for a strength workout:

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And the best thing is, to use this facility costs only CZK 80 (about 4 USD) per workout.

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