steady state

Instead of running, I went on a strawl with my wife Romana and my son Robin. We took the bus to Ořešín and hiked back. It was a very nice walk, through the village of Jehnice, then through the forest and along a few ponds back to our house.

So, enough outdoors and nature to be able to tolerate the 3×20 minutes on the erg, which by this time in the preparation phase are really becoming boring.

Nothing special to report about this session. Sat down. Rowed 3×20 minutes and listened to a course. Stroke histogram and heart rate plot are below. After the third interval, I measured lactate: 1.4 mmol/L. It felt “medium”. I wouldn’t call this a “Watts came easy” session and I had to play a few mind games to negotiate with myself and keep the 200W, but it wasn’t too hard.

This was the last session of a high volume week. The target was missed by a whopping two hours because of the travel and the show. Still, I am looking forward to a lighter week. I am planning it now. Need to take note of the wind forecast too, so I can plan my OTW sessions on the low wind days.

Saturday

The plan was to do some running training. This was a work day at the club. At 9, a few members would take our new dock out of storage. Then there would be a window of two hours during which there would be some preparation work for only a few people, and then we would be building our dock.

It turned out differently. The turn-up was so high, that it actually made sense to do some garden work in the “forest” behind our club house. So we cleaned up plastic bottles, cigarette packs, and other junk that people throw over our fence, then collected dead wood and leaves. That turned out to be a two hour quite physically heavy exercise. Sort of a very long circuit training. Raking the leaves on piles. Putting the leaves in big bags. Hauling the bags around the club house, empty the big bag on a big pile. Start again.

The two hours training window was filled with this exercise. At least we got our job done.

Then we concrete arrived and we could start building the pontoons. Unfortunately, everybody was busy and nobody was taking pictures. We bought very nice Easyfloat pontoons from Belrive, three two by six meter pontoons, each weighing 243kg and with a buoyancy of more than 2000kg (150 kilo per square meter). Here’s a picture from the easyfloat website, to give you an idea:

The work proceeded amazingly quick. Last week, we have built two concrete “cubes” for the ramps. As we approach our water from a very steep hill, we had to build ramps leading to the dock. Because we are on reservoir with varying water levels (winter level being 6 to 10 meters lower than summer levels, and plus or minus one meter easily during the rowing season), the entire design had to allow for the different water levels. The way this was  designed left very tolerance for misplacement of the ramps. Luckily, everything turned out to fit with millimeter precision.

Now we only have to wait for the water level to rise. From Friday to Saturday, we measured a 40cm rise. We have another 3m to go. That meant we could build the dock with dry feet, but we have to wait one or two weeks to start using it. I guess we wish for rainy weather. The dock is now resting on pillars which we built from old car tyres.

I am so much looking forward to rowing from a normal, low dock. Our old one was a horrible steel and barrels construction that scratched boats, and was way too high for launching a single.

Sunday

A 3x20min on the erg. I had planned for a 4x20min session, but I measured 1.9 mmol/L after 3x20min at 195W, so I called it a day. It’s supposed to be a light week.

Funnily, until the start of the third interval, I had the feeling I was OK and would do 4 intervals. Then, in the beginning of the third interval, I had difficulty holding 195-200W without going to too high perceived effort. That improved during the interval, but resulted in the mentioned relatively high lactate level (my target is to be between 1.2 and 1.5 for these sessions).