Jun 6 2017
steady state
Jun 3 2017
Friday morning – Rowing Nirvana
A 6:30 AM row before work. Steady state. Through the gorge/canyon, towards the castle and beyond. Steady state, playing with technique and rates 18, 20 and 22spm. I am also playing with Kinomap which is an app to sync video with your ergometer rowing. Potentially interesting to spice up boring OTE steady state rows coming winter.
Kinomap syncs with Strava and adds the map of your virtual row to Strava. Not sure if you also compete on the real segments. That would be a little unfair, because OTE you go a lot faster than on the water. Kinomap also exports basic data as ErgData does (stroke rate, distance, time, pace, power) so I will probably make a filter so people can use Kinomap data on rowsandall.com.
I made two videos, a short Warming Up and a long one of 48 minutes that I called Bird Song. Feel free to use them on your erg. I turned the GoPro around so that you have the same view as the rower (although from a slightly lower point of view). Here is a short preview. I have added canned bird song, because the GoPro was unable to capture the tweeting concert from the forest. There sure was a lot going on on that forest’s Twitter accounts:
And here is an accelerated run through the entire 48 minutes row. It takes only 12 minutes. The 48 minutes one is a great calming, hypnotizing video, though. I can look at the puddles forever.
Can you imagine how energized I arrive at the office after spending 80 minutes in such an environment?
The row itself was almost identical to the one on Thursday, although slightly shorter. The graph only shows the 48 minutes “middle” part. I recorded warming up and cooling down to different SpeedCoach sessions.
And a few box plots to compare Friday’s session with comparable sessions of the past months:
Pretty happy with the rowing.
Jun 1 2017
Thursday – Long and Steady Morning Row (birds singing)
This was a great row. The lake was a little choppy but all the canyon part was very flat, oily water. The birds were singing in the forest. It was 20 degrees C at the start of another tropical day.
I did 3min@18spm/2min@20spm/1min@22spm and just kept repeating that until I arrived at the little waterfall in Veverska Bytiska, where I turned around, did two minutes of rest to arrive at a multiple of three minutes on the elapsed time, and started again, repeating until I was 400m away from our dock.
And here are a few pictures to compare this workout with similar ones:
May 30 2017
Roeicorvée
Roeicorvée.
Corvée is the Dutch word for drudgery and roei is row, so roeicorvée would be rowing drudgery.
I wanted to row late in the evening, when the temperatures start to drop from the high of 30C. However, by the time I wanted to drive to the rowing club, the sky was black and the weather forecast looked like this:
Not so good, in other words. So I opted to row the steady state session on the erg. Roeicorvée. It was a good decision. The hailstones were the size of golfballs.
Kinomap
One of my Strava followers had talked about Kinomap. This iOS app shows you footage of rowing while you are pulling on the erg. I thought it would make the erg less boring so I installed it on my iPad and rowed the first 2k with it. That is, I played the only video of a 2k effort that was available on the free version and rowed while it played, covering s little over 2400m while looking at some single sculler on a brautiful lake.
For data capture, I had Painsled running in the background, but connecting Kinomap through BlueTooth actually threw out Painsled, as I discovered after the row. Bugger.
But Kinomap syncs automatically to Strava, except that it didn’t transfer heart rate data from the PM5. Here is the workout after import to rowsandall.com from Strava:
So I tried to look at pricing of Kinomap but couldn’t find a way to subscribeor find any pricing info on Kinomap’s website or in the app. I thought about connecting Kinomap through the USB cable (using the connector cable for the iPhone) but the connector csnle is very short and I had no way to support the iPad next to the PM.
So I rowed another 30 minutes of rowing drudgery, wiped off the sweat from the handle, my hands snd my face, dialled up a 5k and rowed on. Here are the PainSled plots. These ones are missing SPM values because Painsled has corrected a typo in the CSV column header (stokes instead of strokes) without informing the developer at rowsandall.com. I will fix that asap.
All really slow as you can see. Tomorrow: another row in the eight.
May 26 2017
Steady State in rough and not so rough conditions
Thursday evening
A quick steady state row in the single. It was very rough out there but rowable on the north part of the lake:
Friday Morning
A data drama! First, I forgot to switch on the recording on the SpeedCoach during the warming up, missing the first 2.5km. Then, half way through the row, the SpeedCoach screen flashed “Memory Full” at me. I remained calm, thinking that there would be another hour of recording left. Nope. The SpeedCoach memory fills up quickly when you use the Empower Oarlock. Missing the final 5km of the row.
Today’s conditions were pretty interesting. Mirror flat, dreamlike, in the north part, and a small ripples in the south part. The ripples were of the unpredictable kind, so they added a little bit of challenge to the rowing. It was fun to work on technique, trying to perfectionize some aspects of technique on the mirror part, then trying to take that to the unsteady part.
For the rowsandall.com demo in Racice, I had ordered a new tablet computer online, with a store that has pretty good next-day delivery and a pick-up facility very close to the rowing club. The promised delivery time was 8:00 AM on Thursday but they missed that and the order stayed in the “preparation” state. This morning I drove to the pick-up facility. While I was driving, they sent me an email with apologies and telling me that they would deliver on Sunday evening. No way. I went in and canceled the order.
Then drove to a brick-mortar store to quickly get a decent tablet, which proved to be harder than I thought. The good old brick-mortar stores are mainly just showrooms and when you tell the personnel that you want to buy a certain type, they walk you to a terminal where they fill out an on-line order for you.
In the end I found the only place where I could wave my credit card and just take the device with me, so I ended up buying an Apple Ipad Mini 4. I would have preferred a slightly bigger screen, but OK.
Talking about the screen of this thing, this made me go for the Apple products in the end. I am looking for a device to demo rowsandall.com, and it better look good when I show it to people. The iPads are really shining here.
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Coming Weekend
No training! I am off to Racice:
May 11 2017
Thursday – Steady State
Every day is different this week. Today it was a nice 21 degrees and sunny. Krocan and I went out in singles and we did a long steady state row. It was choppy when we started and flat when we finished. In the chop, I rowed away from Krocan easily. On flat water, the difference was smaller. I worked on sending the boat at the finish, tapping down clean and keeping the wash metric low.
You can see how the total drive length has a much smaller spread than the effective length.
On rowsandall.com, the wash numbers always look a bit worse than what I expect from the numbers I see in the boat.
All this focus on “wash”. Does it really pay off? I decided to filter my rowsandall.com OTW rows on “Steady State” and look at the median value of Wash and its standard deviation. The result is sobering:
I added the average wind strength as reported by the Dark Sky network to the plot. It seems the wind (and probably chop) is the biggest factor influencing the Wash value and its spread.
Jun 10 2017
Friday: a row in the desert
Wednesday
Travel from Minneapolis to Phoenix. No exercise. Adding a few more hours to my jetlagged body.
Thursday
A workout in the hotel gym. Basically 50 minutes of threadmill running with a slight incline. And 10 minutes on the elliptical.
Friday
Rowing in the USA, so the alarm clock went off at 4:15am. Drove from Deer Valley to Tempe, zipping down the I17 in about 35 minutes. I guess the early rowing is related to the heat. Yesterday’s max was 109 Fahrenheit. I don’t even want to know the conversion to Celsius, because it felt awful just walking to my rental car on the parking lot after the working day.
At Tempe Town rowing, I met with Dottie and a couple of other single scullers. They gave me a 2002 Sykes single built for Lightweights (72.5kg) and it was just fine. The boat had been broken and repaired and looked a bit battered but it was rigged well, it was responsive, and I managed to get a good boat run. I basically did two loops and a bit on the lake and then I had to leave.
Zipped back up the I17 to take a shower in my hotel, then back down that same I17 to make it to my 8:30 meeting at Sky Harbor. Next time I should book a hotel in Tempe, be closer to the rowing and commute to work. It would save a lot of driving time and eould allow me to sleep longer.
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: OTW, rowing, single, steady state, training