Dec 19 2017
Swim and Hour of Power
Monday
My last day at work. I have a couple of vacation days to take up, so I can enjoy being free from now to the end of the year. Well, there are a couple of work related things that I’d rather finish before January, but I can do them from home, and I can enjoy prioritizing slightly differently.
I am doing a couple of a holiday challenges. The first holiday challenge is the classic Concept2 Holiday Challenge ($0.02 per kilometer rowed and logged on the Concept2 logbook goes to a charity).
The second Holiday challenge is to get the Christmas presents without visiting a mall. More about that later.
The third holiday challenge is to row a ranking distance every third day, starting with the Half Marathon and working my way systematically to the shorter distances. I did the HM on Saturday.
So Monday was still a day for a recovery training, and I decided to do no rowing. I opted for swimming, a sport that I rarely practice, mainly because I am a super slow swimmer.
So after work I headed to the municipal swimming stadium Za Lužánkami, built in the communist early 1980s.
When I first visited this pool 10 years ago it was in very bad need of maintenance. Now, the pool has been renovated and it is a basic 50m pool, mainly used by people who want to train.
I go swimming rarely, and hadn’t been in this pool for 10 years, so everything was new to me. I figured out that some lanes were reserved for swimming clubs. Then there were a few lanes for the general public, some of which had a minimum swimming speed of 2 minutes per 100m.
The problem was that I was slightly slow for the 2 min/100m lanes and slightly fast for the slower lanes. Anyway, I quickly figured out that 20 pools was achievable in under an hour, so I had my target. I swam 2km, and evening I fell asleep early.
Recovery training.
Tuesday
First full vacation day. In the morning, I worked a bit on a top secret rowing data project. That was fun.
Then I did some groceries. I figured that 9:30 was an ideal time for doing them. Hopefully, the wave of shoppers who wait in front of the store to open at 8am would already have left, and the pre lunch wave would arrive later. Turned out to be a good bet. I managed to get all the stuff I need for ur Christmas dinners, and only fresh stuff is left for later. Oh, and for the wines I intend to visit a local vineyard. No supermarket wine. I note that I visited a supermarket, not a mall. No anonymous place that looks the same all over the country.
Then it was time to head to the center of Brno to buy some Christmas presents, combined with a lunch, and a coffee in my favorite book store. Brno is a smaller version of Vienna, so imagine lots of Christmas markets, a really nice atmosphere. There is also an abundance of coffee houses with good Italian espresso, so everything was good.
Then it was time to row. The Hour of Power, today. After Saturday’s debacle, I made a point of not looking up my Personal Best and row at a conservative pace. Rowsandall.com suggested a range between 207 and 223W, with the higher number being the best I could achieve. As the calculation is based on very few rows, I ignored the upper limit and decided to start off at 207W, which was not by coincidence the average power of Saturday’s half marathon row. I was pretty skeptical I would be able to put in a good effort. I was still pretty sore from the swimming.
All went very well. I was able to gradually increase the pace. Work per Stroke was nice and constant. I think the images and the summary speak for themselves:
Workout Summary - media/20171219-1631110o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|15366|60:00.0|01:57.1|218.8|24.8|165.3|180.0|10.3
W-|15366|60:00.0|01:57.1|218.8|24.8|165.3|180.0|10.3
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|180.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|01519|06:00.0|01:58.5|208.6|23.3|144.7|156.0|10.9
01|01521|06:00.0|01:58.3|211.5|23.7|158.6|163.0|10.7
02|01515|06:00.0|01:58.8|208.6|23.5|160.3|165.0|10.7
03|01515|06:00.0|01:58.8|208.6|23.6|165.1|168.0|10.7
04|01525|06:00.0|01:58.0|213.0|24.1|166.3|170.0|10.5
05|01527|06:00.0|01:57.9|213.6|24.5|167.0|171.0|10.4
06|01530|06:00.0|01:57.6|214.9|24.7|167.9|171.0|10.3
07|01542|06:00.0|01:56.8|220.0|25.3|170.2|172.0|10.1
08|01561|06:00.0|01:55.3|228.3|26.0|172.9|174.0|10.0
09|01614|06:00.0|01:51.6|253.2|28.4|176.8|180.0|09.5
The irony is that after the row, I found out I was just 14 meters short of a PB. Just one Watt more and I would have equaled my PB. As a rower at my club used to say, I missed a PB by a “pičí chlup”. Do not google this, just believe me it is a very small margin.
Here is my Critical Power Chart after the row and the updated predictions:
Two easy days, then a 10k.
Dec 29 2017
Train rides, reading and a 6k
Tuesday – Steady State
We met at the rowing club. By the time everybody was ready for the 3x15min steady state workout, I had already done a 3km warming up.
Here is the entire workout in one chart combining warming up, main intervals and cooling down.
Heart rate data are slightly offset, because I recorded them separately and didn’t bother to adjust the time offset on the rowsandall.com site.
Wednesday – no training
In the morning, there were some chores around the house. Then we took the train to Pardubice to visit Romana’s mother. The entire trip takes two hours by car, and three hours by train and bus, but in this time of the year I prefer that. I spent most of the time reading. Before Christmas, I plundered the Math/Phys section of the Academia bookstore in Brno. In fact, I bought so many books that the one purchase earned me a lifetime 20% discount card.
The selection is not as great as Amazon.com, but their in-store coffee house has great espresso, and their Physics and Math section is serious, so there you go.
(A note to my American readers, who may be imagining something like the Barnes & Nobles coffee corner when I mention espresso in a bookstore: We are not too far from Italy, and all countries of the former Austro-Hungarian empire have a great coffee house tradition. We are in a different league here. Come over and try yourself.)
Thursday – 6k
Spent the morning at my mother in law, including lunch, and then a bus/train ride home. Again, lots of time for pleasant reading. The car alternative would have involved driving on wet snow and freezing rain. Arrived home around 4pm, so no excuse to skip the next Ranking Distance: 6k.
First, a nice long warming up. For the shorter ranking distances, a good warming up is important, and I have learned that it doesn’t hurt to do 20 minutes including some pretty tough intervals.
Then the main piece. The CP chart gave me the bounds. I was supposed to go faster than 230W (of course, because I had held 230W for 30 minutes just three days earlier) and the stretch target was 245W.
I decided to start at 230W, then accelerate at 3600m to go. I set the PM to record 400m intervals. From 3600m to go down to 1800m, the goal was 235W but I did go slightly higher.
As you can see from the summary, things continued favorably and I managed to finish in 292W, raising the average power to 244W and a total time of 22:32.4. (Somehow, the total time in the summary misses 2.4 seconds, probably because I skipped the final pull.)
So that was a good one, at 96% of my PB power. Looking forward to the 5k on Sunday, actually.
Friday
I did a recovery training in the pool. I swam 2km in about 50 minutes. This time it was slightly challenging, because the pool entrance was free today.
It was nice to see kids from poor families enjoying the water, but it also required a bit of flexibility from the endurance swimmers.
I almost felt like a seasoned swimmer, in this chaos. That was partly because I was swimming with swimming goggles.
By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: 6000m, 6k, concept2, erg, OTE, ranking piece, rowing, training