Oct 21 2017
Recovery Row in the Double
I haven’t exercised in a while.
Sigh.
I returned from my business trip to Egypt feeling well and happy that I didn’t get the food poisoning that they had warned me about. On the evening of my return trip, I did a steady state row on the erg, but I stopped after 30 minutes, because Romana came home and I wanted to greet her more than I wanted to exercise.
Then the misery started. The next day, on Friday, I am having lunch with my team and all is well. An hour later, I visit the bathroom and get a nasty surprise. Another hour later, I am not feeling well. Feeling feverish. I decide that I need to drive home as soon as possible. I spend the rest of the day at home, on the couch, under a blanket, feeling miserable. Terrible headache, belly not good, and fever. I did manage to drink 2 liters of disgusting salt/sugar water mix that I made for myself.
Over the course of the weekend there are ups and downs. I am now eating only light food. After every meal I have to lie down for an hour because of belly cramps. I start taking activated charcoal pills. It seems to slowly get better. On Monday, I work from home. On Tuesday, I feel strong enough to go to work. All seems well.
On Wednesday, I am packing to go to Sofia, Bulgaria, but I am on a 45 minutes fine, 15 minutes of terrible cramps interval session. That lasts the entire morning, and I decide to take the chlorine containing pills that claim to clean my intestines leaving the good gut flora alive.
I depart to the airport, telling myself that if things get worse, I can always turn around before boarding and just go home. But this is an important trip.
My situation improves and I make the trip fine.
Friday, I am back, and it’s ups and downs again, but more ups than downs.
Today, Saturday, I even dared to take out a boat and row. I took our double together with my daughter Lenka.
It was a nice autumn morning. I took some pictures:
And the map:
It is good to be back among the living. Now I urgently need to review my training plans because ten days of travel and being sick does have an impact, and I think I should ramp up slowly and carefully.
Oct 22 2017
Training for Red Bull Head of Prague – turning an eight
So we signed up for this race, to be held next weekend.
The course is interesting:
Four kilometers downstream towards the center of Prague, then a U turn (in the eight) and finally two kilometers against the stream.
They also have a fun video with beautiful shots of eights racing into the great Prague skyline:
We will compete in the Mixed category. So on today’s session we decided to
First, we did a 2k warming up:
Then on to the 3k:
Workout Summary – media/20171022-1625510o.csv
–|Total|-Total-|–Avg–|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
–|Dist-|-Time–|-Pace–|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR–|-HR–|-DPS
–|03166|12:47.0|02:01.2|000.0|27.9|173.3|185.0|08.9
W-|03000|11:08.0|01:51.5|000.0|28.0|173.5|185.0|09.6
R-|00166|01:38.0|04:57.7|000.0|26.5|167.7|185.0|03.8
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00500|01:50.6|01:50.6|000.0|27.2|150.4|169.0|10.0
01|00500|01:51.5|01:51.5|000.0|26.6|171.7|174.0|10.1
02|00500|01:50.0|01:50.0|000.0|27.3|175.3|178.0|10.0
03|00500|01:51.8|01:51.8|000.0|27.9|178.7|181.0|09.6
04|00500|01:52.2|01:52.2|000.0|28.9|181.1|183.0|09.2
05|00500|01:52.7|01:52.7|000.0|30.2|183.1|185.0|08.8
That was a good workout, and I think we found a sustainable pace for the 6k, especially given that we have some team members who are significantly older than I.
The next part was trying out the turns, which looked pretty spectacular as a few times we came quite close to one of the big tourist boats, our cox demanded a turn in three, two, one, and we did a water splashing turn. Quite a few of the tourists took pictures. Here is our course:
We had the feeling that we were improving, but looking at the close-up charts, the turn took us around 30 seconds every time. In the first one, we started going straight too early, though.
That was fun! Doing the turn, we have to remember to lean on stroke side so that the bow side can take quick strokes and actually turn the boat, while we on stroke side are trying to keep our blades and oarshaft under water and help. Big risk of ejection crabs for us on stroke side.
There was another fun aspect of this row. I recorded it with my NK SpeedCoach, then used the NK Android app to download the data to the phone and send it to rowsandall.com by email. By the time I was showered, I had the workouts on the site, including the charts, and I have been able to write this blog including the charts on the iPad, without the need to boot up the computer to run the LiNK PC software. There had been a NK app for over a year, but it didn’t export the Empower metrics, nor did it export coordinates. I like a little map with my Row, and I like to look at Empower data (although today they weren’t there, as the eight is not equipped with Empower oarlocks). The export worked like a charm. I find that very cool, although I must say that the user interface in the app is not the most intuitive. (Which may be a case of the pot telling the kettle it’s black, as the rowsandall.com user interface has been criticized as well.)
By sanderroosendaal • rowing • 0 • Tags: eight, lake, NK, OTW, rowing, training