training

myimage (3)

Jan 3 2017

Abandoned session because of exploding head

I have the flu. Nothing very serious so far, and I did yesterday’s steady state session without problems.

Today, however, I didn’t feel fully recovered from the intervals. Which is weird.

The training plan asked for a 4x2km session. Haven’t done this one in a while. I went to the erg room with a plan. Take it easy. Just row 26spm and take whatever pace you get. It is more important to complete the session than to row it at PB pace.

That was the theory. I set off at 26spm and used the free speed I got from my erg video analysis advice report. Which got me through the first interval at 1:52 average pace, and half way through the third one. That was the point where my head exploded. Not literally, of course, but this was how it felt.

So let’s see how I feel tomorrow.

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IMG_1255

Jan 2 2017

Happy New Year! – Ergometrics

First, I would like to wish all my readers a happy, healthy, and successful new year, without injuries, and full of quality training and successful racing.

I have spent the past few days in Berlin with the Roosendaal clan (my parents, my two sisters, the children and significant others). Of course this was more about sightseeing, visiting museums and attractions, and eating than about training. Still, one of the best ways of sightseeing in a busy city is an early morning run (Strava link).

Here are a few pictures:

Today, it was back to work. I spent the morning shaking hands and wishing my colleagues a happy new year. I kicked off a few things and around lunch time I took a break to go to the lake.

There is a thick layer of what looks like good quality ice there, and many people were ice skating. I have a slight cold, though, so instead of going on the ice I headed to the erg room of our rowing club.

Before doing a nice hour of steady state on sliders, I took a few minutes to video myself erging. For Christmas, Greg gave me a video analysis from Row Analysis, so today I happily taped markers on various places on the erg and on myself, and then made a ten stroke video. The raw result is here:

I hope the video is high quality enough for the analysis. I have uploaded it to the Row Analysis site and am now waiting for the results. Will keep you posted.

The hour of steady state was very nice. It is so comfortable to do this on an erg on sliders. It is easier on the back, and the stroke is longer (because you pick up the acceleration of the flywheel earlier in the stroke) and for me it is easier to hold a pace than on the static erg. If the row club had PM5 monitors for their ergs, I would work out there more often, even though the time lost driving there and back is not insignificant.

Edit

Adding a few video snapshots.

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Syrovice_2016_4_

Dec 26 2016

Mud Baths

Sunday

Just a short 12k on the erg. Related to sports, I spent a considerable amount of time with the Polar A360 that Lenka got for Christmas. It’s a cool watch, with optical heart rate measuring at the wrist, but the first synchronization and actualization takes ages. In the leaflet, they say you can get up and running directly from the Android Polar Flow app. No way. The initial sync and update takes so long that the bluetooth disconnects. In the end I had to do it through the USB cable.

We had quite a lot of snow on Christmas Eve. Robin made a Darth Vader snowman:

On Christmas, temperatures were suddenly much warmer, and during the day all the snow disappeared.

Monday

With Lenka and Iva, we participated in the Christmas run in Syrovice. The girls ran the 5k (one loop) and I did the 10k. As you can see from the pictures, it was quite a muddy event.

A village run event

You should have seen the girls’ faces when I sent them of for the warming up run. They clearly weren’t happy that they had to run in this mud with their clean pink running shoes and matching running clothes. 🙂

This is nothing. Behind those trees it got really muddy. Note the Trabbi on the left

I didn’t have very big plans for this run. I was just there as a chauffeur for the girls, and planned to take it easy. Of course, this plan was discarded when I met Eduard, a Masters rower from my club, at the start line.

I had to finish ahead of him.

Still, I managed to take it easy in the first round. In the muddy ascent through the vineyards, I managed to get a bit ahead of him. With his big posture, he has more difficulty than I taking over in the crowd.

After the muddy vineyards, the run continues on asphalt. During the short climbs I was much faster than the people surrounding me.

The run then loops back towards the village, where you get to run the steps towards the church, a short but pretty steep climb. Then immediately down again, and on to the second loop.

I knew Eduard was somewhere behind me, but I had no idea if he was ten seconds or two minutes behind. That kept me running at quite a high pace. In the vineyards, a couple of runners passed me, and every time I was worried it would be Eda. It wasn’t him. On the asphalt part, I took back the runners who had passed me in the vineyards.

The second time to run the church steps. Now it really hurt, but luckily, after that it’s just a few hundred meters to the finish.

I crossed the line in 42:25 and not long after that I heard the speaker announce the fastest woman. Oh, that’s good! It doesn’t happen very often in running events that I don’t get chicked. 🙂

So, what was supposed to be an easy run may have turned out to be one of my better runs of this winter.

https://www.strava.com/activities/811673254/overview

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challenge

Dec 23 2016

Holiday Half Marathon

My last erg row of the Concept2 Holiday challenge. I thought about doing a full marathon, but I realized I have some other stuff I need to get done today. So just a HM. At Steady State pace.

I dialed up 21097m and just rowed free rate, listened to the radio, and took long water breaks at 14km and 7km to go. One great thing about rowing in the basement in winter is that the water gets nice and cool, and after a long row it tastes so good.


Workout Summary - media/20161223-1420110o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|21097|88:46.0|02:06.2|190.8|22.4|167.0|177.0|10.6
W-|21097|88:47.0|02:06.3|190.2|22.3|166.7|177.0|10.6
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|177.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|01000|04:04.0|02:02.0|186.7|21.1|136.7|152.0|11.7
02|01000|04:05.5|02:02.8|199.8|21.8|157.7|163.0|11.2
03|01000|03:55.4|01:57.7|202.9|22.2|165.2|169.0|11.5
04|01000|03:59.2|01:59.6|204.7|22.3|168.5|172.0|11.2
05|01000|03:58.0|01:59.0|207.6|22.7|171.3|173.0|11.1
06|01000|04:00.2|02:00.1|201.8|22.5|172.4|175.0|11.1
07|01000|03:58.3|01:59.2|206.8|23.1|174.8|176.0|10.9
08|01000|05:17.8|02:38.9|193.6|22.4|163.9|177.0|08.4
09|01000|04:03.1|02:01.6|195.0|22.4|173.0|175.0|11.0
10|01000|04:02.9|02:01.4|195.3|22.5|173.1|175.0|11.0
11|01000|04:02.3|02:01.2|196.7|22.9|174.1|176.0|10.8
12|01000|04:05.3|02:02.7|189.7|22.7|172.5|174.0|10.8
13|01000|04:03.4|02:01.7|194.0|23.1|173.2|174.0|10.7
14|01000|04:03.5|02:01.7|194.3|23.2|173.5|175.0|10.6
15|01000|05:22.3|02:41.2|175.7|21.9|160.6|173.0|08.5
16|01000|04:11.3|02:05.6|176.7|22.0|166.0|167.0|10.9
17|01000|04:09.6|02:04.8|179.8|22.1|166.8|169.0|10.9
18|01000|04:05.6|02:02.8|188.9|22.5|168.9|171.0|10.9
19|01000|04:06.0|02:03.0|187.9|22.6|169.3|171.0|10.8
20|01000|04:01.2|02:00.6|199.4|23.3|171.6|173.0|10.7
21|01000|04:44.2|02:22.1|138.2|20.8|154.5|173.0|10.1
22|00097|00:27.7|02:22.8|127.6|20.0|149.2|150.0|10.5

And here are the great pictures that tell you all about the row.

You can see quite clearly how stroke rate goes up and drive length goes down when I get tired. Not good.

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myimage (40)

Dec 20 2016

Dirty Dozen and One More

Another week where I allow myself one Anaerobic Power workout. Today, I repeated the 13×45″/1′ workout of last week. After that, I did something special to capture stroke power curves, but more about that in the next blog post.

Here are the rowsandall.com plots for this workout. It was hard work. Somehow, I didn’t have the energy to go deep.

The workout editor has a little difficulty getting the averages right for these short intervals. On the PM5, I saw around 220-225 meter for the full 45 seconds, so I believe below statistics are underreported.


Workout Summary - media/20161220-1850090o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|05159|22:45.0|02:12.3|241.0|26.4|164.6|179.0|08.6
W-|02796|09:45.0|01:44.6|335.1|29.2|163.8|177.0|09.8
R-|02376|13:00.0|02:44.1|141.1|23.5|166.5|177.0|02.5
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|00228|00:45.0|01:38.5|341.2|30.8|138.5|162.0|09.9
02|00215|00:45.0|01:44.9|333.4|28.7|161.6|170.0|10.0
03|00214|00:45.0|01:45.2|348.6|28.6|166.8|174.0|10.0
04|00218|00:45.0|01:43.0|348.8|29.6|164.3|174.0|09.8
05|00217|00:45.0|01:43.8|347.3|29.3|164.0|175.0|09.9
06|00216|00:45.0|01:44.3|336.7|29.8|165.0|175.0|09.7
07|00223|00:45.0|01:41.1|342.2|29.4|169.1|176.0|10.1
08|00220|00:45.0|01:42.2|322.2|28.9|167.1|175.0|10.2
09|00209|00:45.0|01:47.6|307.7|28.2|165.2|173.0|09.9
10|00216|00:45.0|01:44.2|339.3|29.3|167.0|175.0|09.8
11|00209|00:45.0|01:47.8|321.2|29.2|167.0|174.0|09.5
12|00207|00:45.0|01:48.6|316.9|28.2|166.6|174.0|09.8
13|00205|00:45.0|01:49.9|351.3|29.8|167.2|177.0|09.2

However, a week ago I had more than 200m less, so apparently I worked harder today!

Click on the images to open the gallery. Also, according to the images, I did 15 Watt more.

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bokeh_plot (71)

Dec 18 2016

Sinner Man

This famous 10 minutes song by Nina Simone is part of one of my go-to playlists for long erg pieces. I always cheer up when this song starts, because I know the next 10 minutes will go by in a blink. It is really good erging to this song.

And the repeated call for “Power”, where Nina probably didn’t have erg power in mind, is a good reminder of what rowing is about.

Today I did 4x5km at one minute rest. I played a bit with stroke rates following the 1000/750/500/250m sequence that is my favorite of this fall.

Measured lactate after 15km: 1.7 mmol/L.

Measured lactate after 20km: 1.8 mmol/L.


Workout Summary - media/20161218-1120080o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|20300|86:20.0|02:07.6|187.1|20.5|157.8|169.0|11.5
W-|20000|82:21.0|02:03.5|189.2|20.5|158.0|169.0|11.9
R-|00303|04:00.0|06:36.4|129.3|20.4|152.6|169.0|00.8
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|05000|20:37.1|02:03.7|184.5|19.6|150.0|165.0|12.3
02|05000|20:20.9|02:02.1|193.0|20.3|162.1|169.0|12.1
03|05000|20:28.2|02:02.8|190.1|21.1|161.5|168.0|11.6
04|05000|20:54.9|02:05.5|189.3|21.0|158.5|166.0|11.4

I didn’t row the last interval slower. It took 58 seconds to do the lactate testing after interval #3, and I sinned and took a drink and another 20 seconds rest before I set off for my final 5k.

The now officially released version of Painsled, (link to iOS App Store) behaved well, except for one small glitch. Even though in the settings I have not activated Sync to Strava, when hitting “Export” in the app, it exported my workout as a “ride” to Strava.

I had to delete it there, because when I take the route through Rowsandall.com, the stroke data are exported better (leading to more meaningful graphs on Strava), and the session is exported as a row, not as a ride. Otherwise, I strongly recommend this excellent app for anybody who rows with a PM5.

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loft--v4244385-1280

Dec 18 2016

No fruit or vegetables were delivered

Thursday. A long version of the hotel gym workout.

15 minutes elliptical

15 minutes treadmill

15 minutes spinning

Followed by 45 minutes of weight lifting. It left me quite sore on Friday and Saturday, but that’s good.

Here is a photo of the view from the hotel gym. Exactly what I am staring at during the elliptical and treadmill part of the workout. There is a traffic light in front of the hotel, so one can study cars and trams driving past and waiting for the traffic light. Sometimes, fruit and vegetable delivery to the Carrefour Express on the corner coincides with my hotel workout. This time, such a highlight did not occur. I must have studied every detail of those roofs and of the brown building on the right during the past 7 years.

The plan for Friday was to cycle to work and come back with the car, which was waiting for me in the parking garage of our office. It was too cold and slippery to cycle. There were other priorities in the afternoon, so no exercise took place.

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