training

Mar 10 2016

Flywheel spinning again

A hard week

Training plan said it was a high volume week. At the same time, I was going to spend Monday to Thursday in Madrid, Spain, to represent my employer at a big industry trade show.

Sunday

Traveled to Prague by train, then flew to Madrid. In bed at 1:30 AM. No exercise.

Monday

Not a show day, but I had to review a large number of documents. Slept in a bit, then started working in my hotel room.

In the afternoon I went to the hotel gym (3×4 meters with a few dumbbells, a threadmill and a cycling machine. I did 10 minutes running on the threadmill, 10 minutes of pedaling, then 10 minutes of running. An interesting observation. In the first 10 minutes, my average heart rate was around 140 bpm. In the final 10 minutes, with the same threadmill slope and speed, my heart rate was around 120 bpm. Quite a significant difference.

After that I did 45 minutes of strength training in the hotel room, using body weight and elastic bands. All in all a pretty good session.

I also planned out the exercise for the rest of the week so I would achieve the prescribed volume and type of training.

Late business dinner.

Tuesday

Alarm clock at 5:45 to go running in the park. Woke up and discovered that it is still dark in Madrid at that hour. I hesitated for about 20 minutes, then went for a short run, not in the park but through the city center. The Madrilenos were getting into taxis or staggering home on foot. There were a few other runners. Did just 40 minutes instead of the planned 60 minutes recovery run.

A full day at the show, standing around, having meetings. Quite tiring and some adrenaline involved as well.

Late business dinner.

Wednesday

I had meetings planned from the opening of the show to the closing time, and then a dinner. This was the second blow to my plans. There was simply no time to exercise.

During the day the starting time of the dinner was moved to the right, and I was able to start my final meeting early, so that created a 40 minute slot for running. Took to the park and did two quick rounds. Quite far from the planned 12 km.

Red: Tuesday morning. Blue: Wednesday evening (two rounds)

We had a very nice dinner at La Cocina de Maria Luisa. An excellent restaurant with a very nice atmosphere, delicious food and excellent wines. In bed around midnight.

Thursday

Alarm clock at 4am to catch the plane. Ouch. This was hard, especially after the late dinner and the excellent wine.

On top of that, Madrid Barajas Terminal 2 is an “old” and inefficient terminal, and this Thursday there were large groups of weekend travelers, people who are not used to the airport security drill. You can’t blame them, but that in combination with super strict checks and very unfriendly and slow personnel, on top of my lack of sleep, made it a not nice experience.

Slept in the plane. Woke up to admire the Mont Blanc Massif, then fell asleep again. Sprinted through Frankfurt to catch the connection to Vienna. Train home. Arrived at three in the afternoon.

At four I sat down to do the planned 5x1500m/R5 workout. First time on the erg in almost 2 weeks.

I knew this was going to be hard. I have done this workout at a pace faster than 1:50/500m, but today I gave myself a soft target of 1:51.5 (i.e. a little slower than 6k PB pace). I managed:

1:50.7 – pretty ok – 0.8 seconds (per 500m) in the bank

1:50.8 – started to be hard – 1.5 seconds (per 500m) in the bank

1:51.5 – 1.6 seconds in the bank

1:52.7 – lost a bit.

The “seconds in the bank” is my number mind game. I basically count how many cumulative seconds (per 500m) I am under the average, so I know how much I can afford to slow down and still make the target pace. After just 4 hours of sleep, I just didn’t have the mental energy to do anything faster than the target pace that I agreed with myself. In the end the average pace for the session was 1:51.3.

I did it. That’s all I can say. Tired now.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 2 • Tags: 5x1500m, concept2, erg, OTE, rowing, running, training

Mar 5 2016

XC skiing in Paseky

I have spent the entire past week doing cross-country skiing in Paseky nad Jizerou. A morning “hard” (can’t call it fast, really) workout alone, and an afternoon “slow” workout with either my sister and/or Romana and the girls rowing team. Only on Monday and Wednesday I had to revert to one session a day. On Monday because I had to drive to Prague to pick up my sister. On Wednesday because the fourth day was planned as a “recovery” day.

Over 10 hours of cross-country skiing in 5 days, 11 hours if you count Sunday as well.

Here are two typical runs. It’s a pity that Google Earth doesn’t have “winter” pictures:

Heart rate and elevation for the “hard” runs. I guess this all qualifies as extensive endurance workouts, but as the terrain comes and there are shorter and longer climbs, as well as descents, I would say there is an “interval” element to it as well. Hard to qualify, but definitely good training effort and a lot of fun.

The Friday morning was an extremely short round. I had to dial in to an ad hoc urgent meeting just before the run and didn’t have more time before the next ad hoc urgent meeting started … Sometimes work can’t wait.

Here are a few pictures I made yesterday and on Thursday:

A very nice week. Now everything hurts. Today we drove home and I relax. Tomorrow is a travel day again. Another business trip. 🙁

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 1 • Tags: cross country, training

Feb 28 2016

First X country run

Drive to Paseky nad Jizerou. Lunch. Then a first round of cross country.

Temperatures above the freezing point but still perfect snow. Skating about 90% of the way. Nothing hard.

Strava link

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: cross country, ski, training

Feb 27 2016

The usual running

I haven’t run a lot from home lately. I have been doing my Saturday running session together with the girls, and that means running from the rowing club.

Today, the girls go to Olomouc for erg/lactate testing, so I was free to do what I wanted. I chose to run my “traditional” 12k loop. Somebody created a “two season” picture of the little pond next to the old railway station of Jehnice. I like it a lot, and it kind of illustrates why I love running in this area. There are short (but sometimes very steep) climbs, there are ponds and brooks. There are fresh water springs. It’s really a nice place to run.

I have no heart rate data today, because I forgot to “pair” it with the Garmin, after having unpaired it last week.

According to Strava, I have done this loop 15 times, but the last time I did it was in September.

https://www.strava.com/activities/503314803

My fastest ever time was 57:40 (March 2014). Today’s effort was 1:00:14. Not bad.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 3 • Tags: running, training

Feb 22 2016

A hard day / waterfall

The day started in an interesting way. I woke up at three, and couldn’t fall asleep again. Some work related issues, and such.

Drove to work early. Control light on dashboard alerted me that my headlight needed replacement.

Fine. I wanted to test that new Volvo shop in town anyway. This would be a nice simple thing, to check them out, and casually get a quote on some bigger repairs that I need to do.

I was welcomed by a “easy on the eye” blonde young lady. Offered coffee and some Swedish pastry. Got to admire a beautiful white Volvo 1800S in the showroom:

The friendly head mechanic took my car keys and promised to change the bulb in 10 minutes.

I waited 30 minutes. He came back to apologize. The light wouldn’t work. They were checking the cabling. Had already tried exchanging the left and right bulbs and other parts.

I agreed to leave the car there and they gave me a lift to work. Again, I casually mentioned the planned repairs and that I was interested in a quote.

A busy day at work. Lots of meetings. I didn’t drink enough water and too much coffee.

End of the day I called the shop. They apologized lengthily, saying that it was a mystery. The mechanic had spent the entire day trying to figure out what was wrong, but couldn’t find the culprit.

I need the car repaired soon. Should I pick it up and drive to the competition? Decided to give them one more day. See how they cope. I hope my car is not a training project for an unexperienced mechanic.

The session was the dreaded 3km/2.5km/2km waterfall. I have mixed results on this one. The door in my erg room has a record of a 1:51.0 average on slides (and on the rowing club, with people walking around behind my erg). The last session (this fall) was a 1:52.9 average. Decided to go for improving that. An “uninspired, grumpy Monday” approach to the session.

Averages were 248W/249W/250W for the 3000/2500/2000m respectively. That boils down to a 1:52.0 average (according to the PM) and a 1:51.9 average according to my spreadsheet.

It was hard work, but it wasn’t impossible. I think about this session as a “longish 6k with breaks” so I kept telling myself that pulling 1:52 was slower than my recent 6k. That helped me through the hard parts.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 3 • Tags: concept2, erg, intervals, L2, OTE, rowing, training

Feb 21 2016

Sunday: 3x20min

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).

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 1 • Tags: concept2, erg, OTE, rowing, steady state, training

Feb 14 2016

End of the volume week

Friday

The girls did a circuit training using their own body weight. I put an erg on sliders in the weights room so I could check them a bit.

I rowed for an hour, randomly interrupted to give instructions to the girls, or just to get some water.

Tired after a long, heavy week. Still, on the slides, my pace is 1 to 2 seconds per 500m faster in these steady state rows, than on the static erg.

Saturday

I was looking forward to this training. Some running with the girls. They would do a 4x3min with light jogging in between, and for me it would be a light jog all the way. Both were wearing heart rate monitors. It was interesting to see the differences. Girl A, the slower runner, albeit with better running technique, reaches 195 bpm while chatting during the warming up, and reached 205 bpm on the first interval. Girl B, the faster runner – but with worse technique, she wastes a lot of energy in up-down motions – had difficulty getting her heart rate above 165bpm in the first interval, and reaches 175 bpm in the subsequent intervals. A case of sprinter vs stayer … girl B prefers the longer distances and has difficulties to start fast.

Just fifty minutes.

Sunday

I decided to do only 3×20 minute of erging (vs 4×20 minutes). I would fulfill my training plan with that and my body is really longing for a rest day now. Did a 1402m warming up, so I could put some score on the 2016 Carole McNally memorial CTC, then 3x20min. I didn’t force the average to 200W, but let it evolve naturally.

Added a stroke histogram to my Painsled spreadsheet, just for fun. The left graph is just the 20 minute intervals. The right one includes the warming up, cooling down, and rest periods.

Here are the stats, from the same spreadsheet:

Heart rate was low on average. I am keeping track of lactate at 60min vs average heart rate and perceived exertion. All rows are between 190 and 202 W on average.

Left graph is heart rate vs Lactate. Not really a trend visible. The right graph is my subjective perceived exertion. It is a little suspicious because I write down this number already knowing the result of the lactate measurement … still I try to be honest and think about the number during the row, before I know the result. This measure correlates a lot better with the lactate measurement.

Next week: Low volume, a 1 minute test and a 6 km PB attempt. Tomorrow a rest day: Hurray.

By sanderroosendaal • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: concept2, erg, OTE, rowing, running, steady state, training

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training

Flywheel spinning again

XC skiing in Paseky

First X country run

The usual running

A hard day / waterfall

Sunday: 3x20min

End of the volume week

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