training

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Sep 22 2018

The Water is Dangerous

Thursday

A nice technique row in the double with Romana. The weather was nice with very flat water when we launched. The only issue was low visibility because somebody was burning leaves or grass on the other side of the lake, and the smoke cloud covered a large part of the lake.

We rowed up to Rokle, and then back to Sirka through the middle of the lake and through the smoke cloud. Then we turned at Sirka and rowed back. When we were about 1km from Sirka, we saw the fire brigade rushing towards the lake. I thought somebody had called them because of the guy creating the smoke cloud.

A little later, the rescue service and the police sped across the lake in their speed boats. I started wondering. They sped to an area in front of Lodni Sporty rowing club, but then they moved to the beach around the 1km mark, roughly where we were rowing when we first saw the fire brigade.

A few minutes later, a helicopter arrived at the scene. We continued our technical/steady state row to Rokle and then turned. The beach at the 1km mark was now full of police, ambulance, fire brigade, and the two speed boats. At that time we thought it was a drill.

Not true. We were witnessing desperate attempts to save someone’s live.

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According to the news, a person of about 65 years of age was playing with a remote controlled model airplane. The plane fell into the water, and he decided to swim for it. Which cost him his life. Difficult to guess what happened, but a few meters below the surface, the water is not exactly warm.

Of course we didn’t know anything about that when we were rowing, and we were quite happy with the pace achieved at a relatively light pressure. Did I mention the water was quiet and mirror flat?

Friday

I nice weights workout in the gym. I found a free hour in the afternoon and did a thorough weights session. Increased the weights on some of the exercises.

Saturday

A 2km swim followed by a hot tub. We went to Kurim, where they have a 25m pool. I prefer a 50m pool, but this was a nice workout. The water was nice. It was good to be swimming again, and I got a very good workout.

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map

Sep 20 2018

Sander beats a 6k

Wednesday, another 6k effort on the program. I am doing a lot of them in the prep for the Uherske Hradiste regatta, and I am doing a lot of them now because I on Monday I will go on a nearly 2 week lasting business trip.

I had little hope of a good performance this Wednesday afternoon. I had slept well but short, and it has been busy at work. Also, I ate some crappy food on Wednesday afternoon (too salty) and I felt it. So I agreed with myself to not to fuss about it and just treat this as a good threshold training. I also decided to not watch the in-boat monitors (NK SpeedCoach, RowP) too much during the row and row on feel.

I arrived at the start in Rokle simultaneously with a group of Juniors in a pair, double and a single, and our head coach in a launch. They set off ahead of me, and I followed. In the first part I had to pass the guy in the single and then I got in the launch’s wake. Luckily, they stopped to do starts practices at the start of the 2k course, so at that point, about five minutes into the row, I was able to pass all of them and just had to deal with the head wind.

Interestingly, it all worked out great. I was super conscious of not pushing too hard and didn’t fuss when the power values were below 210W. I had a tiny crisis with 2k to go but was able to delay the “counting strokes to distract me” until 1k to go. The final bit of the 6k was into a turn, so the low power is artificial.

I actually didn’t know until after the shower that it had been a quite good row. My workouts were syncing during the shower, and after that, Rowsandall.com sent me a nice email.

Pretty nice! Perhaps I should program those notifications to be sent a little more often.

Here are some comparisons with Sunday’s row:

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And here are some details of Wednesday’s row:

Basically, you are looking at Work per Stroke, average drive force and Wash fade away as I get tired and rate up to keep the pace.

Here are some stats:

Workout Summary - media/20180919-1630480o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|06000|27:13.0|02:16.1|212.2|25.3|180.0|187.0|08.7
W-|06000|27:13.0|02:16.2|212.2|25.3|180.0|187.0|08.7
R-|00000|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|00.0|000.0|187.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00500|02:18.4|02:18.4|219.4|24.2|159.1|174.0|09.0 -- head wind
01|00500|02:19.9|02:19.9|213.0|23.8|175.4|177.0|09.0
02|00500|02:17.8|02:17.8|218.4|24.8|178.8|181.0|08.8
03|00500|02:20.2|02:20.2|215.2|24.4|180.6|182.0|08.8
04|00500|02:21.1|02:21.1|210.6|24.5|180.8|182.0|08.7
05|00500|02:35.7|02:35.7|199.6|24.0|181.2|184.0|08.0 -- including turn
06|00500|02:10.6|02:10.6|208.2|25.5|180.4|183.0|09.0 -- tail wind
07|00500|02:10.2|02:10.2|210.1|25.5|182.9|184.0|09.0
08|00500|02:10.1|02:10.1|210.9|26.1|185.1|186.0|08.8
09|00500|02:11.6|02:11.6|207.8|26.1|185.2|187.0|08.7
10|00500|02:07.2|02:07.2|223.4|27.7|185.6|187.0|08.5 -- pushing for virtual race
11|00500|02:10.9|02:10.9|211.2|28.4|186.7|187.0|08.1

In interval #10 above, I was also pushing for the virtual finish line of the virtual race on rowsandall.com:

https://rowsandall.com/rowers/virtualevent/307

I am just racing myself here, but managed to improve by 30 seconds. Next time, I should do the turn a bit earlier. I think I rowed about three strokes beyond the entry into the “turn polygon”.

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bokeh_plot (48)

Sep 17 2018

Another steady state row – Super Flat Water & Technique study

Another Steady State row in the single. It was beautiful weather. No wind at all. Mirror flat water. Great day to do rate ladders and work on technique.

Paying attention to pace at constant stroke rate I noticed significant speed improvements when focusing on sitting up straight on the catch and making sure I don’t open up the back too early. However, it’s difficult in the boat to check whether the speed gains are because I row at higher Work per Stroke (average drive force, stroke length) when focusing on this or whether I am improving boat efficiency. The following chart seems to suggest it’s primarily a power/length/force thing:

If I look at a measure for efficiency and do the statistics, I find a small positive correlation with:

  • Distance per stroke (logical)
  • Slip (higher value = higher efficiency)

I also find a small negative correlation with:

  • Peak force
  • Peak force angle (i.e. lower efficiency when peak force is closer to the bow)
  • Average force
  • Work per Stroke

I find no correlation whatsoever, i.e. pure random behavior on:

  • Drive length
  • Catch & Finish angle
  • SPM
  • Wash
  • Effective stroke length

It may be that I am pretty constant in drive length, catch and finish angle, but I do think that the stats point towards one thing and that is ramping up the force too fast at the catch. Look at the correlations. Larger slip, lower average and peak force and work per stroke point to a most efficient stroke when I am not pushing too hard. The odd one out here is the peak force angle.

I also used the Quiske pod to measure seat speed and try to correlate that to efficiency. I recorded three full lake lengths, and from each stretch I selected strokes at 20, 22 and 24spm. Here are the charts:

Stroke Rate 20:

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Stroke Rate 22:

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Stroke Rate 24:

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I am glad my strokes are so consistent and all curves look nearly identical, but it doesn’t help with the analysis. Only at 20spm there is a clear difference between the red curve and the two others. The red curve has

  • Lower seat speed early in the drive and a lower boat acceleration early in the drive
  • A shorter period where the seat doesn’t move around the finish

In this chart, in particular the recovery in the blue curve seems inefficient. I am hesitant to look at the boat speeds as I haven’t correlated it to average power yet. I am conscious though that this blue curve corresponds to the first Rokle – Sirka stretch, where I was most fanatical in trying to be slow around the finish (doing a “Drew”). One has to bear in mind though that all this was done at low boat speeds and low stroke rates. At full 1k sprint speed and 35spm the recovery dynamics looks totally different, and both boat drag and seat acceleration are much higher. Still, I am sceptical.

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acceleration

Sep 16 2018

A 6k beats Sander

Saturday – rest day. Watched some Rowing Worlds finals on the live stream. Exciting racing!

On Sunday, I watched the rest of the A finals. Incredible performance by the Norwegian single sculler. Synek a good second place. Mason at behind. Interesting. I think it says a lot about tapering and peaking for form.

After lunch, I headed to the lake for a 6k effort.

Not a story to be proud of. I started at Rokle and rowed towards Sirka. A few minutes in, I got hit by a pretty strong head wind. A few minutes later, the wind stopped again.

The water was nice and flat and apart from having to watch other traffic carefully to avoid bumping into pedalos, sailing boats and people relaxing on electric rental boats, the first 3k went by without any drama. I turned and found it hard to keep hitting my 211W target power.

Then, about 20 minutes in, it started to be really hard. In the chart you can see that that coincides with the end of a long stretch in red heart rate values. I decided to slightly ease up on power, but that didn’t seem to help much. With about 1200m to go, I stopped again, paddled for 200m and then finished the final 1k at target pace.

Not good.

The average normalized power for the workout is 210W, so that is not so bad. Not sure if I am tired or overtrained or both. Anyway, I need to repeat this 6k coming week.

I did set up an online race featuring a slightly shorter course than the 6k here.  I managed the course in 25:16 including the 200m of paddling.

I useed the RowP app again to measure boat acceleration. All curves except the red one were measured with head wind. The red curve represents a few strokes just before handing down.

I had the Quiske Pod under the seat, but due to some server error I can get the seat speed graph only for one segment:

Not sure what this chart means. I’ll need to collect more data.

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Sep 11 2018

Steady State & Another Hard Distance Row – Fail

Monday

A nice steady state row in the single. I am still having a head cold, but this was a nice sustainable effort. Pulled a bit harder in the second half of the workout as I was passing two guys from the Lodni Sporty rowing club in a double, then was not too much slower than our Men’s pair, and finally passing a Lodni Sporty guy in a single. I felt fast.

I also had to be at home on time to join my evening conference calls. 
Tuesday

While Monday’s training was in the evening, Tuesday’s had to be first thing in the morning, because of travel. Not ideal when you are scheduled for a hard 7k.

I skipped the hard 8k, so I thought it would be a good compromise to row this one as a hard 7500m. Target power 211W.

In contrast with Monday’s row, this time I remembered to take the Quiske oar pod, but I forgot to put on the heart rate belt. Too much gear!

The first part of the 7.5k went pretty well although it surprised me that I had to work hard to get the stroke power above 211W. Normally, the power comes almost for free in the first half of the hard distances and I am focusing on not going off too hard. This time I had to watch and make sure I was at the target power. Perhaps because the target power was 10W higher? Or perhaps because I was still fighting a head cold?

The first turn was after about 3km. I set off fiercely, happy that I had bitten the first part off of this long hard row. Now I was rowing into a head wind and after about 1.5km I just stopped. I had been watching the total stroke angle on the RowP screen and saw my stroke shortening, which usually leads to shortening. I worked pretty hard to bring the number up again but the long strokes also seemed to sap the energy out of me pretty fast.

Demotivated by the large number of meters left. Unhappy because not being able to keep the stroke angle up? I don’t know. I paddled for the rest of the stretch, during which I formulated the plan to “save” this workout. I would row the final 2km at the original power, and argued to myself that it would still count as a decent threshold workout. At least RowP told me that my stroke was pretty consistent:

The three lines are the average over the entire session, a short number of strokes at the beginning (light tailwind) and a short number of strokes at the end (light headwind), just before handing down.

During the recovery you can see a little acceleration bump which is typical for stroke rates 25spm and higher. Basically, the boat is floating the fastest during the middle part of the recovery. Here’s a comparison (of whole session averages) between head race pace and Monday’s steady state:

The x axis is a bit deceiving as it is a percentage of the stroke duration. A 25spm stroke is of course shorter in duration than a 20spm stroke. What I can see during the row is that on “good” strokes the deceleration troughs on both ends of the chart are relatively short in duration, while on “bad” strokes they are wide. Those are pretty good clues to watch technique during a row.

Here’s a comparison of my head race pieces so far:

The averages are calculated over the “on” strokes only (discarding the middle 1.5km of today’s fail). So I am slightly longer, faster and slightly higher power. At least that’s comforting. Not happy about today’s handing down, but I have another opportunity coming Sunday, when I will row a 6k, which is my race distance.

Now I am heading to the airport and will spend the rest of the week in Sofia, Bulgaria, without an opportunity to go to Plovdiv to watch the worlds, unfortunately. My training plan has anticipated this trip, so I have running and weights scheduled.

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acceleration2

Sep 10 2018

Last Week – Amber and Red

So the week started well with a hard 9k in the single. Still got an “amber” score on my training plan because it was harder than anticipated:

On Tuesday, I did a weights session. The first weights session after vacation, and as expected it created shoulder and breast muscle soreness for two days.

On Wednesday, we had the inaugural training for “Head of Prague”, in the mixed 8+. This one was easier and shorter than planned, although I suspect that I pushed the power a bit harder than what rowsandall.com estimates based on boat speed and stroke rate. We had some replacement rowers which definitely didn’t pull as hard as Martin and I in the “engine room”.Thursday’s steady state in the single was a very nice one. I had chartered Martin to be my sparring partner and we were about the same speed.

The last full lake stretch was interesting. I was experimenting with “waiting” a bit longer around the finish. Here is a plot of distance per stroke when I was doing my normal stroke:

Now the same thing with the much hyped “wait” around the finish:

I did take care to select the same stretch of lake. It looks like I gained 3 centimeters per stroke at very comparable stroke rates, but I was also adding a bit more Work per Stroke. Looking at OTW Efficiency, which is a measure of the power/velocity efficiency, there was a slight increase from 60.5% to 61.5% when I was adding a slight pause at the finish.

In theory, 3cm per stroke would mean 6.6m over a typical 2000m race, but the problem is that I expect the difference to become smaller as stroke rate increases to above 30spm. I think it is good to measure these things and to try and quantify them. Of course, it’s also possible that I was already rowing pretty well (?) or I was not executing the “improved” stroke well enough. Also a third explanation comes to mind. Perhaps this hyped slowness at the start of the recovery works better in crew boats, and perhaps the mechanism isn’t about boat acceleration but more about being in sync. A fourth explanation is that the wind slightly changed. Definitely, wind has a big effect on these metrics. It was only a mild wind on Thursday, but I had to discard the middle stretch of this workout as it was rowed with a very light tail wind, improving the distance per stroke and OTW efficiency numbers.

More to follow. I am really interested in improving my efficiency on the recovery.

I had a morning swim planned as Friday’s recovery cross training, but they are still reconstructing the 50m indoor pool and the outdoor pools have already restricted opening times (because the school vacations have ended). I also had some late conference calls (until 9pm on Friday evening) so there was no time for a light evening workout.

Also, I had started to develop a head cold. This changed my plans for the weekend. The original plan was to do a hard 8km in the single and then either a cross training or a row in the double on Sunday. I decided to go for a run on Saturday (causing muscle soreness because of not having done a running session in a long time) and go out in the double with Romana on Sunday.

Sunday’s row was a great one. In the first part of the workout we focused on our synchronization around the tap down (again using the pauses that I discussed above). In the final part of the row, we added a slight acceleration in seat recovery speed just before the catch. We didn’t do quite enough strokes with this feature to really nail it, and the negative consequence was that we lost a bit of our lightness on the catch, but there were a few interesting strokes. I recorded everything with the Quiske pod and RowP app and here are the charts:

The green line represents the stretch were we focused on our catches. We were slower than when we weren’t! However, I have to point out that even though most of the workout was with mirror flat water, the wind increased strength during the workout, and this final stretch was rowed in head wind conditions.

You can see a very slight delay of the boat deceleration just before the catch when we were focusing on the catches (green line), but the effect is blurred because we were rowing in the double and there were many strokes where the timing wasn’t 100%. In the next chart, I try to pick out one stroke where I think we nailed it:

The blue line is the one with the delayed deceleration before the catch, which is the right most part of the chart. The green line is a similar stroke (at same stroke rate and on the same stretch of the lake) when we weren’t working on the catches. The wiggles at the end of the pull are not good. You typically see them when the synchronization of the tap down and hands away between bow and stroke is not good.

In that sense, the double is a great boat to do these measurements. In bigger boats, one guy being out of sync doesn’t do much to the boat acceleration or deceleration, and in a single you cannot be out of sync and you’re only looking at your individual strokes.

Thinking about boat acceleration charts, another thing should be noted. When rowing at a steady average boat speed, the area of the positive (acceleration) part and the area of the negative (deceleration) part should always be equal. So, if I change something that makes me row more efficient, the boat should speed up a bit. Because at higher boat speeds, drag increases, thus increasing the deceleration. What I am trying to point out is that looking at boat acceleration charts one has to be very careful about comparing two curves if they are taken at slightly different boat speeds. In this case, you can see that although we are managing to delay the big deceleration (checking) of the boat just before the catch, we are paying for that by slightly higher deceleration during the first part of the recovery.

And again, we’re trying to look at very subtle things here, where we always have to bear in mind that the effect of wind or stream may completely overwhelm any slight speed benefits.

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Sep 3 2018

Riding the bus in a rowing uni and flip flops

You will have to read until the bottom of this post to understand the weird title.

It’s been a while since my last blog post. In the beginning of August, we went on a vacation to Italy and had a great time. I purposely did not do any planned exercise, but there was plenty of (sea) swimming, hiking, and bike riding. Nothing very intensive.

After my vacation I was back in the office for four long days. I did manage to get two rows in, one in the single and one in the double with Romana.

Then, I hopped on a plane to India and spent a week in Bangalore. Working days were long and I prioritized socializing with my Indian colleagues over any structured working out. It’s the off season.

Now I am back and it’s time to prepare for the head race season. I am looking forward to it. This year, I am doing three races over three weekends. I start early October with a 6k head race in the single, then, two weeks later, the Prague Head (mixed 8+), and finally the Novembervieren in Amsterdam, rowing a 4x with my old rowing mate and two other guys.

I did my planning for the 2018/19 season and the main events in the run-up to the first head race are long, hard distance pieces in the single. Using the power values given by the Empower Oarlock, these pieces give me good info on where I stand, helping me to select a sustainable power for the 6k head race. I started last Thursday with a 10k piece. I targeted 200W.

It was pretty winy and choppy, and it was hard. I had to row this in the gorge, but because the lake water level is low because of the the draught, we cannot row all the way up to Bityska, have to turn at the castle and thus I had to start and finish on a very choppy lake. You can see the power and pace starting to drop aroun 7500m when I returned to the lake. With 1000m to go, I decided to turn again and stay on the north end of the lake to avoid the worst chop (white caps).

I was slightly disappointed by the power levels, but I did hold a 198W average power, and that is including two 180 degree turns and rowing in the chop.

I spent the weekend cycling through the South Moravian vineyards with Romana (and getting very wet on Saturday, when we were riding in heavy rain).

Today, I arrived at the club around 6pm, and got ready for another hard distance piece. First I had to chat with our medal winners from the U23 European Championships (silver in the LW 4x-). There was a frenzy of activity on the club. The kids had raced in Litomerice and there was a trailer to unload and boats to wash.

I told everybody I was going to go out on the single and set off for the workout.

Pretty calm weather today. Just a slightly nasty crosswind making the 1k part on the south end of the lake a little slower. You can see that in the chart between 0 and 1000m and between 6200m and 7800m. The heart rate sensor had some difficulties in the first 1000m.

The average power was 211W (224W rPower, higher because the turns are lowering the average) and I liked how I rowed, especially the part between 4000m and 6000m where I think I hit a pretty efficient stroke, not too hard on the catch and with a clean tap down. The final 2000m were a struggle, and especially the final 500m required a bit of toughness to keep going.

That was a good 41 minutes of rowing.

I did a very slow cooling down. And that was the moment where I will explain the title of this blog post.

I arrived at an abandoned rowing club. The boat house was closed and locked. The club house closed and locked. The problem was that I had been so lazy as to leave the club house keys in my pocket, relying on the usual Monday evening rowers. Apparently the last one to leave hadn’t checked the dock or the rowing log book to see if there were any boats out there.

They did forget to clean up two pairs of slings, so at least I could get my boat out on dry land. Then I had to think. My car was on the parking, locked. All my other stuff was in the dressing room and I literally had what I was wearing, plus a seat pad, a half empty bottle of water and a NK SpeedCoach. Plus an empty battery that I had replaced in the Empower oarlock.

There was only one option. I climbed over the rowing club fence, hiked 15 minutes to the nearest tram stop, took tram 1 for a few stops, changed to trolley bus 30, then took bus 70 to the bus stop nearest to my house. I was wearing my sweaty rowing uni and flip flops. I didn’t have my bus card with me, nor did I have any ID. If I had been checked by a ticket control, I would have to explain and if they wouldn’t believe me they would probably take me to a police station. Luckily that didn’t happen. It was a bit unpleasant how people were looking at me, but I could deal with that. At home, I rang the door bell, and then explained the situation to my beloved wife. We got in her car and she dropped me off at the rowing club. Using her keys, I was able to get in, get a shower, clean up the boat, get into my car and drive home.

I guess I have learned a lesson and will not rely on ‘the usual training times’ any more, and take the keys with me in the boat as I do on my morning outings.

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Adding Empower Oarlock metrics for later analysis. I have lost an hour riding the bus in a rowing uni, so I have no time to do a deeper analysis. I think the values are reasonable.

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