travel

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Nov 10 2018

Snow Shoeing and other alternative trainings

I spent Monday thru Thursday of this week in France. Monday and Tuesday were a short vacation with my old boss and our old team. The boss is going to retire, and we spent two days around his log cabin in the Pyrenees.

So my exercise on Monday was three hours of hiking with snow shoes, which is great fun by the way.

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After that, we enjoyed some hot springs in another part of the valley and we finished the day with an excellent dinner in a nice small restaurant in the Spanish town of Llivia (a Spanish exclave surrounded by France).

On Tuesday morning we woke up in a mixture of drizzle and snow, so we decided to move to the Mediterranean close to Perpignan for another hike.

At the end of the day we returned to Toulouse, where I checked in to my hotel and joined a business dinner with our Navigation group.

On Wednesday, I worked out in the hotel gym. There was a funny rower, a “Matrix”:

I did my warming up on it and it wasn’t as bad as I expected. It works with a metal flywheel with magnetic resistance. What impressed me was that the simple display displayed watts and pace that were quite comparable to the Concept2 erg. Of course I was working on feel, but pulling 2:09 at 160W and 2:00 at 203W felt like it should feel.

After the warming up I did my strength training. I am now doing 4×30 repeats. I improvised a bit based on the limited equipment I had but it was a good one hour workout.

On Thursday I flew home and didn’t exercise. On Friday, I spent an hour in the Brno Luzanky (Olympic size) pool.

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Mar 24 2018

Travel Week

Monday

This was supposed to be a steady state day, but I bailed out. It was a long working day, and then in the evening I got stuck working on integrating the rowsandall.com site with Amazon Web Services. We’re now using AWS Simple Email Services for sending out mail from the site. This helps to prevent notifications ending up in people’s Spam boxes. As often, I was a bit more ambitious than I should and tried to revamp the email messages in one go. I had everything working on my local notebook, but when I tried it out on the development test server, the damn thing didn’t load well. I managed to fix it but that took the entire evening.

Tuesday

Travel to Brussels. This was a planned rest/travel day and I respected it. There is some summit going on in Brussels, so all the hotels have crazy room prices. I ended up in a hotel near the Jubelpark where I had never stayed. Turns out the hotel doesn’t have a gym.

Wednesday

Hotel room workout. I lacked the motivation but still got out of bed. However, in this old building the wooden floors were quite loud, and I didn’t want to wake the guest in the room beneath me, so I just did one series of what was supposed to be a much longer session.

After a long meeting I headed to the airport and flew back to Vienna, then took a company car to Brno. Arrived at 22:30.

Thursday

First day of a two day visit of our China and India labs, so spent the entire day in meetings and doing a lab tour. I had already anticipated and planned for something a bit stingy but not too long. I also allowed myself to be slow on this 4x1km session:

Heart rate belt behaving strange in first interval

My heart rate belt behaved strange in the first interval. I think it is a bit sensitive when you’re not fully sweating yet, and I hadn’t noticed during the warming up. Only during the first 1k, I noticed that my heart rate stayed at 110 bpm. Between strokes, I moved the sensor by 1mm, and that did the trick.

Not very impressive intensities. On the water, I was pushing towards 300W last season. On the erg, I did a 4x1km on January 6 but that was a full out 1k, followed by 3 sub par 1k intervals.


Workout Summary - media/20180322-1931080o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|06769|34:30.0|02:33.0|152.9|20.8|146.0|179.0|09.4
W-|04000|14:29.0|01:48.7|273.4|28.1|149.0|178.0|09.8
R-|02771|20:02.0|03:36.9|065.7|15.6|143.9|178.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|01000|03:36.6|01:48.3|272.2|27.8|110.3|129.0|10.0
01|01000|03:39.2|01:49.6|271.3|27.8|160.4|176.0|09.8
02|01000|03:37.2|01:48.6|271.7|28.4|160.9|177.0|09.7
03|01000|03:36.3|01:48.1|278.5|28.4|164.3|178.0|09.8

End of the (travel) week effect.

Friday

Second day of visitors, but they were heading towards the airport around 2pm, and I planned to leave for the rowing club around 3pm. This would be the first OTW row of the year!

Things worked out differently. We had a situation to attend to at home, so at 3pm I went home to take care of it, allowing Romana to go rowing. By 11pm everything was relatively under control again, but I skipped training of course.

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Dec 7 2017

Hamburg

Monday

A light hour of steady state on the erg, right after breakfast. Still hurting a lot from the Saturday and Sunday sessions, so I took it a lot easier than I would normally do on these steady state sessions.

Then I headed to the railway station, took the 11:38 train to Hamburg via Prague, Dresden, Berlin. I usually travel by plane, and this train trip was a very nice variation. I love that you have enough leg space, power, USB plugs, and can go to the restaurant wagon whenever you like. I spent most of the time making notes for my speech, then writing out my speech, then condensing it to notes again. It’s how I have learned to prepare and memorize. If I do it well, I can throw away the notes, but I usually like to have them around.

On the train, I also looked at my erging data for the past few sessions.

The Saturday session sticks out. I didn’t split up this session in rest and work strokes, so the averages are pretty skewed, but the top values in the box chart are definitely different than those for a normal session. I was expecting that for “work per stroke” and average and maximum force, but apparently also the stroke length was distorted. Interesting …

Arrived at Hamburg pretty late, took the S-Bahn to my hotel, called my wife, crashed in bed.

Tuesday

Slept too long to do any exercise, and spent the little time I had to have a good breakfast and go through my speech one more time, delivering it to my hotel room. The hotel room didn’t say much, so I guess it was OK. It was a bit short, about 10 minutes shorter than the 40 minutes that I was expected to speak. I guessed that the audience being more interactive than the bed and empty chairs in my hotel room, and leaving a couple of minutes for questions and answers, I would be fine.

Joined the conference, listened to a couple of interesting talks, had lunch, and then it was time for me to deliver my part.

I had just asked a critical question to the previous speaker, and the chairman made a lengthy introduction. To break the ice, I expressed the fear that the chairman (and myself, with my question) had raised the expectation a little too high, and then I started with my intro.

Getting some nods and comments, and expanding a bit on a couple of points that were already raised by previous speakers, I filled the 40 minutes easily. A guy form Alitalia had a few interesting questions and comments, and that was it. Job done. I like to talk about the work that my guys do, but I have to have the time to prepare well.

In the evening, we were invited to drinks and dinner, and I had a good time. The drinks were served inside the airport, on one of the upper levels. This was approximately the view from where we were having our drinks:

Because I had been a speaker, people would come and talk to me, and comment on my talk, which was nice. Met a few of our suppliers. Sneaked out of the party around 10pm, walked back to the hotel through the rainy and windy Hamburg weather, and went to bed.

Wednesday

Set alarm clock for 6am so I could get in some exercise before breakfast. For such an expensive hotel, the Radisson Blu Hamburg Airport, the gym wasn’t much. A few elliptical and a few stationary bikes. Spent 15 minutes on each, then went back to my hotel room and completed the session with 20 minutes of body weights exercises.

I have started to use an app called HRV4Training, which supposedly measures Heart Rate Variability (HRV). You use it each morning. It measures your pulse through the smartphone camera and derives HRV, and something called “Recovery Points”, which I can sync to SportTracks. It also asks questions about travel and alcohol consumption.

For three days I have used it, and my scores have been constantly improving, while I traveled to Germany, trained and slept irregularly, and there was alcohol consumption. Still, my resting heart rate and my “recovery points” keep improving.

Will continue to use it a bit longer to see if it discovers any trends.

I spent the rest of the day at the conference, including an evening workshop.

Thursday

Up at 5 to catch the S-Bahn to the railway station. I had noticed that there was an entrance to the S-Bahn right in front of the hotel, but when I wanted to take it, I noticed the sign that this entrance was closed. Had to walk a long distance to another entrance to the same station, and missed my train. Luckily, I had built in quite some reserve, so even with the next train, twenty minutes later, I had plenty of time at the Hamburg station to take a coffee and some pastry.

Now, I am in the train, between Berlin and Dresden. I hope to arrive to Brno around 5pm, and I hope to get in a steady state erg session. Probably not one with impressive splits, though.

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Dec 1 2017

Tesla & Running in Belgrade

Tesla’s wireless energy system

Wednesday

Full day of conference attendance, plus a nagging work related issue back home which made me work early in the morning, have several phone conversations during the day, and return early to my hotel to do some more work.

At the same time, my friend David (who had quoted Tesla in his opening key note speech) and I had a plan to visit the Nikola Tesla museum. I managed to sign us up for the 6pm guided tours in English.

The museum was great and the tour was brilliant. Tesla was really a genius, and I stood in awe looking at his remotely controlled boat from 1898, with two electro motors and a computer! I dare to call a logical “AND” gate a computer. These things are easy for us, who have learned physics and electromagnetism in school, but for those days, this was truly genius.

Tesla remote controlled boat

Tesla remotely controlled boat

In the evening, I had the conference dinner at the Belgrade fortress. Spent the evening at a table with some Air Traffic Controllers from Italy and had a great time.

Rolled into bed after midnight.

Thursday

Woke up too late for a full run. It was raining and the temperature was much higher than on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. I wanted to run to the Save river, then follow the bank, but I

  • had difficulty crossing the concrete jungle of Belgrade, and
  • ran into a huge building site, I think of what is called the Belgrade Waterfront, and
  • ran out of time

Then I went to the conference again.

For the entire week, I had enjoyed taking the public transport in Belgrade. I liked traveling between normal people instead of sipping through the streets in a taxi, and with the Balkan driving style, the tram was often faster than taking a taxi, and dirt cheap.

This time, I had an interesting ride. The tram stopped in the middle of Slavija square. We all left the tram and crossed a four lane road with cars (me towing a trolley). Waiting for the bus, I noticed that all trams had come to a standstill. Apparently there was no electric power.

After about ten minutes, I was able to take an overcrowded bus 33 to the university.

A few stops later, a ticket inspector entered the bus. My chip card was OK, but there was a problem with one lady. The controller took her out of the bus at the next stop, and that was when I noticed it was Paula, one of my fellow conference participants. Too late for me to do anything. The bus left and she remained there at the bus stop, with an angry inspector, in the rain.

Around lunch time I headed to the airport. I thought I was lucky to have an emergency exit in the Adria Airways CRJ900, but I ended up sitting next to a very overweight, very tall, elderly man. Luckily, I managed to fall asleep, crushed between the man and the window, and the flight passed by fast.

In the train between Vienna and Brno, I made notes for a blog post about Physics and rowing metrics.

Friday

Trying to do a week’s worth of work in one day, including one on one meetings with all my subordinates and reviewing their goal plans for 2018. Also, it was my son’s 13th birthday.

So. No. Training.

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