water

60391079_817659991953912_5831985681483694080_n

May 18 2019

The working week (Monday to Friday)

Monday

A busy day at work and no training. I decided that recovery from an intensive weekend of racing was a good idea.

Tuesday

Weights! My personal trainer decided that I am ready for the “big exercises”. So we did only three of them:

  1. Bench press
  2. Dead lift
  3. Squat

The protocol is to start with light weights (or only the bar) as a warming up, then gradually increase the weights until I can do about 10 repeats, with stretching between each series of 10. Then weights are increased one more time to get to failure somewhere between 5 and 10 repeats. After that weights are reduced again to do a few series at 15 repeats.

For the deadlift and squat the protocol was a bit more gentle. We didn’t push to failure but stopped at the point where I was starting to fail on technique, i.e. I was starting to use the wrong muscles to just get the weights lifted.

After that we did some 10 minutes of exercising the core.

Boy, I did feel this training the next three days.

Wednesday 

I have started calling our Masters eights crew together, and this time it was a success. We had 11 candidates show up, so we hit the lake with a double, a single, and an eight. The water was slightly rough and the coxswain slightly inexperienced, as the map clearly shows:

I had some data challenges. Forgot to charge my heart rate belt.

Well, it was just steady state. A pretty short workout as well, as some of our crew members were time pressed.

Thursday

More data issues. I still haven’t managed to sort my regatta bag and move some essential equipment from the regatta bag to the training bag. I have a pretty good system. A separate “rowing electronics” bag that goes into my small training bag or my big regatta bag. The problem with regattas is that they are so hectic that I become messy with where I put my gear. So rowing electronics ends up in the wrong part of my regatta bag, and then I show up on a training day to discover I have left the SpeedCoach holder at home. Sigh.

At least the OH1 heart rate arm band was charged. However, it didn’t seem to respond very well in the first 20 minutes of the workout.

The session was 4 series of 6×45″/75″ at race pace. These series are tuned to our lake length, and after doing one, I wondered if I would be able to complete the workout. In the end I manned up and just did it. It was so beautiful rowing weather that it would have been a sin to shorten the time on the water:

I gave myself some technique targets, focusing on finishing the stroke strong. I am not sure if I am fooling myself, but it looked like I was faster when I focused on that. Here are the data to prove it:

I am charting “Wash” vs “Boat Speed” for each “on” stroke. The line is my totally unscientific interpretation of the data. So a 5% pace improvement? That would be encouraging!

Friday

Another weights session. Bench press. Squats. Deadlift. And cable rows. Seventy five minutes of heavy work. I am due for a light steady state session today.

By • OTW • 0 • Tags: , , , , , , , ,

mapka

Mar 22 2019

Mirror Flat Lake in Brno

Thursday. Sunny weather. Which means -2 C in the morning, which is a bit chilly on the scooter, and 14 to 16 degrees in the afternoon, which is great for rowing.

Half of our club is in Gavirate for a camp, and the other half are doing a camp on the Labe (Elbe) river in Pardubice. I will join the Pardubice crew for the weekend. But this Thursday it meant that I had the lake almost for myself. There were a few rowers from the club on the other side of the lake.

Steady state. I didn’t monitor the Power values during the row, but focused on Effective Length and Work per Stroke.

During km 6 to 8 I rowed without feathering. I was pretty happy with the execution of the drill, but looking at the data after the row, it shows that I significantly shortened the finish during that bit.

I had a fun “Masters Rower Price” moment in the final 3km full lake stretch. A junior from the other bank was trailing me and apparently doing some intervals. He was fiercely rowing at 30spm and catching up. His rowing was ugly, but he had the strong body of an 18 year old. When he was almost level, I increased stroke rate from 17spm to 24 spm and was able to stay ahead of him by keeping the length and rowing nice and clean, until he gave up. I enjoy those moments. Here’s a zoom in on that bit:

Recently, I have started to use Boat Speed in meters per second for the speed plots, but I am adding a pace (seconds per 500m) for those not used to the meters per second values.

How much more enjoyable is this. Being out on a sunny day on the lake, gliding over the water, outrowing a junior. Compare that to doing mindless steady state on a static erg in a basement, without company. I may ditch erg training early this season. Time to do more running.

By • Uncategorized • 0 • Tags: , , , , , ,

IMG_1359

Feb 26 2017

Exciting and disappointing at the same time

So I had an exciting morning. I drove to the lake to pick up the trailer with three singles. As you can see, the lake was still frozen and it will take another few weeks before it will be rowable.

Frozen Brno lake

We took the singles to the place where our rowing club started 105 years ago, which we still own, even though most of the buildings are in bad need of renovation.

There, it didn’t take us long to get two single ready and we headed out on the water. My first row with the Empower Oarlock, so I badly wanted to record it. Unfortunately, I made a critical mistake. After a few months without using the SpeedCoach, it’s user interface managed to confuse me. Seeing the message “stop”, I figured it was running and recording, and I could “stop” that by pressing the “back” button.

So I happily selected which parameters to watch and went off rowing, already looking forward to taking a critical look at the data.

Unfortunately, as I just found out, you have to set it to “ready” and not to “stop”. All I have is a 27m segment when I was fiddling with the setup! 🙁

Other than that, the row was fun, and luckily I had the Garmin Forerunner running in parallel, so I do have heart rate and pace.

The rowable part of the river is about 2.5km long, between two sluices. It is quite windy.

In the first 2.5km, I selected stroke rate/pace/power/catch angle. I started with arms only, then arms and back, and then to half slide, three quarter and on to full slide. It was fun to watch the catch angle go up. If I remember well, I ended up around 61 degrees.

Power was around 180W. It dropped down to 120 when I was turning to starboard, and went up to 220W when I was turning to port. And as this is a windy river, there was a lot of turning.

At one point, I ran into a thin sheet of ice. Luckily, no scratches on the boat.

At another point, I surprised a few swimmers. I didn’t expect swimmers. I should have known better, with the Czech Republic the world center of cold water swimming. The girls were splashing in the ice cold river while Eda and I rowed by, and only on our second loop they were back on the shore. Amazing!

I experimented a lot with the third and fourth metric to watch, so on the first return leg I looked at slip and average power. Average power stayed at zero. (I know understand why, but it didn’t occur to me then.) Slip was around 4 to 7 degrees. Then I looked at wash and total stroke angle, with wash around 11 degrees, and total stroke angle around 107 degrees, if I remember correctly. And finally, back to power and finish angle. All very exciting. If only I had all the data afterwards. Well, I guess it’s my fault.

It was also fun to watch how my power remained consistently oscillating around 180W, while pace varied with the stream and wind.  I am already looking forward to training for the 6km head race and figuring out what power I can sustain over that distance. I plan to spend some time doing that, and then on race day I can just hold that power for 4 or 5km, and then go for it. Having power feedback available during a row is perfect. Really perfect.

I guess only in the turns, the power value can be deceiving.

After the row, I took a few pictures of our river rowing venue.

After the row I drove the trailer back to the lake venue. I took a shower there and replaced batteries and did firmware upgrades on 8 of the club ergs. After that I drove over to the electronics store to pick up a new Raspberry Pi for my little rowing data logger project.

By • Uncategorized • 3 • Tags: , , , , ,