Nice weather.  Light breeze (3 mph) from the WNW.  A cross head wind going up river and a cross tail wind going down river.

To put it gently, I had limited expectations for this session.  I’ve done no significant speed work in the boat this spring so far, and this was really to just to get reacclimated to higher stroke rates.

I was in Newton, in Alex’s boat.

Workout Plan:

• 8 x 500
• 3 minute rest (paddling)
• Stroke rate 26 to 30
• 4K warmup all the way to the Moody street dam, including power 20s at 26, 28, 30 and >32
• 3 intervals up stream, then turn in the rest
• 3 intervals down stream, turn in the rest
• 2 intervals up stream
• Cool down (SBR)

This plot is from Google Earth Pro.  The SW accepts TCX files and can provide plots of speed, cadence, hr and elevation.   To do that you right click on the path, and choose “show elevation” from the menu.  It’s a pretty cool feature.

These plots were generated from rowsandall.com.  This is an online tool that provides data analysis support for rowing data files from painsled, RowPro, Speedcoach, and Crewnerd (TCX).  It was developed by Sander and is still evolving rapidly, but if what you want is a quick way to generate graphical summaries of workouts, it’s very cool.

This is the CSV summary from CrewNerd, just prettied up a little bit.

My average pace for this session was 2:08.5.  While it is tough to compare sessions on different days, Last year on June 5, I did a 5 x 500 with an average pace of 1:57.7.  There are a number of differences between the sessions.

• Different boat (mostly psychological)
• fewer reps last year
• longer rests last year, around 4 or 5 minutes of rest, so I was better rested
• Standing starts last year (so I should have been slower)
• real speedcoach versus GPS last year (so no current effect on rep times)
• no wind last year (probably worth about 4 seconds)
• I had been doing speed work on the water for more than a month.  I did a 5 x 1K with an average pace of 2:08.1 on April 16, 2015, a full month before now.

But, this is a starting point.  When I get my boat, with my speedcoach, and get settled back in, I will start working on improvement.  Right now, it’s really about technique and fitness.  In terms of a training plan, it’s basically 4 sessions of steady state endurance training and 2 high intensity sessions (one short sprints (1′ to 5′) and one longer intervals (6′ to 12′)) either on the water or on the erg.  Gotta keep it simple right now.

I’m still having the annoying problem with the wahoo strap getting stuck when I do these kind of interval sessions.  I think I will go back to my Polar H7 to see if that works better.