Day: June 26, 2016

Sunday: 6 x 750 / 4′ rest on Quinsig

3 Comments

It was a lovely morning.  Temperature started around 65F and was 75F by the time we finished.  Wind was light from the south, about 2mph with gusts to 5 mph.  It seemed to be strongest during the first 3 intervals (2 with head wind and 1 with tail wind) and then died down.  Very sunny, I was glad I wore a hat.

The plan for today was hard intervals.

  • 6 x 750
  • 4 minute rests
  • standing starts
  • rate:  original plan was to start at 26 and work my way up.  But I changed my plan when I was able to tempt Bob from my club to do the 750s with me.  So, no rate cap.
  • pace:  As close to 2:00 as I could manage without dying
  • technique: Work on getting a clean start, and rowing clean and light.  Try to keep the blades off the water.

When I launched, the HR was working on CrewNerd, but not the Speedcoach.  Then the Crewnerd HR blinked out.  Time for a new battery.

We started with a warmup for about 1500 meters or so.   Some 10 strokes bursts, and then a few practice starts.  Once we were past the narrows, We set up for the first interval.  I setup Crewnerd for the workout.  I guess I must of splashed a bit in my start, because a drop of water strategically hit the crewnerd screen right in the right place to take me to the “Live Tracking” screen.  So, I didn’t have a view of how many meters remained.  Since I was responsible for the interval distance for both me and Bob, I counted out strokes, and when I got to 95, I called it done.  Turns out I stopped about 10 meters short.

Looking at the weather data, it seemed like the wind was very light, but it was hard to get down to target pace.  A 2 mph wind is about 1m/s.  This will add about 3 seconds onto the split.  It felt more like a 6 second adder.

The second interval was unremarkable.  Still the light but pernicious headwind.  And it really hurt!  If the goal of this workout is to provoke the lactate wave, it was certainly doing it’s job.  I felt like I was going to shit myself after this interval.

Now we turned and headed up lake.  By now we had calibrated how much time to leave between us starting so that we would finish just about even.  This ramped up the level of intensity.  The third interval was nice and fast with a bit of tail wind.

The fourth was interrupted at 400m by a gigantic, boat stopping wake.  We picked it back up and did 250m to finish it off after the wake had rolled through.

The fifth and sixth were just damn painful, which was  the point.  To provoke the lactate wave, and push through it.  In each of the last two, the wave hit at about 400m, and I just counted down the strokes to the end.  Each of them took 91 strokes.

From there, we paddled to the north end of the lake, with square blades.  Then we spun, I took my feet out of the shoes and worked on nice clean finishes for the 2500m back to the boathouse.  I was really tired.

Screen Shot 2016-06-26 at 11.16.20 AM

The whole workout, pace and rate, from the speedcoach.

Screen Shot 2016-06-26 at 11.10.56 AM

The fifth and sixth intervals.  I need to remember that the pace gets messed up at 10m per point and use strokes for hard workouts.

Tomorrow:  Steady State rate ladders

Saturday: 3 x 20′ / 1′ r L4

3 Comments

Stayed up too late, and decided to sleep instead of heading to the lake.  I’ll row tomorrow instead.  Got up around 9:30 and hopped on the erg.

After yesterday’s very long row, I decided to only do 60 minutes today.  I also decided to stick with a stroke sequence and let my HR do what ever it wanted to do.

I did the following sequence: 2′ @ 16, 2′ @ 17, 2′ @ 18, 2′ @ 19, 2′ @ 20

Power was 10W * stroke rate (so 16spm = 160W)

One interesting thing in the charts is the drive length.  As usual, you can see my drive length increasing over the first 10 minutes.  I think it is cool how it becomes more erratic as I get tired.  I like all the data that you can get out of painsled.

2016-06-25 10.34.09

 

Started off feeling great.  But I kind of hit the wall in the last 20 minutes.  HR was a lot higher.  I’ve decided to try to do my LIT endurance workouts in a fasted state.  I think the research is pretty clear that it helps keep you metabolizing fats to a higher intensity than if you have eaten recently.  The thing that I am trying to work out now is intensity.

I have the feeling that if I had limited to high end of this workout to 190W, I probably would have maintained a lower heart rate.  It might be better to go back to a constant power level for these workouts.  My suspicion is that there is a fair amount of hysteresis in the crossover between fat and CHO metabolism.  Once you flip the switch to start burning glycogen, that you have to go way down in intensity to flip the switch back to fat.  I think that where I am now, that going above 180W I am flipping the switch.

For now, if I have to do any steady state on the erg, I think I will start doing lactate testing again, and stick to constant power.  Pity.  It is very boring.  But I want to get some unequivocal data on where my base fitness is right now.