January 17, 2017 – Quantified Rowing

Pretty incomprehensible title, huh? This week I am experimenting with the week #1 workouts from the Eddie Fletcher Marathon Training Plan.

There are some very interesting concepts in the plan, and some intriguing workouts that I have never done before, so I decided to make a guess about my current capabilities, try a few workouts and then adjust as I need to when I start the plan in earnest.

Today’s workout was 4 x (6′ @ 5kp + 9′ @ mp)/4′ rest. What that means…

4 intervals each of them 15′ long
4 minutes of rest between interval
the first 6 minutes of each interval is rowed at your current 5k pace
the last 9 minutes of each interval are rowed at you current projected marathon pace

The training plan does not explain exactly what the logic is for this, but having done it, I have a pretty good idea. By starting at a 5k pace, you are working above your MLSS (Maximum Lactate Steady State) pace, which means that you are accumulating lactate. By the time you finish 6 minutes at that pace, your heart rate is up, and you are feeling a bit like you would be much further into a marathon length row. When you slow down to marathon pace, you are no longer building up your lactate levels, but the level of effort is such that you don’t clear much of it either, and your heart rate slowly (very slowly drifts down). This workout seems like a very clever way to simulate rowing in the last hour of a marathon.

I just took a guess about pacing. Based on the 4×4′ CTC, I figured that my 2k pace is around a 1:45. For this workout plan, you use 4 basic paces, which are just percentages of your 2k power. I did a quick table for mine.

The plan was very clear that you should start at the low end of the power range and work your way up. The plan also includes HR limits for the workout. The limit for this one was 92.5% of HRMax, which for me is 172bpm.

Of course that is exactly what I didn’t do. In typical fashion, I looked at the top end of the range as the absolute minimum that I should see on the monitor, and I completely ignored the HR limit. And I enjoyed it.

That made it a very hard workout. I started with a 1k warmup, since the first chunk would be at 5k pace. I worked my way up to 240 watts over the first 400m and then held it for the last 600.

Then into the workout.

Workout Summary - media/20170118-145925-sled_2017-01-17T07-10-05ZEST.strokes.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|17233|76:00.0|02:12.3|196.7|23.6|159.6|177.0|09.6
W-|15317|60:00.0|01:57.5|218.1|23.9|164.1|177.0|10.7
R-|01922|16:00.0|04:09.7|057.0|20.9|138.6|177.0|02.3
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|01611|06:00.0|01:51.7|248.7|25.2|151.1|165.0|10.6
01|02238|09:00.0|02:00.6|199.5|22.3|159.9|165.0|11.2
02|01597|06:00.0|01:52.7|246.8|25.4|159.8|172.0|10.5
03|02235|09:00.0|02:00.8|198.7|22.9|166.3|172.0|10.9
04|01569|06:00.0|01:54.7|244.4|25.6|160.3|176.0|10.2
05|02236|09:00.0|02:00.7|199.3|23.1|170.8|177.0|10.8
06|01590|06:00.0|01:53.2|245.0|25.8|165.9|177.0|10.3
07|02240|09:00.0|02:00.5|200.2|23.4|172.1|177.0|10.6

The results were quite consistent, but I had to go very deep into the well for it. The last 9 minutes at marathon pace were excruciating.

Since this workout is at higher stroke rates and pressure, I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the metrics to compare the sections done at 200W to the sections done are 245W.

Drive was consistent across the two powers, so was force ratio. Force ratio looks like it got more erratic in the last interval (the spread around 0.8 looks broader). I was expecting to see a bigger change in stroke rhythm between rowing at 22-23 for the 200W and rowing at 24-25 for the 245W, but it stayed around 31%. At this point, I don’t understand that metric to know if that is good or bad or indifferent.