More catching up.

April 16, 20174 Comments

Last time I posted was April 5th. It’s been a while. Work has been keeping me very busy and I’ve been struggling to find time to workout, just not enough time to keep good records. Which is a shame because I’m trying to remember what the heck I did way back on the 6th.

Thursday, 6 April: Flew out to San Diego on the 7:30AM flight. No training. Flew home on the red-eye.

Friday, 7 April: Worked from home. Felt really beaten up from the flight. No training

Saturday, 8 April: Slept for a very long time, nearly 11 hours. I had to drive all over to try to organize what to do with my late father’s possessions. No training. I think this might be the first time I’ve taken three days off in a row in a long time.

Sunday, 9 April: A glorious morning. I took my boat out to Worcester for a row with my friends at Lake Quinsigamond Community Rowing. It was an exciting day for us. We bought a used WinTech Double from Saugatuck over the winter and today was the inaugural row. I was in my single, Joe was in the new (to us) double with Gretchen, and we also boated a quad.

The northern end of the lake was off limits because it was being used for a collegiate regatta. We snuck a little ways up the lake before things got going, but otherwise stuck to the southern 2/3.

I wanted to try rowing a bit harder with the Empower oarlock, so I decided to do rate ladder workout.

4′ @ 18
3′ @ 20
2′ @ 22
1′ @ 24
Repeat 4 times.

This was much harder work than it should have been.

But it was delightful. I used the speedcoach mainly to look at effective length, which was darn short.

I’m still trying to figure all this stuff out, so here’s a bunch of charts over the distance and versus stroke rate. I blanked out the rest strokes from all of it.

After I got back to the dock, Joe asked me if I wanted to take a short spin in the new double. I sure did! It’s a big improvement from the vespoli we rowed last year.

Monday, 10 April: Back down in Newton on the Charles. Sunny and nearly 50F. Back to steady state work. My hands were a mess. Blisters on blisters. I decided to keep working on technical stuff like maximizing effective length.

I was rowing at at a consistent (albeit slow) power, dropping off about 10 watts during the session. The interesting thing to me was how much the current effected things. There was very little wind for the first half. A bit of breeze picked up in the second half which was a tail wind for the downriver and had wind upriver. The current was essentially making me 0:05/500 faster going downriver and 0:05 slower going up river. And even more is certain places.

Power and work per stroke faded a bit over the workout as I stayed under my HR cap.
Length was reasonably consistent, effectively length faded.
Catch and slip was very consistent.
Finish and Wash told a real story. The wash went through the roof as I did my last 4K up river. I was not watching wash on the display and it got really bad toward the end.

Tuesday, 11 April: I had a meeting at 8:30 so I had to be quick. I still wanted to get out on the water. My hands continued to be an issue. More light technical rowing. I managed to forgot to start the speedcoach again.

Wednesday, 12 April: Another day, pressed for time. Today, I decided to stick to technique stuff. I did one of my favorite workouts.

2 minutes square blade
2 minutes alternating square and feathered
2 minutes feathered
keep repeating

Thursday, 13 April: Steady State. Watching wash on the speedcoach.

My technique was better today.

Friday, 14 April: Rest day

Saturday, 15 April: Down on the cape. Busy all day. Just popped down to the basement for a quick 10k.

Sunday, 16 April: Still on the cape. 60 minutes at 180W.

Wednesday: 15km OTW

April 5, 2017April 7, 20172 Comments

Weather: Cold and misty. Around 37F. Wind 3-5 mph from the North. This was a head wind heading down river and a bit of a tail wind going up river.

Plan for the workout was the same as Monday. Focus on technique and learn how to incorporate feedback from the EmPower oarlock into really focused practice.

I also wanted to experiment with the idea of using my phone with RIM to complement the speedcoach display. So, I hooked up my HR monitor to my phone instead of the speedcoach.

I spent the whole workout looking at the work per stroke screen and trying to keep my drive length greater than 100 degrees.

It was another really joyful row. Up and down the river a couple of times focusing on form versus pace. By having my HR on the RIM display, I was able to watch and try to keep the intensity in the aerobic zone. I let it go a bit higher if I was comfortable and working on technique.

So, now I had one set of data on the phone and one set of data on the speedcoach. How do I put them together. Well, it turns out that rowsandall.com has a feature called “Sensor Fusion”. This feature let’s you take specific fields from two different data sources, align the start points manually, and create a workout entry that combines the two. In the plot below, the SPM comes from RIM, and so it goes to the very beginning. The pace and power comes from the speedcoach, and I started that about 6 minutes into the row.

There are some interesting features in the power part of the summary plot. The blue bars showing the higher power levels are when I needed to apply a lot of port pressure to go around a turn in the river.

The pace shows the effect of the current. Today is was a good 10 seconds difference on pace. Notice how consistent the power is, even though the pace is very different.

It’s going to take a while to really know how to use all the data I’m getting. Here’s a sampler. A few thoughts..

Power is lower than I was expecting at 154W avg.
Finish angle was consistent, but Wash got progressively worse
Catch and slip were remarkably consistent
Effectively drive length is a short 80 degrees. This is probably driven mostly by critical body dimensions (like my stubby legs), but it will pay dividends if I can figure out how to get a longer drive angle and less wash at the end.

I finished up and put away my boat. When I looked in the car window at my reflection, I could see that a nice layer of dew had formed on my hat because it was so misty.

Today (Thursday), I didn’t have a chance to workout. I caught the morning flight from Boston to San Diego, had a few customer meetings, and now I’m on the red eye heading home. I’m going to pick up my boat on my way home from the airport and I might be able to go for a row in the afternoon. Otherwise, it’ll be another easy hour on the erg.

Tuesday: Back indoors – 60 minutes

April 4, 2017April 6, 2017Leave a comment

Tuesday’s weather was horrible. Windy, driving rain, temperature around 35F.

I decided to sleep in and try to squeeze in a session in the afternoon at work.

I hit the gym instead of eating lunch. I did 60 miutes straight. Target power was 170W. Erg Data hung up on me with about 20 minutes to go and didn’t save any data.

Here’s the HR data from the wahoo app.

4-4a

Monday: Back On The Water!!!! 15km

April 3, 2017April 6, 20171 Comment

Weather: Cold and Sunny. About 35F. Basically no wind. A beautiful morning.

Today was all about just getting back in the boat and trying out my new toys.

New iPhone, case and mount –> running RIM

New Speedcoach GPS (Model 2)

New EmPower Oarlock

The iphone case and mount worked great. Much more rigid than the mount that I was using last year (and considerably cheaper). I got them from Quad Lock.

The empower oarlock and HR monitor paired with the Speedcoach very easily. I had done the angle calibration on Sunday. The force calibration was easy and quick.

I was off the dock within 20 minutes of getting there. The river is really high right now. Right up to the top of the dock, and the current is visibly faster than normal. I was the only person out on Monday morning. I had a beautiful morning all to myself.

Our population of swans seems bigger this year. There was a pretty good number of cygnets last summer. I think they’ve grown up and returned. Pretty to look at, but additional obstacles to row around.

I did my normal row, about 15km. Starting at the docks, I row 4km downstream. The first km is winding and slow. After that, it’s lovely flat water and mostly straight for 2km. Then I go under a narrow bridge and the last km is out across a small basin before the Moody Street Dam. It’s a beautiful row and I was so happy to be back outside, enjoying the morning.

After I turn at the dam, I row back upstream. This time of year, I row up into a long cove instead of completely retracing my steps. There are some nice houses along the cove, and I get a little more distance. It’s about 3km from the dam to the end of the cove. Then I spin, and head back down river to the dam. Finally, I turn back up river and row the 4km back to the dock.

The first and last km where it’s winding I think of as the warmup and cool down.

Now, for the toys. I loved rowing with the EmPower Oarlock. I tried out all the skill screens. There are screen to show catch and with slip, finish angle with wash, power, and work per stroke. I used one screen for each of the 3km sections. Unfortunately, I was enjoying the row so much that I didn’t notice that I had forgotten to start the speedcoach. The way the speedcoach works, it gives you a live screen, but just doesn’t accumulate data if it isn’t started. Of course it does say “stop” right in the middle of the screen, but I just didn’t notice that. I hope I don’t make the mistake again, I’m sure I will.

Of course, since I am obsessive enough about data that I run redundant systems, I had the whole row recorded with the Rowing in Motion app on my phone.

The skill screens on the Speedcoach are great, but I was bothered that I wasn’t able to keep an eye on my Heart Rate while I had those displays up. I know from reading the NK materials that this was a concious choice to limit the chances of information overload, but I find it pretty easy to focus in on on number in a display and only look at other ones every few strokes. I wish that HR and SPM were visible on the skill screens.

But, I have a solution to my problem. Since I am running RIM anyway, I can get that info from my phone while I use the speedcoach for technique feedback. The great part about that is rowsandall provides a cool feature to let me smoosh the data from RIM and Speecoach together before I analyze it. (More about that in my next post).

Based on that conclusion, I will most likely pair my HR monitor to my phone and use the RIM display to show pace, HR, SPM and time. I’ll stick to skill screens on the speed coach, unless I’m doing a workout where I want faster pace feedback, like short sprints.

4-3a

You can see effect of the current on pace. It was about 10 second delta

Here’s a view of just the speedcoach data for the last 30 minutes of the row.

And here’s a stroke profile for the section from 2000m to 2600m

4-3b

I need to double check the angle calibration before I draw any conclusions from this.

I did a quick very of effective drive length and work per stroke to get a baseline.

4-3d

The effective drive length has got me worried, so I wanted to compare it to total length.

I think I have some work to do to get a longer drive.

I also just looked a power for this chunk.

It’s lower than I would have expected. I guess I have some work to do on strength and fitness too!

So. Much. Data. 🙂

Sunday: 3 x 5000 / 1′ rest (HR Capped)

April 2, 2017April 6, 2017Leave a comment

Basically the same as Saturday, but I had less time, so I stopped after 3 instead of doing 4. Still working at a low power. Not sure why HR was this high.

4-2b

In the afternoon, I picked up my boat from winter storage, installed and calibrated my new Empower Oarlock, got rid of the old Speedcoach XL wiring for the HR sensor and stroke rate sensor, and shined up the seat rails. I really enjoyed puttering around on my boat.