My weight is still too high (209lbs). Blood pressure is good 120/80 (with meds)
Thursday: Strength Training
I’d like to incorporate strength work into my offseason training so I started today.
hip equalization
foam roll quads
swiss ball twists with med ball
front plank 3 x 30sec
side plank 3 x 30sec each side
Front Squats. Bare bar, bar + 20, bar + 50…3 x 12
Good mornings. bare bar, bar + 50…3 x 12
inclined row on smith machine, 3 x 12
Friday: 3 x 20’/2′
OK, I was pretty close to paralyzed from the weight work on Thursday. But I did a slow 3 x 20 on the erg. No matter how much I slowed down, I could not keep my HR from going through the roof.
I thought I could be any more sore than I was on Friday. I was wrong. Putting on my underwear was torture. I staggered through grocery shopping and various household chores. Late in the day, I decided to do a short erg to try to loosen things up.
I started very slow. I intended to start at 2:15, but I just couldn’t bring myself to row that slowly. I ended up starting at 2:12, and shaving a second each 1000m. I did a little push at the end to 2:00.
Technical issues with the speedcoach. For some reason, it did not save the session, even though I was sure that I had started it. Luckily, Joe was wearing his Garmin Fenix.
It was nice to get out. The water was really flat and there was very little wind. We rowed 20-22 spm to the south end of the lake. Then we did 2 rate ladders.
750m @ 22
500m @ 24
250m @ 26
Then we did a last ladder. In this one, Joe called for a power 10 and power 20 in each section. We then held the r26 to the end of the lake alternating about 10 power strokes with 10 lighter strokes. Then more steady state back to the boathouse.
Then I got myself ready for a wild ride. Damper up to 10, feet strapped in tight, crank some good tunes and get ready for action.
I set the erg for 1′ work and 2 minute rest intervals. I only rowed hard for the first 10 to 15 seconds of each interval.
Well, that’s not very satisfying. Here’s the pace, power and rate as different charts
The point of a peak power test is to see the maximum power (or lowest split) that you can get over a 10 second blast. The test protocol is defined here.
I did 5 sprints with the erg on the floor, which is the test standard, and then 2 sprints with the erg on slides, which is a f&*^ing blast!
I discovered something interesting with this test. Under some circumstances, painsled does not log every single stroke. Here’s the data…
The last column is the stroke count and there is no data for stroke 1,2,3,4,7,9. So that means that the data that I have is somewhat unreliable.
What I saw on the monitor was a minimum split of 1:18 on most of the static reps. I saw one pull with a 1:17. That is 1 split off my all time best low pull. I took the highest wattage of any of the recorded strokes and that was 1:17.8 or 742W.
On slides, I saw 1:12 on the monitor in both reps, that’s a whopping 923W. Of course I could rate up to about 60 spm on slides which helped out a bit. Needless to say, the static results are the ones that will be used for planning training.
Monday, Oct 22 – 1K test
I hate Monday’s. I never get enough sleep, and I am working out first thing in the morning, usually after working out in the afternoon the day before. This Monday was no exception. But I really wanted to get this set of fitness tests behind me.
What was left? The 1K test. The soul of simplicity. Row 1000m as fast as I can. Use the average power as a proxy for my VO2max wattage.
To begin, the ritual fletcher warmup must be completed.
Apparently, Monday morning’s don’t suck. I was a bit faster, with much better HR response than on Sunday. Buoyed with new confidence, a strapped in for 3 minutes of hell (the first 15 seconds aren’t really so bad).
Actually, the first 250m was just fine. I set out with a goal of matching my test from last year. This was an average split of 1:39.4. I guess I was pretty juiced because my average pace was a 1:37.6 over the first 250. In the second 250, I started to really feel the burn and I dialed it back, just a hint to 1:38.6. When I crossed the 500m mark, I was in respiratory distress, but I found I could tweak the rate up just a little and calm my breathing down.
Around 700m, my legs were burning, but with only 30 or so strokes to go, I closed my eyes and counted to 10. I opened my eyes and I there was about 210m to go. I did it again. 120m to go. And the splits were getting better, not worse. I counted down the last ten, and then there were two strokes to go. Done. 3:15.2. Boom. Fastest 1k that Ive done since my 3:10.5 PB back in 2014.
I did a slow 2k to cool down. I had a nasty erg cough the rest of the day, but it was totally worth it. I ranked it on the C2 logbook. 19th out of 403 for the men’s 50-59 heavies. 3rd best for USA.
So that concluded the fitness tests. The results…
Compared to a year ago.
Peak power: +21W
1000m: +20W
20′ test: +15W
75′ test: +13W
I’ll be trying to figure out what that means for winter training with Marlene over the next couple of weeks, but looking at the numbers, my strongest performance was at 1000m. Since my focus is head racing, I will need to work on aerobic capacity, and lactate threshold.
Friday: I needed to get ready for an important meeting in the morning, so I skipped my workout.
After work we headed down to the Cape and settled in. It was a blustery stormy night, but I slept like a baby
Saturday:
I worked a bit around the house and put the outside furniture in the basement for the winter. In the mid-afternoon, I headed to the basement to do my 75′ test.
I’ve done this test twice before. In October of last year, I pulled 207w (1:59.2). In December, I pulled 214w (1:57.8). I decided to try to use 1:58 as my target and see how it went.
It went great. I was able to hold 1:58 comfortably at 22spm and I just counted out sets of 110 strokes to mark 5 minute periods. I would push a little and then coast a little. Things started to get a bit more serious in the last 30 minutes. By 15 minutes to go, I felt like I had the session well in hand and I started to push a bit more seriously. My heart rate started pushing up into the mid-170s and I eased the rate up to 24. Then in the last 5 minutes I nudged it further to 26 spm and tried to count out the last 130 strokes.
I’ve been a bad boy. I haven’t done any formal fitness testing since December of last year. It’s time to get an idea of where I stand as the OTW season ends and I need to plan my winter training. There are four tests to perform
1′
1000m
20′
75′
On Thursday morning, I decided to do the 20′ test. To make things consistent, I do these tests on a static erg.
I’ve done 2 20′ tests before. In October of last year, I pulled 244w. Then in December, I had improved to 259w. I hoped I was in similar shape to December, but I really had no idea. I set off a little faster than that and hoped for the best.
I did a 2k warmup and got down to it.
I broke a little bit past the half way point with a couple of ugly HDs. But I got back at it and kept pulling. My avg splits popped up from a 1:49 to a 1:51 and it was just a matter of hanging on to the end. I think if I had started a bit slower, I would have ended a lot faster.
In any case, even with the hiccups, I managed to equal my December mark of 259W. Which I was delighted with.
For the past year or so, there has been a product on the market from a Finnish startup called Quiske. They have a little pod that can be attached to your oar, or your seat. On a boat or on an erg. And this pod is MAGIC. It works with an app on the phone to provide a stroke by stroke graph of interesting things like your oar path or your seat velocity.
I am interested in this product because I rarely if ever am able to get real time coaching. I will record video and send it off to Marlene Royle who will give me feedback and recommend drills and suggest changes, but it is very hard to keep these changes in mind when I practice. Here are a couple of examples.
I tend to break my knees too early on the recovery. With the sensor on the seat, I would be able to see the seat velocity occurring too soon and could work to correct it.
I have developed the habit of digging too deep at the catch. Obviously, it’s pretty hard to look at your oar blades, but with the magic pod, I can see the exact path that my oars are taking through the water, and I can see in all its glory how my stroke includes both digging too deep AND washing out towards the release.
So, I had big hopes for this new toy and I was eager to give it a try. So the session on Wednesday was more of a fartlek than anything else.
Setup was a snap. I put the included strap around the oar collar, inboard of the oarlock, and then launched the app, it found the pod and I connected up. Then I rowed out to the good part of the river. I was blown away and delighted by seeing the oar path diagrams like I had seen in Kleshnev’s book popping up on my iphone screen.
First, this is what my normal steady state rowing looks like.
This is apparently what it should look like.
Here is my first screen cap of rowing at head race pace and pressure.
Then I started to work on changing my stroke. The first thing I tried was to consciously keep my oars in deeper through the last part of the stroke.
The I was just having fun. Here are Arm only, then arms and body, then half slide.
Next I tried to row as deep as I possibly could. I really pulled the handles up high and buried the shafts. It looked like this. Now I know what to avoid.
I was curious about the recovery being slanted in all the plots. so I tried rowing with just my port oar and kept my starboard oar flat on the water. It wasn’t as flat as I would have expected. I am not sure if that’s a alignment issue in the pod, or if the water is at an angle where I row.
Finally, I tried some head race strokes again, right at the end.
Not much different from the first ones. Maybe even deeper at the catch. I guess this will be a long project.
This week is a bit weird. No more races for the season, but the weather is still good for rowing, so what should I be doing? I decided that just enjoying the last few days on the water and doing some steady state training would be the best way to go.
So, the goal today was to row at r20 and stay under my HR cap. The exciting thing was that I was rowing with the impeller! It was slightly disappointing that there was a head wind so I could not see perfectly identical splits going upstream and down, but it was still a lot closer than what I was seeing before.
Also, over the past couple of days, and with a lot of help from the fine folks at NK, I finally figured out why my power numbers were so pitifully low. This is a little complicated, so bear with me.
Back earlier this year, NK discovered that their power algorithm was yielding power numbers that were a bit too high, and they pushed a correction in a firmware update. At the same time, the web site that I use to log my training (rowandall.com), did an update so that it would look at the rev of firmware in uploaded speedcoach files, and if it was the old FW, it would apply the same correction, so that power would be consistent for all logged workouts. That’s all great, stuff, but there was a bug in the iOS application that NK provides to transfer workouts. This LINK app apparently was reporting the old FW rev in exported files, even if the speedcoach had been updated. Rowsandall was seeing the old rev and deducting a percentage of my power, but the speedcoach was reporting the corrected power already, so my power readings ended up being about 10% low.
The solution was to delete and reinstall the LINK app on my phone, and viola, my power readings popped back to something that made a lot more sense.
I really enjoyed Sunday. I spent a couple of hours just messing around with my boat. I recalibrated my empower oarlock. I tried setting up the new Quiske Pod and it’s iOS application. And I reinstalled the impeller on the bottom of my boat.
On Monday morning, my training goal was to do some steady state, but the other task was to calibrate the impeller. All season long, I have been unable to do much with the pace reading on the speedcoach because the river current has been higher than normal. I finally decided that remounting the impeller would be better.
But the impeller is a finicky little gizmo. If you don’t have it well aligned with the sensor, you get intermittent readings, if you don’t have it well calibrated, you get wrong readings and if you row in a place with a lot of weeds, it gets fouled. But at least you get rid of current as an error in your data!
So the first thing to do was calibrate. I rowed out to the straight 1000m section, and set up to do a 500m cal. The way the speedcoach does this is it uses the GPS to measure you going 500 and sees how far the impeller has measured. Then you do the same thing in the other direction, over the same exact section of river. The theory is that this will cancel out the effect of the current. Anyway, I did it and it seemed to yield sensible results afterward.
Of course, after I calibrated, I forgot to push “start” on the the speedcoach, so I didn’t log any of the rest of the workout. Have no fear! I had a backup. I was running RIM on my phone.
It’s been a busy week. My last journal entry was on Oct 9 when I did a terrific 5 x 1500.
The rest of the 9th was a blur. I worked out, then a day full of meetings, then rushed off to go a wake (One of our best friends lost his brother to a sudden illness), then ate dinner, then to the airport to catch a ten o’clock flight to Geneva.
I slept really well on the flight. I probably got 5 hours of sleep. We landed in Zurich and then connected to Geneva, finally getting in around 2pm. I had meetings all afternoon, and then we went to dinner. I finally got back to the hotel around 10:30pm and had hoped to get right to bed. Unfortunately a time critical work issue came up and I spent the next 90 minutes on the phone.
My plan had been to do a short workout in the morning before my 10am flight home, but I decided that sleep was more important. I slept until 7:30, had a nice breakfast, called an Uber and went to the airport. The flight home was very uneventful. I did work most of the way, took a short nap, and then I was home. The worst part of the whole thing was the traffic home from the airport.
Friday – Oct 12: Drills and a little bit of race pace
My usual taper is to do a shrinking number of 500m pieces over the week before a race, and then just do a warmup on the day before. This time, I had two complete rest days but lots of inert travel time. I decided that it would be best to do some work on the day before the race to try to make sure that the race pace strokes felt OK.
I also wanted to do a lot of drill work. I find it quite calming, and it really engages my brain in the session. So the plan for the day was to do about 20 minutes of light rowing and drills, then a couple of 2′ race pace pieces, then more drills.
The summary shows the 4 – 1 minute pieces and 2 60 stroke pieces. Plus a little bonus sprint to the dock at the end. Notice the difference in power between the first 4 and the last three. The last three are against the current, so it takes a lot more watts to get the same splits.
Pretty easy session, only 18 minutes above a <ut2 level.
Then I loaded my boat on my car and went to work.
Saturday – 13 October: The Snake Race
This may be my only race of the season, and I hadn’t raced since my disappointing outing at last year’s Head of the Charles. I was nervous as hell before I launched, even though this was a low stakes local race. My competition was.
The rowers from Anchorage and Community scratched. As for the rest.
Maldari is a good rower from Lawrence, he’s beaten me and I’ve beaten him in other events, we are about the same speed.
Kisarale is a rower from Uganda. He’s 38, but he was in the 2015 Olympic qualifying regatta for Africa in the 2x. I’d never met him, but I suspected he was a lot faster than I am.
Haddon is a rower in my club. He was rowing this as a tune up for next weekend when he will be in the HOCR.
Krupnick was a 1st boat varsity rower at WPI and graduated in 2017. He was going to be MUCH faster than me.
Byrnes is in the other main club on the lake. I am usually faster
Sturges. Same story
Sontgerath was the guy that I wanted to beat. I had beaten him in the HOCR in 2015 and then returned the favor last year, beating me pretty badly. This may sound silly or immature, but I saw the race as between him and me.
The way the bow numbers were handed out, I was starting second to last, and Sontgerath was starting last behind me. So, it was simple, I just needed to keep my eye on him and maintain the spacing.
Bob and I launched around 8:30 for a 9am start. We warmed up going down to the start. For some reason, my speedcoach decided to stop soon after launching and I didn’t notice it until I was getting ready for the start. So, most of the warmup is missing.
It was cold and rainy, around 48F. There was a light and variable wind that seemed to be from the northwest, which is a cross/head wind. I only noticed it a couple of times during the race when I felt like I was working harder and the splits slowed down. I was quite glad to have the power meter.
Anyway, we were all at the start, and so the officials decided to move the start time up a few minutes so we wouldn’t just sit there getting cold and wet in the rain. We were called up to the start in order and off we went. The starting line was at the southern end of larger island, right about even with the label “Pinecrest”. My first target was Sturges. I saw him off my starboard side. You go up the western shore of the lake, and soon after the start is a beach that juts out. I decided that I could pass him to the shore side and still have enough room to steer out from the beach. It worked out fine and I was well clear of him by the time I steered a bit out from shore for the beach. The guy who started in from of Sturges was Kisarale, but when I looked around I saw no sign of him. I did see Byrnes, so he became my next target. He was also off my starboard side, and we had the narrows coming up. I just held my line and we slowly moved toward the buoy line that marked the starboard side of the course. I passed him right around the narrows and when I looked around I could spot anyone close enough to focus on.
Now it was time to just row. This is about where the video picks up. There is bit more than 1km from the narrows to the bridge. I was starting to feel the pain, so I started counting strokes. I got to about 130 when I got to the bridge. The whole time I was keeping my eyes on Heri (Sontgerath). At times, he seemed like he was closing the distance, and other times it seemed like I was stretching it out. Frankly, I didn’t even really remember how far back he was at the start, so I had no clue if I was ahead or not.
From the bridge to the end should be about another 200 strokes. Which I counted off as I went. It seemed like it took a lifetime to get from the bridge to the Gazebo. I thought it was almost another 1000m from the gazebo to the finish and so I just settled in and tried to avoid blowing up while I started scanning for the finish. I saw it, but in retrospect, I wish I had seen it sooner. I started my sprint later than I should have. But I finished strong. I thought the finish was going to be marked with white buoys. It was marked by a pair of oranges, which I thought represented the start of a finish chute. I continued my kick for another 100m beyond the finish to a white buoy.
That extra kick brought be me up to be close enough to chat with Maldari. Apparetly, he was trying to keep his seperation with me, like I was trying to with Heri. We had a nice chat about boats and stuff as we paddled to the docks. They I cooled down from the QRA docks to our club at regatta point.
The results
Third place, but first place amongst the old guys. I walked around 10 feet tall the rest of the day.
Here’s a video of the last 9 minutes of the race. The first 10 minutes were basically useless because of water on the lens.
Looking at the video, as always there is a lot of stuff that I need to work on. The most obvious is that I have re-established my habit of digging way too deep and rowing over a barrel. I also need to work on making the body and arms part of the stroke more powerful.
My pace was 2:14.9 this year. I did this race in 2015 in similar conditions and my pace was a 2:12.9. Here is a link. 2015 was my best year at the HOCR. Comparing the two races, I pushed hard in 2015, with the last 5 minutes above 178 bpm. My rowing looks very similar. I am probably about 15 lbs heavier now. I am ever the optimist and when you put all that together, I come to the conclusion that I can get back to and even exceed where I was in 2015. As always, it comes down to weight, technique and fitness.
Well, enough for now. I think I will go do some easy rowing on the dreaded dynamic.
Well, I guess it makes sense to look at my training plan. I was so sure that I was supposed to do a 5 x 1500 today, that I didn’t bother to look. Afterwards, I saw that, in fact, I was supposed to do a 4 x 2k. Oh well, it was a hell of a workout.
It was a nice morning. Grey skies, a bit misty, but around 60F. There was a light and variable headwind heading up river. I passed a few boats as I headed out and they were heading in. I had the river to myself. With the high level of the river and the high flow, There is a fair amount of debris. I scared myself to death when I hit a stick poking up from the water with my oar. It was only about an inch in diameter, but it must have been attached to a really big submerged log because it nearly took the oar out of my hand. This happened on the first rep, so I was working hard to spot the stick on the four next reps as it slowly floated downstream on the current.
I am still having issues sleeping and I didn’t feel so great when I got to the river. It was tiring sweeping he goose crap off the dock. But once I was in the boat and doing my pick drill, I started feeling a bit better.
I stopped and relaxed and had a drink when I got to the fun part of the river and then I started my first rep. As usual, I was careful with rate at first. Today, I tried to keep the power on the speedcoach display in the 180 to 190W range.
The first rep was blazing fast. 2:06.4 and 176W. Thanks to the tail wind and the current, I was flying. The second rep was a rude shock. Almost 11W higher average power for an average pace of 2:17.8. I was a bit more conservative in the third rep, but it was stil pretty damn hard by the last 500m. The fourth was higher watts than #3, but lower than #2 and it really stung at the end. Then it was a cruise down the river for the fifth, 16W lower than the second interval. A bit more fade than I would have liked. But, I’m happy with my execution on the workout.
Tonight, I fly to Geneva. I have meetings on Wednesday afternoon and evening, and fly home on Thursday. If I can find a gym to do a quick taper workout on Thursday morning, that would be a bonus. Then I will do a quick technique row on Friday. I race Saturday.
Quantified Rowing 