I met Joe at 8.  We were expecting 5 total rowers, but everyone besides Joe and I cancelled out.  So, we hopped in the double.

I was glad to get out on the water for a bunch of reasons.

1. It sure beats erging, and I’ll be doing a lot of that over the next 5 months.
2. There are all sorts of changes afoot with the rowing club and I wanted to hear the details
3. I had a new version of the Quiske app that I wanted to try out.

The weather was a little iffy.  It was in the low 40s, but there was a brisk wind blowing from the NW.  It was about 10mph on average, but quite gusty, up to 20mph.

When the wind is from the NW, the worcester side of the lake is quite pleasant.  You are in the wind shadow from the shore and you get flat water and gentle tail wind.  But the trip north up the shrewsbury shore is a real slog.  The wind hits the shoreline and is funneled to the south.  There is a pretty good chop and each headland acts as a funnel for the wind and the waves.

Look at those horribly slow splits!  We were hovering around 3:00 splits for most of the way up the lake.  Each of the big dips was around one of those headlands.

Because I was in the double, I didn’t have my oarlock, but I was curious how much power was required to push into the headwind, so I used one of the advanced features on rowsandall.  There is a physics model to estimate power from pace for a few boat types, including the 2x.  The model includes the ability to correct for wind.  It’s very cool.  It imports the minute by minute wind data from the nearest weather station, and then applies it to the GPS data from your row and figures out whether it was a head wind, cross wind or tail wind and then calculates a corrected pace.  I think today’s breeze might have overwhelmed it.  It says in the toughest bits, we were hitting 300W.

This in turn is used to calculate the corrected pace chart.

I think it might have been a bit generous on the pace estimate, but I sure felt better about the our slow slog into the wind after I looked at it.

The Quiske pod worked great.  When I started I had it mounted wrong way around so it must have thought I was rowing in the Upside Down (little Stranger Things reference for you there).  Once we got to the south end of the lake, I fixed it and was able to see my oar path for about 4K up the lake before my phone ran out of juice.

It’s remarkable how quickly the Quiske folks are improving the iOS app.  It’s already at a state where it can be used to help diagnose and work on elements of technique and they are rapidly working out all the kinks.  I’ll be writing up a more detailed review sometime in the next few weeks.

Tomorrow:  I think it will be basically be a rest day.