Another 10K on the bay

May 14, 2017Leave a comment

Today was going to be my grand adventure. But it didn’t turn out that way.

I got to bed around 11, and I slept hard until almost 9am. So, I got a later start than I wanted to. I finally was loaded up and left the house around 9:30. While I loaded up, I realized that I had forgotten to print out my map. Damn. I guess I would do the best I could from memory. I drove over to a different beach which I thought would be better for launching near low tide. It was.

I got everything down to the beach and was about to put my boat down in the water when I noticed that I didn’t have my seat. Blast! I put my boat up high on the beach (the tide was coming in) and drove home to get my seat. About 10 minutes later I was back on the beach putting my boat in.

The partly cloudy and light easterly winds that were advertised did not seem to be in evidence. The sky was grey, and a moderate wind from the South was blowing. This beach faces north so the water was nice and flat off this beach. The wind was going to get worse. Here’s the weather data.

I finally launched just before 10am. I wanted to be home before noon, so I decided that I would limit my adventure to about 90 minutes.

Here was my original plan.

Here is what I actually did, superimposed on the plan.

Here is the course, from Google earth, with heart rate, which helps tell the story.

a. Launch from beach. Notice that the Speedcoach isn’t showing pace. Remember that speedcoach is set to use impeller, which this boat doesn’t have. Stop and change the setting of the speedcoach. Start rowing again. Take 10 strokes, notice that the speedcoach is not started. Start the speedcoach. Get going. Notice that the water is getting quite shallow. Decide to change course to take me a bit offshore.

b. Stay on the same course until I reach 1.5km. Then return to original course (330deg). The wind is building a bit now, and the waves are pushing around the stern. I’m surfing on some of the waves. This part of the row was good fun.

c. When I reach the breakwater at the mouth of Wellfleet inner harbor, I stop and turn. Now I really notice how much the wind has built. I made this turn at about 10:10. The wind was 12 mph sustained with gusts up to 15. The waves were starting to build. I started to push up into the headwind. I thought the course from my plan was 210 deg, it was actually 200.

d. Anyway, I was doing fine for a while, and then I hit a stretch with particularly nasty waves. I stopped to open up the bailer and started again. That’s the little dip in the HR. Looking at the chart, that place seems to be a bit shallower. I guess it would make sense that the waves would be nastier in the shallower spots. It’s hard to see the difference looking over your shoulder. Anyway, after opening the bailer and getting going again, I was doing ok. Until…..

e. If you look at the google earth image, you can see the color of the water change. On the chart, you can see that the bottom shoals here. The waves suddenly got really, really bad. I wished that I had the gopro mounted because I’d like to look at it after the fact. It felt like the waves were well over a foot tall, and my bow was plunging right into them. They would roll back over the deck and completely fill the cockpit. This happened 3 times in a row and I decided that it was stupid to keep going in this direction. I had no idea if the wind would build and I was barely able to make headway as it was. I decided to turn for home.

f. I steered due east, and tried to work my way through the beam seas. You can see that my HR was pretty low in this stretch because I couldn’t really take full strokes. I just picked my way through the waves and when I would get a really bad set of waves, I would just paddle through them, then try to accelerate during the smoother chunks. After a while, I could see that my easterly course was going to take me too far north, so I turned and rowed to SE for a while.

g. As I rowed into the lee of the island, the waves were blocked and the water flattened out very nicely. I started to row with longer strokes and it felt really wonderful. My HR was quite low today for the level of effort. This section was very enjoyable.

I noticed that the pace was quite fast for open water, and I realized that even though I had a little bit of headwind, I was rowing with the current. I got back to the beach with about 9000m on the speedcoach. I like the blog title “10K on the Bay”, so I did 500m more past the beach, turned and came back. I was having so much fun, I kept going.

It wasn’t the long row I intended, but it was useful practice.

A side note. I spent an hour trying to fix the leak in my boat. It turned out that there are a couple of cracks in the bulkhead between the seat deck and the bottom of the footwell. The rigger attaches to this bulkhead and the screws that hold it in place were frozen in place. The whole bulkhead looks like it is about to go. Ultimately, I will need to cut out the whole bulkhead and replace it (or more likely just sell the boat).

But since I wanted to fix the leak and I couldn’t get the rigger off, I decided to just work around it. I mixed up a batch of epoxy resin and cut a few strips of fiberglass and just reinforced the area where the cracks were.

This photo shows the rigger attachment to the seat deck bulkhead.

Here’s a close up of the ugly repair.

It is not pretty, but it seemed to work. After bashing into the waves, I only had about a cup of water drain out after I was finished.

Tomorrow: Marathon training session.

3 x 20′ / 2′

MP, 10KP, HMP

90.0%

(167)

Paces:

MP –> 180 to 195W
HMP –> 195 to 210
10KP –> 210 to 225

Friday: Groggy 10K of technique

May 13, 2017May 13, 20171 Comment

The red eye was pretty miserable. I was in a seat with extra leg room, but because it was in front an exit row, the seat didn’t recline. I got some sleep, maybe 2 to 3 hours in fits and starts, but I eventually gave up and just read.

Boston was cloudy, drizzly and about 45F when I landed. I wasn’t sure if rowing was the best idea, but it seemed to be clearing up a bit, so I went for it. I’m very glad that I did. It was glorious out there. I wasn’t working terribly hard, and I wasn’t out for very long, but I felt a thousand times better when I finished.

The plan for the day was to just do 2 minute intervals of SBR, then 2 minutes of alternating SBR and feathered and then 2 minutes of r20. It’s sort of become my go to low intensity workout.

I finished 1 lap of the river and had a little bit more time, so I did 6 minutes down river in the 2 minute chunks. Then I turned around and rowed at r22 back to the cut. It was about 6 minutes of high UT1 rowing, and it felt nice and clean. I tried to row it to 190W or so. I think I’m about 10w different between erg and boat (erg higher for the same HR repsonse). When I got back to the lagoon when I launch, I did a 30 stroke set at r26. It sure felt hard. I was doing that for 30 minutes in head races not that long ago.

Tomorrow: My big adventure row.

Thursday: 4 x (6′ @ 5KP, 9′ @ MP)/5′ rest – A terrific workout!

May 11, 2017Leave a comment

In San Diego at Crossfit DelMar.

The plan was to start getting back into formal marathon training. I’ll admit I was a little worried about how it would go. I went to be reasonably early and slept OK. I felt pretty good in the morning.

Workout

6′ @ 5KP (255-240W)
9′ @ MP (180-195W)
5′ rest (it was supposed to be 4′ but I remembered it wrong)
repeat 4 times

I don’t even understand why this workout felt so good. It didn’t feel easy, but my heart rate was nice and low and there was no doubt about being able to handle it. I was able to increment up the power as I went through the repeats.

Tomorrow: I’m taking the red eye home tonight. I’m planning to go for a easy technique row on my way home from the airport. Probably a lot of SBR maybe a bit of bungee rowing.

Mulching, rowing and wimping out

May 8, 2017Leave a comment

Saturday: In the driveway was a pile of 5 cubic yards of dark pine mulch. It was raining and about 60F. I procrastinated until about 11am, and then I finally got my ass outside to spread it. The process is simple and labor intensive.

Use an edger to clean up the edge of the bed
dig out the dirt and mulch that has settled into the edges
Get all the weeds out of the bed
Spread mulch

It sounds simple, but I spent from 11am to 3pm, and then from 3:30 to 7:00pm doing it and I didn’t quite finish. By the time I was done, I could barely lift my arms, and getting up from a sitting position was a struggle. I’d call that 7 and a half hours of strength/endurance training.

Sunday: I was tired and sore when I woke up, but I really wanted to go rowing with my friends out in Worcester. The morning was grey, around 50F, and windy. The wind was blowing from the SSW between 10 and 15 mph. It felt like the gusts were higher than that.

We had 6 of us rowing, two people wanted to take singles, so I doubled up with Bob in our “new” wintech double. I was eager to give it a real tryout.

I didn’t have much of a plan for the workout, so we just rowed down to the south end of the lake, into the wind. We had a lot of starts and stops at the beginning as I tried to get the speedcoach working and Bob got his Garmin Fenix running right, but after the first 1000m or so, we got into a rythym. It was slow going into the wind, but the boat felt good. I was enjoying myself a lot.

When we turned around at the south end of the lake, I asked Bob if he would be OK doing some rate ladders. I ended up messing with some of the durations as we went, but it was good to row with specific rate targets. I think we got better synchronized as the row went on.

After we got the north end of the lake, we noticed that the wind had picked up even more. The row back to the boathouse was very slow and heavy going. I was glad that I was in a double. It would have been a bit hair raising in my single with that much wind and chop.

I tried to reconstruct the ladders as best I could.

Workout Summary - media/20170508-150701-SpdCoach 2182533 20170507 0744amo.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|10759|55:03.0|02:33.5|000.0|23.0|154.3|176.0|08.5
W-|10500|52:03.0|02:28.7|000.0|23.0|155.2|176.0|08.8
R-|00268|03:00.0|05:35.9|000.0|20.1|119.5|176.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00004|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|09.5|086.0|86.0|00.0
01|00682|03:15.0|02:23.0|000.0|22.3|141.1|149.0|09.4
02|01967|09:45.0|02:28.7|000.0|23.8|152.7|166.0|08.5
03|00651|03:00.0|02:18.2|000.0|20.7|142.9|153.0|10.5
04|00432|02:00.0|02:19.0|000.0|21.6|156.1|158.0|10.0
05|00218|01:00.0|02:17.8|000.0|23.0|159.1|161.0|09.5
06|00228|01:00.0|02:11.4|000.0|24.9|161.7|162.0|09.2
07|00860|04:00.0|02:19.6|000.0|22.8|163.0|169.0|09.4
08|00643|03:00.0|02:19.9|000.0|22.2|159.4|161.0|09.6
09|00438|02:00.0|02:17.1|000.0|24.7|163.9|167.0|08.8
10|00229|01:00.0|02:11.2|000.0|26.1|168.5|170.0|08.8
11|00812|04:00.0|02:27.8|000.0|21.1|161.7|169.0|09.6
12|00421|02:00.0|02:22.4|000.0|22.8|160.8|163.0|09.3
13|00702|03:15.0|02:18.8|000.0|27.0|168.2|176.0|08.0
14|01751|10:00.0|02:51.3|000.0|22.1|148.9|159.0|07.9
15|00462|02:48.2|03:02.0|000.0|24.1|157.4|167.0|06.9

It was hard work, but a pretty short session.

It was great to see my friends and I really like the wintech double.

After I got home, I spent another couple hours finishing up the mulching. Not nearly as strenuous as Saturday’s labors but still.

Monday: I felt awful last night. I thought I might be coming down with something. Or maybe I was just worn out from my busy weekend. I felt like I might be getting a fever. Nevertheless, I set out my stuff to go rowing this morning, and I was out the door before 5:30 to get to the river.

As I was driving there, it started to rain. And I notice that the temperature was only around 42F. I made an executive decision. I decided to blow of “real” rowing and just go do a quick erg session at work before my first meeting at 9am. I had some prep to do and I felt my stress level go down as soon as I decided.

I didn’t have any shoes, so I rowed in socks. I don’t much like that since my heels tend to slip out, but it would do for the short session I had in mind.

I just did a easy 10K push. I started with a target of 2:09, and sped up by a second for every 1000m. This was easy to keep track of because the pace was the same as the leading digit of the distance to go. 9xxx –> 2:09, 8xxx –> 2:08, 7xxx –> 2:07, etc.

It was also really easy rowing at the beginning and only started to feel tougher with about 3000m to go.

I enjoyed that session too.

Tomorrow: I will try to get back on the marathon plan. I haven’y yet done any of these workouts on the water. So tomorrow will be.

4 x 15′ / 4′

6′ @ 5KP, 9′ @ MP

92.5%

(172)

Now, I don’t really know exactly how to pace this, so I will try to row it to power. So that would make my targets 225 to 240 for 5KP and 180 to 195 for MP. I’m interested to see how it works.

The other challenge that I have is river length. I can just about squeeze in 15 minutes, but the longer intervals in the plan will require me to spin to get them done.

Friday: 90 minutes of near-bliss

May 5, 20171 Comment

I felt like crap all day Thursday. My stomach was a little upset, and just felt lethargic and slow. We went to bed early again and I got a good 8 hours of sleep. I woke up this morning feeling a whole lot better.

The weather was gray and it rained off and on. The temperature was in the mid-40s. But there was very little wind and I was looking forward to just taking it easy and working on technique. My morning schedule was pretty open, so I didn’t have to rush to much either.

I launched and got going. My plan was:

2′ SBR
2′ alternating square / feathered
2′ r20
repeat over and over again.

As I rowed out to the useful part of the river, I decided that today would be a good day to get the impeller mode of the speedcoach calibrated. Right now there is enough current that my upstream and downstream speeds are different by 10 or 15 second per 500, and since the impeller is already mounted on the boat, I might as well use it.

I had never done the calibration with the speedcoach GPS, so I fumbled through the menus a bit until I found it under the advanced setup menu. Once I found it, it was easy and intuitive to use. Just start it up, it tells you to start rowing, and once you are up to speed, it uses the GPS to measure 500m of true distance. Then it tells you to turn around and press start when you are ready to do the same thing in the other direction. After all that, it tells you what the cal factor is.

So, I did 2 moderately hard 500m pieces to setup the cal. I was suspicious that it might not be a good cal because my boat speed looked a bit too good.

After that, I just rowed. I went all the way down river, back up to the cove, then back down to the dam. The basin down by the dam is pretty broad and the I can do 500m without much of a turn, so I did the cal again. The cal factor came out close to the first time (1.069 vs 1.061), but I did pull one massively bad stroke in the first 500, so I am wondering if I could get it better. Maybe I’ll do it again on Quinsig this weekend over 1000m.

After I finished the second cal, I decided to row steady state the whole way back. I was pulling really hard in the 2 minute chunks of r20, and I wanted to try to practice at a feathered at a lower stroke pressure. This was very pleasant rowing.

The whole outing was about 17km on RIM, and I was on the water for 96 minutes. It was glorious.

This is the GPS data from RIM. You can see the extra loops at each end of the river where I did the cal pieces. You can also see a place in the middle where the was some kind of glitch with the data. I did not, in fact, row through the headland, not even close.

Here is the same thing using the GPS coordinates from the speedcoach. In this one, the cal pieces are missing, but look at how much smoother the path is.

Here’s the summary plot from the speedcoach. Still suspicious about the impeller based pace, but it sure is less noisy! It is also missing the cal pieces.

Here is the summary plot from RIM.

In this plot, I have smoothed the pace data twice, and it is still a lot noisier than the speedcoach data.

I am trying to figure out the best set of parameters to have live in the boat. Today, I setup the speedcoach to have pace, HR, effective length and wash. On RIM, I had stroke rate and elapsed time. This worked out OK, but I think I like using the RIM for HR. For example, today I don’t have any HR data for the cal pieces. In a similar way, if I setup the speedcoach for an interval workout, I would miss the rest data. If I use RIM essentially as a logger, and the speedcoach more interactively, I think that would work out.

I think I will always want to see pace, stroke rate, heart rate and elapsed time. And I would like to have two fields for empower related stuff. Right now I am working on finishes, so it makes sense to have wash. But eventually, I think I will mainly have work and effective length as the main screens.

Feeling so bad yesterday and so good today has gotten me thinking.

I have never really figured how much business travel interferes with training. I used to just think of travel days as enforced rest days and tried to just hit my training goals working around the travel. From that perspective, the only impact was essentially from reduced training hours when I couldn’t squeeze in the sessions.

Now I think it’s worse than that. Spending 6 hours squeezed into a plane (or 15 hours) and shifting multiple time zones is nothing like a real rest day. But it does nothing to improve my fitness level. Right now, I am thinking that it puts the same stress on my body that training does, but without the beneficial training effect.

So the question is…what to do about it? The answer is…I don’t know. It seems pretty clear to me that maintaining a very regular training schedule helps me manage jet lag and stress. It’s also clear that my performance in training sessions after travel is compromised. So, I think I keep doing what I’m doing. I will try to rearrange my schedule to put low intensity sessions after trips and I will focus on base endurance cross training or strength while I travel.

The other thing that is really clear to me is that the best thing I can do to improve performance right now is to lose weight. Losing weight requires no extra time, it can be done while I’m at home or on travel, and every 10 pounds is worth a full second off my 500m split in the boat. The problem with losing weight is will power. It takes a lot of effort for me to lose weight and it’s easy to lose motivation. But, I need to give it a try. It will help my fitness, performance and health.

Tomorrow: yardwork all day. Time to mulch.

Wednesday: The longest hour

May 3, 2017May 4, 2017Leave a comment

I took the red eye home and didn’t sleep much at all, very uncomfortable.

I went home, crawled in bed around 8:30 and slept until noon. I had a couple of conference calls and decided to do an hour on the erg around 3:30.

The plan was to keep it gentle, HR cap at 155.

That required me to row very slowly at the end. I’m getting a bit depressed at how badly things are going right now.

This morning, I got up and I felt so sore and tired that I just wet back to bed instead of rowing. I’m at a low point right now.

Tuesday: 30′ run

May 3, 2017Leave a comment

I’m out in San Francisco for a User Conference. I snuck out for a quick run in the afternoon. It was a beautiful afternoon. Sunny with a bit of a breeze, and the hotel is right on the water near the airport. I could watch the planes taxiing, taking off and landing while I ran.

The run itself was very hard work. I guess I’m just in pretty bad shape.

At least I did something.

Back to Boston on the Red eye tonight. Erg session tomorrow. 4 x 20′ endurance.

Monday: 2′ Intervals OTW

May 1, 2017May 3, 20176 Comments

Weather: Cool and misty. Around 45F. A little bit of wind, head wind when going upstream generally. After Saturday in Wellfleet, I have a new standard for wind and waves. 😉

Plan:

2′ On /2′ Off
3 sets of 4 intervals
Each set at 22, 24, 26, 28 spm

As I set off from the dock, I noticed how much more cramped I felt at the finish than I did in my Alden. I turned around and headed back to the dock and moved the footstretcher 2 cm toward the bow. I noticed the change immediately and I felt a lot more comfortable at the finish.

I rowed the 1km out to the start point and I set off. The 22 was easy, so I only took 1 minute of rest. After the 24, I was starting to feel it so I took the full 2 minutes. This setup worked pretty well. I was pretty gassed at the end.

Workout Summary - media/Fusion_20170502-211209.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|09687|54:00.0|02:47.2|172.2|22.5|151.1|179.0|08.0
W-|05553|24:00.0|02:09.6|246.8|25.5|158.4|176.0|09.1
R-|05345|37:06.0|03:28.2|108.4|20.2|145.3|176.0|08.2
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|00007|00:00.0|00:00.0|000.0|08.5|102.0|102.0|00.0
01|00458|02:00.0|02:11.0|198.3|22.5|153.1|160.0|10.2 - tail wind/curr
02|00467|02:00.0|02:08.4|242.9|24.5|158.6|165.0|09.5
03|00491|02:00.0|02:02.1|266.5|26.5|160.5|169.0|09.3
04|00500|02:00.0|02:00.0|279.3|28.0|162.5|173.0|08.9
05|00437|02:00.0|02:17.4|216.7|22.8|150.1|165.0|09.6 - head wind/curr
06|00442|02:00.0|02:15.8|240.3|24.8|160.8|169.0|08.9
07|00459|02:00.0|02:10.7|231.6|26.7|164.3|173.0|08.6
08|00463|02:00.0|02:09.6|274.4|28.1|164.8|176.0|08.2
09|00451|02:00.0|02:12.9|235.3|22.6|146.2|165.0|10.0 - tail wind/curr
10|00469|02:00.0|02:07.9|272.0|25.3|158.0|170.0|09.3
11|00448|02:00.0|02:14.1|228.9|26.3|159.2|171.0|08.5 - head wind/curr
12|00462|02:00.0|02:10.0|275.2|28.4|162.6|175.0|08.1

This shows some of the power of the interval editor on rowsandall. By isolating each interval, you can see how much the wind and current was effecting pace. Compare intervals 1,5, and 9. In # 1, I was in a tail current the whole way. In #5, I was against the wind and current for the whole interval. In #9, I started in a dead end section and finished with a tail current. You can see that in the variations in pace. More interesting was how I was working at higher powers in each one of them. Look at the consistency of power at r28. 275 to 279W. But the pace was 2:00 with the current and 2:10 against!

To look at the effect of moving my feet, I compared this workout with the a rate ladder workout I did back in April. This workout was at r18,20,22 and 24, so I plotted a few parameters versus stroke rate to see what changed.

Effective stroke length: Improved about 2-4 degrees
Slip: roughly the same, strongly correlated with stroke rate.
Catch angle: Maybe a little higher. I was surprised, I would have thought 2cm would have caused a bigger change.
Wash: 2-4 degrees better. This where the longer effective length came from. By giving myself a little more room, I could tap down better.
Finish: I was expecting this to get smaller since I moved my feet, but it didn’t change all that much.

I am like the new foot position, and I like being able to correlate it with a single parameter (wash) that got better.

Good workout. It’s fun to row hard sometimes.

Sunday: 2 x 30′ / 1′ rest

April 30, 2017May 3, 2017Leave a comment

Just an easy erg session. Got home from the Cape and did some shopping and stuff around the house. Finally got a chance to work out around 7:00pm.

Just an easy endurance session.

Heart rate climbed a bit more than I would have liked in the second 30 minutes.

Workout Summary - media/20170502-2100210o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|14498|62:00.0|02:08.3|168.4|20.3|143.5|156.0|11.5
W-|14212|60:00.0|02:06.6|172.1|19.9|143.6|156.0|11.9
R-|00287|02:00.0|03:30.1|063.5|27.9|136.2|156.0|06.2
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|07120|30:00.0|02:06.4|172.8|19.6|138.2|146.0|12.1
01|07093|30:00.0|02:06.9|171.5|20.3|149.0|156.0|11.6

10K on Wellfleet Harbor

April 29, 2017May 2, 20173 Comments

Weather: It was nice until I decided to go rowing. I didn’t go first thing in the morning since the tide was low. (It’s tough to launch at low tide because there are extensive sand flats all around the island. High tide was at 2:40pm. I launched about 12:45. As I walked over the dune to the beach, I noticed there was a bit more wind. It turns out it continued to freshen through the row. It turned out to be quite an adventure.

I turned north and headed up to Wellfleet Harbor. I actually headed somewhat NW, into the wind and waves until I was past the north point of the island. Then I headed more northeasterly with the wind and waves on my stern quarter. It was only 500m or so, but it felt longer in the boat. Then I lined up a course to take me to the end of the wellfleet harbor breakwater. The wind felt like it was on my port bow quarter, and this was actually a reasonable course with the building waves. At this point they were probably 12″ or so and quite unpredictable. I’d get a couple big ones, and then a few minutes with much smaller ones. I enjoyed this part of the row a lot, but not as much as when I turned the corner after the breakwater. I turned east. The wind was close to dead astern, and the breakwater took care of the chop. There was a longer period swell that seemed to bend around the end of the breakwater and I was surfing down the face of these waves. This was a blast.

It all came to an end when I turned around at the east end of the harbor. All of the sudden the wind that was diminished by me going in the same direction, was right on the bow. Going into the harbor, I was rowing 2:30-2:40 splits, coming back out, I was lucky to get below 3:30. Even on smooth water, this was hard work. As I came out past the end of the breakwater, and hit the waves that built up across the broad fetch over to the great split, it got even rougher. My original thought had been to cross over to Chequesset Neck and then row down the great spit, which would have been somewhat sheltered from the waves, then I would cross back over to the island at the south end of the spit. That plan did not last too long. I bashed my way against the waves and the wind for a few minutes and then decided that I had had enough. I turned for home and tried to navigate with the waves a little bit forward of my beam.

This was easier, but still a lot of work. I would go through sections where the water was reasonably flat and I would get some good strokes in, then I would slam into some bigger waves and completely fill the cockpit with water. The bailer couldn’t keep pace with the all the water that was coming in. At this point the waves were 12 to 18″ and I was struggling with the conditions. The worst was the last 1000m. This part was over the shallow Lt Island shoal that extends out from the island. The waves were much bigger here and most of them were breaking. I just tried to pick my way through them. You can see my HR went down a lot in this section.

You can’t really see just how slow I was going when I turned around into the waves on the summary chart.

So, here it is in isolation.

I am trying to construct what happened when. I used Google earth, which can show telemetry along the mapped route to figure it out.

A. Decide to head straight up to Wellfleet instead of heading over to Indian neck since the waves were building.

B. Turn behind the breakwater. The next chunk was fun.

C. Turn around to row back into the wind.

D. Get slammed around enough that I decide to head straight home instead of heading for Great Spit.

E. Huge waves stop me dead and fill up the whole cockpit, even the seat deck was under water. Noticed that the self bailer was a bit fouled, cleaned it out and continued.

F. Get to the shoals around the island and the waves start breaking. Pick my way between them back to the beach.

Even though it was hard work, and frankly a little scary at times, I enjoyed it and I think it provided some useful rough water practice. I feel pretty confident about what the boat will do in these circumstances and I’m getting the hang of working with the waves.

It was also a pretty good workout.

I noticed a couple of interesting quirks in the telemetry.

First, the algorithm that NK is using to detect strokes doesn’t work as well as RIM when you are going slowly and getting slammed by big waves. In the comparison plot below the RIM data is blue and the NK data is red. The total stroke count on the NK was way off too. I was counting strokes and NK was over counting by about 5 strokes per hundred.

Second, there is a mismatch in total logged distance. In the first half of the row, with less wave action, they match up well, but as soon as I was pounding into the waves, RIM started to give me credit for more distance than NK. One idea is that RIM might be measuring distance in 3 dimensions and NK is measuring in 2? But by the end, it was a difference of about 500m

When I got back to the beach, enough water had leaked into the bow of the boat that I could not lift it. I had to flip it over and let it drain for 5 minutes before I could carry it to the car. I think I found where the leak is. There is a crack in the bulkhead between the seat deck and the cockpit bottom. Whenever the cockpit gets full, water can drain into the bow. Since the cockpit was basically full the second half of the outing, the boat must have been half swamped by the time I was back to the island. No wonder it felt so sluggish.

Next weekend, I think I need to do some fiberglass work!

Quantified Rowing

Measure – Adjust – Improve

Category: Training Journal