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.
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.
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
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.
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. 🙂
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.
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.
Just cruising. Piling up meters. I brought down the power to make it an easy session. My HR raced up anyway. Must be biorhythms or something?
2500m warmup
Then in to the main event, 5142m. I thought I could hold 1:50. I was wrong. Painfully wrong. Ouch.
2500m cool down to bring me over 10K for the day.
Disappointed, but not surprised.
Nothing special. Here’s a comparison to a prior hour. You can see how I rowed to the 20 minute caps. 145 @ 20′, 150 @ 40′ and 155 @ 60′
Tuesday: I had to work through exercise time yesterday morning to prep a presentation for a meeting later in the day. I hoped to sneak off to the gym between meetings during the day, but everything ran long. so it was a Bonus Rest Day! I didn’t need any more rest.
Wednesday: Still dealing with high workload, but I managed to plow through it in time to squeeze 60 minutes on the erg. I decided to no “waste” any of it as rest time, so I just rowed straight through.
Good session. I was bumping up against my moveable cap. The rule I’m using is:
I was fine through about 30 minutes, then I needed to slow down to stay legal. At 40 minutes, with another 5 beats to play with, I went back to 175W, and then slowed again after 5 minutes or so. I decided to reward myself for being such a good boy by allowing me to make up the lost wattage in the last minute.
Tomorrow: 3 x 20 or 4 x 20 depending on how much time I have.
March 23, Thursday: I last posted on Wednesday of last week, with a monster journal entry. Around 4:30, I headed off to the airport to catch a 6:30 flight to San Francisco. I arrived around 11:00 pm and by the time I had picked up my car and driven down to San Jose, I didn’t get to bed until around 1am. I needed to be on conference calls starting at 7am, so I decided to get a bit more sleep instead of working out.
I went to an all day conference, and then headed back to the airport to take a red eye home.
I guess you’d call it a rest day?
March 24, Friday: I slept pretty badly on the plane. I was crammed in coach in row 37 (almost all the way in the back), and felt pretty claustrophobic, I probably managed about 3 hours of sleep.
Working from home seemed to be the most intelligent thing to do, so I did. I had meetings from 9am to 1pm. At that point I jumped on the erg for an easy endurance session to work the kinks out. With that little sleep, I had low expectations.
It was a pretty lousy workout, but I felt better after than before.
Later Friday evening, my wife and I took off for the cape. It is a significant understatement to say that I was really eager to go.
I slept like a log for ten hours Friday night.
March 25, Saturday: I lazed around in the morning, and hung out with my wife in the afternoon. There never seemed to be a good time to go workout, so I didn’t. I felt a little guilty, but only a little. This was a real rest day.
March 26, Sunday: I slept another 10 hours. I felt great when I woke up and I lazed around some more. I was just sitting around doing crossword puzzles. This was the view from the couch.
Beautiful sunny day, but cold for this time of year. Around 38F, with the water temp about the same. I think I have about another month before I really want to do much open water rowing.
In the afternoon, I headed down to the basement and did an 80 minute session. Getting started was frustrating. First, I discovered that I had forgotten the strap for my Wahoo Tickr. Then, I discovered that the battery in my Polar H7 had died. So, I decided to go without a HR monitor. Then I discovered that the batteries in the PM5 were dead, and I needed to steal batteries from a flashlight to replace them. Finally after about 20 minutes of faffing around, I was finally ready to settle down.
I decided to do a 4×20′ session. Since I didn’t have a HR monitor to keep me honest, I immediately decided to row faster, targeting 2:05 instead of 2:08. It actually went really well. I felt strong and relaxed through the whole workout.
The little peak at the end in the power curve was caused by me seeing that I was within striking distance of getting over 20km for the whole session, so I rowed the last 1 minute rest hard enough to roll it over.
March 27, Monday: Back to the routine. Up at 5:15. Email until 7:15. Hit the gym. Today, I decided to do 2×30’/2′ rest @ 175W. This was a bit slower than Sunday, but still faster than last week. I was curious if the early morning or the 80 minute session from Sunday would cause me to push the HR to high.
Nope. It was a good session. HR plateaued nicely at 175W. I think working it up to 180W over this week will be the plan.
Tomorrow: 2 x 40′ / 2′ (If I have time, otherwise another 2×30.
This pace of workouts is basically maintaining fitness, not improving it. But my fatigue level is nice and low!
Last entry was on March 12th. Holy cow, that’s a long time ago.
Monday, March 13th: No Training, Doctor’s appointment in the morning. My BP is running higher than it should be, and he increased the dosage of my meds.
Tuesday, March 14th: Apparently no training, but I have no idea why. This is why I need to do this daily!…. Oh wait. It’s coming back to me. We had a blizzard and I slept in instead of training. I did shovel the walk for about 20 minutes of light aerobic exercise, but otherwise I didn’t have time to train.
Wednesday, March 15th: I had an 8 am meeting, so I needed to be quick. I just did a 10K at 180W. The ANT+ interface on my HR monitor gave up during the row and took down ergdata with it. Luckily, I still had the the wahoo app running on my phone! Hooray for redundancy.
Conclusion from this row. I need to turn down the intensity for steady state.
Then On Wednesday evening, I headed off to the airport to fly on the redeye to London, and then on to France for a meeting. I felt quite ill on the flight, and a bit under the weather the whole time I was in France.
Thursday, March 16th: Arrived in Marseille around 11am, internal meetings all afternoon. Conferece calls until 2:30am. No Training
Friday, March 17th: Up at 7:3oam to head to meeting at customer site. Meeting concluded around 12:00pm. Straight back to airport, caught a flight to London, and then back to Boston. Arrived home at about midnight. No Training.
While I was on the road, and a bit unsettled by how bad I felt on the flight over to France, I decided to take a step back from my current training plan. I was not happy with how my HR has been so high in my endurance sessions. I am also traveling too much to keep pace with the plan right now. Finally, my job stress is basically through the roof.
I decided that I will bring the intensity down a notch. I think it is critically important to my stress level and health to workout as many days as I possible can. But I want the workouts to be more relaxing and less demanding. I think it could actually be quite beneficial to focus on building my aerobic endurance for a few weeks, and then hop back on the plan. The plan would be to row with a strict 155 HR cap, and turn the pace way down to 2:10. I should be able to see incremental improvement in the power that I can hold with this heart rate constraint over a period of a few weeks.
Saturday, March 18th: My Birthday! I turned 54. A relatively non-descript birthday. Not much of a milestone. Very weary from the travel. Slept about 10 hours. Late afternoon, settled in for a very easy session.
Plan: 3 x 20′ / 1′ rest @ 2:10 (160W)
It was a very pleasant workout.
Sunday, March 19th: More low intensity stuff. I slept like a log for another 10 hours.
Plan: 4 x 20′ / 1′ rest at 160W
This was the opposite of the Saturday workout. It felt like hard work and my HR was very high. I slowed down like a good boy and just ground out the meters.
Workout Summary - media/Import_29209848.csv --|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg --|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS --|18234|80:00.0|02:11.6|153.5|20.0|152.0|000.0|11.0 W-|18234|80:00.0|02:11.6|153.5|20.0|152.0|000.0|11.0 R-|00329|04:00.0|06:04.7|007.2|00.0|000.0|000.0|00.0 Workout Details #-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS- 00|04621|20:00.0|02:09.8|159.9|19.0|000.0|0.0|00.0 01|04565|20:00.0|02:11.4|154.1|20.0|000.0|0.0|00.0 02|04515|20:00.0|02:12.9|149.1|20.0|000.0|0.0|00.0 03|04533|20:00.0|02:12.4|150.9|21.0|000.0|0.0|00.0
Here is the comparison of Saturday and Sunday.
It’s like I’m two completely different people.
Monday, March 20: Back to work. Back on a static erg. Only about 6 hours of sleep. I did about 90 minutes of emails before I hit the gym.
Plan: 3 x 20′ / 1′ rest at 160W (2:10)
This was very a nice easy coast. I’m letting my rate float a bit higher these days and it makes for nice fluffy strokes.
Almost the same as the Saturday session. My HR response was a bit better.
Tuesday, March 21: About 6 hours sleep. 2 hours of email and then hit the gym around 8am. Feeling pretty energetic.
Plan: 3×20/1′ rest at 168W (2:08)
I decided to push the power up a bit since my HR was nice and low, and I decided on a HR cap strategy for these rows. I will try to cap the first rep at 145, the second at 150 and the third at 155. Seems like a reasonable allowance for drift.
Another good workout. Higher HR with the faster pace, but a nice plateau in the last 20 minutes. I feared I would have to slow down, but I didn’t.
Comparing Monday and Tuesday.
Wednesday, March 22: Whew, we’re up to today. 6 hours of sleep. 90 minutes of email, then hit the gym at 8am.
Plan; 3 x 20′ / 1′ rest at 168W (2:08)
Same deal as Tuesday. I’d like to see the HR plateau a bit lower before I ratchet up again.
I really enjoyed the workout. Just nice easy strokes. I can feel my aerobic endurance returning a bit (probably entirely in my head)
This was bit better than yesterday.
Now I am off to San Jose for an all day meeting on Thursday. Fitness center triathlon for me tomorrow, then a red-eye tomorrow night.
I think this is a good change. I could feel myself burning out. By focusing on base aerobic endurance, I feel like I have more energy and I’m more focused at work. I’m also sleeping well.
Easy session to finish off the week.
Workout Summary - media/Import_29133954.csv --|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg --|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS --|14345|60:00.0|02:05.5|177.2|19.0|148.0|000.0|11.0 W-|14345|60:00.0|02:05.5|177.2|19.0|148.0|000.0|11.0 R-|00675|04:00.0|02:57.8|062.3|00.0|000.0|000.0|00.0 Workout Details #-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS- 00|07173|30:00.0|02:05.5|177.2|19.0|000.0|0.0|00.0 01|07172|30:00.0|02:05.5|177.1|20.0|000.0|0.0|00.0
Comparison to mid-February
Quantified Rowing 