Monday, July 3:  We delivered my sister in law and her two sons to the ferry in the morning and spent the day doing laundry, cleaning and hanging out.  It was great to have company, but it was also nice to have the house to ourselves again.  Around 3:30 in the afternoon, I decided that the wind had died down enough for a row.  So, I packed up my boat and headed off to the northeast beach.  The wind was blowing about 10mph from the WNW, and there was a ton of chop from the wind and whole lot of motor boats.

I launched from the northeast beach of the island and headed up to wellfleet harbor.  The tide was coming in, so I was going with the current up along the shore of indian neck.  I went into the harbor and did a broad turn up toward “The Cove”.  As I came back toward the channel, there was a sailboat coming out of from behind the jetty.  It’s pretty shallow where I was, and I suspected it was even shallower where they were.  Sure enough, I soon heard a grinding noise and they came to a stop, aground on a sand bar.   As I rowed out of the harbor, I saw them back the sails and maneuver off the bar.

I then headed west along mayo beach.  At certain points, it go pretty shallow.  I could see the bottom and a couple of times one of my oars touched bottom, but it was OK. Then I took a broad turn toward the south and circled around the point of great island.

The row from there to my turning point was bouncy and somewhat unpleasant.  The waves were very confused with all the motor boat traffic, and the various shallow spots.  Eventually, I noticed the time and turned for home.

I had intended to row due east straight past the red buoy #10, but the waves wanted me to take a bit of a more northeasterly course.  I swung around in a big arc and headed for the beach when I passed the northwest tip of the island.

Workout Summary - media/20170704-015955-Greg Smith 20170703 0352pmo.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|15925|98:02.0|03:04.7|000.0|21.1|154.1|163.0|07.7
W-|15470|93:50.0|03:02.0|000.0|20.9|154.6|162.0|07.9
R-|00458|04:00.0|04:22.2|000.0|25.0|142.9|162.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|04982|29:30.0|02:57.7|000.0|20.0|154.8|162.0|08.4 - to harbor
01|06740|42:47.2|03:10.5|000.0|21.0|155.6|160.0|07.5 - across and down
02|03749|21:33.0|02:52.4|000.0|21.7|152.3|162.0|08.0 - back to beach

I was working hard through the whole row, and the HR shows it.  I have to avoid doing that in long races or I will burn out for sure.

Tuesday, July 4: We packed up ourselves and headed back to Hopkinton.  The traffic on the day after July 4th can be murderous on the cape, and we wanted to avoid it is possible.  We got home in the late afternoon, and eventually, I settled down for what I hoped would be a quick and easy 40 minute session.  Of course this was on the cursed, awful dynamic erg at home, so it didn’t turn out that way.

The plan for was an L4 style workout.  I really enjoyed the last 20 minutes of the session I did on Saturday, so I decided to do basically the same thing.  But I found doing it on the dynamic to be a whole different experience.  It was massively difficult.  I have never worked so hard to go so slow!

One mitigating factor was the heat and humidity.  It was 70% humidity and 80F in the room when I finished.  It took two towels to mop up the floor.

Wednesday, July 5th: I guess I must have been tired, because I slept until 10:30.  The rest of the day was a blur of shopping and yard work.  We aren’t around the house much and the outside was looking a bit shabby.  All day long I was dreading the idea of doing another session on the horrible dynamic in the sweatbox.

The plan was to stick to strict HR cap at 155, no matter how slow I had to go.  That turned out to be very slow, and continually slower to stay under the cap.

So, how much worse is the dynamic.  I used the comparison charts to look at this workout, and the 3×20’/2′ workout that I did on the prior Saturday on a static erg.

Both sessions were endurance sessions, with a HR cap at 155.  Here’s  the HR compared.

The orange trace is the dynamic.  The green is static.  Now here’s power.

In the middle of the last interval, when the HR’s were about the same, I was pulling 50w lower on the dynamic!

Here’s a scatter plot of the HR vs power.  You can on the static (green points), the expected relationship of higher powers and higher heart rates holds.  The dynamic (orange points) shows a backwards relationship.  It seemed as if no matter how much I backed off the pace, my HR was pegged in the 150s.  This is consistent with my thought that there is something wrong with the machine which is increasing the friction on the drive.

One confounding factor is temperature.  The static session was in a cool (but humid) basement.  The dynamic session was in 80F/70% humidity.  That could explain a bit of the difference.

Thursday, July 6th:  My father passed away last December.  He took up sailing in the 1970s and it became more and more important to him over the next four decades.  For the last thirty years, he has been a member of the Boston Yacht Club and over that time has been the chairman of the race committee and a principle organizer of a big ocean race that the club runs every other year between marblehead and Halifax Nova Scotia.

We decided that a fitting send off for my Dad would be to scatter his ashes at sea off of marblehead.  We planned it for this Thursday because the start of this race is coming on Saturday and many of the folks that he knew from Nova Scotia would be around for the race.

A friend of his has a very serious vessel, the Elizabeth M.  It’s a 40′ trawler.  Here’s a video of it out for a cruise on another day…

We had aabout 25 people on board, took a slow cruise around the harbor, and then, once we were off marble head light, we scattered my Dad’s ashes and left some white flowers.

It was a really nice send off for him.  He had a great group of friends and he has left a legacy at the club behind him.

Then we headed home, packed up and headed back to the cape.

Friday, July 7: Rain was in the forecast starting in the late morning, so I got up early (ish), and headed out for a row around 7:30.  I launched from the NE beach.  It was overcast with very little wind.  The wind picked up a bit about half way through the row, but only to about 8mph, from the SSE.

The plan was for an easy row.  Try to get the feeling of rowing at a stroke rate of 20 SPM and stay in the UT2 HR zone.  For a 3 to 4 hour race, I want to be doing a pace I can hold all day long!

I decided to explore wellfleet inner harbor a bit today.  I rowed out to Buoy #10, then turned north.  The trip up to the harbor was fast and smooth.  There was little wind and I was rowing with the tidal current.  I  rowed to the breakwater that marks the entrance to the inner harbor and rowed along the town jetty, and around behind to the boat slips.  The speedcoach showed that I had done 7500m.

I stopped for a drink of water, and then retraced my steps.  The row back from the breakwater to buoy #10 was a lot slower.  The wind had picked up a little bit and I was rowing against the current.  The plots show a good 30 seconds difference in pace.

I turned around Buoy #10 and headed due east to get back to the beach.  When I reached the place where I launched, I was about 500m short of 15km, so I continued on a bit, turned around and beached the boat right when the speedcoach passed 15000m.

It was a very happy row.

Workout Summary - media/20170707-170512-Greg Smith 20170707 0739amo.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|15049|87:41.0|02:54.8|000.0|20.5|139.6|157.0|08.4
W-|14836|85:11.0|02:52.3|000.0|20.6|139.7|157.0|08.5
R-|00216|02:30.0|05:47.9|000.0|18.0|119.6|157.0|00.0
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|02397|15:00.0|03:07.7|000.0|20.8|133.1|146.0|07.7 - to buoy #10
01|02947|15:00.0|02:32.7|000.0|20.4|141.4|146.0|09.6 - to bkwtr
02|01704|09:00.0|02:38.4|000.0|20.6|139.5|142.0|09.2 - to turn
03|01163|07:00.0|03:00.5|000.0|20.0|130.1|136.0|08.3 - back out of hbr
04|04753|29:00.0|03:03.1|000.0|20.5|141.7|147.0|08.0 - back to buoy #10
05|01872|10:11.7|02:43.4|000.0|20.9|148.4|157.0|08.8 - back to beach

Now it is raining like crazy.

Tomorrow, hopefully another row just like this one!