Tag: concept2

Sunday: Lactate 10′ Step Test

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Plans for any training down on the Cape this weekend were disrupted by other priorities.  We had all kinds of appointments on Saturday morning, and the main mission for the day was to prepare the deck around the house for a coat of wood sealer.  This took much longer than I was hoping because I vastly underestimated how much deck there was to prepare.  (1400 SQ FT!)  Anyway, by the time that was done, I was not in the mood to do much of anything beside hang out with my wife and drink a couple of beers.

I was thinking I could go for a row on Sunday morning, but when I woke up, it was blowing like crazy.  The peak gust was 50mph (80km/h) and sustained winds were around 35mph (55km/h).  I didn’t even like the thought of trying to pedal a bike into that kind of a headwind, so I decided to wait until the afternoon and just do an erg session.

But what session to do?  I was planning on an early morning row in the Double with Joe on Monday morning, so I didn’t want anything too intense.  And there was a fresh new box of lactate test strips that had just arrived.  So, I quickly decided to do the same 10 minute step test that Sander did last week.

My protocol:

  • No warmup
  • 10 minute steps
  • 1:30 rests
  • start at 160W and increment by 5W to 200W
  • Measure HR throughout and lactate at the end of each step

The purpose of the test is to help define an appropriate steady state intensity for endurance training.  I suspect that it would be around 180-185W or so.

When yo put the data  into a plot, it looks a bit weird.  The test did not go entirely smoothly.  I suspect the lactate test for 170 was contaminated with sweat, leading to a high reading.  The one at 175 had to be redone due to an “E-4” (insufficient sample size).  At 180, I also suspect contamination.  The rest of the readings I think were good.  I had my method down pretty smoothly by then and I was doing a good job cleaning my hands.  I suspect that the inflection above 190W is totally legit. Based on this data, I could try to train at 190W, but I suspect that this would be a bit too intense.  I did this test after a full rest day, and late in the afternoon (my best time of day).  The temp was warm, but cooling down during the session.

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I had plenty of time to think, and one of the things that occurred to me is that it is entirely plausible that it takes me 30 minutes to really warmup for a steady state session.  Some of my best results a couple of seasons ago were when I eased into the first 20 minute session by starting at a lower power and then hitting target power for the second 20 minute piece.  When I did that, I think I was able to hold higher “watts at 2.0 lactate”.  I think I might make that my standard procedure over the winter.

So, 185W will be my training power for now.  Next weekend, I think I will do a 90 minute session at 185W and do lactate tests every 10 minutes to see what happens.  The hypothesis I am testing is that my lactate will initially rise toward 2.0, then fall back toward 1.0, hitting a trough around 40 minutes, and then start to rise again after 60 minutes.

Thursday: 4 x 20′ / 1′ rest

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Last night I reviewed my schedule for today and realized that I had an all day offsite meeting that I was scheduled to attend today.  This made the logistics of doing an OTW session unworkable.  Also, last night I made arrangements to meet up with my doubles partner on Friday morning for a training session on Lake Quinsigamond.  I’m intending that to be an r24 Head Race Simulation type of session, so I changed today’s session from a hard, short interval session into an endurance session.

Plan:

  • static erg at work
  • 4 x 20′
  • 1′ rest
  • rate: 19-20
  • power: 185W
  • HR cap: 157

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Just like yesterday, this session was way, way harder than it should have been.  Compare it to the session that I did on Monday at exactly the same power.

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I tried to respect the HR cap at 157, and dropped the power down to 180 about halfway through the third 20′ piece, and to 182 for the whole 4th piece.  It felt hard, but not all that hard, and I didn’t feel drained at the end.

Tomorrow:  5.5k @ r24 in a 2x on quinsig.

One annoying thing.  I did the session on painsled, but after I finished, there was nothing in the painsled log.  Good thing I had my wahoo fitness app as a backup, or else it would have been like I hadn’t worked out at all! 😉

 

Tuesday: September CTC – 10′

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I prepared for anything this morning.  I dressed for rowing outside, and packed my sneakers to do an erg session in case the weather was no good.  Turns out the weather was awful.  Chilly with a steady, light rain and a blustery wind.  So, I drove straight to work with the intention to do the September CTC.

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First, a Fletcher warmup.

Then the main event!  I targeted a 1:48 pace.  This turned out to be pretty close to a maximum effort.  I backed off a little with 3 minutes to go because I felt like I was losing it.  I let it slide to a 1:50 pace until there was a minute and a half to go and then picked it back up again for the last 40 strokes.

After a bit of gasping, I set up for a quick 2K cool down.  I was aiming for 9:00.0.  I missed it by 0.2

Tomorrow:  Training plan calls for a steady state OTW session.  Who am I to argue.

 

Monday: 4 x 20 @ 185W

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Saturday and Sunday we had guests and there was never a good time to go train.

We came home last night and today, in  the afternoon, I settled in for a long and easy erg session.

Plan:

  • 4 x 20′
  • 1′ rests
  • power:  185W
  • HR limit: 155

I got back into listening to a Teaching Company course.  This one is a skeptics view of american history.  Today I heard about the beginnings of the labor movement and america’s ambivalent attitude toward imperialism.  The time passed quickly.

Tomorrow the forecast is for lots of wind, showers and a chance of thunderstorms.  I think another erg session is called for.  Maybe a shot at the September CTC.

 

Sunday: Easy hour.

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Got home around midnight last night, so I slept in instead of heading off to the lake this morning.  Around 3 in the afternoon I was ready for an erg session.

I wasn’t sure what to do today, so I decided to do an hour.  I would start slow, around 2:05, and speed up by a second every six minutes until I got to the top of the UT band.  Then I would slow down by a second to the end.

It ended up being an enjoyable session.  A bit warm, in the mid 80s and very sweaty, but I was happy that it took until the last 12 minutes before I hit the top of my UT band.

Data was saved using ergdata and then processed by rowsandall.com.

Tomorrow:  14k steady state OTW

Wednesday: August CTC

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I was out late on Tuesday night for a work related dinner, so I decided to sleep in on Wednesday instead of rowing in the morning.  When I got home, I had a little time, so I decided  to give the August CTC a try.  This one is a sprinter’s dream.

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I started with a 2K warmup, including some 10 stroke blasts.

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Then I took a bit of time, got some water and setup the challenge as a variable interval workout.  I separated each piece with 5 minutes of rest, starting with the longest and going shorter in each successive piece.  In the rests, I did about 3 minutes of this paddling, and the last 2 minutes, I toweled off, grabbed a drink of water and let the flywheel come to a complete stop.

It was a fun session. It was challenge to get the start right and I didn’t get it right on the 300 and 200 and was staring at a very slow AVG split that took a while to get down to where I wanted it.  The 400 and the 100 were much better.  I knew I needed to rate up to make this work, but I haven’t practiced at high rates at all, so that felt a bit weird.

Despite those excuses, I had a blast doing it.  The 5 minute rests were plenty long and the pieces were short enough that I felt like I could go all out.

I used ergdata for the session.  This was sync’ed to the concept2 site, and then I exported the CSV data and massaged it with excel.

I like the power chart.  It makes me happy to see over 600W, even if it’s only for about 10 strokes.  The rate chart shows how my rate was tending to trail off during the pieces.  The pace chart is at the bottom.

I was using the wahoo tckr which let me hook up to the PM5 with ANT+ and to my phone with BTLE.  I used my phone to record HR through the warmup, the whole CTC session and a 2K cooldown.  This was done using the wahoo fitness app, and exported as a CSV file and analyzed with Excel to get time in HR zone data.

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The sprint times were  plugged into the little online calculator and that spit out 5:50.6, which puts me currently in 91st place.  Looking at the names and times in the list, I really should be aiming at 10 to 15 seconds faster, but that seems like a lot of work!  So I think I stick with this score.

 

 

 

Sunday: 4 x 20′ / 1′ rest

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Was planning to go rowing but I was still really jet lagged and had trouble falling asleep at a reasonable hour.  Finally fell asleep around 2am and got up around 10am.

I went and did an erg session around 3 in the afternoon.  Goal for today was to basically do the same thing as Saturday.

Still hot ~80F and humid 80% RH.  A real sweat fest.

Today, I was going for r19 and 185W.  Basically the same results as yesterday, but started at a higher initial heart rate.  I eased off against the target power in the last 20 minutes to try to stay right at the top of the UT1 band, but missed it by a couple BPM.

 

Friday: 3 x 20′ / 1:30 rest w/ lactate

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Thursday:  As expected, no time to train.  I took the redeye home from San Jose.  I was not able to get any reasonable sleep on the plane.  Highly unpleasant.

Friday:  I arrived in Boston at 6am.  Then drove home.  Almost immediately, I turned around and drove my wife to the airport.  She is off to visit my daughter in St. Louis.  I was home again by around 11 am.  My eyelids were drooping severely but I managed to stay awake to attend a work conference call at noon.  After that, I took a 3 hour nap.  My intent was to get up around 4, head out to Lake Quinsigamond and do a long and easy technique session.  But, when I was packing my things, I got a text from a friend of mine telling me that there was a wakeboarding competition going on and the whole lake was a really treacherous place to be.  Time to go with Plan B.

Plan B

  • 4 x 20′
  • 1:30 rest
  • Power target: 10W x stroke rate
  • HR cap: around 150
  • Lactate target: 2.0

It was massively hot and humid.  Around 95F and 70% RH.  Rowing at 190 watts felt pretty easy for the first 10 minutes.  Then the room warmed up, I started sweating, and it started to feel like a lot of work.  By the end of the first 20 minutes, my HR was still OK, only around 144, but my RPE was really high.  I was breathing hard, and my first lactate reading was 3.3mmol/l.  Way too high.

So, my intent was to dial it back to 170W from 190W and just take it easy.  After the rest, and a big drink of water, I started again.  It felt like really hard work, and I seriously considered just bagging the whole thing.  I even coasted to a stop about 2 minutes into it, but I thought better of it and decided that I should at least finish this 20′ piece.  I felt a lot more comfortable at 170W, but it was still a pretty sweaty affair.  After this one, I tested out a 2.8mmol/l.  Still too high.  But my RPE was right on.  My breathing was easy, and my ending HR was again around 145.

Well, I had come this far.  I had another drink, and decided to just paddle through one more 20′ piece.  This one I started off thinking I’d target 150W, but ended up pushing that up to 160.  Still very slow.  After this, my lactates were 2.6mmol/l.  RPE right on target, but HR had climbed up to be close to 150 by the end.

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The session seems to add some weight to a few thoughts that I have been pondering.

  1. My aerobic fitness is not so good right now.  I need more low intensity minutes working on my ability to metabolize fat.  My high lactate numbers show that I am crossing over to CHO respiration at pretty low levels.
  2. The effect of heat and humidity on endurance training is pretty profound.  I think it could as much as 10 or 20 watts impact in terms of what power you can hold and maintain a <2.0mmol/l lactate.
  3. I haven’t seen any research to back this up, but I feel like there is some hysteresis in the crossover between fat and CHO metabolism.  Something like this.  I feel like I have to go way down in power to “shut off” CHO metabolism once it has been started.  I think this is another reason why some folks have found lower ultimate lactate readings if they start with a few minutes at a very low warmup power before they slowly increase to their target.

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I think this is fascinating because it brings a physiological angle into a age old debate around how to do HR capped training.  The question that I have seen asked over and over again is this…If you are training to a specific HR cap, is it better to start faster than what you think you can hold for the whole piece, and then start to bleed off pace once you are in the training HR zone and approaching the cap, or is it better to hold a constant training power and adjust that power so that you are around the cap at the very end of the workout?

I have seen recommendations about this from very credible people that are entirely opposite of each other.  One conclusion that one might draw from that is doesn’t matter much in terms of training effect.  But, on an individual basis, if you are trying to specifically train fat burning endurance, it probably makes a lot more sense to slowly build power, or hold it constant  versus bleeding off pace.  Anyway, its food for thought.

 

Tuesday: 3 x 20′ / 1’30” rest (w/lactate)

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I had a blast in Provincetown on the 4th.  I went for a walk in the morning to go collect some breakfast.  Then we lazed around the rest of the morning.  Around noontime, we wander over to a boat rental place and rented a 2 person kayak.  We spent an hour paddling around the harbor, checking out the yachts and enjoying the sunny day.  Then the walk back to the hotel, picking up some sandwiches on the way for lunch.  Later in the afternoon, we headed out again and walked all the way across town to a favorite shop of ours.  On the way back, we picked up some wine, cheese and crackers to enjoy during the fireworks.  We settled in on the deck of the hotel, and watched the fireworks over the harbor.  All together, it was over 7 miles of walking and a brilliant day.

The drive home was unpleasant.  We set out for home around 11am on Tuesday morning.  Apparently, so did everyone else on Cape Cod.  We fought through 4 hours of traffic to get off the cape, and even then, the traffic pretty heavy  the rest of the way.  We didn’t get home until well after 5pm.  I had a snack, and drink, and then went off to do a light 60 minute session.

Plan:

  • 3 x 20′
  • 1:30 rest (to allow time for lactate tests)
  • target power: 185W
  • rate: 19-20

It was hot and humid.  After I finished, the temperature was 80F, and the humidity was 80%.  It was a very sweaty, and hot enough that it compromised the power I could hold with reasonable lactate levels.

The first 20 minutes was fine.  Lactate at the end was 1.9mmol/l.   I missed the start for the second interval because I was running to get a water bottle.  So, I was chasing the target power a bit.  The power for the full interval read 182W, but I missed about 15 seconds of rowing at the beginning, so I was rowing >185W for the whole interval. I also was starting to sweat up a storm and feeling a bit overheated.  At the end of the second interval, I read 3.2mmol/l.  I suspect it might have been a bad reading, but I decided to back off the power to 180W for the last 20 minutes, and push the stroke rate up to 20 to keep things under control.  It did the trick.  My HR stabilized and my lactate level dropped back to 2.2mmol/l. by the end of 60 minutes.

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