I arrived home from Vegas around 9pm on Sept 13th.
Sept 14th: I worked from home because we are having some work done around the house and I needed to be there while the various tradesmen did their things. Around 4 in the afternoon, they cleared out and I went for a quick run. My intent was to do an erg session afterwards, but my wife came home while I was out running, so that part never happened.
It wasn’t much of a run, about 5km. I ran the first 4.3km, then walked for about 5 inutes and then jogged home.
September 15th: The various projects that were supposed to conclude on Thursday, did not, in fact conclude on Thursday, so I needed to be home in the morning to supervise. I needed to be at work in the afternoon, so I left them unattended. A big mistake as it turned out because the work that was done on our heating system was done badly and will need to be redone. Since I got to work late, I spent the rest of the day rushing around, and then in the evening my wife and I spent hours trying to track down the people responsible for messing up our heating system. Ultimately we gave up and drove down to the Cape. So, no training on Friday.
Saturday, September 16th.
On the way to the cape, we got a call from the heating system company. They would have a technician at our house between 10 and 11 on Saturday morning. Oh well, I was hoping for an easy coastal row on Saturday morning, but priorities must be maintained. I headed back first thing the morning. I was quite pleased to see that it was way to foggy to row anyway.
The technician showed up at 1:50pm, in other words, nearly 3 hours late. And the work they did was just as bad as the work done on Friday. It will all need to be done yet again on Monday. The highlight was a slow and sweaty session that I did on the dynamic.
I’m taking a bit of a different strategy with the dynamic. I have upped the drag a bit, setting it around 4 or so. (drag factor 120). and I am keeping the stroke rate above 20. I am also working very hard to keep my knees together at the catch, keep my chin up and limit the amount of layback. It leads to a very different feeling strong. Less long and smooth, but much easier on my lower back.
I was annoyed that I didn’t have my HR strap, so I just rowed to constant pace (2:10, ~160W). In another strategy to limit the back strain, I rowed 15 minute pieces and 2 minutes rests, and I got off the erg and stretched during the rests. This resulted in a reasonable intensity and a huge sweat fest in the humidity (Did I mention that the issues with the heating also effected the air conditioning?)
I was further annoyed when painsled hung up around 8 minutes into the second interval. The PM kept going, but stopped talking to painsled for some reason. It’s really a pretty unreliable connection.
We had house guests so I couldn’t work out until later in the day. I’m still struggling with the dynamic so I decided to just redo the saturday workout with similar targets to see what happened.
Plan:
3 x 20′ / 1′
stroke rate: r20
Heart Rate Limit: 155
Power target: ~160W (up 3W from yesterday, but I started higher than that yesterday and bled down as I went along. I wanted to be steadier in this session.
I am still perplexed about my performance on the dynamic. Here are very similar 3×20′ sessions. One done on the static about a month ago, and the one fro the dynamic done yesterday. I did a bunch of comparison charts, but I can’t draw any good conclusions.
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!
Monday night: Flew out to San Jose. Arrived around 11. Asleep around 1am
Tuesday: Rest Day. Meetings all day. Caught the red eye home from San Jose.
Wednesday: Arrived at the airport around 5:15am. My original plan was to stop in Newton, do a session on the water, and then continue on to work. But, I felt pretty beat up from the flight and I decided to go home and get some sleep instead. I was in bed by 6:30 and I slept until 10. I had breakfast, did some email, and decided I had time for a quick erg session.
I have a race this Saturday. It’s open water, and 8K long. I’m just getting used to the Aero, and I’m not sure what kind of pace I can hold over 8km. Two weeks ago, in my first row, my “tide adjusted” pace was around 2:55/500. That was basically at a marathon pace, so I think 2:45 might work. 8km at 2:45 would take 44 minutes. So, basically, it’s not that different than a hard 10K on the erg.
So, I haven’t really done any hard distance work, so it seemed like a good idea to do a “dry run” to remind myself that its possible to row above 165bpm for a long time, even though it isn’t very pleasant.
I was at home, and I was using the dynamic. So I had no idea what pace would work. I decided to be conservative and take off at a 2:00 pace, and then speed up once I got calibrated. Based on the 4×15 type sessions I’m doing I figure I am good for 1:55 pace over 10K on a static erg right now.
But on the dynamic, it was impossible for me to hold a 2:00 pace beyond 5km. By that point, my HR was already up around 175 (93% HRR) and I was really struggling. I upped the rate and eased the pace to try to get back in firmer control of the row, just the way i would if I went out too fast in a race. I really didn’t want to give myself permission to give up. That is not the way to prep for a race.
So, I struggled my way through the back half of the session and managed the tiniest of sprints at the very end. I spent 6 minutes above my anaerobic threshold. It hurt. It hurt more that I was only rowing at a 2:00 pace.
So, I am trying to figure out just how much harder it is for me to row the dynamic. On clue could come from the session that I did on Monday. That was a 4×15′ where the first 6′ was at 250W (roughly a 1:50 pace). I compared my HR response over the first 6 minutes of that row and the first 6 minutes of this row.
They are very close to superimposed. So, my guess is that I am 40W “better” on the static than the dynamic, that’s 23% different. For comparison, between the static erg and my fluid, the difference is closer to 11%.
So, I still hate that devil machine. (El Dy-ablo)
Tomorrow:
M2
3 x 20′ / 2′
MP, 10KP, HMP
90.0%
(167)
On the water. I’ll do each interval to the proper distance and do quick turns when required.
I hate the dynamic erg. I never have a good workout on it. It is unpleasant to row and very noisy. I think it’s time to sell it and buy a model D.
You might guess that todays workout was not so good. You’d be right.
The plan was
2 x 30′ at mp or slower
2 minutes rest
HR cap at 150
Just and easy session. On a static erg, I would probably crank the first interval out at 180W and the second at 175W and it would be nice and easy. On the dynamic, it was awful. It felt like I was rowing through weeds the whole time. I cranked the drag down to 1 (DF = 82 for the purists) and it still felt heavy. I’m done with it.
Today I registered for my first coastal race. The Provincetown Regatta, next Saturday. It’s a little race. 8k long, two laps of an M shaped 4k long course.
I am training through this race. I am doing it mainly to get an event under my belt before the Blackburn and to meet some Cape Cod based rowers.
I was wiped out all day after my 20k adventure. (Maybe I pushed a bit harder than I thought). Monday was a holiday, but the weather was terrible, so my wife and I decided to head back a bit early. Apparently everyone on Cape Cod decided to do the same thing because we were in a massive traffic jam and it took us over 4 hours to get hour (vs the normal 2 hours).
Once we were home, I decided to do the next M2 session.
M2
3 x 20′ / 2′
MP, 10KP, HMP
90.0%
(167)
I was doing this on the dynamic (and I am beginning to really dislike the machine). I felt awful. Just rowing the first 30 minutes at marathon pace was torture. My HR didn’t climb that much but my RPE was through the roof. I decided to bail after the first 20 minutes.
Part of the problem was that I didn’t respect the fact that I get more watts on the static than I do on the dynamic, but really, the big issue was that I was just spent.
Saturday: I briefly debated going rowing on Saturday morning, but between a forecast for rain, and the need for sleep, I decided against it. It was a good decision. I slept 10 hours and woke up feeling good! My wife and I had some errands to do, and we had a late lunch. By the time I had digested lunch and finished some grocery shopping, it was around 7pm before I got around to working out.
I wanted to do a workout with a bit more intensity, so I opted for my favorite wolverine plan L3 workout.
15 x 3′ / 1′ rest
Target pace: 1:55
I have managed to do this workout sub-1:50 when I am in really good shape. I am not in really good shape. I am also not sure how well I do on faster workouts on the dynamic rower. Anyway, it was a target.
It started off OK, but by the time I got deep into the workout, I realized that I had started too fast. The wheels started to come off after the 10th interval and I just did the best I could the rest of the way. No handle downs, or form breaks, just slower and slower splits.
PM version of power
PM version of pace, considerably more generous than the interval summary below.
Sunday: Up around 8 after a good nights sleep. Felt a bit stiff and sore from the workout the evening before, but I wanted to get a quick workout in before I hopped a plane to go to Seoul. I wasn’t really in the mood for an erg workout, and it was a nice day out, so I decided to go for a run. Nothing fast or fancy.
I did a loop that was about 7km. It took about 37 minutes. It’s been a long time since I’ve run outside. It felt very awkward at first, but I settled in after a few minutes. My knees started to complain a bit after about 4km, and the irresistible lure of home home made me speed up a bit at the end. My legs are nice and sore now.
I don’t think my knees could hold up to running on a regular basis, but I think I should try to do it a couple times a month. I really enjoy it and it’s great cross training.
Now I’m over northern Canada somewhere, with 8 hours or so until I get to Tokyo. I change planes and continue to Seoul.
I get in at 10:30PM local time. I will try to grab a short workout before I leave the hotel at 8am on Tuesday morning.
Quantified Rowing 