15km around Wellfleet Harbor

May 21, 2017May 23, 20174 Comments

The weather was much nicer on Sunday morning. I headed out around 8:30 and launched just before nine.

The wind was from the ESE at 10-12mph with gusts to 15mph. This was enough to kick up seas around 1 foot once I was out toward the further out part of the row.

I was following the same “long row” course that I defined a couple of weeks ago.

I didn’t have enough time to do the whole course, so I cut off the 4.9km out and back. This turned out to be a wise move for a couple of reasons. First, it was getting pretty bumpy and I was a bit concerned about rowing into the wind and waves for 7km. Second, my boat broke when I was still about 3km away from my launching point.

Here is a video of the fateful event. The breakage occurs at 50 second in.

Prior to that I was having some fun in the waves. Here is a video of the last couple of minutes heading out to Billingsgate Island. The waves were getting a bit bigger and I was surfing down some of them. Then I turn and head back toward home. It was about 20 minutes later when I broke the backstay.

Here’s my overall course, from Google Earth.

I need to recheck the course. It looks like the initial 1.2km is wrong and the heading for the leg down to billingsgate Island is a bit off too. I was glad to see that my lines were much straighter from paying closer attention to the course. The stay parted just a little bit north of the buoy nearest the “0.5km/20deg” label.

I was also happy with the HR profile of this row. I wanted to try to maintain this as a UT2 row, because I will need to stick to that kind of a pace for a 3 to 4 hour event. In the summary plot you can see that I held the same heart rate both upwind and downwind. The pace was good, bnetween 2:40 and 3:00/500 until I turned into the wind and waves. Then it was a lot slower, as you can see in the next plot. Then around 1:17, the boat broke and I was limited to a slow paddle.

So, I had a blast during this row. I am bummed out about the boat, but to be honest, I was worrying that it wouldn’t be seaworthy for the race, given the kinds of conditions that can occur. I was also feeling quite vulnerable as I got into bigger seas far away from land. I bought the boat cheaply to find out if I like coastal rowing. I have decided that I really do. So, I think I will buy a proper boat that I can trust.

Saturday: 3 x 20′ / 1′ @ 180W

May 20, 2017May 22, 2017Leave a comment

Down on the cape. I was planning to go rowing but it was too windy. There were gusts above 30mph. But it was sunny and beautiful out, so I set up the erg on the deck and got to work.

Just an easy session to keep the blood flowing.

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.

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.

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!

Long, slow burn in the fitness center

April 26, 2017Leave a comment

Still in Seoul. At the JW Marriott (the fitness center with the mechanical horsey, but no rower)

I had time to kill this morning. I woke up around 5:30AM, and I didn’t need to leave for the airport until 10:30. So, I did some email, did a crossword, surfed the web, and around 7, I decided to head to the gym.

The plan for today

4 x 20′ endurance
20 minutes max incline treadmill
20 minutes flat incline treadmill jog
20 minutes elliptical (intervals, level 15)
20 minutes stationary bike (rolling hills, level 8)

Holy hell it was boring.

Now I’m at the airport waiting to get on my flight. I’m connecting through Hong Kong and getting back to Boston around 10:30PM. Ugh.

I just sync’ed up StravastiX. I’m certainly not putting a challenging load on myself these days. I think I need to ramp up the volume AND the intensity if I want to make much progress. It says that my fitness is improving, but I think it is deceived by the fact that I only started logging after my return from my knee operation. It had my fitness starting from zero, but it was actually pretty good prior to my layoff. I bet that I would be hovering versus slowing improving if that was the case. I think I need to get a good 6 months of activity recorded before I really trust the trends.

It’s almost time to restart the marathon plan. Except this time on the water!

I’m not complaining, but….

April 21, 2017Leave a comment

…my occupation seems to be be getting in the way of taking a disciplined approach to training.

I was planning to do 80 minutes of endurance work this morning, but getting through email took longer than planned, and I needed to keep it to 60 minutes.

Since I was bored, I decided to change up the workout a little. I decided to do power ladders.

Here’s my revised plan.

3 x 5000m intervals
1 minute rests.
break each 5K into 5 1K pieces
first 5K: 160W, 165W, 170W, 175W, 180W
second 5K: 165W, 170W, 175W, 180W, 185W
third 5K: 170W, 175W, 180W, 185W, 190W

Based on yesterday, i figured that 175W was a good UT1 power, so this workout would start out pretty easy and push a bit beyond aerobic for the last 2K or so.

Of course, since I was in a rush, ergdata decided to hangup within 5 minutes of starting. Now I’m wise to it’s tricks, so I had started the wahoo app to collect HR data as a backup, so I just kept going.

The time passed very quickly and I had fun doing it. And I made it to my first meeting just on time.

Tomorrow: I’m really tired. I’m not sure what I’ll do. Probably an erg session in the afternoon.

Better than nothing! 3 x 20′ / 1′ rest

April 20, 2017Leave a comment

Easy day today. Early meetings, so no time for OTW. I planned 3×20′, and I decided to go very easy at the beginning. I did the first 20′ at 165W, then ramped it up to 175W, and then rowed to a HR cap of 155.

I started to exceed the cap towards the end, but a couple of big belches kept me in the proper HR zone. Amazing how that works. It’s usually worth about 3 to 5 bpm. 🙂

Weather forecast is lousy for tomorrow morning. 45F and 99% chance of rain. So I guess I’m inside again tomorrow. I have a bit more time, so I think I’ll do 4×20′ with a HR cap at 155.

Quantified Rowing

Measure – Adjust – Improve

Tag: endurance