Tag: erg

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: 10K Push

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Friday:  No Training.  We closed on our new vacation house down on cape cod.  Here’s the view from the deck.

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Saturday:  No Training.  A very busy day setting up the house.

Sunday:  Started the day down on the cape.  I went for a nice walk around the island.  I decided that the stairs down to the water are too steep to carry a boat down.  I’m going to drive 2 minutes to the beach and launch from there.  Eventually, Ill figure out some way to store my boat down near the water in front of the house.  We headed home in the afternoon.

I was itching for a quick workout, so I hopped on the erg around 7pm.  I didn’t have much of a plan, so I decided to do a 10K push, but start it off slow so I could warmup and also, to be honest about it, because I didn’t want to work too hard.

Plan:

  • 10K push
  • Start pace: 2:05, go 1 second faster for each 1000m, ending at 1:56 for the last 1000m
  • Free rate.  Try to inch rate up as the pace goes down.
  • Heart Rate: No cap

That was fun.  It was hot as hell outside, over 90F, and humid too, so I kept the windows closed and ran a fan.  I generated enough heat to raise the temperature in the room from 72F to 78F over 40 minutes.

I had a little trouble getting myself to row slow enough during the 2:05s, but did better tracking the paces down.  Once I was within 2K of finishing, I kind up gunned it and did the 2000 down to 1000 at 1:55.  Then I finished the last 1000m at a 1:50 pace.  Not super fast, but it stung in a good way.

 

 

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.

 

Thurs: No Training, Fri: No Training, Saturday: CTC, Sunday: Yard Work

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Well, you make your choices and you own them.  This week was quarterly business review week at work, and it’s a big week to prepare our status from the prior quarter and present it to executive management.  There is also a lot of activity to get ready for our earnings call.  Anyway, this quarter it meant early starts to the work day and late nights and no time for training.

Wednesday:  I was at work until around 8pm, got home around 9

Thursday:  I had meetings starting at 9, but I had to do some prep for them so I was at my desk at 7.  No time to go rowing, or even hit the gym at work.  Meetings were back to back from 9am to 7pm.

Friday:  My meetings started at 8am, and again I had prep work to do before, so I was at my desk at 7.  I had meetings most of the morning, then more prep, then a big review from 2 to about 6pm.  I got home after 7.  And I was totally exahausted.  I don;t think I had gotten more than 5 hours sleep any night of the week so far.  I decided there was no way I could get up early to row out at Quinsig.  I conked out around 11, and slept until around 9am.  It was bliss!

Saturday:  I had a another busy day.  We had our work family day at an amusement park about an hour away from home and I needed to do some shopping for a trip to China and Japan.  But I desperately wanted to get some training in.  I decided to do the July CTC as soon as I got out of bed.

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It’s always a guessing game to do these sessions when I am not erging regularly.  This looked a lot like a Wolverine L2 session, like the waterfall (3K/2.5K/2K), and I can usually hold about a <1:50 pace for sessions like that, so I thought I would go for that as my pace.

I warmed up with rate ladder 18/20/22/24/26 over the planned 2813m distance, and then paddled a bit in the 4 minute rest.  I let the flywheel completely stop so my first rep of the CTC would be legal.

I took off at my 1:50 pace and very soon realized that it was way too aggressive.  I started to bleed off speed about half way through the rep and by the time I finished, I had let the average pace creep up to 1:51.

I knew even that was too spicy and I set out on rep #2 targeting 1:52.  Again, it was too much for me and I slowed in the middle.

The last rep, I figured i was toast.  I started off trying to hold the 1:52.6 from the last rep, but it was not working out very well.  I saw lots of 1:55s and some 1:56s in the middle, but with a bit less than 2K to go, I found a bit of energy (and pride) and started to bear down.  The split came back in line and I was seeing 1:54s and 1:53s.  Then I started seeing 1:52s.  With 1000m left, I was counting down strokes.  My avg pace was still above 1:54, but I was seeing it come down.  As Rocket Roy describes it, the “red mist” descended and I sudenly thought I might be able to equal my previous rep.  Turns out I missed it 3 tenths of a second.  I dug my way out of a really deep hole.

I did a quick cool down and then had some breakfast.

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The rest of the day was a blur.  Shopping, off to the picnic, back from the picnic, laundry and packing.

Sunday:  I had to leave for the airport around 11am, and I really needed to get some yard work done before I took off.  There were trees to be pruned, and a bunch of shrubs and hedges that needed trimming.  I was hoping to dispatch it quickly and do an hour on the erg, but it took nearly 3 hours and I finished with barely enough time for a shower before I had to head off to the airport.

Now I am in a plane somewhere over canada, near mackenzie bay.  I am on my way to Shanghai for some customer meetings on tuesday.  Wednesday, I fly over to our plant in Kumamoto Japan.  Our building was essentially destroyed by the recent earthquakes and the folks we have working for us there have been doing an amazing job improvising, finding space, and supporting our local customers.  I’m visiting to see the damage and review our reconstruction plans.  I fly home during the day on Friday.

In other words.  More cross training this week.

 

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.