Tuesday: 3 x 20′ (MP,10KP,HMP)

Weather: Overcast, cool, humid.  Light wind, headwind going upstream.

Felt very low energy in the morning.  Got up anyway.

Plan:

M2 3 x 20′ / 2′ MP, 10KP, HMP 90.0% (167)

Power targets:

  • MP: 158-171
  • HMP: 171-184
  • 10KP: 184-197

So, I had two different thoughts in my head.  One was the memory of the awesome workout I did on Saturday where I pegged the watts above the top end of the band.  The other was the empty legs feeling from the aborted workout Monday night.

For the first interval, aggressive Greg was dominant.  I rowed it at an average power of 176W (including the s-turn, but not the spin).  Or 6 watts above the top end of the power band.

Same thing in the second interval.  I rowed the first five and a half minutes at 196W watts avg, spun the boat, rowed another 3 minutes at about the same power, hit the HR cap, tried to slow down, and then bailed on the interval. I rowed the rest of it out at sub marathon power.

Chastened, I rowed the final interval smack in the middle of the power band, but it was massively hard to do.

I annotated the summary plot with the turns, rests and failures.

myimage (22)

The pie charts show elevated HR, and overly ambitious power.

There should be no 2kp and very little 5kp, basically just from starboard turning strokes.  There should be around 20 minutes of 10kp, 20 minutes of hmp, and 20 minutes of MP.  And then the balance sub-MP, about 15 minutes.  Lousy pace discipline.

I’m finding it hard to row to a target power.  It seems to bounce around a lot from stroke to stroke.  Perhaps that is an indication that my rowing is inconsistent. Perhaps, it is a characteristic of the measurement method.  I wonder if there is a way to have the speed coach show a running avg of the power over a few strokes?

Alternatively, I could try to row to a specific work per stroke and stroke rate.  That seems to be a bit let noisy on the display.

Workout Summary - media/20170530-172024-Greg Smith 20170530 0643amo.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|-Avg-|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|-Pwr-|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|13813|74:21.0|02:41.5|163.9|21.4|152.8|172.0|08.7
W-|11824|57:49.0|02:26.7|175.8|21.6|155.9|171.0|09.5
R-|01997|16:31.0|04:08.4|104.8|19.4|135.3|171.0|04.4
Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|-Pwr-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
01|02771|13:13.8|02:23.2|179.0|20.5|149.4|156.0|10.2 -1st mp
02|01431|07:04.8|02:28.4|172.5|20.3|155.2|159.0|10.0 -1st mp
03|01162|05:31.8|02:22.8|194.5|23.6|160.2|168.0|08.9 -2nd 10kp
04|00607|02:52.2|02:21.9|192.2|24.3|161.6|167.0|08.7 -2nd 10kp
05|00262|01:15.0|02:23.1|174.3|23.3|154.5|157.0|09.0 -2nd ease up
06|01664|08:13.2|02:28.2|154.9|19.2|147.5|160.0|10.6 -2nd post bail
07|03927|19:39.0|02:30.1|176.1|22.8|162.0|171.0|08.8 -3rd

I was wondering what the heck was wrong.  Why was I so tired.  I decided to do an experiment.  My HR monitor didn’t work on my long row on Sunday.  But, my guess was that I averaged about 150 for the 2 active hours of the row.  I manually doctors the CSV file for the row to insert 150 for the active part of the row and reimported it to Stravistix.  Turns out that a 2 hour workout at 150bpm is a TRIMP of 256.  It pushed me into overload.

Screen Shot 2017-05-31 at 11.51.09 AM

Then my aborted session and the Tuesday session kept me right on that line.  I’m not sure that this is exactly right, but I do think that rest will do me more good than working out right now, so I decided to sleep instead of rowing on Wednesday morning.

In the Eddie Fletcher Marathon Plan, he says that you may need extra rest days and you should not hesitate to take them.  Despite the fact that it I still have trouble believing that I can make more progress by doing nothing than by doing something, I should let the evidence and data guide my actions.  The important thing to me right now is to be able to do quality sessions, and especially to be ready and eager for the open water long rows that I do about once a week.  Those are the pinnacle sessions.

Wednesday: Rest Day

Thursday:

On the water

M1 4 x 15′ / 4′ 6′ @ 5KP, 9′ @ MP 92.5% (172)

Power Targets:

  • 5KP: 184-197
  • MP: 158-171

More fun with Stravastix

I am really grateful for a post over on RowingMusings that introduced me to an add on to Strava called StravistiX.

It is an online tool that essentially does a version of TRIMP (Training Impulse), a method to measure total training load that uses both the duration and the intensity of a session.  Intensity is measured as a % of HRR.  (HRR is the delta between your maxHR and your RestingHR).

StravistiX has implemented a flavor of this as a pretty seamless add-on to Strava.  So, now I routinely upload each session to Strava, either directly, or as an export from rowsandall, and every week or so, I sync it to StravistiX.

This is the output I get.

Screen Shot 2017-03-08 at 10.01.27 PM.png

So, you can see in one chart the story of my training since January 15th.

On Januray 16th, I was cleared to get back to training after my knee surgery.  I’ve had a greater number of rest days than I normally plan (14 vs 8), mainly due to an insane business travel schedule.

Despite this, I have tried to keep on track with the Marathon training plan, and it seems to be paying off.  By the measures here, I am in overload right now.  I’m not sure if that is a bad thing or not.  And it seems to think that my fitness is improving.

I’m planning on reviewing this weekly and probably posting something about monthly.  Right now I’m doing it to learn.  Eventually, I might use it to guide the intensity of the training sessions I have planned.