Wednesday: 13K LIT Technique

August 3, 20161 Comment

Weather: cool and misty. Around 60F, quite foggy at the start, but cleared up as I went along. Light wind <2mph, seemingly from every direction of the compass.

Plan:

2′ Square Blades
2′ alternating square and feathered by stroke
2′ feathered – r20
Objectives: clean finishes, balance during recovery (blades high!), full compression at the catch
HR guideline: Top of UT1 (155), maximize time in UT2 (137-143)

This was a nice relaxed session. Good balance and some very nice strokes.

75′ LIT

Tomorrow: 4 x 2700 / 4′ rest @ r24, pace target <2:20, HR limit 170

Sunday: 15K of Technique

July 17, 2016July 17, 20162 Comments

Well, more like 13K of technique and 2K of slogging through nasty chop.

Weather: Weird. It started out just fine. Little or no wind. Overcast. About 70F and more humid than yesterday, about 80% RH. We launched at about 6:45 and the weather stayed that way until about 8am. Just when we had hit the south end of the lake. We turned around and all of the sudden there was a pretty considerable headwind from the North. It was a slog up to the narrows, and it got worse from there. The chop on the north side of the narrows was awful, and it made me feel like all the good drill work that I had been doing had gone to waste.

Don’t take my word for it. Take a look at the plot from Weather Underground.

Anyway, back to the rowing.

Today’s Plan:

2K of rowing with a bungee. Trying to work on relaxing my arms and shoulders through the drive and getting my arms out straight. Work on sequencing the drive better and holding a forward position through the leg drive.
(500m of SBR, 500m of alternating SBR and feathered, 500m of feathered) repeated over and over again. Working on trying to maintain the same back position at the finish when feathered of square. Try to correct my habit of laying back too much. Also try to get way out at the catch and challenge my balance at the catch.

We launched and headed north. I had a bungee around the boat about where the footplate was. I was working on getting my arms straight and my shoulders relaxed. At first, I was really hammering the catch and opening up my back too early. I was also rowing at a very low rate. As I continued up lake, I was doing better getting to full compression, easing into the drive, and holding my body forward longer. This was a much smoother stroke and my speed and rate both picked up. Very satisfying at the end seeing the water flying everywhere off of the bungee.

At the north end of the lake, I had a quick drink and took off the bungee. Then I started my 500s with my blades square. My balance was pretty good and I was able to get out to full compression reasonably well. I was having some trouble keeping my finishes clean. On about 1/3 of the strokes, I could feel myself getting hung up as I extracted the oars. My best strokes, the finish was much smoother, essentially maintaining the pace of the stroke at the finish and just lifting the blades clear of the water. On the bad strokes, I would reach the end of the stroke with the blades still buried and I could feel the pressure on the blades from the boat velocity. It got a bit better as I continued to work on it.

The alternating SBR and feathered is a great drill (in my opinion anyway). I have noticed that I tend to layback too much, especially as I get tired and leave the oars in the water too long. Then I feather and extract the oars in one movement. By doing alternating strokes, I can try to match the exact body position at the finish for both SBR and feathered. An early finish on SBR leads to a smooth extraction, going late leads to a hang up. The feeling is much more pronounced than when rowing feathered and the turn of the oar handle avoids the hangup. The alternating strokes reinforces the right moment in the drive to push the handles down.

It’s always a relief to do the 500m of feathered rowing, but also a chance to really try to reinforce the body position that I was holding at the finish. I caught myself with too much layback a bunch of times, but the good thing was that I really noticed it and corrected it.

The 500m chunks are a good length because it’s enough time to really work on stuff, but not so long that you lose concentration.

I did about 11K of this drill, so maybe 7 complete sets or so. the last couple sets were into the newly developed head wind. I could really feel it pushing back on square blades. I bailed out on the drill at the narrows because the water was too nasty to row n the square productively. I slogged along until I was nearly at the bridge and then pumped up the rate a couple notches and tried to finish with a bit more effort.

Workout Summary - media/20160717-165231-2016-07-17-0647o.csv
--|Total|-Total-|--Avg--|Avg-|-Avg-|-Max-|-Avg
--|Dist-|-Time--|-Pace--|SPM-|-HR--|-HR--|-DPS
--|15370|86:10.0|02:48.2|17.8|146.0|169.0|10.0

Workout Details
#-|SDist|-Split-|-SPace-|SPM-|AvgHR|MaxHR|DPS-
00|15370|86:09.0|02:48.2|17.8|146.0|169.0|10.0

Tomorrow: Probably a rest day. I am picking my wife up at the airport at 11:30pm. I doubt I’ll want to get up at 5am after going to bed around 1am.

Week #1: Plan vs Actual

Date	Day	Workout Type	mode	Planned Workout	*Actual*
Meso Cycle #1 – Endurance
7/11/16	Mon	Rest	rest		40′ UT2 cross training
7/12/16	Tue	Hard Distance	erg	60′ @ 1:57	60′ Threshold on treadmill
7/13/16	Wed	Steady State	erg	4 x 20′ / 1′ (hr cap at 150)	80′ UT2 on elliptical, bike, treadmill
7/14/16	Thu	Hard Distance	erg	60′ @ 1:57	rest day
7/15/16	Fri	Technique UT2/UT1	otw	Bungee Row first half, Steady state r20 second half	3×20′ UT2/UT1 on erg
7/16/16	Sat	Hard Distance	otw	2 x 5.5K r26	1×5.5k hard distance, plus 60′ LIT
7/17/16	Sun	Technique UT2/UT1	otw	Square Blades / Slow Roll Up / r20 2 minutes each, repeated	90′ OTW Technique work
Summary				240′ LIT SS 110′ Threshold distance work	330′ LIT SS 85′ Threshold

Happy enough with that. Priority is on lots of SS minutes now.

Friday: 20K Steady State / Technique

June 25, 20162 Comments

I got home around 11pm and got to bed around 1AM. There was no way that I was getting up at 5:15 to go rowing. I did pack my rowing stuff in case I was able to sneak out and go for a row in the afternoon. It turns that I did.

I was not in the mood for the planned 6 x 750. I still felt pretty worn down from all the plane flights and jet lag. Also, I had not been in a boat since the previous Sunday. Even that didn’t entirely count since it was my chubby boat. So, I thought it would be a good idea to work on technique. I went to my go session for working on balance and technique

2′ square blade rowing
2′ alternating square and normal
2′ normal
Rate target: 18 to 20
Pace target: none
HR cap: < 150 (hopefully a lot under 150 for most of it)

It was beautiful out today. Around 80F, but with a nice breeze from the ENE around 5mph, with gusts higher.

It was a really nice outing. Nice and easy. It’s hard to concentrate for that long, but I had stretches where I felt like my rowing was fluid and natural. I also had periods where it was just wobbly and awful.

The XGPS160 was acting up badly today. It froze and I cycled power four times. Each time, the symptoms were identical. The pace and distance would stop updating. I would power it off, power it back on, it would start talking to the iphone again and everything worked fine.

It was also navigating horribly. Here’s the map of the whole outing.

Some of the lines look a little jagged. When you zoom in it gets much more apparent that the position it is reporting has a lot of uncertainty to it.

The first map is the leftmost third. The jaggy line is the beginning of the row. Look at the sudden jumps in the position. Further over, notice that the position is just wrong. It has me rowing through the penisula.

The second picture also has navigation errors showing me rowing into the north bank of the river coming out of the s-turn. I assure you, I did not.

The third picture is the Moody street basin and you can see the weird results by the bridge. Also, the lines down the canal are wrong. The good water is very narrow and I tend to follow it quite consistently, the lines are all over the place.

At this point, I think I am going to be leaving the XGPS160 in my kit bag until I hear something back from the vendor. With this much error in the position and the impact it has on the instantaneous pace display, which is jumping all over the place, it’s worse than the much slower updates of the internal GPS of the iphone.

Tomorrow: The promised 6×750.

Tuesday: 14K of Technique

May 31, 2016May 31, 20165 Comments

Monday: I inadvertently slept until about 10 AM. zThere was no other time during the day to grab a workout. Instead, I drove into Cambridge, collected my sons and brought them back out to the house for a Memorial Day feast. Steak, salad, corn on the cob, beer, strawberries. A fine dinner and great company.

Last night, I had terrible trouble sleeping because I got so much sleep over the weekend. I probably slept about 2 hours in little 15 minute snatches. Still I managed to get out of bed at 5:15 and headed down to the river.

I was pretty tired, so I opted for a low intensity, technique oriented session

500m square blades
500m alternating square blades and easy r18
500m of slow rollups, finish normally feathered, but immediately start to roll to square during the recovery.
The objective with all of these is to keep the blades clear of the water on recovery, and keep my shoulders relaxed and low. Also to try to be very precise with my recovery, arms first, then body, then finally legs.
Repeat as many times as possible, so roughly 4 sets of the 3 – 500m chunks.

Tomorrow (Wednesday): Steady State, r20. HR cap around 155.

Tomorrow around noontime, I am flying out to Chicago for a customer dinner, and then meetings on Thursday. I fly home Thursday night.

On another note, I am looking at an open water boat to use down on Cape Cod. This Saturday, I will be checking out a used Alden Star, a 22′ open water boat.

It’s a good price and it should be a reasonable choice for the conditions. Now, I jut need to figure out how to get it up and down these stairs.

Maybe something like this.

Thursday: 14K of technique work

May 12, 2016May 12, 20165 Comments

Another perfect morning! Sunny, 60F. Very light wind (0-2mph) from the north. This is basically a cross head wind going downriver, and a cross tail wind heading up river, I only noticed it a couple of moments in the row. Otherwise, it was just little ripples on the water.

I changed my mind about my workout plan this morning when I woke up. I was tired and sore all over. I decided that doing an High Impact session was a bad idea, and a better idea would be to just work on technique the whole time.

So, I did my favorite technical workout.

500m of square blade rowing
500m of alternating 1 stroke square blade and 1 stroke normal
500m of r20, trying to row with perfect form
Repeat over and over again.

One thing that works out well about this workout is that the useful length of the river is 3000m, so I can fit two sets in each direction very neatly.

I ended up rowing 1000m through the twists and turns, then did 8 sets of the 3×500 technique drills. That got me back to the cut. At that point I pulled my feet out of the shoes and rowed the 1000m back to the dock “strapless”. This is also really good practice to get clean finishes.

This was a really enjoyable workout. And I felt like my finishes got a lot better. I was tapping down earlier, and getting the oars out of the water with less disturbance. It didn’t hurt that it was a glorious morning and I was on a beautiful river.

This afternoon, I’m driving down to New York City to have dinner with a customer, and then I’ll drive home tomorrow morning. I think I will probably do an erg session when I get home.

Quantified Rowing

Measure – Adjust – Improve

Tag: technique