I did body weight and core exercise during a 4 hour conference call marathon. There were enough low information density moments that I could listen and “work out” at the same time. It gives a new dimension to “Plank” when at the same time you are following the conversation.
I am entering a low volume training cycle, and I didn’t find time to completely plan out each session for this cycle, so I had to improvise a bit. Fartlek, “speed play”, is, for example “sprint all out from one light pole to the next, jog to the corner, give a medium effort for a couple of blocks, jog between four light poles and sprint to a stop sign, and so on, for a set total time or distance” (quote from breakingmuscle.com). I basically allowed myself to play with the boat speed as I felt fit.
Romana was training the girls, but had to jump in a double with a less experienced girl, so she asked me to row with Iva, who was doing 500m intervals. So I rowed with her and coached her by rowing my single next to her and shouting instructions.
And, I recorded all that with my GoPro Hero Session 5 camera.
In the video, I am showing my (long) standard warming up drill starting with arms only. Then a (not so well executed) technique drill, then some snippets from 500m intervals, and finally a very short race pace piece.
All in all I am pretty happy with the row. By the way, this was the first real video taken with my new camera.
It’s now a bit over a month since I have started to row on the water again, so time for some analysis.
I made these charts using the Box Chart functionality on rowsandall.com. Click here to read the tutorial on how to use the Box Charts.
I am not going to make any conclusions based on these box charts now, apart from the things I mention in the image captions. But it show that this is a good tool to monitor progress.
A 6:30 AM row before work. Steady state. Through the gorge/canyon, towards the castle and beyond. Steady state, playing with technique and rates 18, 20 and 22spm. I am also playing with Kinomap which is an app to sync video with your ergometer rowing. Potentially interesting to spice up boring OTE steady state rows coming winter.
Kinomap syncs with Strava and adds the map of your virtual row to Strava. Not sure if you also compete on the real segments. That would be a little unfair, because OTE you go a lot faster than on the water. Kinomap also exports basic data as ErgData does (stroke rate, distance, time, pace, power) so I will probably make a filter so people can use Kinomap data on rowsandall.com.
And here is an accelerated run through the entire 48 minutes row. It takes only 12 minutes. The 48 minutes one is a great calming, hypnotizing video, though. I can look at the puddles forever.
Can you imagine how energized I arrive at the office after spending 80 minutes in such an environment?
The row itself was almost identical to the one on Thursday, although slightly shorter. The graph only shows the 48 minutes “middle” part. I recorded warming up and cooling down to different SpeedCoach sessions.
Pretty happy with the rowing.
The plan was to do 20km of steady state. I didn’t even get to half way. I woke up early after a short night, and there is so much stuff to do before Christmas.
So I did a 5km at steady state pace. Heart rate way to high and perceived effort as well.
Then I tried to film myself in order to reveal something about my stroke force profile.
And here is the video. I am afraid I don’t have a better quality right now.
Today Romana would video the girls and me. I was a bit nervous about the quality of the result, because Romana would have to steer the launch and take video at the same time.
Also, our lake’s sense of humor played up again. On video day, there was a bit of chop. I did steady state plus a few minutes of 27-28spm rowing next to the girls in the double, and a few 32spm sets for the video.
Here’s the result. Even though it’s shaky, I think side videos from a launch are much better to study technique and come up with recommendations than the GoPro videos from behind. I am really looking forward to the comments!
The best part of the video is the last 2 minutes.
Oh that mirror flat water. It was a good, good week!