Category: Kayaking

I went erging again. I’m sure you’ll be relieved to hear I didn’t bring my video camera. The last few times I’ve done a long “distance” workout, I’ve done half an hour straight, then for the last half hour I’d spend 15-20 seconds having a sip of water, paddle normally for the remainder of 9 minutes, then paddle very hard for 1 minute, repeat, then sip, paddle for the remainder of 8 minutes, and go hard for 2 minutes.

This time I tried doing the “9 minutes normal, 1 minute hard” right from the beginning. Given that I’d done a fairly hard 25 minutes on a rowing erg yesterday, that was probably a mistake. The breaks were often a bit longer than normal, because the foot brace on Stephen’s erg kept slipping, as well as having a few iPod issues. Everything was ok, but at the end I only got one minute and twenty seconds into my last hard bit when I just had this weird “I don’t want to do this any more” feeling. I wasn’t especially exhausted, and I didn’t stop because I was tired. I just didn’t want to continue any more. It’s kind of odd for me to get 59:20 into a planned 60 minute workout and stop then. You’d think that close to the end you’d just keep going.

I’m getting some major calluses forming on my right hand (the “control” hand) at the base of my middle fingers, and a bit of an open sore on my left hand on the top of my thumb. I’m not sure where that sore is coming from.

[youtube RZJNpDA9QI8]Another technique work-out at Dan’s. The highlight of this video is that there is about a half a minute at the end of Dan showing me how it’s done.

[youtube o7pA1Ac0ZLs]On Saturday I went to Stephen’s to erg, and on Wednesday I went to Doug’s to erg. I’m trying to emphasize the things that Dan and I worked on last Thursday, but it appears that I did a better job of it on Saturday and on Wednesday. Both times I paddled for half an hour non-stop, then started doing 9 minutes normal, 1 minute fast, and about a 30 second rest while I got a drink of water, and then went really hard for the last two minutes. But on Wednesday, my stroke rate was higher, my heart rate was higher, and from the video I don’t think I was rotating as well. Also, I tend to do a stroke-stroke-pause instead of a stroke-pause-stroke-pause, so I don’t know if I am, but I think I’m not pulling as hard on one side as the other. It’s too bad the erg doesn’t tell you whether you’re getting the same power on both sides – on the boat you’d know because you’d be going in circles.

On Sunday I went over to Stephen’s to erg. Last time I was there the battery on the computer died and Stephen warned me not to rely on it, so I brought my gps to act as a timer and heart rate monitor. I also brought my video camera to bore everybody on YouTube again, but unfortunately the battery died after just a minute or two.

Without the erg computer, I was relying on other cues to know how well I was doing – I listened to the sound of the turbine and tried to notice what muscles were tiring. What I wanted to hear from the turbine was a ‘VOOgah’ sound that meant I was getting some pause and glide. If I wasn’t paying attention I would get a much steadier ‘vrrrmmvrrrmmm’ sound that meant I wasn’t pausing. (later on I tried the computer for a while and discovered that when that happened, my stroke rate went up from the mid 60s to the low 70s, but with no increase in speed.). I also tried to remember to get good twist and rotation – the more I concentrate on it now the sooner it will become natural.

I paddled steady for 15 mins, took a sip of water, paddled another steady 15 mins, then I tried the erg computer. With the computer to help me see if my stroke rate was increasing, I paddled for nine minutes steady, increased my speed for one minute without increasing my stroke rate, grabbed a quick sip of water and repeated two more times. The last set I finished off with two minutes of high speed (still at 65 strokes per minute) and some slow cool down. Over an hour of paddling all told.

[youtube D3_qAcF8n4Q]This is why I don’t mind paying Dan for some coaching, even when I don’t have a lot of spare cash. I can watch videos of myself alone until I’m blue in the face, but it takes a coach to point out the things I was missing. In this video I’m getting a *lot* more torso rotation that I do when I erg alone. And if there’s one thing that last year taught me, it’s that doing good technique on the erg translates to having good technique be natural on the water. If there’s one thing I heard over and over again from my teammates in 2009, it was how good my technique was and how naturally it seemed to come to me. Stephen referred to me as “a technique savant”. But it wasn’t natural, it was a result of hours spent at Dan’s house erging and listening to his advice, as well as listening to the advice of other experienced paddlers.

Today I was doing 800 metre (half mile) intervals, working on technique while maintaining a fast pace. I did 6 intervals, all around 4:11-4:13. This video is from the last one, where I was my tiredest.