Category: Revelation

Training on the erg

Because the weather is turning bad, I’ve been turning to the erg to do most of my training on. I’ve been doing a lot of kayaking, trying to build up the distance I could go on it. When I first started using the erg, I was disappointed that I could only seem to go a very short distance on it before my muscles got tired, like 500 metres a few days after I’d managed 4 miles (6.5km) in a kayak. I think a lot of that is due to the fact that in the boat, the wing paddle “kicks out” on its own, assisting you in getting your rear arm up in the air ready for the next stroke, whereas with the erg you have to lift it up yourself. Also in the erg there is some resistance at the rear part of the stroke where in the boat your paddle is fully out of the water and just “following through” with no resistance. (Hey, here’s an idea – why not use an electromagnet instead of a fan for resistance, then you could trigger it to remove the resistance when your paddle stroke hits the part where you’d normally have no resistance?)

Anyway, Dan said not to be discouraged, and if I could only do 500 metres to do 500 metres. So that’s what I did – I did 500 metres the first day, the next day I did 500 metres, rested until my heart rate was down under 100 bpm and did another 200 metres, and so on until I was doing 5 reps of 500 metres. Then I stepped up to 600m, doing 3x600m the first day, 3×600 plus a bit the next, 4×600 the next, and so on.

Two nights ago I did 5x700m. Last night I did my 5x700m but when I hit the end of the last 700, I just hit reset on the computer and did another 700m without stopping. It felt good to do that.

It’s a definite trend that I don’t feel as sore and tired at the end of the third and subsequent reps as I do at the first two. I’m starting to experiment to see if I can do some stretches and the like so the first two don’t feel so bad. Another thing I might try is doing a couple of short reps to warm up, then doing longer ones.

One interesting thing about this is that I’m having more trouble with the shoulder that didn’t get operated on than the one that did. On Friday I’d had a really good work-out, thought that maybe next day I could really step it up (to 1000m at a time or something like that) but I woke up the next morning feeling like I’d torn my rotator cuff. I had to take two days off erging, icing and gulping down Aleve and Tylenol (and missing out on two days where it would have been nice to get out on the boat) but by Sunday night I was fine again. Again this morning, I’m a little sore in that shoulder – not as bad as last Saturday, but still enough to worry.

My goal is to be ready in spring to race again. That means this winter I want to be able to do some very long (over 16km) LSD (long slow distance) erg sessions, and also keep my speed up through interval work and fartlek, again on the erg. I’m starting to feel like this might be possible. I’m even working on improving my technique – I never had a forward lean, mostly because my big fat gut gets in the way, but I’m working on that. I’m also trying to stop splaying out my legs and keep them down the center of the boat, but I’m having some anatomical problems with that.

A long boat on a short car

One of the problems with my car is that the gap between the roof rack bars is so short. I bought a v-rack so that I wouldn’t be supporting the boat at two points near the middle and having it flexing all over the place, but the fact that such a long object is supported by two bars very close together means that the v-rack itself bounces up and down, or more accurately pivots forward and back, and places a lot of stress on the bars of the rack. It makes a lot of noise as it flexes, and I’m continually worried that the rack is just going to tear out as I go over a bump.

So today I took some action. I bought a couple of Seattle Sports “Hood Loops”, which are little nylon loops with a grommet on the end that you can attach using one of the quarter panel bolts under the hood of your car. I also bought a couple of “Quick Loops” from the same company. They’re a similar idea except instead of bolting them to the car, you just close them in the rear hatch and a soft but strong piece of plastic tubing prevents the loops from coming back out. Those are more experimental – once I figure out exactly where I want them, I might replace them with something bolted or otherwise more permanently attached. I ran a rope from one Hood Loop over the v-rack and down to the other Hood Loop, and did the same in the back with the Quick Loops. I then put the boat on the rack and went for a short drive. The difference in stability is incredible. It’s so much more stable, and quieter. Also, when I take the rack off for the winter, I can flip the Hood Loops inside the hood out of the way, and take out the Quick Loops, and take the car to the car wash.




Progress

For the last several months I’ve been trying to slowly build myself back up after the surgery. I paddle once or twice a week, and generally I do one “long” (for values of long that seem ridiculously short to me) continuous go at first, and then continue for as long as I can doing paddle/rest/paddle/rest. Sometimes I have to stop because my shoulder is sore, sometimes because my muscles are tired, sometimes because my aerobic system is worn out, and sometimes it’s all three. Up until last week, my maximum “long” stretch was about 1.25 miles, and my total distance was generally around 3 to 4 miles with a lot of stops.

Last week, I was off work, so I actually managed to get out 3 times. I also started getting much more diligent about doing the stretches and exercises my physiotherapist prescribed back when I was still doing that. And I went to see the massage therapist I was seeing a couple of years ago about my shoulder and neck.

On Wednesday, I managed to paddle 1.5 miles, take a quick drink of water, and keep paddling to a total of 2.5 miles, and then do stop/start paddling for a total of 4 miles. That’s the first time all year I’ve seen two miles in less than 11 minutes per mile. (Oh yeah, did I mention that my speed compared to last year also sucks?) So that was pretty good.

Today, I did even more. I managed to paddle 2 miles, take a quick drink of water, and continue to a total of 3.2 miles, and then do stop/start paddling for a total of 4 miles. That’s 3 miles in a row at less than 11 minutes per mile! That’s real progress!

Ok, granted both times my shoulder was pretty damn sore afterwards, but I’m so tired of waiting for the pain to go away before I start getting fit again. I have an appointment with the surgeon next week to see why it’s taking so long, but I suspect he’s going to tell me to stop paddling.

I’m making progress, and I’ve got the erg so I can keep going all winter. Here’s hoping I can bring the endurance up to the old level and then start bringing up the speed.

My new system

Back in 2007, I build a new box, mostly to act as my home server. It’s been a pretty decent home server, and I hadn’t really seen the need to upgrade it. But recently, my laptop, which has been my “everything desktop” machine was showing signs of not having enough RAM for everything I do with it. Mostly because every few days I’ll notice that Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Client (RDC) is grabbing absurd amounts of RAM – I’ll notice things getting slow, see that RDC is using 1 Gb of RAM, then look back in 2 minutes and see it’s up to 1.2 Gb. Since the laptop is topped out at 4Gb of RAM, there’s nothing more I can do about the lack of RAM, except stop trying to use it for my work and my personal stuff.

So I hit on the idea of using my home server as a home desktop. I’d used it once before when my laptop was in the shop, and so I knew I could open a VPN and remote desktop into work. There were only two problems with it – it had less RAM than my laptop, and it couldn’t support 2 monitors. So I had a few choices:

  • Max out its RAM (I think it could support 8Gb) and buy a new video card
  • Replace motherboard/RAM/CPU/Video card with something more modern
  • Buy an entirely new Linux computer
  • Buy a Mac Pro

Unfortunately, the Mac Pro is *way* expensive. A new Linux computer would cost a hair over $1000, but an equivalent Mac Pro would be over $2500. I decided to re-use the old box’s case, power supply (more on that later) and disks, and just replace the motherboard, RAM, CPU and video card. I spec’ed out a bundle from my go-to supplier, J & N Computer Services:

I also bought a second LCD monitor, this one a 24″ ViewSonic to go with my 24″ Dell. The bundle from JNCS was about $745 and the monitor was about $170.

Frankly, the extra CPU is probably not all that important, since I’ve never been CPU bound before and I didn’t see that becoming a problem. But you can never have too much RAM, and 16Gb has me thinking that I might be able to run my development environment, Websphere and Oracle here instead of RDC into work. Maybe I can even run a VirtualBox or two.

Anyway, I got all that home and was setting it up, and discovered that the “connector conspiracy” has been at work again. The old power supply had a 20 pin, two 4 pin and one 6 pin power connector. The smaller ones are all pairs of +12VDC and ground. The new motherboard required the 20 pin and one of the 4 pins in the main socket, and then an 8 pin connector in the auxiliary socket. The 6 pin connector was keyed so I couldn’t use it in the 8 pin socket, and there were dire warnings about not running it with just the 4 pin. So I ran down the road to FrozenCPU and got a PC Power and Cooling “Silencer Mk II” 650W supply to replace the CoolerMaster 500 that probably would have been perfectly adequate for the job if the connectors lined up.

Anyway, as is my custom, here’s a comparison:

Old Machine New Machine
Processor 1 64 bit dual core Intel Core2 Duo E6320 1.82GHz 4MB cache 1 64 bit Quad Core Intel i7-2600K LGA-1155 3.4GHz 8MB cache
RAM 2 1Gb DDR2-800 RAM 4 4Gb DDR3-1333 Kingston RAM
Disks 2x500Gb SATA-II, 2x1Tb SATA-II 2x500Gb SATA-II, 2x1Tb SATA-II
Ports 6xUSB 2.0, 2 Firewire, 10/100/1000 Ethernet, Serial, Parallel, 6xSATA-II, Audio, Video 2xUSB 3.0, 12xUSB 2.0, 2 Firewire, GigE Ethernet, PS/2, 2xSATA 6Gb/s, 4xSATA 3Gb/s, Audio, Video, DVI, Display Port, HDMI, etc.
Fans 2 12mm case fans, 1 7mm heat sink fan, 1 12mm power supply fan 2 12mm case fans, 1 7mm heat sink fan, 1 12mm power supply fan

After I got it set up, I discovered a couple of problems.

The first problem was trying to get the second monitor set up. The “non-free” drivers in Ubuntu didn’t support this video card. I had a hell of a time getting the binary drivers from the nVidia web site to load – basically instead of just running the “.run” file that you download, I had to extract it with “–extract-only” and then run it and run it again with the “-K” option, or something like that. Whatever I did, it was a mixture of black magic and cargo culting, and it eventually worked. I had to borrow the HDMI cable off the DVD player, but we use the DVD player so infrequently that we hadn’t noticed that the cable had fallen off and had cobwebs on it.

The second problem I discovered is that a /tmp partition sized for server use isn’t big enough for interactive use – especially when you watch youtube videos (it appears to cache them in /tmp). Fortunately I used lvm, so it was possible to resize the partition. The only problem was figuring out how to boot in single user mode so I could do it without /tmp being in use.

I’m still trying to figure out how to set up the VPN tunnel to work. I copied the config files I use on the MacBook, and I copied the setup I used back when I used the Linux box to VPN into our old location in Genoa, but I couldn’t get it to work. Eventually I got it so I can open a VPN using the command line “sudo openvpn –config ~/ovpn/dmr.ovpn”. What I need to do next is figure out how I can simultaneously open a second VPN to Genoa, because our SVN server lives there and I want to be able to check stuff from there.

I also had a bit of a problem with the remote desktop client. When I first set up things, I’d open the remote desktop client “full screen”, and it would only take up one of my two screens. But I made a few minor changes (or so I thought) to my configuration, and now when I specify “full screen”, it covers both screens, which I don’t want. Fullscreen other apps only takes up one screen. So again, I resort to the command line.
rdesktop -g '1920x1080' -D -r sound:local:driver:oss -r clipboard:PRIMARYCLIPBOARD 10.255.120.119
Unfortunately that usually ends up on screen 1 instead of screen 2, so I have to do some tricks to make it work. Also, every now and then cut and paste stops working in the session, even within Windows. In that case, I have to use the Task Manager, find the “rdpclip.exe” process and kill it. That gets cut and paste working within Windows, but unfortunately kills cut and paste between Linux and Windows.

Last night I upgraded Ubuntu from 10.04LTS to 11.04 to see if it would help the rdesktop and some other minor issues. We’ll see.

Empire State Regatta

Today I went to a kayak race. Not, unfortunately, to race. I was there to act as time keeper.

It was a fun time. The weather was awesome, the venue was pretty good, and the organizer pulled out all the stops in terms of providing food, drink and entertainment. The only problem was the turn out. Basically we got the local paddle community, and Scott Stenberg up from near where I work, and that’s it. Nobody from the Adirondacks and nobody from out of state. That’s too bad.

Last year the same organizer ran a race, which was unfortunately the weekend between the 90 and Long Lake. But in spite of that, he had a huge crowd. But because he was a first time race director, he was completely overwhelmed and didn’t get any real results, just a list of boat numbers and their finish times, and didn’t have any real prize presentation. Every paddler wants to see proper results. I don’t know if this is an unfair stereotype, but it seems to me that canoers care more about prizes than kayakers do. I dont know if that’s why people stayed away this year, but I’m sure it’s a factor.

Any way, this year he’s doing it right. Results up quick, and some nice prizes. Hopefully, word will get out that the problems from last year were fixed, and the crowds will come back.