[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.
Category: Revelation
Spot the irony
Update: It turns out that the way I’ve been creating the smart playlist, with “Genre = Podcast”, which worked for years now, suddenly stopped working. Changing it to “Media Kind is Podcast” and making it sync under the Podcast tab worked.
Thanks to the latest iPod and iTunes updates from Apple, the iPod, the very device that “Podcasts” are named after, has become useless for listing to podcasts the way I want to listen to them.
The way I like to listen to podcasts is in the car, while driving, a time when I probably shouldn’t be poking around the screen of my iPod instead of watching the road. But Apple, in its infinite wisdom, made podcasts different from music or audiobooks in that you can’t (by default) click “Play” on them and listen to them one after the other. Instead, you have to pick one, hit play, and when it’s done, find another one, hit play, and lather, rinse and repeat. Until a few days ago, I had a very nice work-around: I made a Smart Playlist that contained “Genre = Podcast + Playcount = 0”. It worked great.
But now there is a new update for the iPod and iTunes, and they’ve broken it. The playlist still shows, and I can still play it in iTunes and it plays all the way through and the ones you listen to remove themselves from the playlist. Beautiful. But even though that playlist is still checked to sync to the iPod, the playlist doesn’t show up anywhere on the iPod. So how the fuck am I supposed to listen to an hour and forty five minutes of podcasts, some of which are only 3 or 4 minutes long, without spending time poking around on my screen instead of watching where I’m driving?
Maybe it’s time to find a podcast app for my Palm Pre.
More erging
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.
Technique workout
[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.
Erging at Stephen’s
[youtube F8HlKZJiboI]I did a long work-out at Stephen’s today. I think my technique is coming along nicely, except I drop my head down and to the side too much when I get tired. Jim says I look like I’m leaning back, but I think that’s because my gut gets in the way. The front-view video is from about 40 or 50 minutes into the work-out, and the side view is from the first ten minutes. One thing I worked on was trying to get more rotation – when I thought about it and worked on it, my stroke rate dropped from around 72-74 down to about 64-66, but my speed stayed the same. I didn’t see much change in my pulse, but my heart rate monitor was cutting in and out all the time. I guess I should find out from Dan whether he thinks the longer slower stroke will lead to good results in the water as well.