Row for the Cure 2010

Row for the Cure 2010 in Seattle was Sunday September 19.  Crews from 22 boat houses participated, more than 660 rowers in total!  I rowed my Pepe in the M1x Masters category.

The master category is tricky, I've learned after only 3 competitions. You get a handicap which is roughly 1.6 second/year/km, with year being computed relative to the youngest competitor in the class. At 39 years, I turned out to be the youngest, so I would get no handicap at all.

In the end I ended up as 4 out of 6 participants on raw time, and 6 out of 6 in handicap time, as I wasn't able to keep the old-timers at bay. Definitely need to get faster and control the check better.

The race is interval 3 in the map below. I did reasonably well staying around 26 spm for the duration of the race, although the speed went down a bit. But at least I have something to compare to now for future races.


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3x(10x8[Power];30s@20)@24,26,24;3mins@20

Tuesday morning practice. It's 3 sets. Each set you do 8 strokes at power, then rest for a bit (30 seconds in this case), then you do another 8. Repeat until you've done this 10 times. First set you do all the power strokes at 24 strokes per minute (spm), 2nd set at 26 spm, 3rd set at 24 spm. Do 20 spm between repeats, when you're resting.

This set is the 2nd interval. Couldn't count properly after first set, as you can see. Also, stroke rate was a bit high for the 2nd set. But otherwise not too bad. Was told to initiate my drive a little bit faster after the catch, in order to get quicker through the drive and get a slightly longer recovery at that rate.


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Row for the Cure!

19 September 2010 is Row for the Cure in Seattle! I'm rowing my 1x and you can help me raise money for breast cancer cure here: http://www.active.com/donate/seattlerftc/greatdane

Mercer Island Marathon

So, Sunday 29 August was supposed to be the day where I would be the 3-seat in a quad, rowing all the way from Pocock around Mercer Island and back again - a full Marathon of 42.2 km for the benefit of Rainier Valley Rowing.

The route was s'posed to be something like this (thx to Kim); a nice little Sunday morning row:

So, at 5 am Sunday morning we all met at Pocock, where another quad, a four and 2 eights were also departing for the row. Hugo was stroke, I was in 3-seat, Kim in 2-seat and Elizabeth in the bow, guiding us around the Island.

We got down and got hands-on our boat and got it launched. Then we got in, pushed off, adjusted the stretchers and we were off!  The wind was breezy, to put it mildly. When we cam out to SR-520 bridge and went through, we had - almost - whitecaps on the water, and a wave now and then coming over the gunnel. 

The support launches told us to go back to the lee of 520, and we rowed to the far east end of the bridge, so try and make it down the coast on the east side instead of on the west side (normal traffic pattern). 

But alas, as we came to the east it was pretty obvious that the wind and waves were also too much on this side, so we turned back towards Pocock and the sheltered waters of Lake Union.  Even that turned out to be a bit of a challenge, as the wind picked up a bit during the early morning hours...

However, we made it through the ship canal and all the way to the far end of Ballard, only half a mile from home for me!  In Ballard we stopped for a few minutes for 'lunch' - a few sips of Gatorade and a power gel...

From Ballard it was back through the ship canal, down around the bottom of Lake Union and then home to Pocock where we docked around 9am, about 3 hrs after the start.  We had managed 32 km out of the 42.2, so we'll grab the last 10 k next year - that will be easy peasy, even if the wind is rough!

Here's a map and stroke info of 18k of the route (click the triangles). I had some issues with the otherwise *Brilliant* SpeedCoachMobile app - not sure it can handle really long rows...

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Thursday morning row on Lake Union

So the iPhone SpeedCoach Mobile app really does a decent job of getting ones track down:

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We did a 12000 m row, and a 500 m piece towards the end. More later from the water!

Oars!

All mine: A brand-new pair of Croker S2 Superlights with standard stiffness, 288 cm median length, Slick blade, Mk3 asymmetric sleeves, adjustable carbon handles and standard grip size. Yay!  Only problem: How do I get them to the boathouse…?