Toes to the Edge

This Year’s Hammer Ergatta information was just announced:

It will be at the John Carroll University Recplex on Sunday, February 22.

This indoor regatta benefits a local collegiate rowing club, so if you are in the Cleveland area, come on out, have a little fun, and help out a rowing club.

Contact Chris Maeder for more information.

I found the old Erg-Piece Calculator I wrote back when I maintained the WRRA website. Since it’s been lost on that site, I thought it would be nice post it here.

Just fill in two of the three fields and hit tab or enter. The calculator will fill in the third field, then it’s up to you.

Just a quick update. The first release is feature-complete. At this point I am just waiting on the voice vendor to complete an evaluation of the demonstration/trail mode. ErgMate will ship with a high quality voice that is a marked improvement over MS-Mary, Mike, or Sam.

While I’ve not posted any updates in some time (that’s what having a baby will do to you), I have been busy incorporating feedback from the early beta testing. The biggest new feature is a wizard that allows one to create new sequences by simply answering a few questions. You also can now row to music from your iTunes collection in addition to files on disk.

It’s coming! Beta testing revealed that new users can use a hand getting started. There’s going to be a wizard to help new users create sequences.

I was going to post a screen shot of the flow, but that’ not very exciting, so instead here’s a screenshot of the latest version. The icons to the left of each clip indicate the type of trigger that causes that particular clip to play. Rulers represent distance, while the clocks represent time. For example, the first power 10 is triggered based on some time from the end of the row. The chain indicates a simple trigger that plays the clip immediately after the clip before it finishes.

This guy is doing the Concept 2 “row as far as you can” challenge this month, even though officially it is a team challenge this time. He wanted the time spent to have a bit more meaning, so he’s doing it to raise awareness of breast cancer.

His plan is to erg 2000 miles ( > 3 million meters ) in January.

“…12 days + 4.5 hours finished, and I’m now past my previous month best, set this past fall. 1,101,336 and 34.2% finished.”

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=305324608&blogID=341877773

That is hard-core.

(I came across this article this morning that I wrote for the old Western Reserve Rowing Association web site. At this point, our local high-school teams are in dire need of coaches, so maybe this will help in some small way).

February 24, 2003

I left work today feeling a little sick and very tired. Grabbed a cup of venda-coffee on the way out to wake up as I drove out to the school. The coffee bore a most uncanny resemblance to river water.

The team has some ergs in a very small room at the school. The team was elsewhere strectching and warming up when I arrived. One of the coxswains brought me the list of athletes present - 17 rowers and 2 coxswains. Hmmm. We had the workout schedule written down through the ergatta the previous weekend, but nothing determined for today. Well, I’ve been meaning to have the team run stairs. It would be a good change as the sight of an erg makes them sick at this point in the season. Sharon, the other coach suggested erg/stair relay races. That would be hard to coordinate as the stairs are fairly far from the ergs. 6 ergs, 17 rowers, and 2 coxswains. That’s 6 groups of 3 if the coxswains row. So it boiled down to relay races on the ergs. Each rower would row 1000 meters and switch. Cycling through this 6 times would be a good hour and 15 minute workout. So we lined up the team in order of their 2K erg score and created 6 even teams of 3. That was after creating 3 teams of 6. (Rowing all these years has impaired my ability to count past 10.) The teams got started and the athletes rowed hard.

The races were amazingly even given the distance they were rowing. There was much yelling, power tens, and all kinds of encouragement resulting in rowers pulling hard, then falling off the ergs. The energy was amazing. All I could do was stand there and smile. The screaming continued until there was one person left rowing. The entire team gathered around this rower and egged her on, finally calling a power ten at the end. 18000 meters, an hour and 15 minutes later, and 19 tired rowers.

We talked to the team, explaining the purpose of the workout - how they are learning their capabilities, how they are a team when they support each other like they did, and how now that they were warmed up the real workout could begin. I left the parking lot feeling relaxed, energized, and quite happy. It beats happy hour any day.

Many organizations need coaches. Even coaching part time will be a big help. Just contact any of the delegates listed on http://www.clevelandrows.org

While we were unable to see the live webcast on this side of the pond, Tim Marcovy convinced a local pub ( O’Reilly’s in Cleveland Heights) to open early today so we could view the coverage on ESPN-U. About 25 local rowers showed up to watch ITV1’s live coverage. It seemed very appropriate that it was held at one of the few places in town that pours an imperial pint of Guinness correctly.

This was simply the best coverage of a rowing race I’ve ever seen. Each shell had a small camera on a stalk behind the coxswain. This camera could be rotated to view the other shell. The coxswains were miked as well. It also appeared that those running the video knew about rowing and what angles to show. I got the biggest kick from the stroke rate shown for each crew on the bottom of the screen throughout the race. I am just awe at the ability shown by these crews. They made rates of 35-40 look like a casual row. It was the first time watching a regatta that we were just stunned by the technical ability of the crews. The excellent race coverage brought this out and allowed one to see it, where as in the Olympic or Worlds races, the camera cuts away too quickly and is taken from such a distance that one doesn’t get a good view of the technique.

A video stream of the race coverage I’m writing about is at:
http://www.itvtheboatrace.premiumtv.co.uk/page/Video/0,,12539,00.html

It was also nice to see the wide spectrum of rowers in attendance today at our viewing of the Boat Race. The usual hard-core masters group was present, but the audience also included a large group of rowers that have recently come up to our competitive masters program from our summer rowing league. Some local scullers and members of the Case Western University Crew rounded out the audience. Marcovy is head coach of the latter, although I doubt attendance got them out of any ergometer work this morning.

Quote of the race - I’m not sure which commentator said it:

Bodies are asking ‘why’?
The mind has no answer
-but the spirit is willing.

After today, I’m ready to row NOW. Too bad there’s 5 inches of snow on the ground.

Voting is taking place now for the finalists in the Concept2 Video Contest. The contest started out slow, but the quality of videos has picked up over the last 3 weeks. The final videos are all pretty funny, but I thought ‘Erging, it’s the cool thing to do, ‘Row-Blots’, and ‘Concept2 Model D Montage’ were the best.

‘Tame the Erg’ gets an honorable mention too.

Take a break from that winter training and check out the videos.

Now that our local ergatta is over, I was able to work on and release a new Beta version of ErgMate.

The first official release will be soon. The program is stable and I am mostly tweaking it and the documentation.

Changes since the last release:
o tweaked power 10 timing - it now calls the stroke number just before the catch in a more reliable manner
o added power 10 / 20 clips that count down ( counting up was already present )
o added heart-rate monitor support
o added ability to select different voices for each status clip
o improved the quality of voice clips
o cleaned up MP3 tag display
o cross-fade works better when sampling clips
o added ability to change sound drivers