Toes to the Edge

Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Zachary Lewis rowed his first 2K erg race and wrote about it. I’m just impressed with his time, that being only the 2nd time he’s ever rowed a 2K erg piece:

Indoor rowing machines’ virtual experience a whole-body workout: a Stretching Out column

The Hammer Ergatta to benefit Rivergate Park Boathouse is on Sunday, February 21 at the Saint Ignatius field house in Cleveland, Ohio.

Regatta Central has full information.

Until then you’ll have to settle for watching the Hammer Ergatta video.

Just found Concept 2 Crossfit, a blog with some great articles on preparing for and rowing a 2K erg piece. It’s well worth checking out.

This is a graph of last night’s baseline 2000 meter erg piece on the Concept 2 ergometer. Meters are along the X axis and the units of the Y axis depend on the data series. It just took a quick change to a new erg program I’m working that wrote information out to a comma-delimited file every second.
Open Office’s spreadsheet did the rest.

The race plan was to do even splits and sprint at the end. Splits are represented by the red line (seconds/500 meters) look fine at the overall scale, but the watts line jumping so much means there’s room to make a more even power application throughout the row.

I was hoping to see more information about the relationship between cadence, slide ratio, and meters-per-stroke, but the numbers were rounded for the latter two instead of showing 1 or 2 decimal places as needed. That’ll be fixed up for next time.

Graph of baseline 2K erg test 1/4/2010

My unofficial interface to the Concept 2 Online Logbook is ready.

This allows one to programmatically get information from the logbook (such as your total meters rowed to date) or to add workouts to the logbook from another program.

For example, entering this URL in your browser after getting your own API KEY:

http://c2logapi.appspot.com/api/1/user/totalmeters?format=xml&api_key=xxx

would cause the browser to prompt you for your logbook username and password and then it would return the total meters you’ve rowed to date.

Details and code examples in Python and Java are at the (Unofficial) Concept 2 Online Logbook REST API Home Page.

An update to ErgMate is available at: http://powertwenty.com/ergmate/update.html.

This fixes problems found with communication to the erg and calling power 10′s and 20′s.

There is no need to download the full version if you’ve installed it once already, the update is much smaller as it does not include the computer voice.

Do download the full version if it is your first time as it contains a high-quality voice.

I am pleased to say that ErgMate 1.0 was released today.

ErgMate is a program used while rowing on the Concept II Indoor Rowing Machine.

It helps you meet your goals by calling out information about the row – such as distance remaining or time to go, just like a real coxswain. It can sequence music for you throughout the piece – start out with a list of songs that are steady and driving, then switch over to something fast for the final 250 meter sprint as your ErgMate calls a final power 20.

Have a look and download a free trial at http://powertwenty.com/ergmate/index.html.

Hope you enjoy it!

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.