A couple of days ago, I did the following erg workout:
- Warming Up
- 4 x 10 minutes at 4 minutes rest (with each 10 minutes consisting of 4 minutes @ 20, 3 minutes @ 22, 2 minutes @ 24 and 1 minute @ 26spm
- Cooling Down
At the end of the first workout, I had to leave the erg room to take a delivery. I brilliantly managed to do this during the four minutes rest period, but when I came back, the PM5 had lost connection to my heart rate belt, so I had to reconnect and start a new workout.
Of course, also the cooling down part was a separate workout. So a full session ended up as 4 pieces uploaded to rowsandall.com, synced to Strava, SportTracks, etc.
Similar things happen when using in-boat apps or devices like BoatCoach, CrewNerd, or the NK SpeedCoach. Each piece uploads as a separate “workout” to rowsandall.com. Here are the charts related to those four pieces:
To make matters worse for coaches who want to compare the same workout between athletes, they find that the same workout can be broken into pieces in different way, which makes it hard to compare.
So, it was time to finally implement something that has been ready for deployment for a long time. Just as “split” helps you to break workouts into pieces for easier comparison, “glue” helps you to glue together the broken pieces of a session into one single workout.
So how does it work? I put a link to the functionality in two places on the site. It is near the bottom of the workouts list:
Also, I have added a button close to the “Split” button on the Advanced page for a single workout:
Click that button and you get to a page that looks as follows:
On the left, you can select any number of workouts that you want to glue together. Then, on the right, you decide on the name of the new workout and the visibility to other users. Clicking the submit button will create the workout and drop you off at its Edit page:
Here is the chart of the full session:
Also, looking at the workouts list, I can now see the new workout (called “Monday Workout”) as well as the separate pieces. It is up to you, the user, to decide whether you want to remove some of them, as they are duplicates.
A couple of things to bear in mind:
- For gluing together the workouts, I use their exact position in space-time. That means, that if you have a few minutes (or hours) that go unrecorded between the pieces, you will see that in the combined workout.
- Some apps do not export the absolute time, so the workout time on rowsandall.com is a guess (usually the time of upload). Make sure you correct them before you start gluing.
- The glue function works in chronological order, taking the earliest workout first, then attaching the next one. If there is overlap between the workouts, it will keep the data from the earliest workout. There may be situations where you don’t want that. In that case, use Split functionality first to remove the uninteresting parts.
These are advanced operations. I do recommend to make sure that your team uses the same setup on the PM and in the boat to record pieces, and I am personally a big fan of just using “Just Row” mode, then edit the intervals after the fact, but I do think that this functionality helps you split and combine the data exactly like you want.
