iTRAIN workouts

[Laura]

Does anyone know anything about this? It was linked from the Concept2 website. They have workouts for 60, 40, and 20 minutes. Could have potential, I guess, but I'd hate to pay $8 just to hear some recorded voice chanting encouraging phrases for a whole hour...
www.itrain.com/home.php?pageSelect=irow&partner=Concept2iRow

[Alan]

Unless they have the "Boot Camp" version in which a witty but a cruel drill instructor says stuff like "there's only two types of rowers that come out of Oklahoma.... I don't see any horns on you.. etc" I don't think it would be useful.

Please note that I may have internalized this thought and quote from various movies I have seen including "An Officer and a Gentleman" and "Full Metal Jacket" or from the TV series "Gomer Pyle, USMC."

[Don]

I have the ability to make very similar audio tracks, I might leave out the motivation, and just put in instruction "bring it to 30spm...." "20 more seconds...." that kind of thing.

My plan is to grab a boom box from home, plug in my mp3 player, and pump out some music during team practices....

what i need from you is some genres of music to make rowing mixes with! Classic rock, rock, hip/hop, techno.

I will work on a few ideas, and get approval from Jeff to play a stereo in the rec.

-Don

[Laura]

80s rock.

Erging goes MUCH better with the proper music...

[magnuson]

But absolutely no Rocky theme song!

[Alan]

The Commodore is right, once again. If you want to train and listen to music, it has to be 80's music. The comes from the London Telegraph:

German athletes fed steroids and Supertramp
By Bojan Pancevski in Kienbaum
Last Updated: 1:00am BST 23/09/2007



For more than two decades they were part of the world's greatest athletics scandal, taking vast quantities of steroids in an attempt to prove communism's superiority.


The East Germans' secret depressurised underground training facility


Now, though, another guilty secret of East Germany's Cold War Olympic success has finally been revealed – not a cocktail of performance-enhancing drugs, but a mixture of Supertramp, Bruce Springsteen and Shakin' Stevens.

Hits such as Dreamer, This Ole House and Born in the USA have been revealed as the unlikely motivational soundtrack for the country's athletes as they trained at a top-secret sports complex, now earmarked for reopening after 16 years lying disused.

Despite pop music being banned by the communist authorities, a discreet exception was made for sports stars as a treat to help them train harder.

"We always had good music, the latest Western hits," said Torsten Gutsche, 59, a multiple Olympic gold medallist in kayaking, one of nearly 100 successful Olympians who was coached there.

advertisement"It was quite a privilege because that kind of stuff would not be played in East Germany. The idea was that we would perform better if we were happy."

Built in 1979, the underground training facility, consisting of a special depressurised bunker designed to simulate high-altitude conditions, was developed as an alternative to steroid programmes when international doping tests became more sophisticated.

The complex had remained quietly forgotten until this summer, when a doping scandal involving German cyclists sparked renewed interest in the East's controversial sporting past. Now there are calls for it to be made into a museum.

The Sunday Telegraph was granted a rare tour around the facility, beneath a conventional sports training centre at the lakeside resort of Kienbaum, outside Berlin.

The East German government camouflaged it so that it would be undetectable from the outside, a move designed to keep it hidden even from the occupying Russians, unofficially as much a sporting rival as Western nations.

Inside, a descending corridor leads to a steel shaft, followed by a decompression room – a gateway into a hermetically sealed two-storey chamber, fitted with treadmills, exercise bikes, weight-lifting devices and rowing practice pools.

An elaborate ventilation system extracted air until the pressure was similar to that at an altitude of 4,000 metres (13,000ft), inducing athletes' bodies to produce more red blood cells and extra endurance.

"There is no doubt that the chamber fulfilled its purpose. The results were obvious. And there was nothing illegal about it," said Klaus-Peter Nowack, the head of the Kienbaum sport centre.

Athletes were ordered to train underground for weeks on end, being sent off to big contests only when their red blood cell count was drastically raised.

Because of the immense psychological strain of the hard training in an isolated subterranean environment, some considered it a form of torture.

"It was horrible feeling to train there, in that narrow space surrounded with concrete," said Birgit Fisher, 45, another East Germany kayaker. "I hated being there and I believe my colleagues felt the same."


Heidi Krieger in 1986


The East German regime considered sport competitions an extension of the ideological struggle against the capitalist West, and mounted a systematic campaign to make its athletes the best.

Between 1972 and 1988 they notched up 384 Olympic medals – from a population of just 16 million.

Up to 2,000 former athletes who were forcibly doped are now suffering serious health problems as a result, including Heidi Krieger, the 1986 European women's shot-put champion, who had a sex-change operation in 1997 as a result of having taken steroids that change hormone levels.

Gerd Heber, who coached East German runners and later the athletes of united Germany, said: "We would often spend days with our athletes inside, without seeing any daylight. It was, in a way, also a form of torture, but it has brought us a lot."






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[Laura]

Alan, how do you find this stuff???

Meanwhile, do you think the rec will build us a tank in an altitude chamber to practice in? And then check our RBC's before sending us to compete? If Mag can get them to buy us new ergs, he must have them wrapped around his pinky.