Row Your Best or Don't Row at All

I remember my first coach walking along behind the ergs early one morning hollering "THERE'S NO PACING!"  Speaking practically, he was wrong, of course - no pacing in a piece that isn't purely anaerobic leads swiftly and directly to crash and burn, fly and die, or whatever you want to call it.  But on a purely gut level, though, he was absolutely right about the best attitude for an oarsman to have, which is something along the lines of "I'm going to honk on it with everything I've got on THIS STROKE, and now THIS ONE, and now THIS ONE and I'm going to give little or no thought to the rest of the piece because I'm making the boat go fast and I'm going to keep doing it until after my opponents crack and/or the finish line gets here."  It's what Jim Dietz was talking about when he said, famously, that "the racer doesn't think of limits - only the race."

My own favorite story about this comes from my first week of rowing, and I like to tell it because it illustrates something very important about oarsmanship, which is this: whether you're a first-day novice or a five-time Olympian, the task remains exactly the same and the purity of racing does also.  Sometime in September of 1987, there were over 100 guys out for the novice crew at the University of Virginia.  The coaches had announced that they could only keep 40 of us.  So on maybe the third or fourth day after we had ever put our hands on an oar, we were to have an erg test that would result in 60+ guys getting cut.  Adding to the drama was the fact that we were doing the erg test on first-generation ConceptII Model -A ergs - the kind with the bicycle speedometer/odometer rather than a digital readout.  The test piece was three "miles" if I remember correctly, and that turned out to be a 3+ minute piece for most people.  The coaches timed it on a stopwatch and didn't give you your time, adding suspense to the question of how everyone had done and probably allowing the coaches to be a little secretive and sneaky and select a range of times and maybe cut a guy or two who went faster and keep a guy or two who went slower, on the basis of seeing who really went for it and who coasted to a respectable time without emptying the tanks or what have you.  

Anyhow, the important thing was that everyone knew this was a reckoning, and no one knew much about anyone else's abilities, so the task was simple: row as hard as you could row and hope that was good enough.  In other words, you'd better be racing every stroke, and pacing yourself might mean a very premature end to your rowing experience.  So what I remember most about that piece was how pure the effort was - I raced every single stroke of it because I believed I had to.  I might not make the top forty times, but by god if I didn't it wouldn't be for lack of effort and commitment.  And twenty-three years later, I cannot say that I've ever raced any harder or been any more satisfied with myself as an oarsman or had any more fun than I did that day in 1987.  I've certainly raced with that mentality many times since (and failed to do so more than I care to admit), and gone far faster - I'm sure that my power output near the end of that piece was nothing special and that the last few strokes were far slower than the first few, but that's not the point - the point is rowing every stroke with a pure racer's intentions.  And the more often you can hew to that standard of oarsmanship, the greater your reward.  Better to race and not win than to win when you didn't truly race.