In the fall of the year that Jamie Koven won Worlds in the single, I remember being at the USRowing Convention and hearing him do a Q&A at lunch. Somebody in the audience had asked him "Umm - do you train scientifically?" to which the then twenty-something Jamie Koven responded along the lines of "No, I just do the same workouts I did in college." Now, setting aside the unstated fact that the workouts he did in college were almost certainly designed by someone with a pretty good familiarity with available research on training and the accumulated wisdom of a lot of coaches and physiologists so the program itself was somewhat "scientific," the message seems obvious: training is not that complicated and a guy who pays for physiological testing, supplements, and "scientifically designed" training programs may not enjoy any great advantage over a recent college graduate who's doing the workouts he remembers from rowing in college.
Herewith, then, are a handful of succinct training aphorisms that have helped me a great deal as a coach and an athlete, with explanations where needed:
"Once a week, go so hard your eyeballs hurt. Once a week, go so slow the snails yawn."
This one was from a column in "Cycling" magazine, if I remember correctly. It's a companion piece to the somewhat more mundane advice that most people's easy workouts are too hard and their hard workouts aren't hard enough. The average athlete, at least in this country, tends to go out and beat himself up day after day and thereby ruts himself in a state of semi-intense mediocrity. He rarely if ever truly empties the tanks and rarely if ever rests enough to truly recover, so he finds a nice plateau and stays there and in the end laments that he never had enough talent to go any further. Make your eyeballs hurt. Then make the snails yawn. If you're not willing to go that hard, why are you wasting your time trying to be an athlete? And if you're not smart enough to rest long enough to recover, you've earned the burnout you're going to get.
"If ye want to goo foster, ye have to goo fost." (This one I got from listening to Declan Connolly speak at Craftsbury, so say it out loud, with an Irish accent, and it will make more sense). Dr. Connolly is bursting the bubble of athletes who think they can do nothing but steady state training and someday will turn into racers. Steady state training is critical to an endurance athlete's training, but if it's all you ever do, you'll just turn into a really fit sculler who can go slow for a long time.
"Oatmeal is better than no meal." Translation: If all you have time for on a given day is a fifteen-minute training session and the alternative is doing nothing, then do a fifteen minute training session because it's better than skipping a day (for those of you who are metaphorically challenged, the oatmeal represents something plain, simple, easy, and available - and the full meal would be a complex workout with warmup, drills, intervals, and cooldown).
"Practice makes permanent." Larry Gluckman uses this one often, and I've forgotten what he says about where he first heard it, but I think it's the greatest mastery-related truism there is. It amounts to a more subtle way of saying "you race the way you practice" and/or "you are what you habitually do." If you train inconsistently or inattentively, you'll be inconsistent and inattentive on race day too - the immature crews are the ones standing around on race day trying to pump each other up with nonsense like "This is the state championships! We're gonna row REALLY HARD today!" Right, fellas - and now tell us why you didn't do that at every appropriate opportunity for the past eight months? Tell us all about it after the race, after you're finished with your own variation on the "we'll get 'em next year" theme (not without a change in your mental approach you won't). On a related note, it's not a bad idea to keep in mind that when you're training, the most important thing you're really developing is your mind and your nervous system. Your brain wants to do what it has been trained to do and has a hard time doing things it hasn't done before. If you expect race day to be a success, you'd better have gotten your brain used to race-day-style demands well in advance. If you want to row smoothly when the brass ring is on the line, you'd better already have developed the habit of rowing smoothly over the past months and years. Permanent, indeed.
"When you sense that your opponent is sinking, throw the S.O.B. an anvil." Will Scoggins used this one now and then as a coarser and more memorable way of saying "find and exploit your opponents' vulnerabilities" and "never sit on a lead - expand it right now." In a world where anything can still happen, from a jumped slide to a boat-stopping crab or a popped oarlock, how much lead is enough? I remember watching a Canadian sculler named Cam Baerg win at Canadian Henley one year, and his coach was running down the footpath hollering "Make it certain! Cam! Make it Certain!" And he did, rather memorably. Make a racer's attitude a habit by bringing a racer's mindset to your training.
Good racing in 2011. Goo fost.
