Trust, or the Belief in Belief Part III

"Good rowing is about trust" was something I heard over and over again from my novice coaches at the University of Virginia, both of whom were fire-breathing true believers who would have appeared to be  dangerous fanatics to someone outside the world of rowing.  None of us really understood what they were talking about at the time, and chances are good that many if not most people who hear that but never really experience it are equally in the dark.  That's the trouble with great, simply articulated truth: it sounds like an inspirational message, and any twit can repeat any such message without ever having experienced it.    And that's how such truths hide in plain sight - by coming to be regarded as coachspeak through mindless repetition.  The good news is that mindless repetition can and often does  turn into real understanding without warning.

     I was reminded of all of this a few weeks ago when I heard Ric Ricci say of his pair partner from college, with whom he won the IRA's, "I think the secret of our success is that neither one of us ever blamed the other guy.  If we had a bad day, I always assumed it was my fault, and he always assumed it was his.  I've always believed that if you start blaming the other guy, you may as well get out of the boat and quit.  Start blaming the other guy and you're done."  Blaming the other guy, after all, is the antithesis of trust.

     I used to scull with a group of guys at the Duluth Rowing Club, all of whom were in their thirties or early forties.  We were all of similar ability and speed, and although there was some sense among us of who was the top guy (see the "Pecking Orders" post), on any given piece the order of finish might be anything at all.  And as the result of beating one another up on a near-daily basis and seeing over and over again that everyone intended to race every piece, we came to trust each other, and when four of us got in a quad, we often went faster than anyone outside our boat expected us to, probably for no other reason than that we weren't going to let one another down, and no one in the boat was going to blame any of the other three if a race didn't go our way.  We won the B quad at Masters Nationals in 1999 in the fastest time of the regatta, and I came to find out that the silver and bronze-medal boats had sat on the starting line without giving much though to the crew from Duluth - the third place crew had won the event for several years running, and the second place crew had trained all year to beat them, only to have an interloper sneak in and spoil their party.  Somebody from Rowing News came over and asked us if we were surprised to win (what kind of question is that?) and I had to answer honestly that the thought of not winning that race hadn't really occurred to me, except maybe as the anxious thought I had during our warmup when the pitch in my port oarlock seemed funky, of catching a crab and letting my boatmates down.  Looking at those three crews objectively, though, I can see why people might have assumed that we were the dark horse entry - our bow pair were lightweights, the shortest guy in either of the other medalist crews was taller than our tallest guy, and we hadn't ever attended the regatta as a quad so we were an unknown quantity.  It didn't matter, because we had mutual trust in one another, and although that probably didn't guarantee victory (it's always easy to talk about a result as though it were foreordained after it's over), it did get us pretty close to making the boat go as fast as we were capable of going that day, and that was pretty sweet.