I Hear the Rotors In the Distance - Receding, I Hope

I received a phone call the other day from a parent who was looking to do something on his child's behalf.  It was an understandable scenario - certainly nothing that, by itself, should result in this parent being accused of hovering, or helicopter parenting, as it has come to be called in the last decade or so.  Be that as it may, it did remind me of the phenomenon and so it got me talking to another coach about parenting and that got me a little wound up on the subject.  So let me lay out this message, tell a couple of stories, and hope for the best - if it doesn't produce a revolutionary change in the culture, at least maybe I'll get a mild catharsis out of it. 

Okay - never mind the aw-shucks, let's-not-take-life-too-seriously tone of the above.  This is too important.  Parents, hear this: You've been getting it dead wrong for the better part of a generation.  Much of what you think of as good parenting is in fact bad parenting.  The most important thing you can do for your children is allow them to fail.  That's right - allow them to fail.  And when they do (and they will), you can react in any number of ways, as long as one of them does not involve fixing the problem yourself or making a phone call to pull whatever strings you know to pull to get the thing worked out in your child's favor. 

In the conversation I had with the other coach, I had offered the opinion that although overparenting seems to be this generation's cross to bear, it's probably better than the other side of the spectrum, or neglect.  His response was "I'm not sure about that - depends how long it takes them to learn to cope!"  And that's it, really, isn't it?  What is a twenty-something to do when he's never had to have a hard conversation with a teacher because his parents always did it for him once the conversation became challenging?  When I hear stories like the one about the guy fresh out of law school whose mother allegedly called the senior partner who was his nominal boss to gripe about his workload, I always assume that they are urban legends - more fable than actual occurrence.  But then fables are often intended to instruct, and are inspired by the desire to rectify some human shortcoming or vice, and thus must reflect some seed of reality.  In the interest of mollifying the skeptics, though, here's a true story: shortly before my stepdaughter graduated from the high school where I had been teaching for a number of years, I received a phone call from one of my colleagues who worked in the college guidance office.  One of the subsidiary concerns of the college guidance office in any prep school is the class rank of each member of the graduating class, since that is a useful tool on both sides of the college admissions process.  They had miscalculated one student's GPA and so my stepdaughter's class rank was, in fact, one position higher than we had previously been told it was.  My colleague was sure that I would be horrified, and she was pre-emptively reassuring me of how sorry she was, and she honestly seemed to expect that I would be righteously indignant.  Although she had graduated near the top of her class, nothing much was at stake in her rank moving up or down one notch.  It didn't affect who was the valedictorian or the salutatorian.  It didn't even make a difference in who any of the top 10% "Honor Graduates" were, and even if it had, they caught the error in time to fix it before graduation.  Because the school did not publish class rank or provide it to colleges, it could not possibly have affected any of her college admissions decisions.  It was a complete non-issue, and no one in my family had given it a moment's thought prior to my colleague's call.  And even after my repeated assurances of all of this, my colleague didn't seem to grasp that I was not upset, nor was my wife nor my stepdaughter.  She apparently thought that I was just being polite, and continued to verbalize her regret about the error, still waiting for the storm to break over her.  Clearly, she had already had too many conversations that had gone the other direction: "what do you mean, you miscalculated!?  My daughter's class rank was actually 7th and it was reported as 8th?!  Do you realize how catastrophic this could have been to her ENTIRE LIFE?!"  It was all I could do not to giggle at the thought. 

I sat through graduation as I always did, and was alternately buoyed by the happy solemnity and serene pomp of the occasion and bored stiff by the tedious repetition of academic liturgy, as I always was.  And I was neither more nor less proud of my stepdaughter than I would have been if she'd been salutatorian or graduated 83rd.  High school graduation is, in fact, a bit of a big deal, but it's not V.E. Day, for god's sake.  And I don't remember my wife or I ever having picked up the phone to call one of her teachers to explain why an absence should be excused or why a B+ should have been an A or any of that nonsense.  I claim no particular virtue thereby - I learned this behavior from two sources.  One was my father, who had always behaved likewise.  I didn't know until many years after I had graduated which of my teachers he had believed were not up to snuff because the old man was wise enough to know that nothing good could come from his giving me an excuse to think less of any of them.  As it turned out, he had some pretty salty opinions of some of them, and it unquestionably could not have benefitted me or my teachers for me to have known them when I was in high school.  The other was having been a teacher myself, and I believe that, for the same reason that everyone should have to wait tables before they ever pick up a check in a full-service restaurant, everyone ought to have the experience of being a classroom teacher before they ever send a child of their own off to school. 

I'll close with my favorite story of an educator dealing with an "involved" parent.  As it happens, the educator was a crew coach, and the parent wanted to know, predictably enough, why his son wasn't in the varsity eight.  After it became clear where the conversation was headed, the coach stopped the parent and said "Mr. Sanderson [not his real name], we can have this conversation if you like, but my experience has shown that every syllable we exchange on this matter diminishes your son's likelihood of success."  That was a conversation ender, and the coach not only kept his job but has continued to coach championship crews ever since. 

Keep your children from imminent danger and genuine abuse.  Answer their questions.  Assure them that they are resourceful enough, intelligent enough, and resilient enough to solve their own problems, and let them do it.  A skinned knee is a blessing, and not knowing how to talk to your professor when you're eighteen or your boss when you're twenty-three is a curse.  Step away from the phone.  Have a glass of iced tea, take a deep breath, and count your blessings.  And occasionally remember to thank your child's teachers and coaches for holding them accountable - that's what they really should be paid to do.

If it Doesn't Work With Alcohol...

I'll tread some dangerous ground in order to make use of an analogy that I hope will resonate, and at the risk of being accused of an apples to oranges comparison (boy, I'm coming to hate that figure of speech).  So let's get right to it, then: the vast majority of people who drink, even those who drink more than they should, are nevertheless aware that drinking to excess does not optimize the drinking experience.  Every sensible person who drinks knows that if two beers in an evening puts a nice glow on one's outlook, it does not follow that twenty beers will multiply that glow by a factor of ten.  Rather it will likely result in a miserable evening and day after spent wishing that one had stopped closer to two (if not alcohol poisoning, blackout, and death).  Somewhere between two and twenty, there's an optimal point and a bit past that is a tipping point where the nice buzz tips over to one or a few too many.  Our struggles to know exactly where that is aside, most of us understand, both intuitively and through experience, that too much is too much, and most of us learn to moderate our intake accordingly. 

If that is true of drinking, might it not also be true of training?  Why does there seem to remain such a culture of excess in training, particularly among those who aspire to the status of elite athlete?  Why are so many athletes so foolishly attached to the idea that if a 5x3 minute interval workout is good, then 9x3 minutes must prove to be even better?  Why do we so often fail to even ask if 4 X 3 or even 3 X 3 might not be optimal?  I recall reading last year on the blog (or was it a Facebook post?) of a rower aspiring to make the Olympic team that this athlete had done an AT workout of something like 8 X 10 minutes and promptly followed that up with a post-row of something like 400 burpees, 400 pullups, and 200 one-legged squats on each leg (one wonders where the coach derived those numbers - did it "sound good"?).  That afternoon, the athlete followed it up with a 7 mile run on hilly terrain.  The days bookending that day were similarly loaded with hard training.  There was, predictably, no chronicle of the quality of rest that this athlete took either before or after.  More must be better, right?  Maybe the only rest was fitful sleep between bouts of grim intensity and willpower. But perhaps this athlete was mistaken: could it have been that 50 one-legged squats per leg during that training cycle was optimal and 200 was about four times too many?  It's worth noting that this same athlete is currently training at far less volume and seems to be faster than s/he was at that point.  Admittedly, it could be that the crazy intensity six months ago is driving the speed s/he has now, but it also could be that the seemingly insane volume of six months ago was counterproductive from the get-go. 

I also recall seeing a video clip of a Dutch rower who contrasted what he regarded as the stereotypically American mentality toward training of "I'll do as much as I have to in order to get faster and if that means four-a-days that's what I'll do" - with what he thought of as the more stereotypically Dutch mentality of "How much do I have to do in order to attain world-class speed?  That's what I should do - why would I work myself to a nub if I don't have to?" 

Wherever the optimal point is, it behooves us all to discard the foolish idea that more training is inherently better for us.  It doesn't work with alcohol, why would it work with intervals, AT, etc.? 

I'll close with another chestnut whose source I have forgotten and therefore cannot footnote but will not claim as my own: Most people's easy workouts are too hard and their hard workouts are not hard enough.  If your race pace and faster outings are of sufficient quality, you probably don't need to train to exhaustion as often as you might think. 

It's the combination of high quality training and high quality recovery (including both easy outings and outright rest) that produces speed.  The best athletes find the balance.  Good luck, and remember to stop well short of twenty. 

Modern High School and its Discontents

Sports Illustrated runs a recurring item entitled "This Week's Sign of the Apocalypse," highlighting something particularly absurd and ridiculous in sport.  I'll up the ante and offer the past two decades' sign of the apocalypse within the rowing world, and it is this: high school crew coaches telling their athletes with a straight face that they need to start specializing in rowing at the age of fourteen (or earlier).  This argument is so tremendously flawed that I don't really even know where to begin savaging it.  But since it's summer at Craftsbury and that means daily conversations with Pepa Miloucheva and Lisa Schlenker, let's just start there.  Pepa and I respectfully disagree about a lot of things pertaining to rowing and sculling, but here's something about which she is right on: rowing and sculling are among a small handful of sports that an athlete can never encounter prior to age 20, take up at age 23, and be world-class by age 30.  Try doing that as a nordic skier (forget about it).  Or a gymnast.  Or a swimmer.  While Pepa underestimates the subtleties of movement that rowers and scullers must master to be truly outstanding in their sport, she does not underestimate what it takes, neurologically, to master her own sport of nordic skiing or many others that require the athlete to manipulate his bodyweight in an unfamiliar gravitational environment.  While you might not have to specialize in swimming from age six forward, the door to world-class status is probably closed to you if you start learning to swim when you're 25.  For rowing and sculling, though, the door is still pretty much wide open.  Exhibit A is Lisa Schlenker.  She never picked up an oar until she was 26.  She's got two World Championship Silver medals in the ltwt single in her closet (or drawer or shoebox, or framed, I don't know which) and a trip to the Olympics in the ltwt 2X behind her.  Rowing may, in fact, be at the very top of the list of sports in which early specialization is not only unnecessary, but also potentially damaging to the long-term success of its participants.  So what such coaches are saying to you boils down to this: You should specialize in a sport that doesn't really require specialization, so that four years from now you can lose races to people who are better athletes than you because four years ago they were playing two other sports in addition to rowing.  Ask any collegiate coach at any level to tell you a story about a recruited athlete who rowed exclusively in high school and got steamrolled in the spring by stronger, fitter, more athletic walk-ons.  Most coaches I know have a dozen or more such stories.  This is not to knock participation in high school crew, but rather to discourage the crabbed outlook that assumes it guarantees anything or that multiple seasons of it is better than a single season for a multi-sport athlete.

So here's my message to high school coaches who are exerting subtle or not-so-subtle pressure on their athletes to stop playing other sports and focus exclusively on rowing: Stop it.  Stop it right now.

And the corollary message to parents of high school athletes and the athletes themselves: If your crew coach is telling you that you need to row ten or eleven months out of the year to the exclusion of participation in other sports, remind yourself to consider the source.  It may seem to be in your coach's best interest for you to train exclusively in rowing or sculling - he's got a trophy case to fill and a resume to build, after all, but hear this carefully and thoroughly: it won't make you a better human being, or even a better athlete, or even a better rower or sculler in the long run.  Here's a true statement: one of the most recurrent complaints that collegiate rowing coaches have about their rowers is lack of general, all-around athleticism.  And early specialization cannot teach that or provide an environment in which it is likely to develop.  I shudder to think what kind of athlete and sculler I would be if I had not participated in half a dozen other sports prior to finding rowing at age 20.  The truth is that I've learned valuable things that enrich my enjoyment of and proficiency in sculling from nearly every sport I've ever tried.  Further, if you ditch your other sports in order to devote yourself exclusively to crew, you miss out on one of the greatest opportunities of American adolescence.  Middle school and high school afford us the opportunity to participate in multiple team sports for a very short span of years, and almost none of us will ever get that opportunity again in any meaningful sense.  Quick - name an adult amateur soccer league that inspires commitment and devotion on a par with high school sports (trick question - there's not one).  We will become adults, embark on careers, perhaps get married and have children, and so on.  Playing pickup basketball can be tons of fun, but it will never match the experience of sharing a season, in uniform, with your peers.  And if you enjoy and are proficient at more than one sport, you should allow yourself the opportunity to play more than one sport, and the devil take anyone who tries to tell you otherwise.  

Here's the healthier alternative: commit yourself to being a fit, strong, athlete on a year-round basis.   Never allow yourself to get "out of shape."  If you enjoy more than one sport, go ahead and commit to participate in more than one sport.  And if you find at 16 or 17 that your real interest in your other sports or your aptitude for them is waning and you are inclined to devote more time and passion to crew, then do that.  And if your crew coach can't handle that, find another crew coach.

Full disclosure, complete with convenient rationalization: I coached high school crew for fifteen years, and more of my scullers were one-sport athletes than were multi-sport athletes,  but I was never comfortable with that and did my best to encourage people to be involved with a second sport (or third, in exceptional cases).  So if you're one of my former athletes or crew parents and are reading this and thinking "really?  Is this the same guy?" then I sincerely apologize for having failed to render this message as emphatically or to articulate it as precisely as I should have.

Res ipsa loquitur.  Avoid the coming apocalypse and its attendant craziness.

A Case for the Usefullness of a Neurological Perspective

At some point as the seed of this post germinated, I thought "maybe I shouldn't write this one - it's too close to giving away little-known trade secrets" and then I remembered that, by and large, coaches and athletes in endurance sports that are fitness-dependent have pretty much ignored this idea for at least a hundred years and that there's no reason to think that a blog entry by a comparatively unknown coach is going to change that.  So here's the big secret that hides in plain sight: training is just as much a neurological phenomenon as it is a physiological one.  The very word that is most often used to describe our daily training betrays our assumption that physiology is not merely our primary focus, it overwhelms most others: the word is "workout."  Every outing is a workout, and we assume that must necessarily entail raising the heart rate, respiration rate, lactate levels, and so on, and if a given training session does not do those things, then nothing much has been accomplished.  That simply is not true.  Good sculling is as grounded in the training of one's nervous system as it is in the training of one's heart, lungs, and musculoskeletal system.  An outing in which a sculler works hard but carries unnecessary tension may accomplish its physiological purpose, but be a step backward in terms of learning to scull well.  Further, an outing in which a sculler truly focuses on rowing relaxed and easy and tapping the boat along without giving any thought to whether her heart rate is in the proper zone may be a great leap forward for her ability to race well and make the boat go fast.  An outing in which the sculler never leaves the area next to her docks and simply does a variety of stationary and semi-stationary drills that establish greater mastery of her boat (or perhaps her craft, in both definitions of the word) may do more for her than another interval workout.  I once heard a fellow coach whose ideas I much admire say, while sitting in a single "you've got to own this space."  He couldn't have been more right - and owning the space means being comfortable in it, and being comfortable in it means (at least in part) having a nervous system that has achieved a high level of mastery of that environment.  And you can think that this will only take you so far and that it's time to get back to your interval workout and remain among the blind, or you can see what a frontier there is in considering neurological training to be important enough to give it substantial time and attention and perhaps join the ranks of those who are on a path to mastery of sculling.

Motion Over Effort - What Scullers Can Learn from Nordic Skiers Part 2

One of my fellow coaches at Craftsbury likes to say that sport is about motion, not effort.  In a more humorous and curmudgeonly moment the same coach has kidded a few campers who were sculling less than gracefully by saying "your sculling is a triumph of effort over motion."  In both variations, I think he's on to something.  Most people have heard at least one pithy story (if not a hundred) of a martial arts master who was either elderly or diminutive or both who, in demonstrations of skill, makes much younger, larger, stronger opponents look clumsy, slow, and incompetent.  A subtle turn of the hip here, a bend at the knee at just the right moment there, and the angry, musclebound, brimming-with-adrenaline twentysomething opponent is looking up from the mat, wondering what happened.  His effort had been giant and the tiny old man had seemingly expended little if any effort of his own, and yet had defeated him.  How could such a thing have happened?  And if you haven't already flashed on Yoda and Luke Skywalker, I'll go ahead and bring that up as what is likely the most universally recognized modern version of that story.   In any event, the stories tend to resonate with us because on some level we know that brute strength and effort are rarely the deciding factors at high levels of sport - or even not-so-high levels; I had a friend in 7th grade football who had some gymnastics training and could seemingly block anybody of any size.  His "secret" was keeping his center of gravity lower than everyone else's, allowing him to get his helmet and shoulder pads under yours on every single play.  Without much apparent effort, he stood you up and rendered you ineffective.

Before I digress further, though, let's shift to Nordic skiing.  I remember one of the first times I ever went out skiing, trying to keep up with a guy whose level of fitness and achievement as an endurance athlete is comparable to mine but who had spent a lot more time on snow.  After effortlessly dropping me on an uphill section for the umpteenth time, he stopped and waited for me and when I had caught up he observed "It's not your fitness that's lacking, and after you've got a few hundred more hours on skis, you're gradually going to start learning how to carry more of your speed through the transitions from downhill to uphill, around corners, over the crests of hills, and so on." And of course he was right and so by the end of my first season on skis I was skiing quite a bit faster and more gracefully without having made any great gains in either general or ski-specific fitness.  It was a simple matter of paying attention, over the course of dozens of hours of skiing, to what creates and preserves speed and what does not.

It wasn't until a couple of years later, though, that I took another substantial step forward by beginning to intuitively understand that one of the real keys to going fast is knowing the most appropriate places and moments to put your effort.  For example, when you are coming to the lowest point of a descent, there seems to be a perfect moment at which to come out of your tuck, shift your weight, adjust your tempo, and switch to the climbing technique most appropriate to the terrain and situation.  And if you hit that moment perfectly, you go into your climb with a lot more speed and a lot less effort.  And if you hit it clumsily or with your weight in the wrong place or your posture not quite where it ought to be, you quickly begin to feel like you're skiing through molasses or honey or some other slow-moving liquid and you get to have the punishing experience of climbing the hill while trying to earn back speed that you could have simply kept if you'd been cleverer in your movements.   To borrow a phrase from the previous post, the difference between the right moment and almost the right moment really is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.  Miss the moment by a few inches or a few hundredths of a second and you may as well have missed it by ten meters or week.  And there are dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of these transitional moments in any ski race or training session, and the difference in the time it will take you to complete ten kilometers of skiing when you are hitting those moments sweetly and ten kilometers of hitting them clumsily will be measured in minutes rather than seconds or tenths of seconds. And the difference in your fatigue level as your workout wears on also makes the virtues of skiing well self-evident.

It may or may not go without saying that something similar applies to where you put the effort over the macrocycle of a whole race.  Two skiers might put exactly the same amount of energy into the same ten minutes spent skiing and the one who is skiing smartly and adroitly could be hundreds of meters ahead.  Having burned exactly the same number of calories (or perhaps fewer), the skillful skier wins the race handily over the skier who knows more about pain tolerance than he knows about skiing well, and the same is equally true for any two scullers.

You can undoubtedly see where this is going.  Sculling may not have climbs and descents or abrupt turns, but just as Nordic skiing has a microcyclical pattern of shifting the bodyweight from over one ski to over the other, the microcycle of sculling is the single stroke from one catch to the next, and where and how you place your effort in that movement is critical to the effectiveness of the movement. And you can be Yoda in your single or you can be a brawny but ineffective stormtrooper cut in half by his light saber.  Hit the catch a little too hard, or mis-time the change of direction by the hips and shoulders, or miss any of a thousand even more subtle somethings and your boatspeed will suffer without your even being conscious of it or knowing what you could be doing differently to improve it.  Do it right and you can take ten truly effective strokes using less effort than you'd put into five crude ones or nine very good ones.  And the difference is very tricky to find and almost impossible to articulate. And that attempt to articulate something that can only be found through experience is, I think, the greatest pitfall of a mechanical (or even a biomechanical) approach to the sculling stroke.  No one's talking biomechanics on the mat at the dojo.  At some level it's like trying to teach someone to walk by talking them through the process: "first, pick up your right foot and move it forward.  Let your hip follow, and at the same time let your left shoulder move backward" etc.  Sculling, like walking, is probably best learned experientially, imitatively, and intuitively rather than by being coached on each individual part of the cycle.  Which is by no means to say that such coaching is useless - I'm not about to talk myself out of a profession, and the martial arts analogy holds as well - no one ever mastered Judo in the absence of instruction from a master, but in the end it is the student's intuition that either makes good sense of the master's guidance or fails to do so.  Or oftentimes  that makes good sense out of the imperfect guidance of a well-intentioned but equally imperfect coach.

Effort applied skillfully, judiciously, and intuitively, both in each individual stroke and each racing or training piece, is what separates the great scullers from the merely very good ones and the good ones from novices and/or hapless hammers.   Just as there are hard-earned lessons in how the hips and shoulders must move for judo throws to work as they are intended, there are hard-earned movement patterns for skiers and scullers.  And the difference between a true master oarsman and a merely fine sculler is not often something that is readily apparent to the eye or to the intellect, but it shows up quickly in the larger, younger, more muscular guy on his back in the dojo or five lengths of open water behind after 2k.  Better motion.  Effort placed only exactly where and when it needs to be.  Faster boats, and opponents left baffled, wondering "how did he DO that?"

Playing With Gravity, or What Scullers Can Learn From Nordic Skiing

I participate in Nordic skiing not so much because of any inherent fascination with it but rather because it's what there is to do around here from December through March if you're an endurance athlete.  And if you're reading that as an insult to the activity, then I beg your pardon, because that's not the intent.  Though I came to the sport late and it doesn't quite grab me by the lapels the way that sculling always has, there are days when I can see how it might.  What is most important for my purposes, though, is that there are a lot of insights into sculling that can be gained by paying attention to what makes you a better Nordic skier.  I'll only nod in the direction of the cross-training benefit by acknowledging that from my perspective at least, Nordic skiing exposes the limitations of steady-state training on flat water: because there are no hills in sculling, the sheer sameness of always training on a level surface can be problematic if for no other reason than that it's all too easy to fall into a routine in which the most important training principle (VARY THE STIMULUS) is insufficiently honored.  Ninety minutes of steady state at 22 SPM three times a week is almost inevitably going to create a less varied stimulus than three skiing outings of ninety minutes over varied terrain including climbs, descents, transitions, and varying routes and snow conditions.  As has been observed more than once around here, "Nordic skiing is 100% fartlek; there's no such thing as steady state unless you live where it's flat."

None of that, however, gets at the technical insights for sculling that can come to you from playing with gravity as a skier.  I don't remember exactly when Pepa first showed me what has become my favorite skiing drill, but I keep coming back to it every time I want to add to my understanding of what constitutes good skiing.  And like most things that initially appear to be magic that on closer examination are revealed to be simple physics, it has the potential to teach us something.  Describing it rather than demonstrating it probably won't do it justice, but I'll hope for the best.  To start with, she places her skis in a "V".  From there, she positions her bodyweight where she knows it needs to be, flexing her ankles, dropping her hips, and adjusting her center of gravity.  And without appearing to move any of her limbs at all, the skis begin to move forward on their own, as if by magic.  Anyone with even a modicum of understanding of skiing can do this, but when you see it as a brand-new beginner it tends to make an impression.  The skeptic watching this demonstration on level ground may dismiss it and think or say something like "big deal, you're just pressing out with your feet" or some variation of that, but most people are more impressed when the drill is moved to a hill and repeated so that it becomes clear that one can actually begin to "climb" uphill without taking any steps.  If the bodyweight is positioned appropriately, the skis still move on their own, even on fairly steep inclines, and it becomes apparent that it isn't just alpine skiing that involves playing with gravity; if anything, Nordic skiing places an even greater importance on it.  An observant skier begins to notice that, more than perhaps anything else, it is the position of the body over the ski that determines whether one moves through space rapidly or slowly (or perhaps even goes backward).  This may lead to the realization that skiing, in an important sense, can be understood as controlled falling, and that it is desirable to learn how to "fall uphill" if one wants to climb effectively rather than muscle one's way up a slope.  Further, it doesn't take long for an attentive skier to notice that shifting one's bodyweight skillfully during the rhythmic cycle of moving from one ski to the other makes a huge difference in the speed that one travels.  I can almost hear Pepa saying "Over one, ofer the other!  Over one, now ofer the other" right now, in her thick Bulgamerican accent.

What that's got to do with sculling may or may not be obvious, and for that matter, I may or may not be right about this, but I think that if body position over the ski and rhythmic, effective shifting of the bodyweight is critical to speed in Nordic skiing (and it is), then body position within the shell and rhythmic, effective shifting of the bodyweight is probably critical to speed in sculling, and that if playing with gravity skillfully by intuitively adjusting the position of your body as it moves through a rhythmic cycle is what separates great skiers from mediocre ones, the same is probably true for scullers.  Although I never rowed for Igor Grinko, I'm told that one of his favorite calls to his scullers is "USE YOUR BODYWEIGHT!" and I think that's telling - Igor's early wrestling matches with the English language are legendary, and particularly during his first years in the states he had to find ways to use what he knew effectively, so the phrase might be seen as a powerful distillation of what's really important in sculling.  Sculling, like skiing, involves playing with gravity, and that has everything to do with how you position your bodyweight throughout the stroke cycle.  And it is as true on level, liquid water as it is on varied terrain with frozen water underfoot.  Sculling well involves learning to fall horizontally - this is part of what wise coaches mean when they say "rowing is not a pulling sport." Learn to play with gravity - it never gets tired.

The Trouble With Sports Physiology

My best friend Pepa Miloucheva gave me an article today which purported to be about the physiology of 2k erg pieces.  To the extent that I could make heads or tails of it, the article reviewed the existing research indicating that a 2k erg piece for an elite athlete tends to be about 70% dependent on the aerobic energy pathways and 30% dependent on the anaerobic energy pathways.  Nothing new there.  From that point, it went on to speculate about non-linear relationships between maximum wattage, wattage at VO2 max, and wattage at paces slower than VO2 max, and thenceforth to a lot of tables that I didn't understand at all.  My first reaction to finding myself lost was "gee, I wish I knew what all these terms and abbreviations meant so that these tables would be less incomprehensible to me - I might learn something."  Then I remembered something that I've always regarded as self-evident: sports physiologists often think that physiology and victory are related, when the truth is that they're usually not.  Bookmark this one: physiology determines the level at which you compete, but is otherwise unrelated to winning.  Though it is rare that you'll see a sculler whose VO2 max is 55ml/kg defeating a sculler of the same gender whose VO2 max is 72ml/kg, it's not at all uncommon to see a sculler whose erg time is only the ninth or tenth best among his crew win every seat race and every challenge put before him.  It's also not uncommon to see a big, strong rower who never seems to win because she feels intimidated by smaller, more assertive athletes.  And physiologists have a litany of rationalizations for all such situations.  Every coach I know can tell multiple stories of athletes who were "gifted," by which we mean here that their measurables were off the charts, who regularly were defeated by athletes supposedly less "gifted" than they.  This is what Jim Dietz was talking about when he talked about the difference between competitors and racers.  A tall, strong sculler with off-the-charts VO2 max who is insecure and intimidated by a smaller sculler with less impressive VO2 numbers can be counted on to reliably produce mediocre, underachieving results.  Conversely, a short, feisty sculler who likes nothing more than to make everyone eat his wake can be counted on to reliably defeat the previously described marshmallows.

By all means, gather all the data.  Use it to set and to refine your training program.  And when you're ready to select your crew, throw all of your lactate/pulse rate/VO2 max data in the dumpster and answer this one question: Who makes the boat go fast, every damn day?  Put those people in your varsity crew, and stop thinking that the race results can't be right because they don't match what the guys in the lab told you.

Sports physiology has its place, and that place is in planning a customized training program.  Don't let it anywhere near your selection process, where it can only cloud the issue of who makes the boat go fast.