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?"
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