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.