Don't Argue With Free Speed - What Scullers Can Learn from Nordic Skiers Part IV

It is winter again in Craftsbury, which means the lake is frozen and we're skiing and erging rather than sculling. The longer I'm here, the more I look forward to ski season as an opportunity both to ski for its own sake but more importantly to ski in order to learn more about sculling, and I am rarely disappointed on that front. Thus far, this year's overwhelming lesson mostly involves a deepening understanding of what skiing has been trying to teach me all along: that more effort does not necessarily equate to more speed. Granted that sculling teaches that lesson, too, I'll offer the potentially controversial opinion that skiing teaches it with greater clarity - if nothing else, it makes the lesson more obvious. I've written on this same topic before (see 3/29/12 post "Motion over Effort") but that's of no great consequence, since we so often fail to learn what is not repeated, and besides, I have two new stories to go with it. A week or so ago, I was skiing behind two other scullers, both of whom have made multiple national teams over the past few years, looking to make their next one. We were on a hill called "Dyno", which is not a particularly daunting climb but is long enough and steep enough to show the inefficiencies of scullers who are still in the comparatively early stages of learning to ski - real skiers either drop us off the back on Dyno or get to the crest a lot less gassed than we do. After we had gotten back on the flat, one of the scullers remarked "You know, it's an interesting thing about skiing - a lot of times when you add effort, you don't get any faster." The other one went a step further and noted "Yeah - sometimes it actually makes you slower." That was the whole conversation, but it got me thinking about whether scullers understand the phenomenon of wasted effort as well as nordic skiers do, and I didn't have to wait long for a possible answer. About a week later, two of our best skiers were running a clinic for the scullers, teaching us simple fundamentals like body position, weight shift, and the timing of steps and pole plants. Small miracles were taking place all over the short stretch of trail we were skiing on, and the GRP scullers were chattering about how much difference it makes to do really simple things like thinking about swinging the arms from the shoulder and elbow rather than from the hand, moving arms and legs rhythmically, and all sorts of other things that ten-year-old skiers do automatically but that hadn't occurred to us to try. In very short order, we were all skiing faster with less effort. Our first reaction, as I've noted above, was amazement and delight, but it was the second reaction that should give scullers everywhere pause: not long after the initial expressions of enthusiasm, several of the scullers started joking about the whole faster-with-less-effort phenomenon. Tell me if you haven't heard something like this on the water or around the boathouse before. Sculler #1: "It feels really easy - that's amazing." Sculler #2:"Yeah - I don't trust it." Sculler #1:"Exactly - good technique is the devil's way of tricking you into thinking that you don't have to work as hard." It was a joke, of course, but we all know that the root of humor is usually a truth about human foibles, like not being able to fully enjoy the simple pleasure of going fast without somehow feeling guilty about it. And that made me marvel at the hold the culture of effort seems to have on scullers and rowers. Too many of us don't trust free speed even as we seek it. As it happens, scullers #1 and #2 in the conversation above have both been on multiple national teams in multiple boat classes. Both of them are known for their willingness to tear themselves in two in order to win races of any kind. They are exactly the kind of oarsmen that everyone wants in the boat with them when the brass ring is on the line. And while it may well be that elite nordic skiers learning to scull might have a similar conversation as they begin discovering simple means of making the boat go fast with less effort, the exchange struck me as being very much a rower's conversation. I admittedly haven't spent nearly as much time around nordic skiing as I have around sculling and rowing. Certainly I have heard nordic skiers talk about skiing hard, just as rowers, scullers, and coaches talk about pulling hard, honking on it, and so forth. Skiers, like scullers and other endurance athletes, are proud of their gut-wrenching, I-passed-out/puked/couldn't-stand-up-after-the-race stories. But I do think, based on many years of observation, that scullers and rowers tend to be very stubborn in their seemingly unshakeable faith in more effort as the bottom-line solution to all problems and less inclined to trust free speed when they find it. I really think that when an elite skier finds himself really flying, he's more inclined to think something more along the lines of "cool!" while most scullers, even at the elite level, are inclined, at least in a back-of-the-mind way, to think something more like "this doesn't feel hard enough - what am I not doing that will make it hurt the way it's supposed to?" It's not the devil's way of tricking you, meathead. It's the rowing gods' way of telling you you're doing it exceptionally well for once. Sometimes more effort can make you faster. Sometimes it makes you slower. Don't argue with free speed when it comes. Embrace it and go faster.

Effeeciency - What Scullers Can Learn from Nordic Skiers Part III

     I have a friend and colleague in coaching who gets incensed when other coaches say that rowing and sculling are "simple sports."  The ease with which this particular coach gets incensed over such seemingly small matters aside, I think he has a point.  One can easily argue that with the incredibly varied skills that athletes must have and the incredibly complex schemes that coaches devise, games like football and basketball are more complicated than rowing and sculling, but that doesn't mean that coaches of rowing and sculling have easier jobs than those of football and basketball coaches.  If anything, the sculler's learning process and his coach's teaching process are more difficult, because the feedback that rowing and sculling provide is so subtle.  Not convinced?  Consider this: a golfer who takes an imperfect stroke for any of a hundred thousand reasons sees immediately that he has done so - his ball not only doesn't go where he intended for it to go, it may careen crazily into the woods, skip dismally into the lake, or dribble harmlessly into the tall grass two hundred or more yards from where it would have been had he executed the shot to the best of his ability.  That's immediate feedback.  A sculler who takes a poor stroke that his coach can see is clumsy to the point of oafish gracelessness still gets to witness his boat moving forward from A to B, and it's an impossibility for the boat to go careening off into the woods as the result of one bad stroke.  You could flip, of course, but the threshold for that is a lot higher than for a mis-hit in golf.  I pointed this out to a roomful of very accomplished rowers one day during a video review session and proposed the idea that if rowing gave us feedback as emphatically as golf does, we'd all be much better at it.  After a short pause, one of the rowers quipped from the back of the room "Yeah, either that or we'd all quit."  And he's probably right, unfortunately. 
     But let's look at Nordic skiing again, as an example of another so-called simple sport that, though it doesn't give feedback as emphatically and obviously as golf, does give it a little more noticeably than rowing and sculling do. 
     As you make progress in Nordic skiing, it is not hard to see when you are losing speed, particularly when making turns or climbing.  The same hill, climbed patiently, goes by more quickly both in a literal, by-the-clock sense and insofar as it takes less out of you both mentally and physically.  Try to hurry and your rhythm falls apart and suddenly you're skiing with less speed and more effort.  The feedback is admittedly much more subtle than it is in golf, but it's a good bit more obvious than it is in sculling.  Swimming is similar.  And if I seem to be making too fine a point here, consider this: we have all seen elegant crews who were by no means lacking in fitness lose to crews that were clearly and obviously clumsy in their movements in the boat.  This sort of thing just doesn't happen in Nordic skiing or swimming - if you ski or swim clumsily, you lose.  In rowing and sculling "Just pull harder," as I've noted before, often does produce victory, and that's the nefarious thing about trying to convince fit, strong people to truly dedicate themselves to technical proficiency and boatmanship.  The obvious question for a meathead to ask is "if I can win just by honking on it harder than you, why do I need to do anything else?"  And that's the great conundrum of our sport.  And the solution is subtle, not simple - and though it's always elusive, it's more likely to find you if you're in a single than an eight.  Learn to pay attention. 

No Stars on a Crew (or "No One Ever Hurts a Crew By Quitting")

"Never say never" tends to be a pretty good aphorism for rowing coaches or anyone else.  Thor Nilsen said Brad Lewis would never be a champion, and at the time he said it, that was probably a pretty good bet in the eyes of most rowers.  1984 shot that statement full of holes.  "You'll never win races if you don't stop lunging at the catch/hesitating at the release/getting too much layback/etc." takes a beating season after season.  Crews with laid-back coaches win races.  So do crews with intense, militaristic, "do-it-my-way-or-get-the-hell-out" coaches.  So there appear to be very few absolutes in the coaching of successful rowers and scullers, but here's one that's pretty damn close: Never allow an athlete to think that s/he's more important than any other hard-working member of your crew.  And its first corollary is as follows: never allow a crew to regard any individual as more vital to the crew's success than any other member of the crew. 

I could probably write or speak about this topic for days on end and not run out of material.  "There are no stars in rowing" was one of my first coach's favorite refrains, and like many such things, it has progressively gained resonance and made more and more sense with each passing year.  It's as true now as it was when I started rowing in 1987; something that is nearly absolutely true can't get any truer, after all.  But for the sake of anyone reading who isn't already a member of the choir, I'll move on to anecdotes and examples. 

I once had a conversation with another coach about an athlete we both know and have coached who has all the talent and ability she'll ever need and who has had some noteworthy successes but more often than not, performs below expectations - both her own and those of her coaches.  The other coach had known this athlete during her scholastic rowing days and said "You know, when she was rowing eights, her coaches always sort of treated her like she was the franchise player - they even sort of said so publicly and in a way that she knew they thought so."  And I thought "bingo - that's what's held her back.  People whose judgment she trusts have given her the impression that it's the other eight jokers in the boat who are sullying her shot at greatness."  And once an athlete is in that mental/psychic space, she's as good as done until she gets back to the combination of confidence, humility, and willingness to train and race like a crazed animal that really moves boats. 

Similarly, I know an athlete whose physiological numbers are off the charts but who somehow hasn't been in very many fast team boats since his high-water mark as a high school rower.  He graduated from college having been part of a crew that didn't do a lot of winning during his tenure in the varsity eight.  Curiously, the same school's current  varsity eight, while by all available accounts lacking anyone of this athlete's abilities, has been achieving remarkably superior results since his departure.  Granted that there could be thousands upon thousands of reasons for that crew's turnaround, one still scratches one's head and wonders how many of those thousands had "I know I'm making the boat go fast - what's the matter with the rest of these nimrods?" as a contributing factor.  All it takes to poison a crew is one guy (or girl, or coach) with even a hint of suspicion that his fellow rowers aren't entirely worthy. 

I remember, too, the guy on my own collegiate crew who came to be widely regarded as our wheel horse.  Fastest on the erg, always in the varsity eight from the fall of his sophomore year onward, etc.  As a senior, virtually everyone assumed he was unbeatable and that we should just go ahead and write his name in Sharpie on six seat of the varsity eight. Our coaches hadn't even seat raced him during his junior year.  Fortunately for us, we had a wise coach that year who did seat race him against three of the other port oars from both the 1V and 2V eights. Astonishingly, he lost twice and narrowly won the third and kept his seat in the 1V by the skin of his teeth.  Even more astonishingly, the whole 1V got a lot faster the week after those seat races.  You needn't wonder whether the humbling reminder lit a fire under that guy or whether beating the unbeatable guy did likewise for the rest of the crew's morale. 

Finally (I'll stop at four for the sake of brevity despite feeling as though I'm just getting started), there's the story that I heard from a younger coach about a high school rower who complained to his fellow rowers "Coach isn't giving me enough credit for everything I do and have done for this crew."  Are you kidding me?  Anyone who even dares to think that needs an immediate attitude adjustment.  Anyone who actually says it should be demoted to a regimen of land-training-only, or maybe just cut, depending on the circumstances.  Fortunately for his coach and his crew, this athlete quit within a couple of weeks, or more precisely, jumped ship to a different program after being wooed by another coach who knew of his dissatisfaction with his circumstance - poached, you might call it, but good riddance in any case.  Some of his fellow rowers probably wept and gnashed their teeth at the time (the arrogant athlete had the crew's best erg time - big deal) but guess what?  That crew won their season-ending championship regatta despite having lost their "star" - who was never a star to begin with (or haven't you been paying attention?).

As soon as you've identified the star on your crew, take him out of the first boat.  He's slowing you down.  No one ever hurts a crew by quitting.  This truth speaks for itself, repeatedly and at every level, if you'll pay close attention. 

These Kind of Hiccups are a Choice

Every coach I know has a hiccup story - even the legends.  It usually involves some combination of outright defiance, or, more heartbreakingly, of athletes making the regrettable miscalculation that their youthful resilience is unlimited.  Here are a couple of variations:

A superbly talented varsity eight knocks on the door of victorious greatness all season, finishing a very close second at regatta after regatta to another superbly talented crew (one that will ultimately be named "Crew of the Year," in fact).  In the weeks leading up to their last opportunity to knock off their nemesis, the eight is making remarkable progress, gaining speed and poise all the time.  Guys who haven't mastered rowing in pairs start making breakthroughs in the small boats.  The eight starts to jump in ways that it previously has not.  This already-fast crew senses that it can go even faster, and does.  Then their college's traditional spring party weekend rolls around.  Five guys and the coxswain abstain from beer etc./staying up all night etc.  Three guys get drunk and are found carousing in that state, at the boathouse, after hours (of course, right?  Everyone knows the boathouse is the right destination for the end of a great, blotto collegiate evening).  Two weeks later, the crew loses to its nemesis by a few tenths of a second in their final opportunity, at the biggest championship regatta they attend annually.  Even if they had stayed sober,  they might still have lost, but that's not the point - those three guys wilfully and with forethought threw a hiccup into the process.  As it turned out, the coach never would have found out had the campus police not told the assistant athletic director about the incident at the boathouse.  That, of course, is not the point either.  Their hangover hiccuped the crew's preparation.  It's unforgivable, even though it happens all the time.  But it permanently branded that crew an also-ran who threw away their shot, and gave them all something to regret.  Had those three stayed sober, they could have crossed the finish line a deck down and known they did everything they could.  Since they didn't, they're stuck forevermore as the crew that might have broken through and conquered but chose not to.  Irrespective of the outcome, the difference is huge. 

Story 2: A pair of high school crews, one of each gender.  The boys have been chasing their archrivals all year and getting closer all the time, the girls haven't lost all year but have seen their rivals close the gap recently.  Both are looking forward to a huge out-of-town regatta at which they are fast enough to medal if not win.  Before the penultimate race of the season, several of the boys sneak out after curfew.  The only senior in the boat tries to dissuade them from doing something stupid, but the muddle-headed juniors prevail, probably saying "dude - coach is already in bed - he'll never know" or something even more sophomoric if not vulgar.  As icing on the cake, they then break one of the crew's very few non-negotiable rules of away regattas: no boys in girls' rooms and vice-versa.  They get caught.  The coach and the school have no ethical choice but to prohibit them from going to the out-of-town championship race.  The members of the crew who had no part in nor knowledge of the transgression can't compete either because there aren't enough of them to fill the planned entries.  Rotten luck for them to have their fates dictated by somebody else's hiccup. 

Of course it will happen again, countless times this year, in fact.  That's not the point.  The point is that such hiccups, in contrast to the literal kind, are entirely preventable.  Don't choose them and your crew won't get them.  Guaranteed.