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.