We're Going to Say We Told You So

Shortly after the results went up for the Men's Champ 8+ at the Head of the Charles yesterday, Pete Graves was in the hospitality tent for the great eights and heard Olaf Tufte joking with several of his boatmates "can you believe we won ziss race? None of us even knows how to row!" Meanwhile, a hundred feet away at the Craftsbury Sculling Center booth, one of the marketing posters that we've used for years was in its usual spot with its caption: "Reason #8 (to come to Craftsbury): Sculling Makes Sweep Rowers Faster." We've been shouting this from the rooftops for years, and it's nice to have some validation land squarely in the lap of the rowing world at North America's greatest annual event (with all due respect to the Canadian Henley and the Stotesbury Cup). All things considered, though, maybe we're not shouting it loudly enough or clearly enough - earlier in the weekend,a high school rower was looking at the poster and asked "how does it do that?" and we were all tongue-tied for a minute at the unexpectedness of such a simple but entirely understandable and valid question. We should not assume that everyone already knows the answer. More amusingly, there was a coxswain for a D-I women's crew who turned to several of her rowers while filling out her raffle card for a free week of sculling camp and asked in all seriousness "which one is it when everybody has two oars each?" Come to camp and let us help you with that, okay?
The truth, I suspect, is that Olaf Tufte probably wasn't too surprised to end the day a champion in the men's 8+, and that he knows as well as we do at Craftsbury that sculling is the real foundation of rowing. His joke, then, was on the folks both within and outside our sport who stubbornly persist in thinking that the best way to create a fast eight is to sweep row almost exclusively when the evidence is right in front of you that one mind-bogglingly effective way to create a fast eight is to take the eight fastest single scullers you can find, put them in an eight with a really good coxswain, and tell them their job is to beat up on a field of boats full of people who are primarily sweep rowers. As always, the thing speaks for itself, if you understand what you're listening to.

Consistency

I want to vent a bit about consistency, or rather, perhaps, about the absence of it. Nothing drives me more bananas as a coach than the athlete who says "Oh, I have an extra gear for race day that I don't use in practice." First of all, you probably don't. Second and more importantly, if you have that "extra gear" that you're not using, what you're effectively saying is "I don't really push my limits when I train because after all, it's just practice," which also gives you away as someone who thinks that turning it on only for races is an acceptable way to live as an athlete, and dammit, it's just not. Here are two truths that I hold to be self-evident, at least to those whose eyes are open and who are not suffering the effects of self-deception: 1) if you haven't done it in practice, the likelihood that you'll do it on race day is effectively nil. 2) We are what we habitually do. The latter can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle, who said essentially the same thing, but probably in Greek, and followed it up with "excellence is not an act, but a habit." So let's explore that for a very brief moment. If we proceed from the assumption that Aristotle got it right, then what, exactly, are we to make of athletes who are inconsistent, which is to say, they don't have anything identifiable that can be said to be what they habitually do? Their habit is to not have any identifiable trait apart from being inconsistent. How do their coaches or their boatmates know what to expect from them? The obvious answer is that no one can predict how such people will respond on a given day to a given situation, which is just another way of saying that they cannot be trusted. By contrast, someone who habitually honks on it and makes the boat go fast no matter how he feels today or what the weather is like or what happened to him an hour or three days ago has a habit that defines him and makes him an oarsman who can be counted on. Move the boat with a sense of purpose. All the time. Irrespective of the stroke rate, the conditions, your mood, or anything else. To do otherwise is to habituate yourself to something less trustworthy, and to put yourself in the situation of never knowing who you'll be today. No one has any reason to trust such a person, nor should they. If, on the other hand, you'd like to be able to sit at any starting line knowing what kind of performance you and everyone else can expect from you because you do it the same way every single day, then stop giving yourself excuses and just honk on it in all situations. It's astonishing how well this habit of mind and body alleviates anxiety and breeds confidence.

On the Virtues of Having a Home-course Benchmark

Back when I was coaching scholastic crews at the Episcopal School of Dallas, a tradition developed of doing timed laps of the small lake where we trained. Bachman Lake is between 1600-2100m long, depending on whether the bridges on the creek that feeds into it are clear and safe to row under, and it is much wider at the south end than the north so the longest piece you can realistically row continuously is about 3700m from Love Field's landing lights, around the south end, and back again, mildly complicated by having to make a broad turn and hit a narrow channel midway through the piece, so while roughly 3k of the piece is a straight "drag race", there's a mild tactical/steering element as well. From about 1995 on, we started calling these pieces "big loops" and doing them head-race style for time became a regular feature of the program, both fall and spring. The tradition took a big step forward when we began to have access to enough boats to do them in singles, and after a few years, time standards were pretty well established: if you were male and couldn't turn a big loop in under 18:00 or female and 19:00, you were pretty much still a novice. If you could break 16:00 (boys) or 17:30 (girls) you could legitimately start calling yourself a varsity-level sculler. Any time we had four or more guys under 15:30, we felt pretty good about our prospects at the state championships and Stotesbury Cup. The girls' record was 16:24.3 and the boys somewhere just south of 15:10 - I'd have to dig around in my coaching logs to find that one. In any case, the tradition seemed to serve a number of useful purposes: it gave everyone a clear series of goals and standards to reach, it served as a focal point for the program, it gave us milestones to celebrate, and it was a lot more reliable indicator of boat-moving ability than a 2k erg time. Granted that 3700m is an arbitrary distance and admittedly a lot longer piece than most of our races, it made sense for us because it fit our home course so well.

At Craftsbury, we have the Head of the Hosmer. We call it 2800m even though it's a few strokes shy of that if you steer well. As recently as 2011, we thought 10:15 for men or 11:10 for women in flat or tailwind conditions was pretty darn fast. Now that our GRP athletes have been training here for several years, it appears that breaking 10:00 for men or something a bit south of 10:50 for women gives an athlete a reason to think that s/he is in the ballpark of world-class speed, and that until you meet that standard you're probably not quite there yet. To date, five athletes have broken 10:00 for the Head of the Hosmer and GRP's men are representing the U.S. in the quad at the 2014 World Championships, having earned a bronze medal at World Cup 3 in Lucerne. This is not a coincidence. Speed at home tends to reflect speed away from home, and if you don't know what constitutes the former, you're less likely to achieve the latter. Establish a home course benchmark. It's invaluable.

Oarsmanship

The essence of oarsmanship is to sacrifice and to eschew entitlement. It is your job to be willing to prove your worthiness anew every single day. You are not to expect special privileges or accolades, or to be granted the benefit of the doubt based on past performance. Insofar as what you do involves emptying your tanks, working to find your limits, and faith that there is virtue in honest racing, that is special. Insofar as you are tempted to regard yourself as above anyone else, be they rowers or scullers who are not as proficient or as accomplished as you are (or anyone else under god's sun), you are misguided. Do not expect anyone to ask for your autograph; it is just a signature of the same worth as theirs. Make the boat go fast. Be worthy of your boatmates. That is enough.

Race Plan? What Race Plan?

Complicated race plans for 2k races on straight, buoyed courses have always bemused me. For the most part, I think they're expressions of coach or athlete anxiety - a vain search for a sense of certainty in the face of not-entirely-predictable outcomes. I suspect, too, that coaches who script a race from start to finish are often trying to keep a sub-par coxswain from saying or doing something stupid or to give nervous crews something to think about besides "what if we don't win? My parents won't love me any more and I will die alone."

In any case, here's all anyone really needs to know about any 2k race on a straight course (and don't even start with the yeahbuts - you're wrong): 1) Barring misadventure, the first 500m is irrelevant to the outcome. Just get going. 2) The second 500m is where you find out who you're really racing. 3) The third 500m is where you race them. 4) The fourth 500m is where you either seal the deal or you don't. Race all the way across the finish line, then look around and see how you did. With incredibly rare exceptions, the best crew wins.