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.