tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-91658233473844695332024-02-20T12:45:11.398-08:00Sculling and Stuff Like ItTroy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.comBlogger32125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-23676602714644382752020-10-28T12:12:00.006-07:002021-03-01T06:38:01.186-08:00Consider the Erg - It Toils Not, But it Does Spin<p> Okay, look - I'm not going to change any ever-optimistic parents' or unrealistic junior scullers' minds; the culture of "what's your 2k?" is far too embedded in the miasma of misinformation about our sport for one blog post to have much impact. I'm just feeling a little once-and-for-all salty today and need to put this in writing for my own catharsis. The fact is that 2k, 6k, and other erg benchmarks mean something, but not much, and not what most people - coaches included - think they do. And as a rowing coach and a sometime/longtime SAT tutor, I can state unequivocally that the analogy between the SAT and the 2k erg score is quite apt. Both will help you get in the door, and neither will do much of anything for you once you're there. </p><p>"But coach," you might object, "shouldn't I attach quite a bit of my identity to my SAT/2k erg numbers?" No, you poor, misguided soul, you shouldn't. Think of it this way: if you were born in this country to middle or upper-class parents and your SAT verbal/math is 600/620, your application to Harvard, Stanford, or Princeton is going straight to the "deny" pile unless you are also a 4.0 student with multiple glowing recommendations, a patent for survival blankets that you distributed by hand to hurricane survivors for the Red Cross, and you are the best 18 year old cellist in the lower 48 and have guest second-chaired in that capacity with the Cincinnati Philharmonic. On the other end of the spectrum, if you are the proud owner of 800 Math/800 Verbal, your professors, fellow students at Yale, and future employers are going to care as much about that once you're there as they do about your birth weight. By the same token, you'll need a good 2k erg time to get on the radar of the assistant coaches in charge of recruiting at collegiate rowing programs, but when you're sitting at the stakeboats waiting for the flag to drop, none of your opponents will know or care that you pulled 7:14 as a high school senior (or 6:10-ish on the men's side), and while your 2k time might have some small influence on your coaches' decisions on whom to switch you with during seat racing, it will have very little bearing on the outcome of those races. Knowing how to make a boat go fast becomes real currency when actual on-water racing is involved. </p><p>"But coach, don't you have to be sub-6:00 to race internationally?" Again - no. The list of men who have never gone sub-six and women who have never gone sub-seven and still won World Championships and Olympic medals is actually fairly long, and the list of sub-six and sub-seven collegians who would get pantsed/doored/horizon-jobbed in international competition is exponentially longer. As a measure of raw horsepower and to a lesser extent, grit, the 2k erg isn't a bad test. Indoor rowing, though, is a contradiction in terms, and the two activities (erging and on-water rowing and sculling) just aren't nearly as similar to one another as most people believe they are. The very idea that being able to produce good watts on a stationary bike would be a good indication of potential for the Tour de France is absurd. So is the idea that watts on the erg translates directly to the boat. I've said for years that faith in erg times proves that football coaches are much smarter than rowing coaches. When a football coach sees a recruit who can run the 40 in 4.4 or who can power clean 350 pounds, his first response is "yeah, but can he play football? Can he move in space and put himself where he needs to be and make a play?" Rowing coaches who encounter athletes with good erg scores, by contrast, will continue to seat race big ergs against good boat movers with lesser erg scores long after the rest of the crew knows that the rower with the big erg and no boat sense makes every lineup he gets in slower. Learn to row a single well. Get better at following other rowers, and at stroking team boats. And yes, continue to improve your erg time - you need a good one, but it only tells you something about your performance relative to yourself, and <b>it has no place in crew selection. </b></p><p>n.b. Just for grins, here's a fly-on-the-wall guide to coaches' reactions to girls' 2k erg scores from hopeful recruits: <7:20 = When can you come for an official visit? 7:20-7:29.9 = Okay, you have my attention. 7:30-7:40 = Not bad. Why don't you do another one in a month and get back in touch? 7:40-7:50 We'd love to have you join us as a walk-on and see how you develop. >7:50 Seriously? Why are you broadcasting this information? Email again when you're 20 seconds faster. Knock off a full minute for men's times, and adjust within gender by 5-10 seconds if you're a lightweight or you're applying to a small college or a club program that takes itself seriously. <br /></p>Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-57764952074810396072020-02-05T06:28:00.000-08:002020-02-05T06:28:02.151-08:00Bring The Mules!Oh, man - I've got about a hundred closely-related soapboxes I'd like to get up on this morning, most of them related to coaches who only want to coach "talented athletes" and who believe that their primary job lies in recruiting them rather than creating them, and that they can elevate their own reputations by associating only with the "best" athletes and the "best" programs. The most memorable story I have heard lately on this topic was told to me by a colleague at Craftsbury. He had recently had a conversation with the coach of a small college who fancies himself a real coaching savant. The conversation had come around to the specious matter of which athletes are worthy of a coach's attention (the simple answer is "all of them, if they're serious about studying the sport"), and the coach-savant's head-spinning pronouncement was that he wanted to recruit "thoroughbreds, not mules. I can train mules and turn them into fast mules, but I can't make them as fast as thoroughbreds so why should I waste my time trying?" <div>
Oh, coach - so wrong-headed, for so many reasons - where to begin? Here's an observation: of all the elite athletes I've ever met in sculling, rowing, Nordic skiing, and biathlon, the overwhelming majority of them don't strike me as people who could aptly be described as "thoroughbreds", if what we mean by thoroughbreds is genetically blessed with superior anatomy and physiology for their sport. In fact, if we're going to stick with the metaphor, most of them are mules - if what we mean by mules is ordinary, hard-working, and methodical - people you could pass in the grocery store and never suspect are world-class athletes. Further, there is no breed standard for humans, and there are more proverbs than can be counted that chronicle the trouble we cause ourselves when we begin to think of ourselves as inherently superior or inherently advantaged, and this isn't a pitfall for animals, who don't overthink or indulge in petty snobbery as we do. You can have the thoroughbreds, coach. Bring me the mules. I want to coach the mules. Mules get it done. </div>
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Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-56089638070962009552019-12-27T14:17:00.001-08:002019-12-28T09:21:08.061-08:00New Year's Resolutions, Redux<i>"No one of our human passions is so hard to subdue as pride...</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;"><i>For even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my Humility." - Benjamin Franklin</i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;"><i><br /></i></span><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">There is a priceless voiceover in the opening moments of the first season of "Eastbound and Down" in which the recently and involuntarily retired major-league pitcher Kenny Powers says with apparent conviction "I am the man with the baseball. I am the man who can throw it faster than f__k. And that is why I am better than everyone in the world." It is such a bald statement of the total absence of humility that it cannot help but get a laugh, but because it is so over-the-top, its more subtle point is often missed: it is ever so tempting to hear someone else's out-of-control ego and feel better about ourselves. We laugh, and gloat a little without realizing it, and think with a sigh of relief "thank god I'm not a jackass like THAT guy." The uncomfortable truth, if we care to acknowledge it, is that there is more of Kenny Powers in most of us than we are prepared to admit. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;"><br /></span></span></span><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">Ten years or so ago, I got a subtle lesson in what humility really means from my wife, whose intent at the time was not to teach it but rather to call me out for not recognizing two of pride's many avatars: the making of false idols and condescension. It went like this - in the late 1990's, there were a couple of Olympic medalists training in Dallas, out of the same boathouse as my scholastic crews at the Episcopal School of Dallas. We had a pretty good girls' quad that year, and the two Olympians had befriended the girls in the quad, along with the rest of the crew, and been supportive of their quest for speed and Stotesbury Cup/Youth Nationals hardware. They even baked cookies for the girls for the plane ride to Philly in May - a nice gesture that turned out to be the catalyst for the humility lesson when I unknowingly reacted to it in a way that subtly over-valued the gesture and prompted the following questions: 1) If Olympians want to bake cookies, why shouldn't they? 2) If Olympians bake cookies, are they necessarily more valuable cookies than those baked by people who are not Olympians (the correct answers, by the way, are 1) Yes, if Olympians want to bake cookies, they should by all means do so and 2) No, they're not any more valuable for having been baked by Olympians. We'll return to that in a moment. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;"><br /></span></span></span><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">My reaction was this: cookies in hand, I made a big production of telling the girls how special and important it was that their efforts had been recognized in the form of the charitable service of NOT ONE BUT TWO OLYMPIC MEDALISTS SACRIFICING THEIR FREE TIME TO BAKE COOKIES FOR THEM, prompting my wife to ask, privately and days later, "so if it had been someone who was not an Olympic medalist doing the baking, it would be less special and important?" Full disclosure: she had skin in this game too - as a practitioner</span><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;"> in myofascial release and deep-tissue massage, she had supported the crew at ESD (and the two Olympians -particularly their hamstrings) and helped keep them healthy and injury-free throughout the year and thus had various reasons, some of them no doubt egoic, for feeling slighted that I would make such a fuss - but that's beside the point. My first reaction was both befuddled and slightly defensive: well, of course it's more special and important if Olympians baked your cookies - because - well - because they're Olympians and they didn't have to! To which the obvious response is "no one else had to, either - so explain again why it's MORE special?" Well, because they're Olympians. And not only that, but medalists too. "Uh huh. And that's relevant to enhancing the value of an unsolicited kindness how?" Well, I'm not sure, exactly, but I know it must be. Maybe because they have the baseball, and they can throw it faster than f_k, and that's why they are better than everyone else?</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #181818; font-family: "merriweather" , "georgia" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 21px;">Everyone, it seems, wants to feel special and important. We human beings seem to spend inordinate time and energy finding reasons to feel superior to our fellow man. So much so that many of our otherwise noblest efforts end up soiled by the ulterior motive of mastering something in order to feel superior to others who have not done so. Sometimes we even spend time and energy finding reasons to feel INFERIOR to our fellow man in the misguided hope that some of their superiority will either rub off on us or perhaps be available to be experienced vicariously, or perhaps later, when we've successfully emulated them and become more special and important than we ever dared to think possible. The two Olympians devoted huge chunks of their lives to the craft of making boats go fast. My wife raised a child for nine years as a single parent, while simultaneously learning skills as a soft-tissue therapist that might be favorably compared to throwing a baseball - well, really fast. The fire chief put his life at hazard to save people and preserve property from destruction. The third grade teacher gave confidence to students by showing them they can master things that seem overwhelming to their young minds. And the reality is that they can all "throw the baseball faster than f_k," and having mastery of a skill IS special, but none of them is better than everyone else because of that, and if they bake you cookies, your gratitude should be the same toward any of them. Happy New Year 2020. Be humble. Bake cookies often. Avoid the twin extremes of condescension and the false idolatry of hero-worship. And feel free to remind me (and Ben Franklin, or Kenny Powers) of the same. </span></span><br />
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Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-19809575980959296522019-07-13T09:38:00.002-07:002019-12-04T08:20:13.468-08:00More Reflections on Training the Nervous System For SportJust outside my office, under the shade of some firs and tamaracks, our ski shop director sets up a slack line, horseshoe pit, bean bag toss/cornhole game, and volleyball/badminton court. You might look it over in passing and see just a modest collection of picnic party games, but what I always see is an ideal playground for teaching the nervous system things that will improve my sculling and coaching.<br />
When I've got ten minutes between tasks or in a gap in the sculling camps' daily schedule, I like to wander over there and spend a few minutes alternating between getting out of my comfort zone on the slack line and tossing beanbags and occasionally horseshoes. I confess that I haven't yet figured out how to include badminton in a way that specifically benefits sculling, but someday maybe.<br />
Here's what I continue to learn and reinforce nearly every time I do it:<br />
1) <b>Faith in the plasticity of my nervous system and proprioception</b>. Three or four years ago was the first summer I spent trying to learn just to stay on the slackline for more than a second or two - I did more falling off than anything else that first year. By the second summer, I could stay on it pretty well, and in the third year, I developed the ability not just to walk on it but also to change direction and sometimes to be able to jump from the ground to the line and stay on. Simple stuff, but remarkably satisfying. And from the "when the student is ready, the teacher will appear" process-oriented school of thought, if someone had told me even a year ago that in order to move forward with learning to slackline what I needed most was to begin to feel the upward force of the line supporting me, I'd have had no idea what that even meant, and yet recently I have spontaneously begun to feel exactly that. Unexpected epiphanies abound if you're receptive and open to them. And if my nervous system learns something about balance and stability on a tightrope/slackline, I'm confident that I can apply that to balance and stability in the boat. <br />
2) <b>A new appreciation for allowing looseness in the joints and the muscle groups that move them.</b> I had already learned this lesson from both horseshoes, golf, and darts, but apparently not well enough, so I needed Cornhole to seal the deal. What I've noticed lately is that if I can truly let go of my deltoids and pecs and let my arm and shoulder relax and truly swing like a pendulum, I get a much more consistent flight out of the beanbag and a much higher percentage of throws landing on the platform and/or dropping through the hole. It is not hard to tell when something seizes and gets tense on the downswing (or anywhere in the cycle), and the result is usually a toss that misses its intended mark. I can even verbalize whether a throw is going to be successful as it's happening ("Off!" or "On" just before I release the beanbag) and I am almost always accurate in my assessment. I've written on this topic before, and will only add this: the difference between genuine looseness in the joints and limbs and even a little bit of needless tension is subtle but crucial. And unfortunately for scullers, the feedback is not immediate and therefore not as obviously important; a boat rowed by a tense person can still go fast for quite a while, while a beanbag tossed or a golf ball struck by a tense person shows the error immediately. This, in my opinion, is why sculling is so difficult to refine - it fails to punish us for small errors and rewards us for effort, so we are fooled into thinking that more effort is always the best solution. It's a conundrum. Paying attention to the nervous system's subtle feedback is the way out. Pay attention!<br />
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<br />Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-72436616506521358602018-08-02T12:40:00.000-07:002019-06-01T09:40:46.532-07:00The Elusive ObviousThere's a book on my shelf at home called "The Elusive Obvious." It is about human movement patterns and how they develop, neurologically, and how patterns become habituated, as well as how even long-standing patterns can be changed and new ones learned in their place. So that's the background of this post, but what really intrigues me from one day to the next has less to do with the specific content of the book and more to do with the many potentially valuable interpretations of its title, and the one that is on my mind today has to do with relaxation and its relationship to exertion and fatigue.<br />
So let's start with something obvious: <b>The absence of relaxation is fatiguing</b>. Would anyone care to disagree with that? If you do, please stop reading - the rest of this won't help you. If you agree with the statement, though, stay with it for at least a few more sentences. From there, let's take things a step further with a modest theorem: <b>Relaxation is not binary. </b>In other words, at any given moment, any human being is not either "relaxed" or "not relaxed/tense." Rather, we are always somewhere on a spectrum. And if we can move ourselves in the direction of being more relaxed, we might find ourselves less fatigued. Now let's return to a second thing that seems obvious: <b>Our reserves of energy are finite. </b>It should not be too great a leap, then, to conclude something like the following: In making boats go fast, you are drawing on finite reserves of energy. Energy that goes into needless tension, wherever it appears, whether in specific locations like the face, hands, forearms, etc. or spread over the entire body generally, is wasted energy that does not contribute to making the boat go fast. Thus, learning to set aside needless tension might be an incredibly valuable thing for a sculler's nervous system to learn and well worth each of us devoting unremitting attention to it. And yet, obvious as this is, it is maddeningly elusive. We may find that rowing easy and relaxed at 15 spm feels like a walk in the park - pleasant and seemingly sustainable for as long as we care to continue it. We might feel almost as relaxed here as anywhere else. Maybe we can even bring most of that ease to more vigorous steady state rowing at 22 spm, or even to some 20's and 30's at race pace with paddling between. "They make it look so easy," come the plaudits from the sidewalk next to the river, and it does feel easy. And then we go to a start & twenty at 42spm, settling to 36, and suddenly we're tensing everything more than is strictly necessary. We know that it's possible to move quickly without needless tension, and yet it somehow seems to creep in anyway. And in doing so, we're habituating our nervous systems to waste energy because "well, coach, you just HAVE to get tense to row 40+spm. No you don't. It's obvious, and it's elusive. That's why it's so special. First relax - then go faster. The two go hand in hand. Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-44579067771382362712018-05-22T17:53:00.001-07:002019-06-01T09:40:45.859-07:00Oarsmanship In rowing and sculling, there are two types of people: The first type, even when he has reasonable evidence to believe that he is the best boat-mover in his crew, always wonders if he is worthy of rowing with his boatmates, and sets about every day to be an oarsman that can be counted on in every situation. The other type always wonders if his boatmates are worthy of rowing with him, and is pure poison to a crew even when he is the fittest, strongest, and most talented oar in the boat. If you are looking to create or be part of a championship crew, start by getting every rower with the latter attitude out of your boat, even if it means demoting your "best" rower. My colleague Ric Ricci once summed it up nicely - speaking of his pair partner from college with whom he won many races including the IRA's, he said "Whenever the boat wasn't going well, I always blamed myself and Dave always blamed himself. As soon as you start blaming the other guy, you're done. You might as well get out of the boat." Take that one to the bank, and always bet on a boat full of people who trust each other and want to row together over a bunch of guys who think they're the guy everyone should want to row with. Trust wins races, even over superior physiology. Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-77422068942065371592018-03-10T04:56:00.000-08:002019-06-01T09:40:46.603-07:00Comfort In The BoatI think it was around 2011 that I nodded off during a dock talk that Kevin MacDermott was giving and woke up just as suddenly to see him gesture broadly around himself in the 1X and declare "you've gotta own this space." That was the genesis of the Comfort In the Boat dock talk and the idea of spending the better part of a whole outing to systematically explore drills that, to a passing observer, look like nothing but showing off/stupid boat tricks. We're not the first people to employ stationary drills to gain mastery of tippy boats, but we believe in them as an antidote to the common misconception that training for rowing and sculling is nearly 100% physiology. An important frontier is neurological. Take time to explore it in between your 10x500m and your 120' battle paddles.<br />
Video here:<br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDHEjYYqtb0&t=29s">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDHEjYYqtb0&t=29s</a><br />
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<br />Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-79386349169495806432017-05-16T15:22:00.001-07:002019-06-01T09:40:46.709-07:00Misconceptions and Self Deceptions Part I - Small BoatsTell me if you've heard this one:<i> </i><br />
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<i>"I'm not that great in singles and pairs, but I'm much better in big boats."</i><br />
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Or this one:<br />
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<i>"I'm not very fast in the single, so I think I'll find a partner for the double and we'll really make some noise at the (insert championship regatta name here)" </i><br />
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By all means, if you enjoy rowing in the bigger team boats, you should take advantage of opportunities to do that. The greatness of team boats is apparent to all who have experienced them. Their virtues are numerous - cooperation, accountability to something larger than oneself, shared experience of victory (or just exhilaration) and so on. Doubles are sublime. Victorious eights are thrilling in a way that no other boat class can quite match. Quads and fours are fantastic. That being said, if you cannot row singles and pairs, you are not contributing optimally to the bigger boats you're in. The assumptions inherent in the two statements above amount to little more than common means of self-deception and guarantors of continued performance that is less than what you and your crew could be capable of.<br />
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The place where rowers and scullers get themselves into trouble is by engaging in the wishful thinking that it is possible to select or create a fast team boat full of people who row small boats poorly.<br />
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Scratch any world-class double and you'll find that it contains two world-class single scullers or something very close to that. You're just not going to find championship doubles composed of two athletes with big ergs who can't row singles well. Same for quads: in any quad race, bet on the boat that has the four best single scullers in it. Take apart any really fast eight and you'll find that the four component pairs are also pretty slick rowing the 2-. If you think that you and your doubles partner can be competitive with a double composed of two scullers who can defeat each of you by 10 seconds over 2k in singles, I'll cover all bets against that outcome. None of this is to say that if you are reasonably certain that you are not fast enough to win singles trials, you shouldn't take your shot in the 2X or 4X. It IS to say that you shouldn't be avoiding singles trials because you think you're "better" in the 2X (news flash - if you aren't fast enough to make the A/B semifinals in the single, you're not going to be in a double that wins trials), and it is also to say that <b>the best path to optimizing your value to team boats at any level involves increasing your mastery of the single and/or the pair</b> rather than continuing to row the vast majority of your kilometers in the bigger boats that mask your shortcomings. No one is better in the big boats. They're just better hidden. </div>
Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-85664950926377537412017-02-02T03:37:00.000-08:002019-06-01T09:43:35.123-07:00Queens of Turd Mountain<i>n.b. the phrase is not mine. I first heard it from Wes Ng at his 2016 Joy of Sculling presentation, and whether or not it's original with him, I thank him for introducing it to my lexicon and for giving me something to think about over the past few weeks and to write about this morning. </i><br />
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Too many coaches take it as a given that intra-squad competition is always and inevitably a good thing. Like many oversimplifications, this is true unless it isn't. More accurately, it's true if certain usually-unmentioned conditions are met. And it is certainly a counterproductive falsehood when you allow it to make you the Queen of Turd Mountain.<br />
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The concept doesn't require a great deal of illustration, and once grasped, should not be easily forgotten. Put simply, intrasquad competition works best when and only when <b>the people who are not winning are truly emptying the tanks and making those who are winning give their best effort. </b>A quote-unquote "victory" over an opponent who is content to make the competition look good to someone watching from the bank while racing well within current capabilities is pretty close to meaningless. Imagine a high school track team with five guys who can all run the mile in around 4:50. In training, there's one of the five who usually wins short intervals, another guy who usually wins longer intervals, and a third guy who almost always sets the pace for long runs. The other two guys always finish in the middle, with an occasional but infrequent surprise. And they go through the motions of beating one another up a bit in all workouts, but they all keep running in the 4:50's and the guy who almost always wins keeps almost always winning - except when they go out of town and face the five guys from other schools who can run 4:42. If the goal is to run faster than anyone else in the state or even just to keep improving, those five guys need to stop being the Queens of Turd Mountain and shake up their pecking order. They are not doing each other any favors by training in a way that they content themselves with feeling comfortable being fast relative to one another. They need to get back to earning their status daily and going faster than they've ever gone before. <br />
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A few years ago, we had a sculler in the Craftsbury SBTC program who habitually seemed to find a way to break loose from the field during pieces and just walk away. When she had to empty the tanks to win a piece by half a deck, she did. More importantly, when she got a length up halfway through a piece, she kept her foot on the gas and expanded her lead. The situation didn't seem to matter - she always and inevitably put everything on the table, and it was a ton of fun to watch. I remember one representative workout when she was crushing it as usual. I looked over at Larry Gluckman, knowing that we were both thinking more or less the same thing. "She wants to make a statement," was Larry's terse summation. She was the very antithesis of the Queen of Turd Mountain: the athlete who says "Okay, if you guys aren't coming, I'm going ahead without you, because the point of this exercise isn't just finishing in the lead - it's to make the boat go as fast as I possibly can, right now, and every time I get the opportunity." And if you're fortunate enough or skillful enough as a motivator and creator of team culture to have more than one or two people in your program who are looking to make a statement, being the Queens of Turd Mountain won't be an issue and intrasquad competition will serve its intended purpose - the creation of fast boats rather than more grist for the manure pile. <br />
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<br />Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-34463729719687136672016-12-11T06:34:00.000-08:002019-06-01T09:40:45.508-07:00What Scullers Can Learn From Swimmers, Part I It is a very common pitfall, particularly among rowers and scullers, to assume that more fitness inevitably means more speed, because it usually does, if you only consider a single athlete in comparison to himself. Simple math, right? If I get fitter, I’ll get faster! So far so good. The theory falls apart, however, when you look at two equally fit athletes, one of whom is well-adapted to the more subtle aspects of the sport and the other of whom has limitations that have nothing to do with fitness, but rather technique, confidence, temperament, neurological factors, and so forth. Something I’ve learned from being around competitive swimmers is instructive here. <br />
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I swam in high school, for a single season. The team was pretty improvised - we frankly were not very good, not very dedicated, and not very well coached. That said, by the end of the season we had learned enough to have some sense of why we weren’t very fast in the pool, what it was that we lacked, and how we might go about moving in the direction of swimming better. One phrase that stuck with me was "ride the glide," which pointed to the idea that swimming was as much about streamlining the body and allowing it to "run" while under the somewhat periodic application of propulsion. The interplay of propulsion and glide was intriguing, and most of us were limited by our rudimentary understanding of how to actually make it happen. It made sense in an academic sort of way, but we couldn't really feel it in the pool, or at least not the way that better, more accomplished swimmer could and did.<br />
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Many years later, after I had rowed in college and learned to scull, I got back in the pool - partly because I had developed an interest in using triathlons as a cross-training and competitive outlet and partly because I had a recurring back injury to keep at bay. I was training a few times a week with a masters group, some of whom had swum competitively in high school and/or college and some of whom, like me, who had not. What swiftly became apparent was that the people who were real swimmers had a phenomenal ability to go further with each stroke than those who were not. By far the biggest difference between a fit person who swims and a real swimmer is the number of strokes it takes each to get across the pool. It would be hard to overstate how dramatic the difference was - the “real” swimmers might take 11 or 12 strokes to cross the pool, while the fit people who were not swimmers might take 18 or 19. And it clearly wasn’t a matter of physiology - some of the non-swimmers were demonstrably fit people - people who were winning races in their chosen sport at a very high masters level, 2:30 marathon runners - while some of the folks who had been collegiate swimmer had clearly gone to seed, so to speak - they weren’t that fit and could still easily go faster than the fit non-swimmers. And you see that happen and you scratch your head and you almost inevitably have the "wow - how do they DO that?" reaction. So then you try to do it yourself, and you take a shot at getting across the pool in fewer than 20 strokes and you get there in 18 or 19 and you experience a similar reaction - you still don't really get it. "I tried really hard to get more propulsion per stroke, and I tried really hard to streamline myself and glide further and I can now imagine getting across the pool in 11 strokes and I did it in 18 and now I can imagine doing it in 17 but how in holy hell are they doing it in 11? And at that point you have a moment of truth in which you either decide that you're not ever going to get it to the extent that real swimmers do, or you accept that the road to figuring out the subtleties of the sport is long and requires more than just fitness and you're just going to have to keep chipping away at all of those unquantifiable subtleties as you make your journey from 20 to 11. Good luck. Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-15704666964877819292014-10-20T05:12:00.001-07:002019-06-01T09:40:45.156-07:00We'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? <br />
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. Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-17337463740276003872014-10-14T18:40:00.002-07:002019-06-01T09:40:45.262-07:00ConsistencyI 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. Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-24967259584426500422014-07-27T09:09:00.001-07:002021-01-26T14:42:23.653-08:00On the Virtues of Having a Home-course BenchmarkBack 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. <br />
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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. <br />
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Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-58556535527328096232014-05-27T15:45:00.002-07:002019-06-01T09:40:46.250-07:00OarsmanshipThe 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. Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-39903410693315521332014-05-09T05:06:00.002-07:002019-06-01T09:40:45.720-07:00Race 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." <br />
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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 <b>incredibly</b> rare exceptions, the best crew wins. Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-64666560767230642122013-12-11T09:38:00.000-08:002019-06-01T09:40:46.357-07:00Don't Argue With Free Speed - What Scullers Can Learn from Nordic Skiers Part IVIt 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. Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-70738080415692684832013-04-06T09:08:00.000-07:002019-06-01T09:40:46.427-07:00Effeeciency - 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. <br />
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. <br />
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. Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-55760176817125679712013-03-08T12:34:00.003-08:002020-09-12T03:19:26.955-07:00No 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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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<b> think</b> 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?). <br />
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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. Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-36472989457749130812013-02-20T10:17:00.001-08:002019-06-01T09:40:45.649-07:00These Kind of Hiccups are a ChoiceEvery 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:<br />
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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. <br />
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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. <br />
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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. Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-75931482064344773882012-12-20T13:11:00.002-08:002021-01-22T10:27:12.132-08:00I Hear the Rotors In the Distance - Receding, I HopeI received a phone call the other day from a parent who was looking to do something on his child's behalf. It was an understandable scenario - certainly nothing that, by itself, should result in this parent being accused of hovering, or helicopter parenting, as it has come to be called in the last decade or so. Be that as it may, it did remind me of the phenomenon and so it got me talking to another coach about parenting and that got me a little wound up on the subject. So let me lay out this message, tell a couple of stories, and hope for the best - if it doesn't produce a revolutionary change in the culture, at least maybe I'll get a mild catharsis out of it. <br />
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Okay - never mind the aw-shucks, let's-not-take-life-too-seriously tone of the above. This is too important. Parents, hear this: You've been getting it dead wrong for the better part of a generation. Much of what you think of as good parenting is in fact bad parenting. The most important thing you can do for your children is allow them to fail. That's right - allow them to fail. And when they do (and they will), you can react in any number of ways, as long as one of them does not involve fixing the problem yourself or making a phone call to pull whatever strings you know to pull to get the thing worked out in your child's favor. <br />
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In the conversation I had with the other coach, I had offered the opinion that although overparenting seems to be this generation's cross to bear, it's probably better than the other side of the spectrum, or neglect. His response was "I'm not sure about that - depends how long it takes them to learn to cope!" And that's it, really, isn't it? What is a twenty-something to do when he's never had to have a hard conversation with a teacher because his parents always did it for him once the conversation became challenging? When I hear stories like the one about the guy fresh out of law school whose mother allegedly called the senior partner who was his nominal boss to gripe about his workload, I always assume that they are urban legends - more fable than actual occurrence. But then fables are often intended to instruct, and are inspired by the desire to rectify some human shortcoming or vice, and thus must reflect some seed of reality. In the interest of mollifying the skeptics, though, here's a true story: shortly before my stepdaughter graduated from the high school where I had been teaching for a number of years, I received a phone call from one of my colleagues who worked in the college guidance office. One of the subsidiary concerns of the college guidance office in any prep school is the class rank of each member of the graduating class, since that is a useful tool on both sides of the college admissions process. They had miscalculated one student's GPA and so my stepdaughter's class rank was, in fact, one position higher than we had previously been told it was. My colleague was sure that I would be horrified, and she was pre-emptively reassuring me of how sorry she was, and she honestly seemed to expect that I would be righteously indignant. Although she had graduated near the top of her class, nothing much was at stake in her rank moving up or down one notch. It didn't affect who was the valedictorian or the salutatorian. It didn't even make a difference in who any of the top 10% "Honor Graduates" were, and even if it had, they caught the error in time to fix it before graduation. Because the school did not publish class rank or provide it to colleges, it could not possibly have affected any of her college admissions decisions. It was a complete non-issue, and no one in my family had given it a moment's thought prior to my colleague's call. And even after my repeated assurances of all of this, my colleague didn't seem to grasp that I was not upset, nor was my wife nor my stepdaughter. She apparently thought that I was just being polite, and continued to verbalize her regret about the error, still waiting for the storm to break over her. Clearly, she had already had too many conversations that had gone the other direction: "what do you mean, you miscalculated!? My daughter's class rank was actually 7th and it was reported as 8th?! Do you realize how catastrophic this could have been to her ENTIRE LIFE?!" It was all I could do not to giggle at the thought. <br />
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I sat through graduation as I always did, and was alternately buoyed by the happy solemnity and serene pomp of the occasion and bored stiff by the tedious repetition of academic liturgy, as I always was. And I was neither more nor less proud of my stepdaughter than I would have been if she'd been salutatorian or graduated 83rd. High school graduation is, in fact, a bit of a big deal, but it's not V.E. Day, for god's sake. And I don't remember my wife or I ever having picked up the phone to call one of her teachers to explain why an absence should be excused or why a B+ should have been an A or any of that nonsense. I claim no particular virtue thereby - I learned this behavior from two sources. One was my father, who had always behaved likewise. I didn't know until many years after I had graduated which of my teachers he had believed were not up to snuff because the old man was wise enough to know that nothing good could come from his giving me an excuse to think less of any of them. As it turned out, he had some pretty salty opinions of some of them, and it unquestionably could not have benefitted me or my teachers for me to have known them when I was in high school. The other was having been a teacher myself, and I believe that, for the same reason that everyone should have to wait tables before they ever pick up a check in a full-service restaurant, everyone ought to have the experience of being a classroom teacher before they ever send a child of their own off to school. <br />
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I'll close with my favorite story of an educator dealing with an "involved" parent. As it happens, the educator was a crew coach, and the parent wanted to know, predictably enough, why his son wasn't in the varsity eight. After it became clear where the conversation was headed, the coach stopped the parent and said "Mr. Sanderson [not his real name], we can have this conversation if you like, but my experience has shown that every syllable we exchange on this matter diminishes your son's likelihood of success." That was a conversation ender, and the coach not only kept his job but has continued to coach championship crews ever since. <br />
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Keep your children from imminent danger and genuine abuse. Answer their questions. Assure them that they are resourceful enough, intelligent enough, and resilient enough to solve their own problems, and let them do it. A skinned knee is a blessing, and not knowing how to talk to your professor when you're eighteen or your boss when you're twenty-three is a curse. Step away from the phone. Have a glass of iced tea, take a deep breath, and count your blessings. And occasionally remember to thank your child's teachers and coaches for holding them accountable - that's what they really should be paid to do. Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-84296855703003262722012-10-30T15:10:00.000-07:002019-06-01T09:40:46.955-07:00If it Doesn't Work With Alcohol...I'll tread some dangerous ground in order to make use of an analogy that I hope will resonate, and at the risk of being accused of an apples to oranges comparison (boy, I'm coming to hate that figure of speech). So let's get right to it, then: the vast majority of people who drink, even those who drink more than they should, are nevertheless aware that drinking to excess does not optimize the drinking experience. Every sensible person who drinks knows that if two beers in an evening puts a nice glow on one's outlook, it does not follow that twenty beers will multiply that glow by a factor of ten. Rather it will likely result in a miserable evening and day after spent wishing that one had stopped closer to two (if not alcohol poisoning, blackout, and death). Somewhere between two and twenty, there's an optimal point and a bit past that is a tipping point where the nice buzz tips over to one or a few too many. Our struggles to know exactly where that is aside, most of us understand, both intuitively and through experience, that too much is too much, and most of us learn to moderate our intake accordingly. <br />
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If that is true of drinking, might it not also be true of training? Why does there seem to remain such a culture of excess in training, particularly among those who aspire to the status of elite athlete? Why are so many athletes so foolishly attached to the idea that if a 5x3 minute interval workout is good, then 9x3 minutes must prove to be even better? Why do we so often fail to even ask if 4 X 3 or even 3 X 3 might not be optimal? I recall reading last year on the blog (or was it a Facebook post?) of a rower aspiring to make the Olympic team that this athlete had done an AT workout of something like 8 X 10 minutes and promptly followed that up with a post-row of something like 400 burpees, 400 pullups, and 200 one-legged squats on each leg (one wonders where the coach derived those numbers - did it "sound good"?). That afternoon, the athlete followed it up with a 7 mile run on hilly terrain. The days bookending that day were similarly loaded with hard training. There was, predictably, no chronicle of the quality of rest that this athlete took either before or after. More must be better, right? Maybe the only rest was fitful sleep between bouts of grim intensity and willpower. But perhaps this athlete was mistaken: could it have been that 50 one-legged squats per leg during that training cycle was optimal and 200 was about four times too many? It's worth noting that this same athlete is currently training at far less volume and seems to be faster than s/he was at that point. Admittedly, it could be that the crazy intensity six months ago is driving the speed s/he has now, but it also could be that the seemingly insane volume of six months ago was counterproductive from the get-go. <br />
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I also recall seeing a video clip of a Dutch rower who contrasted what he regarded as the stereotypically American mentality toward training of "I'll do as much as I have to in order to get faster and if that means four-a-days that's what I'll do" - with what he thought of as the more stereotypically Dutch mentality of "How much do I have to do in order to attain world-class speed? That's what I should do - why would I work myself to a nub if I don't have to?" <br />
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Wherever the optimal point is, it behooves us all to discard the foolish idea that more training is inherently better for us. It doesn't work with alcohol, why would it work with intervals, AT, etc.? <br />
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I'll close with another chestnut whose source I have forgotten and therefore cannot footnote but will not claim as my own: Most people's easy workouts are too hard and their hard workouts are not hard enough. If your race pace and faster outings are of sufficient quality, you probably don't need to train to exhaustion as often as you might think. <br />
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It's the combination of high quality training and high quality recovery (including both easy outings and outright rest) that produces speed. The best athletes find the balance. Good luck, and remember to stop well short of twenty. <br />
<br />Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-76783641260545968882012-06-28T12:09:00.002-07:002022-02-01T09:11:49.352-08:00Modern High School and its Discontents<i>Sports Illustrated</i> runs a recurring item entitled "This Week's Sign of the Apocalypse," highlighting something particularly absurd and ridiculous in sport. I'll up the ante and offer the past two decades' sign of the apocalypse within the rowing world, and it is this: high school crew coaches telling their athletes with a straight face that they need to start specializing in rowing at the age of fourteen (or earlier). This argument is so tremendously flawed that I don't really even know where to begin savaging it. But since it's summer at Craftsbury and that means daily conversations with Pepa Miloucheva and Lisa Schlenker, let's just start there. Pepa and I respectfully disagree about a lot of things pertaining to rowing and sculling, but here's something about which she is right on: rowing and sculling are among a small handful of sports that an athlete can never encounter prior to age 20, take up at age 23, and be world-class by age 30. Try doing that as a nordic skier (forget about it). Or a gymnast. Or a swimmer. While Pepa underestimates the subtleties of movement that rowers and scullers must master to be truly outstanding in their sport, she does not underestimate what it takes, neurologically, to master her own sport of nordic skiing or many others that require the athlete to manipulate his bodyweight in an unfamiliar gravitational environment. While you might not have to specialize in swimming from age six forward, the door to world-class status is probably closed to you if you start learning to swim when you're 25. For rowing and sculling, though, the door is still pretty much wide open. Exhibit A is Lisa Schlenker. She never picked up an oar until she was 26. She's got two World Championship Silver medals in the ltwt single in her closet (or drawer or shoebox, or framed, I don't know which) and a trip to the Olympics in the ltwt 2X behind her. Rowing may, in fact, be at the very top of the list of sports in which early specialization is not only unnecessary, but also potentially damaging to the long-term success of its participants. So what such coaches are saying to you boils down to this: You should specialize in a sport that doesn't really require specialization, so that four years from now you can lose races to people who are better athletes than you because four years ago they were playing two other sports in addition to rowing. Ask any collegiate coach at any level to tell you a story about a recruited athlete who rowed exclusively in high school and got steamrolled in the spring by stronger, fitter, more athletic walk-ons. Most coaches I know have a dozen or more such stories. This is not to knock participation in high school crew, but rather to discourage the crabbed outlook that assumes it guarantees anything or that multiple seasons of it is better than a single season for a multi-sport athlete.<br />
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So here's my message to high school coaches who are exerting subtle or not-so-subtle pressure on their athletes to stop playing other sports and focus exclusively on rowing: Stop it. Stop it right now. <br />
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And the corollary message to parents of high school athletes and the athletes themselves: If your crew coach is telling you that you need to row ten or eleven months out of the year to the exclusion of participation in other sports, remind yourself to consider the source. It may seem to be in your coach's best interest for you to train exclusively in rowing or sculling - he's got a trophy case to fill and a resume to build, after all, but hear this carefully and thoroughly: it won't make you a better human being, or even a better athlete, or even a better rower or sculler in the long run. Here's a true statement: one of the most recurrent complaints that collegiate rowing coaches have about their rowers is lack of general, all-around athleticism. And early specialization cannot teach that or provide an environment in which it is likely to develop. I shudder to think what kind of athlete and sculler I would be if I had not participated in half a dozen other sports prior to finding rowing at age 20. The truth is that I've learned valuable things that enrich my enjoyment of and proficiency in sculling from nearly every sport I've ever tried. Further, if you ditch your other sports in order to devote yourself exclusively to crew, you miss out on one of the greatest opportunities of American adolescence. Middle school and high school afford us the opportunity to participate in multiple team sports for a very short span of years, and almost none of us will ever get that opportunity again in any meaningful sense. Quick - name an adult amateur soccer league that inspires commitment and devotion on a par with high school sports (trick question - there's not one). We will become adults, embark on careers, perhaps get married and have children, and so on. Playing pickup basketball can be tons of fun, but it will never match the experience of sharing a season, in uniform, with your peers. And if you enjoy and are proficient at more than one sport, you should allow yourself the opportunity to play more than one sport, and the devil take anyone who tries to tell you otherwise. <br />
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Here's the healthier alternative: commit yourself to being a fit, strong, athlete on a year-round basis. Never allow yourself to get "out of shape." If you enjoy more than one sport, go ahead and commit to participate in more than one sport. And if you find at 16 or 17 that your real interest in your other sports or your aptitude for them is waning and you are inclined to devote more time and passion to crew, then do that. And if your crew coach can't handle that, find another crew coach. <br />
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Full disclosure, complete with convenient rationalization: I coached high school crew for fifteen years, and more of my scullers were one-sport athletes than were multi-sport athletes, but I was never comfortable with that and did my best to encourage people to be involved with a second sport (or third, in exceptional cases). So if you're one of my former athletes or crew parents and are reading this and thinking "really? Is this the same guy?" then I sincerely apologize for having failed to render this message as emphatically or to articulate it as precisely as I should have. <br />
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Res ipsa loquitur. Avoid the coming apocalypse and its attendant craziness.Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-120278685279987092012-05-13T05:55:00.000-07:002019-06-01T09:40:44.979-07:00A Case for the Usefullness of a Neurological PerspectiveAt 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.Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-51395610007129882042012-03-29T18:50:00.019-07:002019-06-01T09:40:45.969-07:00Motion Over Effort - What Scullers Can Learn from Nordic Skiers Part 2One of my fellow coaches at Craftsbury likes to say that sport is about motion, not effort. In a more humorous and curmudgeonly moment the same coach has kidded a few campers who were sculling less than gracefully by saying "your sculling is a triumph of effort over motion." In both variations, I think he's on to something. Most people have heard at least one pithy story (if not a hundred) of a martial arts master who was either elderly or diminutive or both who, in demonstrations of skill, makes much younger, larger, stronger opponents look clumsy, slow, and incompetent. A subtle turn of the hip here, a bend at the knee at just the right moment there, and the angry, musclebound, brimming-with-adrenaline twentysomething opponent is looking up from the mat, wondering what happened. His effort had been giant and the tiny old man had seemingly expended little if any effort of his own, and yet had defeated him. How could such a thing have happened? And if you haven't already flashed on Yoda and Luke Skywalker, I'll go ahead and bring that up as what is likely the most universally recognized modern version of that story. In any event, the stories tend to resonate with us because on some level we know that brute strength and effort are rarely the deciding factors at high levels of sport - or even not-so-high levels; I had a friend in 7th grade football who had some gymnastics training and could seemingly block anybody of any size. His "secret" was keeping his center of gravity lower than everyone else's, allowing him to get his helmet and shoulder pads under yours on every single play. Without much apparent effort, he stood you up and rendered you ineffective. <br />
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Before I digress further, though, let's shift to Nordic skiing. I remember one of the first times I ever went out skiing, trying to keep up with a guy whose level of fitness and achievement as an endurance athlete is comparable to mine but who had spent a lot more time on snow. After effortlessly dropping me on an uphill section for the umpteenth time, he stopped and waited for me and when I had caught up he observed "It's not your fitness that's lacking, and after you've got a few hundred more hours on skis, you're gradually going to start learning how to carry more of your speed through the transitions from downhill to uphill, around corners, over the crests of hills, and so on." And of course he was right and so by the end of my first season on skis I was skiing quite a bit faster and more gracefully without having made any great gains in either general or ski-specific fitness. It was a simple matter of paying attention, over the course of dozens of hours of skiing, to what creates and preserves speed and what does not. <br />
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It wasn't until a couple of years later, though, that I took another substantial step forward by beginning to intuitively understand that one of the real keys to going fast is knowing the most appropriate places and moments to put your effort. For example, when you are coming to the lowest point of a descent, there seems to be a perfect moment at which to come out of your tuck, shift your weight, adjust your tempo, and switch to the climbing technique most appropriate to the terrain and situation. And if you hit that moment perfectly, you go into your climb with a lot more speed and a lot less effort. And if you hit it clumsily or with your weight in the wrong place or your posture not quite where it ought to be, you quickly begin to feel like you're skiing through molasses or honey or some other slow-moving liquid and you get to have the punishing experience of climbing the hill while trying to earn back speed that you could have simply kept if you'd been cleverer in your movements. To borrow a phrase from the previous post, the difference between the right moment and almost the right moment really is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. Miss the moment by a few inches or a few hundredths of a second and you may as well have missed it by ten meters or week. And there are dozens, if not hundreds, if not thousands of these transitional moments in any ski race or training session, and the difference in the time it will take you to complete ten kilometers of skiing when you are hitting those moments sweetly and ten kilometers of hitting them clumsily will be measured in minutes rather than seconds or tenths of seconds. And the difference in your fatigue level as your workout wears on also makes the virtues of skiing well self-evident. <br />
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It may or may not go without saying that something similar applies to where you put the effort over the macrocycle of a whole race. Two skiers might put exactly the same amount of energy into the same ten minutes spent skiing and the one who is skiing smartly and adroitly could be hundreds of meters ahead. Having burned exactly the same number of calories (or perhaps fewer), the skillful skier wins the race handily over the skier who knows more about pain tolerance than he knows about skiing well, and the same is equally true for any two scullers.<br />
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You can undoubtedly see where this is going. Sculling may not have climbs and descents or abrupt turns, but just as Nordic skiing has a microcyclical pattern of shifting the bodyweight from over one ski to over the other, the microcycle of sculling is the single stroke from one catch to the next, and where and how you place your effort in that movement is critical to the effectiveness of the movement. And you can be Yoda in your single or you can be a brawny but ineffective stormtrooper cut in half by his light saber. Hit the catch a little too hard, or mis-time the change of direction by the hips and shoulders, or miss any of a thousand even more subtle somethings and your boatspeed will suffer without your even being conscious of it or knowing what you could be doing differently to improve it. Do it right and you can take ten truly effective strokes using less effort than you'd put into five crude ones or nine very good ones. And the difference is very tricky to find and almost impossible to articulate. And that attempt to articulate something that can only be found through experience is, I think, the greatest pitfall of a mechanical (or even a biomechanical) approach to the sculling stroke. No one's talking biomechanics on the mat at the dojo. At some level it's like trying to teach someone to walk by talking them through the process: "first, pick up your right foot and move it forward. Let your hip follow, and at the same time let your left shoulder move backward" etc. Sculling, like walking, is probably best learned experientially, imitatively, and intuitively rather than by being coached on each individual part of the cycle. Which is by no means to say that such coaching is useless - I'm not about to talk myself out of a profession, and the martial arts analogy holds as well - no one ever mastered Judo in the absence of instruction from a master, but in the end it is the student's intuition that either makes good sense of the master's guidance or fails to do so. Or oftentimes that makes good sense out of the imperfect guidance of a well-intentioned but equally imperfect coach. <br />
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Effort applied skillfully, judiciously, and intuitively, both in each individual stroke and each racing or training piece, is what separates the great scullers from the merely very good ones and the good ones from novices and/or hapless hammers. Just as there are hard-earned lessons in how the hips and shoulders must move for judo throws to work as they are intended, there are hard-earned movement patterns for skiers and scullers. And the difference between a true master oarsman and a merely fine sculler is not often something that is readily apparent to the eye or to the intellect, but it shows up quickly in the larger, younger, more muscular guy on his back in the dojo or five lengths of open water behind after 2k. Better motion. Effort placed only exactly where and when it needs to be. Faster boats, and opponents left baffled, wondering "how did he DO that?"Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9165823347384469533.post-12908266520751174862012-02-23T02:43:00.004-08:002019-06-01T09:40:45.050-07:00Playing With Gravity, or What Scullers Can Learn From Nordic SkiingI participate in Nordic skiing not so much because of any inherent fascination with it but rather because it's what there is to do around here from December through March if you're an endurance athlete. And if you're reading that as an insult to the activity, then I beg your pardon, because that's not the intent. Though I came to the sport late and it doesn't quite grab me by the lapels the way that sculling always has, there are days when I can see how it might. What is most important for my purposes, though, is that there are a lot of insights into sculling that can be gained by paying attention to what makes you a better Nordic skier. I'll only nod in the direction of the cross-training benefit by acknowledging that from my perspective at least, Nordic skiing exposes the limitations of steady-state training on flat water: because there are no hills in sculling, the sheer sameness of always training on a level surface can be problematic if for no other reason than that it's all too easy to fall into a routine in which the most important training principle (VARY THE STIMULUS) is insufficiently honored. Ninety minutes of steady state at 22 SPM three times a week is almost inevitably going to create a less varied stimulus than three skiing outings of ninety minutes over varied terrain including climbs, descents, transitions, and varying routes and snow conditions. As has been observed more than once around here, "Nordic skiing is 100% fartlek; there's no such thing as steady state unless you live where it's flat." <br />
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None of that, however, gets at the technical insights for sculling that can come to you from playing with gravity as a skier. I don't remember exactly when Pepa first showed me what has become my favorite skiing drill, but I keep coming back to it every time I want to add to my understanding of what constitutes good skiing. And like most things that initially appear to be magic that on closer examination are revealed to be simple physics, it has the potential to teach us something. Describing it rather than demonstrating it probably won't do it justice, but I'll hope for the best. To start with, she places her skis in a "V". From there, she positions her bodyweight where she knows it needs to be, flexing her ankles, dropping her hips, and adjusting her center of gravity. And without appearing to move any of her limbs at all, the skis begin to move forward on their own, as if by magic. Anyone with even a modicum of understanding of skiing can do this, but when you see it as a brand-new beginner it tends to make an impression. The skeptic watching this demonstration on level ground may dismiss it and think or say something like "big deal, you're just pressing out with your feet" or some variation of that, but most people are more impressed when the drill is moved to a hill and repeated so that it becomes clear that one can actually begin to "climb" uphill without taking any steps. If the bodyweight is positioned appropriately, the skis still move on their own, even on fairly steep inclines, and it becomes apparent that it isn't just alpine skiing that involves playing with gravity; if anything, Nordic skiing places an even greater importance on it. An observant skier begins to notice that, more than perhaps anything else, it is the position of the body over the ski that determines whether one moves through space rapidly or slowly (or perhaps even goes backward). This may lead to the realization that skiing, in an important sense, can be understood as controlled falling, and that it is desirable to learn how to "fall uphill" if one wants to climb effectively rather than muscle one's way up a slope. Further, it doesn't take long for an attentive skier to notice that shifting one's bodyweight skillfully during the rhythmic cycle of moving from one ski to the other makes a huge difference in the speed that one travels. I can almost hear Pepa saying "Over one, ofer the other! Over one, now ofer the other" right now, in her thick Bulgamerican accent. <br />
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What that's got to do with sculling may or may not be obvious, and for that matter, I may or may not be right about this, but I think that if body position over the ski and rhythmic, effective shifting of the bodyweight is critical to speed in Nordic skiing (and it is), then body position within the shell and rhythmic, effective shifting of the bodyweight is probably critical to speed in sculling, and that if playing with gravity skillfully by intuitively adjusting the position of your body as it moves through a rhythmic cycle is what separates great skiers from mediocre ones, the same is probably true for scullers. Although I never rowed for Igor Grinko, I'm told that one of his favorite calls to his scullers is "USE YOUR BODYWEIGHT!" and I think that's telling - Igor's early wrestling matches with the English language are legendary, and particularly during his first years in the states he had to find ways to use what he knew effectively, so the phrase might be seen as a powerful distillation of what's really important in sculling. Sculling, like skiing, involves playing with gravity, and that has everything to do with how you position your bodyweight throughout the stroke cycle. And it is as true on level, liquid water as it is on varied terrain with frozen water underfoot. Sculling well involves learning to fall horizontally - this is part of what wise coaches mean when they say "rowing is not a pulling sport." Learn to play with gravity - it never gets tired.Troy Howellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11044322083067888809noreply@blogger.com1