What 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. 

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.

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. 

We're Going to Say We Told You So

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

Consistency

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

On the Virtues of Having a Home-course Benchmark

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

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

Oarsmanship

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

Race Plan? What Race Plan?

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

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

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

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