The Elusive Obvious

There'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.
So let's start with something obvious: The absence of relaxation is fatiguing.  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: Relaxation is not binary.  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: Our reserves of energy are finite.  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.  

Oarsmanship

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.

Comfort In The Boat

I 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.
Video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDHEjYYqtb0&t=29s