Consider the Erg - It Toils Not, But it Does Spin

 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.  

"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.  

"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 it has no place in crew selection.  

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.

Bring 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?"  

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.  

New Year's Resolutions, Redux

"No one of our human passions is so hard to subdue as pride...For even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my Humility." - Benjamin Franklin

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.  

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.  

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 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?

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. 

More Reflections on Training the Nervous System For Sport

Just 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.
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.
Here's what I continue to learn and reinforce nearly every time I do it:
1) Faith in the plasticity of my nervous system and proprioception.  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. 
2) A new appreciation for allowing looseness in the joints and the muscle groups that move them.  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!

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

Misconceptions and Self Deceptions Part I - Small Boats

Tell me if you've heard this one:

"I'm not that great in singles and pairs, but I'm much better in big boats."

Or this one:

"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)"  

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.


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.

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 the best path to optimizing your value to team boats at any level involves increasing your mastery of the single and/or the pair 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. 

Queens of Turd Mountain

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. 

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.

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 the people who are not winning are truly emptying the tanks and making those who are winning give their best effort.  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.  

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.

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.

Effeeciency - 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. 
     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. 
     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. 

No 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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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 think 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?).

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. 

These Kind of Hiccups are a Choice

Every 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:

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. 

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. 

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. 

I Hear the Rotors In the Distance - Receding, I Hope

I 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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.