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.