Focusing on ourselves... the only way to perfrom when we need to!

In competitive sculling, as with most other competitive things in life, there are no second chances. Nobody's going to re-run a championship event because you didn't have a good race, no-one will let you re-take an exam because you screwed up or didn't study... everyone has a bad day once in a while, and if that bad day happens to be the day of your Olympic A Final... tough shit, nobody cares but you.

We've had a bit of a rough start to the season. The girls have not performed as well as I thought they would, but we're learning alot from every race, even if we're coming in the lower 50% of the field. I keep telling myself that I'd rather we have our bad races now and learn from them so that we can get to Champs or Boat Race knowing what not to do, but we need to have some promising performances now, and I'm not seeing them.

Our erg scores are not good and some of the girls are having trouble grasping technical concepts, but based on the performances from last season we should be up near the front of the pack fighting for 3rd at least.

I think that we're worrying too much about performing. If the girls (and myself) just relax and focus on our own preparation instead of trying to beat the others all of the time, the performances will come when we need them, and we'll start having fewer bad outings and races.

We need to set a goal and get to work achieving it... and saying we're going to come 3rd in the next regatta or at Champs is not going to cut it... that gets us focusing on the competition again and not on ourselves. We need to aim for something like improved erg scores or improving our max squat every week... if we get caught up stressing about other crews, we'll have pretty much resigned ourselves to bad performances.

One of the parents filmed some of the starts at the sprint regatta this last weekend, and I noticed that all of the girls have their eyes on the crews to the left and right for the majority of the first 500m... even in the coxed events where they don't have to even look at the lane buoys.

Rowing is not a sport where strategies and game plans play a huge role in winning or performing well. Athletes have to perform the same motion about 250 times over a straight 2000m course with no obstructions or obstacles, and the most efficient one reaches the line first. Race plans and tactics play a role in the outcome of a race, but there are only so many things that you can do differently... going out fast and holding on, or racing from behind and conserving a bit to come through in the final stages are about all there is to it. So why do we constantly feel the need to look at the boats next to us if all it will do is screw up our concentration and rhythm?

We should be happy to row our own race and let the coxes worry about where we are in relation to the rest of the field.

This also extends to erg assessments. Many of the girls rely heavily on some 'superstitions' when doing an erg test... the right music or only certain people talking to them. As far as I'm concerned, you push your feet through those footplates regardless of what is going on around you and you focus on what you're doing then and there.

2000m races are a crazy time for anyone... there are coxes screaming into their mic's with the speakers turned up too high, umpires calling for crews to stay in their own water and a general atmosphere that the world is crashing down around you. Add to this the stress that you are putting your body under... and you are not in a very happy place. There is no inspirational music nor is there your favorite cox or fellow athlete at your side guiding you down the course... so why should we spoil ourselves on the erg? Practice being in a race under proper race conditions, and you'll more likely be accustomed to that stress by the time you experience it for real.

It's great to have fun and enjoy rowing but in terms of performance, John and I are only asking for about 4 hours of intense training and performance out of the 8 or 9 hours you spend a week in the gym or on the water. You can have 4-5 hours of fun with your friends and good music in your ears a week... and if we start to get into it, the performance part will be fun as well... that's when all that time you spend training will be worth it and you'll really start to love rowing and racing.

Counting the Final Strokes - One for the Coxes...

I found this article on the Row2K.com website. It's a new addition to one of their many columns on rowing, coxing and training for rowing in general by Rob Colburn.


I'll post the whole thing here, but if you want to read more, just click on the link below or go to http//:www.row2k.com.

http://row2k.com/columns/index.cfm


"Counting the Final Strokes to the Finish Line Accurately
posted on September 24, 2007

The final ten strokes of a race are crucial; they are the "empty the tanks" strokes where you want your rowers to be able to expend every last ounce of energy without holding anything back. There is a saying, "the last stroke you take is the last stroke you can take," so a coxswain can make a real contribution to a boat if the rowers know exactly how many strokes they have left. There is a special room in hell reserved for coxswains who miscall the final ten (as well as buckets of coxswain blood on boat bay floors) and who either have to say "uh, sorry, two more," or who waste two or three strokes by leaving too much margin.

Counting the final ten strokes accurately takes practice, doing it over and over again until you know how far your boat will go in ten strokes. Some people simply are more used to using the spatial functions of their visual cortexes than others. (I am not one of those, incidentally.) The distance will differ for eights and fours; it will differ according to headwind or tailwind or current. Ultimately, it comes down to a certain boatfeel and a lot of experience, but here are some techniques you can use to speed the learning process and make it more of a science.

Most importantly, make yourself conscious of distances every time you practice a piece with your boat, in all conditions. (This has uses in situations other than the final ten).

Test yourself not only whenever you are practicing the final thousand or final five hundred meters, (when you will actually be counting the final ten), but also when you are doing any piece. Silently test yourself as you come up to the end of, for example, a middle five hundred. Pick points during pieces when you think you are ten strokes from them, and see how right you are until you get better and better at it. If you are doing power tens, you can test yourself by picking a point out ahead of you on the water that you think your boat will get to. (Bear in mind though, that a boat going into the final ten of its sprint may have a lot more speed on it than a boat doing individual tens). The more familiar you become with distances -- even at different ratings and stages of the race -- the more you will be able to think ahead during various stages of a race, and to anticipate how the blocks of the race will fit together.

Don't be afraid to tell your boat, "I'm going to practice calling the final ten on this one until I get it down."

Distances over water can be deceiving; appearance can vary depending on how smooth or rough the water is. Cross-correlate during practice by picking points along shore to get a feel for how far ten strokes looks against a fixed distance, and combine that with estimating water distance; the two will help reinforce each other.

Naturally, if you race on a home course, you can pick out landmarks during practice that you can use during a race, but even on an unfamiliar course, the practice you have gained estimating distance based on fixed points will be helpful.

On a buoyed racecourse, the standard interval is ten meters between buoys. An eight with decent speed and ratio covers roughly ten meters per stroke. Use your practices to figure out your particular boat's distance. A four might take eleven strokes to cover the same distance an eight covers in ten. Obviously, headwinds and tailwinds adjust this. Get a feel for what 100 meters looks like in various contexts, over water, on land, while driving, riding a bicycle, any situation you can think of until you just know at a glance, "that's one hundred meters."

In theory, if your bow is ten buoys from the finish line, that will be your last-ten-strokes call; however it's not as easy as it seems. Studies have shown that the human eye can apprehend groups of three -- or at most four -- objects at a glance; more than that requires conscious counting. Linguists have theorized that that is the reason that 3 and 4 were not only "sacred" numbers in a number of cultures, but also that it is the reason why -- in many languages -- the numbers up to three, or occasionally four, have declension endings (especially the ordinal numbers) and the higher numbers do not. (e.g. in English, "first," "second," "third" have unique endings, but beginning with "fourth," all numbers end in "-th." Latin declines "uno" "duo" and "tres" but not "quattor" or higher.)

Whatever the biological reason, during the last ten strokes of a race, there simply isn't time to count buoys, especially when the coxswain needs to be doing a lot of other things such as making calls, keeping track of other boats which may be charging, giving the building strokes for the final stroke count increase, etc.

A trick to get around this is to speed-count the final buoys as 3-3-4, which your eye can do almost instantly. It's even faster if you count them backwards from the finish line, so that the group of four is closest to you. If you are coxing a four, you might do it as 3-4-4.

None of these tricks is foolproof, but used in combination they will help you get better at it. In time, it will become almost second nature, so that you'll just know when it's right."