Drills are one of the most effective ways to engrain a new habit, particularly those that overemphasize a certain movement so its normal application feels easy. Rowing on the square teaches the correct hand path during the release and balance on the recovery.

There are numerous variations of this seemingly simple drill. Coaches may choose starting the drill in a balanced boat at low speed. Increasing the pressure, speed of the boat, stroke rate, and the number of rowers involved adds to the difficulty of the drill.

Pausing is another popular drill, which helps with balance, sequencing, and crew coordination. This drill also has varying levels of difficulty, with the “easy” starting point consisting of a short pause with fully-stretched legs, the hands in front of the knees, and blades feathered.

The so-called “wide-grip” drill increases the catch angle and, for sweep rowers, emphasizes proper rotation while also stressing balance. Increasing the width of the grip makes this drill more difficult and changing the hand position every stroke adds to the complexity.

The variety of drills becomes literally endless when we start combining them.

In general, beginners or athletes with poor skill levels need to start with more straightforward drills. Experts can be challenged with the most difficult combination of exercises administered with minimal feedback from the coach. 

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A feeling of lightness is one of the hallmarks of good suspension on the drive. When sculling, think about shifting your weight to your feet as you come forward for the catch. Then press your legs against the foot stretchers as your blades drop down to the water and simultaneously engage the lower back, shoulders, and arms. 

 In the early part of the drive, your legs should be driving down while your back remains in a forward body angle, arms extended. At this point in the stroke, it is as though you are standing on your feet and hanging off the oar handles with your arms. This creates a feeling of lightness on the seat and is one of the hallmarks of good suspension on the drive. Always avoid initiating the drive with your back. This reduces the effectiveness of your leg drive and can lead you to dig at the catch.

Here are some other tips:

* As you approach the catch, the weight of your body should shift to your feet as if you were standing up. Maintaining pressure on the foot stretcher sets you up for a solid leg drive.

* Keep your head up and eyes fixed on a point on the horizon as a way to keep your back in the proper position. Tighten the muscles in your lower back to support your legs as you transfer power to the end of the oar.

* When you are properly suspended at the catch, you should feel as though you could lift yourself off the seat. While that’s a sign that you are doing it right, stay in contact with the seat to keep your movements horizontal.

The feeling of hanging on your arms will give you the sense that you are driving the boat forward properly and efficiently.

The post The Unbeatable Lightness of Rowing appeared first on Rowing News.

One of my greatest worries as a coach was that my rowers would lose their ratio during the throes of battle. The ratio naturally changes as the rates increase, but it’s still important to maintain it, even if the difference between the drive and recovery is reduced at full speed. In a low-rate endurance workout, for example, the ratio between the drive and the recovery may be as much as three to one. At race pace or higher, it may come closer to one to one. But it’s still important to be aware of it. There are several other cues you can focus on. Pay close attention to what proper timing feels like. Try to feel when the backs of your calves touch the ends of the slides, which indicates whether or not you are driving evenly. Keeping the head up on a level plane will help increase awareness of lunging at the catch. By focusing on the horizon you will also be increasingly aware if you are moving horizontally or if there is excessive vertical motion. Paying attention to the oarlocks on your side and on the seat of the rower in front of you are useful tricks to focus on timing. But the most important cue, the one that trumps all others, is whether or not you are in front of your competition during a race. 

The post Got Rhythm? appeared first on Rowing News.

A solid connection between the legs, lower back, and arms is essential to move the boat effectively and sustainably. Because the legs are the strongest muscle group, the arms and back move very little during the first half of the drive, with the arms remaining straight until the legs are down. The leg drive is initiated the moment the blade enters the water. The acceleration of the legs increases the speed of the shell, but the arms and back have to transfer the energy generated to the second half of the stroke. Veteran coach Larry Gluckman (Trinity, Dartmouth, Columbia, Princeton) suggests that athletes picture a “power rectangle” at this phase of the stroke, formed when the wrists pass over the knees and the rower’s back is in the upright position and the legs are down. Think about these points: 

* Keep your arms straight for the first part of the drive. If you can draw your arms toward your body at the catch, your legs are not fully engaged.

* A strong lower back and glutes will keep your back in the correct position when the knees are down. 

* Strive for a “power rectangle” when you row, with wrists over the knees, arms extended, and the back upright as the legs come down and you press off the foot stretcher. 

* Keep your head up and your eyes fixed on a point on the horizon to keep your back from lifting early.

* The arms and back pry the boat forward once the legs are down. 

The post The Perfectly Connected Stroke appeared first on Rowing News.

How much water can you cover in one stroke?

It’s an important question: small gains in boat run quickly add up. Consider that a single sculler takes around 600 strokes in a typical head race. A five-centimeter increase in distance per stroke would give you about 3.5 boat lengths of extra distance. That’s why it’s good to focus your on-water training this time of year on maximizing boat run.

Training for run includes single-stroke work so you can solidify small changes in your stroke and then gradually build the new movement pattern up to higher rates.

A good drill for this is single-stroke rowing with a pause at quarter slide, holding the pause until the shell almost comes to rest. Start by driving firmly and then release the blade cleanly from the water. Come out of the bow in fluid fashion, without rushing, and feel the momentum you have built up during the drive as you swing forward. Carry the acceleration all the way to the perpendicular point of the handle on the recovery when the knees rise slightly. Pause here and let the boat glide. Once the boat has slowed significantly, carefully complete the recovery and prepare yourself for the catch so the timing is precise and does not interrupt the flow of the boat. In the second half of the recovery, be patient and try to match the hull speed.

Pause for sets of 15 strokes focusing on increasing your meters per stroke.   

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“The single is like an amplifying mirror of whatever imperfection you have,” Ted Van Dusen, owner and operator of Composite Engineering, Inc.—the home of Van Dusen Racing Boats USA—tells me on a Sunday afternoon in February. “To be out in this definitely unstable boat that is very light. It mirrors right back in your face in no uncertain terms—so you learn very quickly.”  

As a former coxswain, I muse on that for a moment. The best feedback on performance I ever got was from my athletes and a tape recorder that captured my race-day calls. The notion of looking directly into some kind of proverbial mirror feels unfairly exposing. Like a never-ending seat race with yourself.  

I’m speaking with Van Dusen and other experts in the realm of sculling to better understand what makes the single so special. Having never rowed one myself, I’m at the mercy of my own assumptions and what others are willing to share. True, there is a sense of freedom and inherent flexibility that comes with rowing a boat of one. But my real mission is to understand what makes this boat class so universally captivating—to find the ways in which it has and continues to evolve our sport.

With no expectation that I’ll get a reply with the Tokyo Games just months away, I send 2016 Olympic silver medalist and one of America’s preeminent single scullers Gevvie Stone an email asking for 10 minutes of her time to talk. To my delight, she gets back to me to say she’s available. Then she replies again minutes later suggesting I call her now. She’s training down in Texas and is currently stuck in traffic driving home from practice, giving her an unexpected few minutes to connect on this day.

Stone picks up my call and I make a point to jump right in, not knowing how much time we will have. I ask her what first drew her to the single, hoping to better understand its allure, particularly given her pre-single background rowing team boats.  

“I confess that I had a little bit of time in the single trying out for the quad in 2008,” she tells me, “but I really didn’t get into the single until I came to Boston for medical school. I had a pretty tight schedule in terms of med school classes, in addition to not having anyone to row a team boat with. The single was the default choice. It gave me the freedom of flexibility with my schedule. I could train when I wanted, which made it incredibly time-efficient. If class got out a half-hour earlier I could practice a half-hour earlier. Just the virtue of being able to do the training plan I wanted at the level I wanted was enough.” 

“The single provides you with immediate feedback on how your rowing translates into boat speed. Part of the magic is that you can layer in teamwork while still learning individual boat feel. You can get everything out of it if you balance it right.”

-Gevvie Stone

Flexibility. Check. But when did she decide it was her boat? “I can’t say I loved it at first. It did give me freedom, which I appreciated, but it also can feel pretty lonely,” she says. “A big part of why I fell in love with it was because I began feeling more comfortable in the boat itself, but I also found a group of people to train with. I started training about a year in with the masters men from Cambridge Boat Club. It gave the single the camaraderie that a team boat has for the hard practices. Since then, I really try to do hard work with other people, because I think just like in a big boat, where working with someone else forces you to elevate your game, working alongside other people forces you to do the same in the single. It provides you with immediate feedback on how your rowing translates into boat speed. Part of the magic is that you can layer in teamwork while still learning individual boat feel. You can get everything out of it if you balance it right.” 

I ask Stone why, when there are boats like the quad or the eight that move so fast, the single reliably commands some of the biggest crowds? “I think the single highlights some of the dichotomy of the sport, in that the better you row it, the easier you make it look: this amazing harmony between effort and beauty.”

She pauses, thoughtfully, then continues. “I think that is what intrigues the outsider. People know in the back of their mind when they watch the Olympics that these athletes are working insanely hard, because it’s an Olympic sport and that’s what people do. At the same time, if you don’t know better, rowing looks easy. Especially in the single because there is an inherent flow to the boat.” As Stone prepares for what would be her third Olympic Games, flow is clearly something she’s got down. 

From sprint racing to head racing, I decide to speak with Mitz Carr next, the defending champion in the women’s grandmaster single at the Head of the Charles. In addition to her athletic pursuits, Carr is also a former coach, current New Haven Rowing Club member, and an active part of what makes Connecticut’s Head of the Housatonic come to life each fall. I’m hoping to build on my conversation with Stone by learning from Carr what has made the single a lifelong passion for her, and how she balances the desire to win with an appreciation for the process. 

I ask Carr about her training and approach to the Charles each year. “I am so demanding of myself in that I want to put out the best performance I’m capable of. It’s not as much about the other people, and it’s not as much about the rowing world, it’s just me personally wanting to hold my feet to the fire on that day. How do I put the pressure on myself throughout the year to make sure that all of my activity starts to ramp up and support what I need to do to get there.” 

When I ask Carr what the single has taught her about both rowing and herself, she inhales for a moment and then recalls one of her biggest challenges. “One of my toughest Head of the Charles memories is being 18 seconds ahead of everyone at Cambridge, only to roll myself out of my boat three strokes before the finish line. That was 2018. I know I’m a little late on the square on the starboard side. That’s not a new thing for me. I rowed port in college. And I knew those oars were a little light and it was gusty, and I caught the gust at the exact wrong time. I was so shot. I remember [coach] Dave Vogel asking me, ‘What on Earth? How could that happen after working that hard, that late in the race, when you had that much of a lead?’ But I was so shot. I had trained the last 100 strokes, and remember thinking, ‘I have to put that out there. I trained for it.’ Then three strokes from the finish, I knifed [the blade] in. I was so spent,” she explains.

I recall the mirror analogy Ted Van Dusen so wonderfully described earlier. “It mirrors right back in your face in no uncertain terms,” he said. This was the “no uncertain terms” part. Knowing now the impact the single had on Carr as an athlete, I ask her about its implications as a coach. “It’s the only proof you’ll ever have,” she says right away. “As a coach, you’ll spend the rest of your life hearing athletes say, ‘I’m better than that. I’m better than where you put me in that seat.’ They’re constantly looking for a proof source to demonstrate how good they are. The one quality we all know about rowers is that they tend to over-value their contributions. ‘If this were a boat of eight of me we’d be flying.’ And it’s constantly the case that, yes, some people can’t put it together on the erg and yet they are great racers. Others have some technical flaws that don’t translate well into certain boats. But when you’re trying to prove that you’re a boat mover, the single is the only proof you will ever need.”  

So how does one master the art of rowing the single, if mastery is even possible? Surely Malcolm Gladwell would concur that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, in this case, would still not be sufficient. “You have to spend a ton of miles at steady state, quietly finding where you find the load and where you best move the boat,” Carr explains. “I don’t know how anyone else would do it. That’s what I did. I spent enough time over my sculling life that I can feel when I have the boat and I know how to accelerate and hold on to it. You have to find a way to be able to identify that moment.” Hearing Carr, it’s clear that a focus on reps is a large part of the answer.

Stone, unsurprisingly, has similar feedback. “You just spend more time in the single. And you make a point not to be too hard on yourself. I think a common mistake, in the beginning, is that people think, ‘My oar caught the water, that’s not supposed to happen,’ or ‘Sometimes I flip.’” I can feel her smiling through the phone. “The best of us do that. I’m not rowing with my oar completely off the water every stroke of every practice. I would love to, but I’m definitely not. I flipped when I was coaching Radcliffe in Florida in the winter of 2017 just shoving from the dock because I left my oarlock undone. I think the more time you spend in the single the more it teaches you. It’s an endless learning curve, and that’s one of the really fun things about the boat, how much it can teach you just by doing it. That’s how you get better. You just put the strokes in.”

With a renewed appreciation for single sculling at the elite and masters level, I consider the ways in which sculling has influenced the junior rowing landscape in recent years. Some of the best junior programs have dedicated sculling coaches and equipment. There are entire youth regattas structured around sculling. It is no longer the case that a middle schooler will be dubbed a starboard at age 12 and remain a starboard throughout college (or beyond). Many of the best youth rowers are learning to scull first and only later to sweep, taking a page from their European counterparts.

I ask Van Dusen what the changing landscape has looked like from a boat-buying perspective. “There’s no question that today that more youth are rowing singles than in the past. The better rowers in the youth program…often their parents will buy them a single when they graduate so they can keep going and row summers when they’re in college.”  

Sean Wolf, who handles all of the Canadian rowing shell manufacturer Fluidesign’s sales across the United States, shares what that trend has looked like for him. A Bostonian through and through, he says “kids start sculling wicked young now. And they are rowing singles really well. Look at Clark Dean, who went from winning youth nationals to winning junior worlds. Even middle school kids are learning how to scull. Take Sarasota and even Saratoga. You see these programs and think, ‘Wow, this is so cool. How does that kid row so well and not feel afraid of anything?’ It blows my mind.”

Maybe Wolf is on to something. Perhaps the key to success in the single is to look into the mirror, but only long enough to appreciate the ways in which it is making you faster. Look often, fail fast, and remain unafraid. That, of course, coupled with those reps. 

The post The Case for Single Sculling appeared first on Rowing News.

Change is something we all face as we age. Bodies grow—vertically at first and then often horizontally—and so do attitudes about training and motivations for staying in the sport or even taking up an oar later in life. Yet the template for how many rowers train and race, from the youngest juniors right through to the very oldest masters, can feel like it misses the mark.

While a one-size-fits-all approach still dominates in many sports, a growing trend shifts the focus onto the individual athletes that make up a team or club. This is especially significant for older athletes, who may not have the time to commit to vast amounts of training. We’ve all heard the expression, “train smarter, not harder,” but what does training smarter actually mean for rowers trying to perform as they age?

To find out more, I reached out to four experienced coaches from across the United States and Canada.

Breaking Bad Habits

My first call was to three-time world champion German/Canadian lightweight sculler Michelle Darvill. 

“All of this depends on the individual,” she said in response to my question about training for older athletes. In fact, I ended up hearing a lot of this sort of thing, not just from Darvill, but from others I contacted as well. “How someone trains is often based on physiology, training, and length of race,” continued Darvill, who until recently served as a national development team coach and women’s coach for Rowing Canada. In other words, it’s all relative. 

Yet there is one thing, according to Darvill, that is not relative: good technique. “Technique is important in all age groups to enable maximal leverage, minimize injury, and maximize boat propulsion,” she told me. Poor technique can lead to bad habits and for Darvill the only solution is “mileage and the desire to change.”

“This means staying focused on the task,” she explained. “Many people are willing to try something out for a couple of strokes, but want a quick fix. You have to be willing to dedicate time to making a technical change to retrain patterning and even look at other areas, such as flexibility or core strength, that you can improve on. When you look at periodizing your training plan, starting a new season and the general preparation stage may be the period of the year to devote to looking at the gaps and correcting technique. It is also important to look at how race pace may impact technique.”

The good news is that no matter one’s age, technique change is still possible, according to Darvill. “It is about having the right attitude,” she said. “Having feedback can also help; whether it is video or coaching or speed feedback, there are lots of tools out there.”

Rigging and Racing

A properly-rigged boat is a critical part of rowing well and racing fast. In fact, the adjustability of equipment to fit the athlete rather than the other way around is a good example of individualization already at work in the sport. But should rigging change as a matter of course as athletes age?

Not really, according to Patrick Kington, director of rowing at the San Diego Rowing Club. “As far as rigging is concerned,” he told me, “we don’t make changes based on age group per se, but rather on fitness level, size of the athletes, and those types of things. So while it’s true that, in general, I’ll have lighter loads for our athletes as they age, since younger athletes are more powerful on average, we use the fitness levels of the individual athletes to make the determination rather than making adjustments based on age group.”

Kington’s exceptional work with masters rowers was recognized in 2018 with a USRowing Fan’s Choice Award for Masters Coach of the Year, yet his engagement with rowers spans all ages and abilities. I reached him while he was en route to Austria for the senior worlds as coach of U.S. Paralympic sculler Blake Haxton.

When it comes to racing, “tactics do change with age and ability,” he said. “Our younger masters will come off the line at higher rates, have a more aggressive base pace, and begin their sprints earlier. Our older athletes will adopt a more conservative pacing strategy. The other main difference in strategy that one sees in masters racing versus junior or collegiate or elite is that the 1k race demands a more aggressive strategy. There simply isn’t time in the race to make large moves if a boat gets left behind off the line.”

For Darvill, the focus of a good strategy at any age comes down to pacing. “One consistently successful strategy we do see at all levels is even pacing,” said Darvill. “You want to minimize big changes in speed because it takes more effort to get the speed back up if you take your foot off the gas pedal. It often takes years of experience for athletes to find where the fine line is. This takes practice and specific training. For 1,000-meter races, you might be able to push a little harder, but you can’t treat it like a 200-meter sprint or you will fly and die.”

And once again, it comes back to the individual. “People need to figure out the best strategy for them,” she said. “There are many things to consider; wind, number of races, temperature, where they are in the season, and so on.  For some it might feel like they can’t race well unless they are ahead of the group. You don’t want to be sitting in wash, so sometimes you need to put yourself out there.”

Rest and Recovery

There are some interesting things that happen from the physiological side of things as athletes age,” said Kington. “I find it is important to continue to engage in high-intensity workouts with aging athletes; however, they will require more time to recover, both in between intervals within a workout and between workouts.”

“We do periodize the training for all of our athletes, regardless of age, but there are some differences within that framework,” he continued. “For instance, a men’s eight in the B age group may be planning to base [rate] at 38 strokes per minute, whereas a women’s quad in the G age group may be planning to base at a 30 for their race. As we approach a priority competition and start doing a lot of race-specific work, both groups would engage in the same workout—say 6 x 3 minutes—but the women’s G quad would do that with more rest between intervals and do the intervals at 26-32 strokes per minute, and the men’s B eight would do it with less rest between intervals and at a 34-40.

On a longer time scale, Darvill said how masters choose to periodize their training “depends on what you want to get out of it, how committed you are, and what your lifestyle allows. Periodization can help athletes in many ways to peak for events, recover properly physically and mentally, and in conjunction with tracking, can help tailor a program to support peak performance.”

Changing things up is a big part of keeping the adaptations coming, including later in life. “I think stimulus change is important for everybody regardless of age,” said Darvill. “Your body gets used to doing something one way, becomes often efficient at it, so changing stimulus is important to improving. A lot of masters have been weekend warriors doing their own thing, but there are so many services out there offering specialized training and targeting areas of weakness. If people are willing to go that route, you can circumvent injury and see improvements in other areas.”

Longevity

The idea that athletes can be proactive in things like injury prevention and longevity in the sport is central to Allison Ray’s mission as head coach at Oakland Strokes Rowing. “As you get older you need more time to recover,” the former assistant coach for Canada’s men’s team told me during a call from California. “As a masters athlete, you have to get really good at the recovery and injury prevention game so you can train as hard as an elite athlete. When I think of older national team rowers, some of those guys have had to train differently.”

While her current work with juniors may seem to put her at the opposite end of the age spectrum to masters, setting her young rowers up for a lifetime of enjoyment and success in rowing is a top priority for Ray.

“The first stage is learning to love the sport,” she told me. “Then learning how to train, then compete, and then how to win and how to lose.”

“A big part of it is helping them develop body awareness,” said Ray. “We have someone come in twice a year and do a functional mobility assessment and she gives us a score for the athletes and they work on things like flexibility and so on.” 

“Teaching them accountability, responsibility, and how to function as part of a rowing team are also important,” adds Ray. “Those things actually lead to longer-term success in the sport. I think there is something about it not being a self-centered experience where they learn the joy of doing things for the team together.”

The most important lesson that Ray seems to be imparting to her juniors, however, is learning how to learn. “Learning to have conversations with coaches, each other, and themselves, learning how to be in new situations like selection, how to seat race, how not to seat race,” she said. “These are skills that will allow you to feel empowered and provide motivation to rowers at all levels to stay with the sport.”

Motivations

When it comes to understanding what motivates people to start rowing and stay with it, U.S. Olympic gold medalist Holly Metcalf knows a thing or two. 

“My first exposure to motivation I had not experienced before was with masters women back in the early ‘90s,” said Metcalf, who is entering her 13th season as head coach for MIT’s open-weight women. “I had just finished my national team career and was coaching at various community programs. During this time, high school rowing was growing, and many women were introduced to rowing through their children.”

“Women in particular were drawn to rowing and wanted to learn to row,” she explained. “Many of these women were pre-Title IX and excited by the fact that they did not have to have prior experience and could start as novices. The motivation for many of the masters women was to experience teamwork—the kind they had observed their children growing so much from—to improve health, to have a community of women outside of their families and work demands, to learn something new, and discover the athlete within.”

“I was shocked by the stories of masters women—and men—being coached with a lack of respect for their desire to learn to row,” recalled Metcalf, who remembers her own feelings of trying to find her place in the sport following success at the international level as an athlete and then coach. She realized that, “what the masters community needed was respect for where they were in their lives and for the depth of experience they had in life.”

So she developed one of the first masters women’s rowing camps in America that offered quality instruction and, more importantly, what Metcalf called an “environment supportive of their journey into rowing. For those who never considered themselves competitive, they discovered a natural desire to find more speed as their knowledge grew.”

From her first successful Row as One camp she took her philosophy to Boston’s inner-city schools with G-Row Boston, fostering leadership for girls. Her next initiative, WeCanRow, has spread across the nation and focuses on bringing the life-changing power of rowing to the breast cancer survivor community. “With all groups, we shared the same love of feeling the sum of the strength of nine people connecting strength through the demands of moving together, being intense together, finding grit together.”

The Mental Game

Grittiness is something talked about a lot these days when it comes to sport psychology. For Darvill, staying on top of the mental game is what separates the best from the rest.

“Mental training is particularly important for masters rowers in racing and is a big part of enhancing peak performance. We all know that the adrenalin push helps rowers get through those last few strokes, however it is important to find ways to stay on task throughout the race. You train your body to perform during racing, and in the same vein your mental game needs to be honed.”

The social aspect of masters rowing shouldn’t be ignored either she added. “We are now seeing larger subscriptions to masters racing, which often involve training camps and social activities at the regattas. For many this social aspect is a large draw to the sport. For both new and returning athletes it is important to understand what type of experience they want and this will help guide their training and approach to seeking out the best training environment.

“Athletes do tend to want to get different things out of the sport as they age,” agreed Kington. “Our youngest groups are very concerned with competition, while our oldest groups seem to get more out of the sense of community and enjoy racing with athletes with whom they’ve been racing and training for decades. Obviously, there are individuals within these groups for whom the opposite trends hold true, but that seems to be the case on average.”

“In the same sense, athletes that are hoping to get different things out of the sport respond best to different coaching styles. I don’t know if it’s accurate to say that I coach large groups differently, such as the junior women one way and the masters men another, but I definitely try to learn what each individual within a group is after and try to find what styles of coaching will be most effective for them.”

For coaches and athletes then, finding the right mental space seems to come down to managing expectations and setting appropriate goals. Fortunately it is never too late—or too early—to plant the seeds of mental toughness.

“For us,” Ray said of her juniors, “the goal-setting is focused around what is happening at the boathouse and at school, short term and long term. Having a process to follow up on it is critical—socializing it in their day to day at the boathouse so they are having conversations with each other about how they are doing.” There is also a mental health aspect to all of this, as the door gets pushed open to provide a safe space for important conversations to take place.

“We’ve had kids down here before and they’ve been struggling and we say, ‘OK, just tell me if today is not a good day and we can figure out what to do.” When it comes to individualizing experience, it can be difficult, Ray said. “In the context of 100 kids, it comes down to what small things can you do if kids are having a hard time? We do spend time trying to motivate them to come and talk to us if things are difficult. And having limits and cultural standards on your own team about how they talk to each other, being good teammates. These sound like simple things, but being disciplined about it creates the environment that helps with mental health.”

The Sky’s the Limit

The idea of an age limit on top performance is a common view, but Darvill thinks it’s time to rethink what older athletes can do. “The mind will usually go before the body,” she said. “Diminishing will and desire likely precede physical limitations. That being said, some masters rowers have all of a sudden found a fountain of youth and dedicate large amounts of effort and time into their training and racing.”

“Every athlete can find something to help them improve, whether it is nutrition or integrating some stretching routine,” Darvill continued. “We do not know a lot about the limits of what masters can do because they usually do not follow a high-performance plan and often do not have proper systems in place to maximize performance. There are many ways to circumvent a decline in performance that are still untapped.”

“As the baby boomer retirement generation grows and their lifestyle changes, we will see more people devoting time to fitness. For rowing, the increased access to coaching, training regimes, and great racing opportunities around the world only serves to increase the appeal and enjoyment to both veteran and novice rowers alike.”  

The post Training Through the Ages appeared first on Rowing News.

*This piece originally ran in the September 2018 issue of Rowing News

When Dick Dreissigacker and Judy Geer took over the Craftsbury Outdoor Center in 2008, they knew they had the chance to make an already good thing even better.

Founded by Russell and Janet Spring in the mid-1970s, the Craftsbury Outdoor Center in Craftsbury, Vt., was originally an all-boys prep school the Spring family turned into a training center for Nordic skiers and rowers interested in learning to scull. Each summer, Judy and Dick would travel to Craftsbury for one week to guest coach the sculling camps, a group comprised of athletes of all ages and skill levels, eager to master the art of rowing small boats.

Through the Craftsbury camp system, Dick and Judy taught their two daughters to scull at an early age and, eventually, to ski.

“Up here it’s a long winter,” Judy says laughing, “and so we taught our kids to ski early on. In turn, they got to know the other kids who were cross-country skiing at the center. At that time, Craftsbury had hired a new cross-country skiing coach who wanted to start a junior program, and so we asked Hannah, our oldest, ‘Do you want to be a part of this program?’ and she said yes. We’ve been involved ever since.”

(Hannah, by the way, would go on to compete in the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014 as a biathlete. Her sister Emily competed in biathlon in the 2018 Winter Games.) 

In 2008 Dick and Judy purchased the training center from the Spring family and reorganized as a non-profit to ensure the Craftsbury experience would be around for generations to come. Judy notes that she and Dick worked closely with the Springs during the transition, reflecting on what Craftsbury had been, and sharing visions on what it could be. Today, Craftsbury is a training center for elite rowers, Nordic skiers, bikers, and more recently, runners. It is arguably the most energy-efficient training facility in the country, and has built a strong reputation on its sustainable innovation and reliable snow.

Ask any Craftsbury athlete or coach, however, and they’ll likely tell you that above all, the center is a special kind of utopia. The Craftsbury Outdoor Center is many things, and in some ways, they’re just getting started. 

When Judy describes the foundation of the Outdoor Center, she quickly points to the mission statement by which the athletes, coaches, and members of the larger community live.

“We created a mission for the Outdoor Center, which has three prongs,” she says. “To support and promote participation and excellence in lifelong sports with a special focus on rowing, Nordic skiing, biathlon, and running; to use and teach sustainable practices; and to be good stewards of the surrounding land, lake, and trails.”

While sustainability—especially at scale—requires ongoing effort, Craftsbury is happy to rise to the occasion. Judy explains that in exchange for three organic meals per day, housing in the dorms, access to equipment, coaching, and all-expenses-paid travel to important competitions, Craftsbury Green Racing Project athletes (the official name for their post-collegiate group of elite rowers, cross-country skiers and biathletes), give back by dedicating 10 hours per week or 500 hours per year to the center by working on projects that support the mission.

Depending on the day, this could mean anything from working in the garden to splitting wood to trail maintenance, helping design a new building, or analyzing the energy uses of existing buildings. Oftentimes, too, giving back includes either mentoring or coaching junior or novice athletes. Judy notes that this idea of contributing to the larger community helps provide balance for athletes training at the elite level, while simultaneously creating a community by and for athletes of all ages.

“It’s an ongoing challenge,” she says. “These kids have to fly all over the world [to compete], and it’s not easy to be a team that way and be green. But we would, of course, rather try than not try at all.”

“These kids have to fly all over the world [to compete], and it’s not easy to be a team that way and be green. But we would, of course, rather try than not try at all.”

-Judy Geer

When Stephen Whelpley, former U.S. senior national team rower and Green Racing Project (GRP) alum returned to Craftsbury in 2017 to assume the role of head coach for the GRP rowing squad, he was already familiar with the green ways of life so central to the community. In addition to the benefits of sustainability at Craftsbury, Whelpley recalls the positive impact cross-training had on his career as a rower.

“When I joined GRP as an athlete back in 2012, I had never before cross-country skied,” he says. “That whole first year when you do it, you may be inefficient and have to augment what you do on skis with other indoor work on the erg or the bike, but by year two, it’s an invaluable cross-training tool.” 

Whelpley continues, explaining how Judy and Dick still today find new ways to harmonize their athletic initiatives with their vision to be as energy-efficient as possible across the center. Most recently, that has involved a snow-saving study in partnership with the University of Vermont, that tests and refines methods of storing snow over the summer months, with the goal of lengthening the Nordic ski season in late fall and early winter, while simultaneously reducing the energy costs and carbon emissions associated with snowmaking.

“We began almost sort of joking about it,” Judy chuckles, but Paul Bierman, who is a professor of geology at the University of Vermont and a Craftsbury member along with his kids, said, ‘We can do this, and I have a masters student named Hannah Weiss who would be a great asset to this project.’ From there, it all came together.” 

Judy explains that storing snow over the summer is both an art and a science, as it requires managing energy gains and losses to the snow pile, understanding which methods of insulation work best and are most sustainable over time, and of course, predicting melt rates that inform how much snow should be stored in order to net out to the desired amount. Right now, the center’s goal is to successfully store roughly 2,000 meter’s worth of snow to help lengthen the ski season, and act as a buffer for unexpected warm days or periods during the winter.

“Early races are something you stress about getting enough snow made for,” Judy says, “and the later races are challenging because you don’t want to make too much snow. This is where having that cushion would be a very nice thing.”

Judy notes that Craftsbury wanted to be in a position to host more racing, especially at the bookends of the season in November and March, and that snowmaking only works when temperatures drop below a certain threshold.

“Unfortunately, more recently, rising temperatures mean Craftsbury isn’t getting cold enough by the time we want to have snow,” she says. “And so what a lot of places in Scandinavia, and a few in Canada and southern Germany do, is save a huge pile of snow in the winter, and cover it with something during the warmer months … sawdust, wood chips, etc. What we’re looking at now is what’s going to be the best for us at Craftsbury. It’s science, combined with economics and environmental concerns, including the efficiency, the logistics and costs. It’s truly a multifaceted study.”

Part of what makes this project both challenging and interesting, is that the insulation methods that may work for one country or climate won’t necessarily work for another, since energy is transferred from the environment to the snow piles in different ways. Professor Bierman and Hannah Weiss, alongside Judy and Dick, must constantly consider the ways in which heat is conducted from the ground below to the base of the pile, since that variable directly affects the rate at which the protected snow will melt.

“They have fascinating monitoring equipment that can measure how fast the pile is shrinking,” Judy explains, “and temperature monitors that we put below the pile and then in the pile to help compare the different layers of insulating materials, in order to determine which are ultimately going to work best.”

Other variables the team must consider include the changing ground temperature during the warmer months, seasonal rain, and the increasing temperatures each year that warm the top of the insulating layer during the day, and in turn, melt the pile from the top down. The best conditions to store snow are of course cold, but also dry. If the air is dry, evaporative cooling from moist wood chips or sawdust will help remove energy from the stored pile of snow, rising out of the snow into the cool, dry air. 

An added bonus of snow storage for the center is that it allows the team to focus on making artificial snow only on the coldest nights mid-winter, when it is most efficient from a power and water perspective. Right now, Craftsbury has two experimental piles, but the plan is to refine the project for next year and in years to come based on this year’s findings.

“These are two experimental piles we knew weren’t going to be enough,” Judy explains, “but they should enable Hannah and Professor Bierman to create a model for how much snow we’ll need, based on how much snow they forecast we’ll lose. We’ll probably lose a good third of our snow, so that just means we have to save that much more,” she notes.

At the same time, Judy and team recognize that the journey is part of the process.

“We had some fun on the fourth of July,” she says, “and dug out a bit of snow for the local kids to sled on. It was a lot of fun.”

From a racing perspective, Whelpley notes that more and more important cross-country skiing competitions are being held at Craftsbury because of the center’s reliable snow, a reputation the study will only help uphold. He recalls his time as a GRP athlete and his role in helping make Craftsbury’s artificial snow making process as efficient as possible.

“One of the biggest byproducts of snow making is that the generator has to cook like crazy,” he says. “It pumps water from down below and helps run the process of pumping the water out and making it freeze, which, in turn, throws off a ton of heat. There was a neat, innovative project that preceded this process, where the team ran tubes underground and through ventilators into the shed where the generator lives, picking up the exhaust heat, and using it to heat a 50,000 gallon bladder, which I helped install as an GRP athlete.”

Whelpley explains that the bladder stays hot because it is insulated inside a cement box that functions as a heat reservoir, from which the center sources their domestic hot water for faucets, as well as for much of the radiant heating throughout the building, replacing the need for fossil fuels.

“We are very conscious that this thing we do to make our livelihood possible has byproducts,” he says, “and I think that’s an example of really interesting problem-solving. As a first step, we always look at what is already in place. In the case of the snow storing project, we looked at what was around us and recognized that if you have the snow, man-made or natural, why wouldn’t you try saving it?”

“We looked at what was around us and recognized that if you have the snow, man-made or natural, why wouldn’t you try saving it?”

-Stephen Whelpley

Olympic hopeful and Green Racing Project athlete Jennifer Forbes couldn’t agree more. When asked about the benefits of the snow storing study, and more generally, of having access to cross-country skiing trails and equipment as an elite rower, she is quick, like Whelpley, to acknowledge the ways in which Craftsbury’s variety of training options have helped her.

“I’ve always wanted to learn how to cross-country ski because I felt like that would be an amazing way for me to get off the erg,” she says. “After my back surgery, I was able to come to Craftsbury and do something that developed my hip and lower body strength, while still getting a killer cardiovascular workout. And, of course, there is the added bonus of being outside in the winter. You still need to stay in touch with the erg, but a lot of my work I did outside once I got proficient at skiing. Mentally it was great, but physically my body felt more balanced.”

From a coaching perspective, Whelpley says this type of cross-training is equally as appealing.

“You don’t have to come in an already savvy skier. Cross-country skiing as a form of cross-training is something you see across a lot of the successful European rowing teams. Look at the Sinkovic brothers [of Croatia], they ski. The Norwegians obviously ski, the British team skis, it just keeps going on and on, and I think that is because it’s such a therapeutic way for your body to get aerobic volume done without it taking a toll. There are a lot of other perks like balance on the skis that can translate to balance in the boat, and of course, there is a rhythm play that happens, too.”

Whelpley explains that cross-country skiing taught him how to work and rest at the same time, a notion familiar to rowers who are constantly perfecting the inherent dichotomy between the drive and the recovery.

“When you’re gliding on the ski you can’t turn off completely and be a bowl of Jell-O,” he says. “You still have to find a way to move that ski forward and relax at the same time. Everything we do in rowing is partial extension of the hip joint, and whether you prefer classic or skate skiing, both are therapeutic and engage your glutes while extending the hips. The injuries that our sport are most prone to are connected to overuse, and the imbalances that are derived from it. I think this type of cross-training makes rowers better athletes in the long run,” he says. 

While the Craftsbury and larger skiing community will have to wait and see what findings this initial snow storing study will bring, there are a few things we know for sure. So long as athletes continue to train and live at the center, Craftsbury will continue to innovate. Forbes describes just a few of the reasons the center is so special to her, quick to cite Dick and Judy’s support first and foremost.

“Dick and Judy are incredibly generous and supportive, and not just physically by giving us the things that we need in order to successfully train, like boats and a place to live,” she says. “The food is amazing, the air is clean, the water is clear, and it’s simply this little piece of paradise. My soul is very happy being here, and I think a lot of people share that notion. It’s a nice place to live.”   

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Full disclosure: I slouch. But I am not alone.

Many of the masters I have coached over the years slouch too. This is not a strong position for rowing.

Instead, aim to sit up straight with your head over your shoulders and hips and your eyes on the horizon. This is not only a biomechanically better way to approach the stroke, it also puts you in a better position to ensure you are using your full lung capacity.

Poor posture is a source of not only back pain, but also muscle fatigue, breathing limitations, and arthritic joints. When our bodies are out of line our muscles have to work harder.

Prolonged slouching begets more slouching, with tightening tendons and muscles contributing to a default slouch position. Keeping your head up will help you keep your back straight.

On the recovery, try swinging a straight back from the hips to achieve proper forward body angle. Take time on the release to catch your breath and make sure your shoulders are relaxed, but not rounded. 

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