Month: November 2015

Q&A Rowing Training & Nutrition

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Hi, I wanted to know if you if you have any advice on goals that you could set yourself. I’m 14 years old and I’m female, I’m 5’9 pushing 5’10 and participate in a lot of sports so I have a tall lean but muscular build. My high school doesn’t have a rowing team so I have joined a club. I really like rowing and I’ve been rowing for about 6 months. My coach is great and I row in a quad, double, and single (all scull). I row 4 times a week and I’m starting to become successful but I want to set myself some goals so I can keep improving. We are going to start gym sessions soon so I was wondering if you have any tips on times or achievements I should aim for?

This would be a great question to ask your coach because he/she would be able to give you a more specific answer than I can since they know your current times and all that stuff. Without knowing any of that it’s hard to give any concrete advice but I will say that whatever times you do end up aiming for, have that be the end goal but also have targets to hit at various intervals leading up to that as well. If you’re currently at an 8:00 2k and you want to be at 7:40 by spring break, determine how often you want to test yourself in between now and then and what times you’re shooting for with each test (i.e. 7:55, 7:50, 7:45, 7:40…).   It’s a lot more effective to be able to check off a small goal each month than to just aimlessly work towards a bigger goal that is three, six, nine months down the road.

When you’re in the gym, if you’re doing a bodyweight or plank circuit, try to add reps or time every couple of days. For example, if you’re doing 30 second planks, after two or three sessions add 10 seconds. If you can comfortably hold it, do 40 second planks for a couple sessions before bumping it up again. If you can’t complete whatever additional amount of time/reps you add, go back to the previous amount. The goal is to slowly build upon whatever you’re already doing. When you’re on the ergs, consider getting a heart rate monitor so you can track your workouts and make sure you’re training in the right HR zones when you’re doing steady state. This can help a lot with tracking your progress towards your goals (because if you’re training the way you should be you should in theory be able to hit your targets with little to no issue).

Q&A Training & Nutrition

Question of the Day

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Any ideas for a holiday-themed practice?

Santa hats for the coaches, elf ears for the coxswains, and the rowers wearing reindeer antlers while doing a 10k in teams of four (or eight, if you’ve got that kind of space) on linked sliders. Christmas music playing in the background, obviously. Team breakfast/dinner + Secret Santa afterwards.

Alternatively, a 12 days of Christmas themed “circuit”. 1 lap around the exterior of the boathouse, 2 flights of stairs, 3 pullups, 10 spiderman pushups, 11 reverse crunches, 12 second plank, etc..  Holiday-inspired unis optional.

College Q&A Rowing

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Firstly thank you for writing your blog its been really helpful to me!! Secondly I had a question about heavyweight/lightweight in college. I’m a lightweight junior and I’m 5’4”. I would love to row D1 in college and it seems that there’s a possibility my erg score will become competitive enough to get some attention from openweight programs. What do you think the pros and cons would be of being a smaller person on an openweight team?

If you’re a lightweight with times that can get an openweight coach’s attention I’d say you’re probably in a pretty good position to make an immediate impact on the team. That right there is a huge pro, not just for you but for the coaches too. The two other pros/cons that immediately come to mind though are…

Pro: More opportunities/wider range of choices since there are more openweight programs than there are lightweight ones. If you’re interested in the schools that have top lightweight teams (Stanford, Harvard, Wisco, Princeton, BU…) then I definitely wouldn’t rule them out but because there are fewer schools that offer lightweight rowing, you’d be limiting yourself if you only looked at those schools.

Another pro is that since lightweight rowers have to rely a lot more on technique to move boats than heavyweight rowers do (who can get by with raw power and mediocre technique), this could give you an advantage when it comes time to make lineups.

Con: Maybe slightly contradictory to my last point but getting into the top boats will probably be harder if you’re competing with women who are 20+ pounds heavier (and 10, 15, 20+ seconds faster) than you. That’s not to say it’s impossible but I think it’d be an uphill battle to say the least.

Another issue that I hadn’t considered until recently has to do with body image/eating disorders. I was emailing with someone over the summer who said she had a really hard time last year (her freshman year) dealing with the amount of the muscle/weight she gained from training after going from a pretty thin lightweight in high school to openweight in college. I think it was a conflicting issue for her because she was doing really well on the team, had great times, was in good boats, etc. but just seeing her body change from the increased amount of lifting, fueling, etc. was difficult for her to process. There were some unhealthy decisions that cropped up that led to her seeing a counselor on campus and is something that, as of the last time we talked, she’s still dealing with (although in a healthier/smarter way than before).

It might seem out-of-the-box and like I said, it’s not something that would have even crossed my mind if you’d asked the same question in the spring but now that it’s been brought up I do think it’s something you have to at least think about. You know yourself better than anyone else so you’d have to consider how you would fare in a similar situation. Obviously it’s not a make-or-break issue for most people (at least in my experience with the handful of lightweights I know that have rowed on openweight teams) but it’s worth pausing to think about.

Coxing Q&A

Question of the Day

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Hi, so I have been a rower for 2 years and on my high school rowing team next year there will be a few coxswains leaving because they are seniors. I am making my transition to coxing so by next year I will a cox. I have tried coxing once and I realized how difficult steering is, I won’t be able to practice steering on an actual boat until spring season in March but how can I practice steering so I will be ready? Are there like video games to help steering a boat that I could try? Any recommendations or advice?

Don’t overthink steering. I’ll always consider it the hardest skill to master with coxing and it is tricky when you first start out (which is normal … cannot stress that enough) but it’s nowhere near as difficult or panic-inducing as people make it out to be. The best thing you can do to “practice” steering before the spring is to learn the traffic pattern of your river/lake, read up on the basics, how to dock, how to spin, etc., and talk to the other coxswains to see what advice they have. The more aware you are of this stuff before going out the less likely you’ll be to freeze up in the moment and potentially put yourself in a bad situation.

Here’s some questions/posts to start with (you can find a lot more in the steering tag here).

Tips & Tricks: How to steer an eight

What do coaches look for in a coxswain?

Cutting corners

Coxswain skills 101, part one (oversteering) and part two (always steering vs. never steering)

Do you have any advice for a novice coxswain who just crashed for the first time? It really shook me up, and I know I won’t be able to get back in the boat for a few days (due to our walk-on coxswain rotation) but I want to get over it.

I heard that you should just steer whilst the blades are in the water to reduce drag and maintain the set. Does that mean I only move the strings when the blades are in, or do I return them to the straight position during the recovery? The latter doesn’t seem like it would turn the boat much.

The other day I was stuck in the center lane. Let’s just say it didn’t go so well. How do you concentrate on boats on either side of you/your point, your rowers, making calls and stroke rate? Ack, overwhelmed!

Any tips on how to properly dock an 8+?

College Recruiting: Managing your time as a student-athlete + narrowing down your list of schools

College Recruiting

College Recruiting: Managing your time as a student-athlete + narrowing down your list of schools

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Previously: Intro || The recruiting timeline + what to consider || What do coaches look at? || Contacting coaches, pt. 1 ||  Contacting coaches, pt. 2 || Contacting coaches, pt. 3 || Contacting coaches, pt. 4 || Highlight videos + the worst recruiting emails || Official/unofficial visits + recruiting rules recap || When scholarships aren’t an option

Time management is a skill that, luckily, rowing teaches us early on in our careers. Managing your time in high school is a lot different than managing it in college because you go from having a very structured schedule to an abundance of free time and no structure. Whatever structure there is is there because you created it. Knowing how much time you want to spend rowing (and all that that entails) ahead of time can go a long way in helping you keep your head above water once you get into the grind of classes. D1/D2 is obviously going to take up a larger chunk of time than a D3/club program so that’s something to keep in mind as you look at schools and consider how capable you are/need to be at regulating yourself accordingly.

To give you an idea of the time commitment, the NCAA limits the number of hours you can practice per week at 20 when you’re in-season with no more than four hours per day and at least one day off per week. We – a D1 men’s team – are usually around 15ish with 7-8 rows and two lifts per week (which is on the lower side for the Sprints league). To keep track of this, there are time sheets that the captains sign off on that indicate how many hours we practiced that gets turned into the compliance office at regular intervals. Our “off-season” (winter training) starts today so we’re down to eight hour  weeks until sometime in late February-ish, which means that the only mandatory practice time is our 90 minute erg/tank sessions on M-F mornings. Our lifts, which were previously mandatory, are now “on your own” and there’s more responsibility on the guys to get a second workout in on their own time to make up for not having a second row or Saturday practices. All of this is done on top of an incredibly rigorous course load, going to regular office hours, part-time jobs, UROPs (undergrad research), flying all over the country for job interviews, etc.

One of the biggest challenges in managing your time is being disciplined enough to take advantage of little opportunities, like breaks between classes or, if you’re a coxswain, land workouts where there’s not much coxing to be done, in order to get some reading done, start homework, etc. Your schedule will ebb and flow a lot more too than it did in high school so there will be times when everything is manageable and pretty low-key, other times you’ll have “hell weeks” where you’ll be pulling your hair out as you try to balance your responsibilities with the team and your responsibilities as a student. There’s no sense in pretending that doesn’t happen either or assuming that because no one mentioned it during the campus tours that no one at that school has to worry about it. You quickly learn that, for better or worse, all the “free time” you have isn’t actually free time if you want to stay on top of everything.

Transitioning now to narrowing down your list of schools, one of the most important rules of this whole process is to not tell (or think you have to tell) multiple schools that they’re your #1 choice because, as I’ve said many times already, coaches talk and word can/will quickly get around that you’re just fishing to see who takes the bait. If it’s early in the process and you don’t know where certain schools stand or which one is your favorite, don’t say “I don’t know” or be non-commital if the coaches ask … just say that “it’s still early in the process, I’m still researching places, etc.”. Obviously if it’s later on and you kinda need to be ranking your schools, you need to have a better answer than that so if you’re still struggling to determine where schools fall, say something like “I’ve narrowed down my top two to Dartmouth and Penn but am having a tough time naming a true #1 because I could see myself being a part of both schools/programs.” If that’s the case in your situation, many of the coaches all said that your ultimate decision must be based on the school, social scene, and the community at large because rowing is just rowing and it isn’t/shouldn’t be what makes or breaks your college experience. You will be a lot happier choosing a place based on how you feel as a potential member of the community vs. choosing a school based on who tells you your’e the best (which is the trap people fall into with recruiting).

Next week: Coaches interest and being recruited from small programs

Image via // @washingtonrowing

Coxing High School Q&A Teammates & Coaches

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Hi I’ve been recently reading your blog and have really enjoyed your posts. I have a question to ask you. I am in a high school crew and last year was my novice year. I spent the whole fall season rowing and also did winter conditioning, but I hoped I could become a coxswain. About half way through spring my coach realized that we needed a coxswain, and since I was light and eager to cox he used me as coxswain about once a week and I was able to cox four 4+ races, but they were always B boats because I was only the “part-time” coxswain. In the summer I rowed. Then this fall, my first varsity season, all but one of our coxswains, a girl who had coxed the guys novice last year during the spring were gone, participating in other activities. The coaches decided to make me the head girls varsity coxswain and, we’ll call her Maddie, the head boys varsity coxswain. At first I struggled a lot because I had hardly any instruction, and I was basically a novice varsity coxswain. Many of the rowers became exasperated with me. They would talk bad about me in the boat and at the boat house, and they would frequently decide to tap or back seat cox. About two weeks into the season, Sarah, a coxswain who has been coxing for 5 years and just last spring took a lightweight men’s 4+ to Nationals and placed 2nd, returned after being begged by one of our coaches. Instantly my problem became worse and the rowers would compare me to Sarah and wouldn’t take me seriously. Sarah and Maddie became close friends and have been excluding me and telling the rowers I am the worst coxswain to ever exist; they don’t take me seriously and think of me as a rower. The problem has only gotten worse as I’ve improved because Maddie seems to feel threatened by me because we are both in the same grade. So, my question is: how can I gain the respect of my fellow coxswains and the rowers after rowing for a year? Thanks for reading my long question, and I really hope you can answer it and help me gain some respect.

Check the “respect” tag as well as the post linked below. There’s plenty of stuff in both those links that’ll give you ideas for how to earn respect from the rowers.

As for the coxswains, you kinda just have to be the bigger person, ignore their bullshit, and find a way to communicate/work with them. Icing out another coxswain because you’re “threatened” by them or don’t like them or whatever is just petty and I get that you’re in high school so that’s like, the norm for that age but at some point you have to wake up and realize that doing that isn’t just hurting whoever’s on the receiving end of it, it’s hurting the entire team. You can say exactly that to them too (nicely but still firm enough to make your point) and to be honest, you probably should. Maybe part of the reason why they say this stuff about you is because they think they can get away with it because (they think) you won’t stand up for yourself or say anything back to them. I don’t think you need to engage them in any way but you shouldn’t let them walk all over you either.

Related: Some things to know as a novice coxswain

If Sarah is a good coxswain, which it sounds like she is, then presumably you have stuff you can learn from her so try to get on her good side by asking her questions, talking to her about how she’s coxed the boats she’s had in the past, proposing hypotheticals like “how would you deal with XYZ if this was your boat…”, etc. Sometimes that’s the best/easiest way to deal with a difficult person … flatter them and make them feel like you getting to learn from them is the greatest experience ever. Don’t be over the top about it or come off super fake because then they’ll just think you’re being passive aggressive (which in turn will only ramp up their collective attitude problem) … just approach it like you would a normal conversation with any other person. Hopefully doing that will give you a chance to develop a better working relationship with her and let her see that you’re not the enemy just because you’re a new-ish coxswain who’s still learning the ropes.

Coxing Q&A

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Hi, do you have any tips on staying motivated through a long winter? This is my fifth year coxing at high school and as usual we are heading into a long winter and the girls are doing a ton of small boats stuff. This means I am rarely out on the water coxing (once since May last year, actually). I feel like I’m losing all my motivation, I don’t want to attend practice as I used to, and dread every session even though I love my team. I really don’t want to be training at the moment but I know if I quit now I will regret it in the summer, thinking about how amazing it was racing at nationals last year, and how much I want to do so again. The summer really is amazing but at the moment it is too far away to even comprehend!! Obviously watching them row in smaller boats from a launch can be beneficial but after so many hours it gets a bit tiresome. I know winter isn’t the most enjoyable for rowers either but at least they are developing and improving… I hope this makes sense! Have you ever felt like this?

I actually felt like that this past year. I absolutely love my team but there were times this past winter/spring where I questioned if that was enough to keep me coming back every day. When I first applied for the job  the coach I was talking to told me straight up that the team is small and how much coaching I was able to do would be dependent on our numbers. Last year we were really small and only had an eight and a four, which meant I wasn’t going to have my own boat to coach. Occasionally I’d take the four out if the other coaches both wanted to go out with the eight but I spent the majority of the year being a launch puppy.

Once I get bored with something I lose interest fast and I felt that happening starting sometime in late January. I’d wake up at 5am, be at the boathouse by 6am, sit around for two hours, go to work, come home … rinse, wash, repeat. There were a few times when I thought about telling the other coaches that I was just not coming anymore (during the winter) because technically they didn’t need me but I never did because even though I know they would have been fine with that, I’d signed up for this. Showing up everyday, even on the days I had zero interest in driving the 20+ minutes in sub-10 degree, snowy weather to stare at bunch of ergs, was just part of the job (at least from my perspective). I knew that negative mentality had more to do with not feeling like I had a sense of purpose than anything else so that was when I started to really ramp up what I was doing with the coxswains. I looked at it like if there wasn’t something for me to do I’d come up with something on my own and that’s what I did. We watched video, listened to recordings, shared stories about past races, talked about the technique we were seeing on the ergs, or just sat in the lounge and complained about stuff (which sounds unproductive but it was fun and actually gave me a lot of good ideas). In the spring when I was in the launch I’d take a lot of notes (either mentally or on my phone) on what we were doing, what the other coaches was saying, etc. and then I’d pass that along to the coxswain(s) to use for the next race/practice. It was a good way for me to feel productive and in turn it helped the coxswains, which by that point had been firmly established as my “niche” on the team.

Being bored during the winter is a given. It’s going to happen so you just kinda have to accept that it comes with the territory of being a coxswain. I think it’s good to not always have something to do (like you do when you’re on the water) and to be able to just sit and quietly watch but it does get old after awhile. If you don’t have something to do, come up with something on your own. See if you can get the other coxswains on board with having weekly meetups during practice where you talk about a recent race, film the rowers on the ergs so you can study their technique, crowdsource calls for races, practice, drills, etc., … stuff like that. The winter is a GREAT time to work on your technical eye so try to come up with (as juvenile as it sounds) “activities” that focus on that. (You can obviously do that on your own but I think it’s a good idea to do it in a group when you can.) At the very least, this would be a GREAT opportunity for you to step up (as, I’m assuming, one of the more experienced coxswains on the team) and take the initiative to help train the younger coxswains.

Don’t be afraid to take some time off either. I’ve said this every year but outside of the summer, the winter (particularly the start of winter training/anytime before Christmas) is really the only opportunity that coxswains have to take a break. If you’re feeling burned out, bored, or you need to get back on track with classes, talk with your coaches and see if you can work something out. Obviously don’t say “I’m bored and don’t want to come anymore, hit me up when it’s time to go back on the water!” but just communicate how you’re feeling and if the coaches don’t foresee any immediate need for you to be at practice, see if it would it be possible to take a couple days/week/two weeks off to recharge. If they absolutely insist that you come every day, bring a notebook on the water with you and start taking notes. I try to write down just about everything the coaches say (to individuals and the whole crew) on technique, as well as whatever offhand phrases they say that could potentially turn into calls so I can share it with the coxswains later. “Try less hard to go faster” is one of my recent favorites. I’ve been working on this for most of the fall so I’ll probably spend some time next week now that we’re indoors organizing the Google Sheet I’ve got everything sitting in so it’s ready to go for our training trip in January. A project like that might sound sorta unnecessary in theory but I think it’s useful and it’s a good way to utilize time that I’d otherwise spend mindlessly staring at erg monitors.

Novice Q&A Racing

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Hello! I was wondering if you had any advice for not panicking during a head race? I’m a novice rower who usually rows stroke in doubles. During practices everything is fine. Mock races are great, good start, ratio, and pressure … but during the last two actual regattas I started panicking when the head race started and my rate was too fast with no pressure and I felt like it was endless and I couldn’t push … it almost felt like I had to give up! Do you had any advice?

If things are good during practice then the issue is more likely you just letting your nerves get to you rather than you getting to the starting line and panicking because you feel unprepared (which is another reason why people freak out at the start). I used to always get really nervous before the start of a race too so before our boat would meet to start our land warmup I’d find a quiet spot well away from the boats, other people, etc. and just sit for 10-15 minutes to try and relax. Sometimes I’d go lay in our trailer if it was a short walk away and other times I’d go into the boathouse and find a stairwell to sit in. I totally sabotaged myself during one of my first races as a novice by letting my nerves get to me and it was a total shitshow (at least on my end) so I learned quickly that I needed to take a few minutes to get out of my own head before we launched. During the row up to the start I’d always try to focus on my breathing too (long, slow, deep breaths), that way I’d always have something to focus on even when I wasn’t making calls to the boat.

Related: I’m a novice rower and I’m racing in my 1st head race this weekend, any tips? I’m freaking out!

The more experienced I got the less nervous I’d be by the time we got to the starting line but even now the buildup of adrenaline still makes me antsy. Once I catch myself drumming my fingers on the gunnels I know I need to close my eyes and take a couple deep breaths to get back to that relaxed baseline feeling I had on the row up. I talk to myself a lot while we’re sitting there too (in my head, not out loud … that’d be weird), usually just to remind myself to chill out, the crew trusts me and has my back, etc. Each of my stroke seats and I (or bow seats if I’m in a four) have always had our own little thing we’d do too (fist bumps, “secret handshakes”, things we’d say to one another, etc.) and that’s kinda the last little thing I need to get me 100% dialed in. At that point there’s no time left to be panicked or antsy because I’ve got a job to do so whatever nervous energy I have left just has to be channeled into calling the race.

Related: How should a coxswain deal with pre-race doubts and jitters?

I’d recommend doing something similar before your next race – find somewhere quiet to collect your thoughts before you launch, subtly focus on your breathing on the row up, and dial yourself in at the line so your start is as controlled and powerful as possible. What works for everyone is a little different so you’ll probably have to tweak all that to make it work for you but eventually you’ll get into a pre-race routine that leaves no room for nerves to take over.