Year: 2016

Coxswain skills: Steering a buoyed course

Coxing Racing

Coxswain skills: Steering a buoyed course

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Previously: Steering, pt. 1 || Steering, pt. 2  || Boat feel || How to handle a negative coxswain eval || How to cox steady state workouts || How to cox short, high intensity workouts || Race steering

Today’s post is going to be a super quick recap-ish post on strategies for steering a buoyed course. I’ve gotten several emails about this lately and with IRAs this weekend and Youth Nationals coming up soon, this will hopefully be a good last-minute refresher for anyone that hasn’t had much experience with buoyed courses (which apparently is more common than I thought it was).

I talked a lot about race steering in the last post (linked below) so I won’t regurgitate what I said there but a point that does bear repeating is that if you’re thinking about steering during your race, something has already gone wrong.

Related: Coxswain skills: Race steering

There are four things you can loosely focus on when you’re on a buoyed course to help you maintain a straight course. They include:

A point far off in the distance (like a building or tower on the skyline)

The center line where the buoys meet

The distance that one side’s blades are off the buoy line

The buoy line that’s just ahead of you

When looking at the buoys just up ahead, it’s similar to standing on the street and looking one block up, then you walk a block and look up at the next block. You’re taking it one chunk at a time as opposed to looking down the whole street, or course in this case. I’m personally not a huge fan of this approach because I think it pulls your attention back to your steering more than it should but if the idea of looking straight down the whole course at once is a little daunting, this could be an approach worth trying.

The center-line approach is a commonly used one but coxswains tend to overthink it and freak out because they can’t actually see where the buoys meet because the rowers are in their way. This is where good coxswains separate themselves from the rest because a good coxswain would be able to use their critical thinking skills and common sense (more so the latter than the former, to be honest) to realize that obviously the point where the buoys meet won’t be visible when you’re actually following a straight course. The goal here is to point yourself at the start so that the center line is “hidden” behind the rowers and then to use whatever’s on either side of that point to maintain a course straight down the middle between them.

The last approach is to use your peripheral vision to maintain an equal distance between the blades and the buoy line. This is best used in tandem with focusing on the center-line or a point off in the distance. It’s also easy to practice too when you’re rowing side-by-side with another crew at home (sans buoys) since keeping the crews close without clashing blades is an important part of practice management. The one downside to it is that if you focus too hard on one buoy line it can tend to pull you over to that side. I have a tendency to do this so my go-to is to always look straight ahead and focus on the center-line.

Buoy lines ultimately are not a hard thing to handle, even if you don’t have a ton of experience with them. The last two years at Sprints I’ve seen a lot of coxswains, mostly freshman/walk-ons I assume, nervously asking their coaches what to point at, how to hold a point between the buoys, etc. and it’s very obvious that they’re thinking way too hard about it. Buoys are your friend so don’t think about them more than you need to – they’re there to make your life easier, not harder.

Image via // @merijnsoeters

Erg Playlists

Music to erg to, pt. 122

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A couple recent posts to check out if you haven’t yet:

This question yesterday on race steering and whether you should move back to the middle of the lane if you get moved off-course.

How to lose vs. how to win. Alternatively known as tactical mistakes that can cost you, as well as strategies that can put you in a good position during the race.

Race calls. These are a couple examples of calls that were mentioned on our coxswain evals, in case you need some inspiration or further confirmation that your calls don’t need to be magical or anything other than simple and straightforward.

https://play.spotify.com/user/1241641027/playlist/5UJVGZmx6WZE8aCvTuLq10

Coxing Racing

Question of the Day

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Hi Kayleigh! This weekend our start pushed us to port and we ended up with our blades about 6-9 inches off the buoys, so I decided to stay along the buoy line and go straight there instead of adjusting to the middle and then going straight. Despite this, the guys who have been watching the GoPro have said that I should’ve gone to the middle of the lane and then gone straight. If you had been pushed to one side or the other off the start, would you have adjusted to put yourself in the middle of the lane or stayed just off the buoy line? Thanks so much!

Yea, I agree with the guys, I would have eased back into the middle for two reasons.

First, if you’re sitting on one side of the lane instead of in the middle then you’re setting yourself up to potentially row in the wake of the crew beside you (i.e. if you’re in lane 3 and you’re riding the port buoys, you could end up hitting lane 4’s wake). I don’t think this is a super common occurrence but I remember talking about it at IRAs last year (though I can’t remember why) so it’s something I remind our coxswains of now to be aware of when we’re on buoyed courses.

Related: Race steering

The second reason is more likely to happen and has to do with the wind. If you get caught off guard by a gust of wind (and let’s be honest, this happens a lot more than we’re all gonna admit) then it can end up pushing you over so that instead of being 6-9″ off the line, you’re now one touch of the rudder away from hitting them for the next 2-3 strokes before you can steer back out. The other scenario though is your blades go over the buoys and you end up interfering with another crew’s race. That’s obviously the worst case scenario (and one you can get DQ’ed for) but it’s still something you have to be aware of.

I know it seems counterintuitive to say that you should steer back to the middle when literally every other piece of advice says you shouldn’t be steering during a race but you have to consider the alternatives (i.e. what I said up above) and how much time you’ll lose if you get caught up in one of them vs. how much time you’ll lose by just touching the rudder for a stroke to reposition yourself.

Related: “Always steering” vs. “never steering”

If you haven’t already you should figure out why your start pushed you to port (starboards out-pulling ports, ports taking a bad stroke, not having a point, the wind pushing you over right off the line, etc.) so that you can address it and hopefully avoid it the next time you race.

There is a calm that overtakes you. The task ahead requires everything you have, all the savvy, every ounce of competitiveness, and every drop of confidence you’ve earned. Calm washes over you and replaces the last threads of realistic doubt with confidence. Your heart is beating strong. Your mind is no longer crowded with any thoughts except maybe one—the physical task ahead. Winning is an affirmation of your ability and has hardly anything to do with your opponent. You are certain. Any exhaustion, exasperation, frustration, resentment or fear that may have gripped you some other time has been shed in a fine sheen of sweat. What is exciting, what makes your heart pound is anticipation of your performance, the anticipation of demonstrating all you know, all your strength—you are going to live a little beyond yourself, beyond the person you were moments before.

Devin Mahony Harvard University
How to Lose vs. How to Win

Coxing How To Racing

How to Lose vs. How to Win

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Previously: Steer an eight/four || Call a pick drill and reverse pick drill ||  Avoid getting sick || Make improvement as a novice || Protect your voice || Pass crews during a head race || Be useful during winter training || Train when you’re sick (as a rower) || Train when you’re sick (as a coxswain) || Sit in the boat

It’s obviously not that simple or black and white but that’s the easiest way to frame the points I’m trying to make.

There are two big tactical mistakes that you can make during a race that could cost you a win, a qualifying position, or a spot in the medals. (There’s probably/definitely more but our team had issues with both of these at various points this year so they’re fresh on my mind.) I say you because it’s your job to be aware of how you’re moving and how the race is evolving. If you’re paying attention and not just robotically going through the motions of reciting your race plan then you’ll be able to recognize these situations and say/do something to (hopefully) prevent them from having a negative impact on your crew.

Getting comfortable/sitting on a lead

The longer you sit on a short lead the more confidence you’re giving the other crew(s) to make a move on you. A coach I worked with a few years ago frequently said “hope is not a strategy” – you can’t sit on a six seat lead and hope that you can hang on until you cross the finish line. Leads are fragile and you don’t want to give the other crew(s) any opportunity to think you’ve peaked and “now’s our chance”.

Succumbing to another crew’s move

A crew has broken you if they can get in your head with a single move. In most cases this happens somewhere between 750m and 1250m; you’ll be even or close up to this point, their coxswain calls for a move, they walk four or five seats, and you completely fall apart or scramble to make a counter-move and then fall apart because you’re just spinning your wheels.

You also can’t guarantee a win (it’s foolish to ever think that, regardless of how you stack up against your opponents) but you can put yourself in a good position to succeed, which is what these points address.

Make your moves decisive

Rather than being the one who gets broken, be the one doing the breaking. Once you start moving, regardless of whether you’re walking on a crew or moving away, don’t stop. Racing is a game of inches (see also our race against Wisco) so every move you make has to have an unwavering amount of intent, focus, and discipline behind it. This starts with you – your calls and your tone can/will have a huge effect on how successful your moves are.

Execute the race plan

It’s there for a reason. Without it the race lacks structure which makes it impossible for you to manage and if you can’t manage it, you can’t win it. Know when to focus on your boat, when to focus on the field, what your cadence should be, what your moves are, where you’ll take them, what volume/tone is appropriate at different points throughout the race, etc. Your coach not giving you a race plan is not an excuse for you not to have one. Period.

Practice how you want to race

I’ve always viewed this as a standard that the coxswain is responsible for upholding, mainly because attention-to-detail is a core component of what makes a good coxswain and the devil is always in the details. You have to have the discipline to act like an athlete on and off the water and as the coxswain, you sometimes have to be the person that reminds them of that when you’re away from the boathouse and holds them to it during practice. You can’t practice with a lackadaisical attitude and then expect it to all come together on race day – it never works like that.

This post, as you might have noticed, isn’t about giving you bullet-pointed solutions or ideas – it’s about increasing your awareness so you know what to pay attention to when you do pieces during practice, watch race video, etc. From there you (along with your boat and/or coach) can come up with strategies to achieve/deal with each situation so that on race day you’re prepared to manage the race regardless of what happens.

Image via // @tristanshipsides
Race calls

Coxing Racing

Race calls

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“What are some good calls I can use during a race to motivate my team?” “Is there anything I shouldn’t say during a race?” “What are some calls that have worked for you…?” “Can you give me some really great calls to use during my race?” (Lol no.)

This question gets asked ad nauseum. I’ve given and highlighted plenty of examples in past posts (all of which are tagged “calls“) but for this post I thought I’d highlight a couple examples that have come up on our coxswain evaluations. When we refined the evals last spring we added a section that asked what calls the rowers liked and didn’t like, which gave them a chance to highlight what they wanted to hear and/or didn’t want to hear during races (and practice, but that’ll be a separate post).

You can see some of their comments, exactly how they were on the evals, up above. Not only is none of it groundbreaking, none of it is “magical” either. Everything they said is pretty straightforward and basic … just like your calls should be. This is just one set of examples of what a D1 men’s crew likes to hear but hopefully this gives you a few ideas for calls to incorporate into your repertoire as we get into the championship part of the season.

Image via // @merijnsoeters