Category: Racing

College Coxing High School Racing Recordings

Coxswain Recordings, pt. 4

By readyallrow January 3, 2013

University of Delaware Coxswain Practice POV

The part I specifically want to point out in this recording is from 1:44-2:05. She’s concise, to the point, intense, and consistent with her calls – she doesn’t stop talking but she’s not rushing to get her words out either. Her calls in between each stroke are spot on and you know what she means even though she’s not saying a lot of words.

Also, after the starts when they’re doing the rate shifts, she does a good job demonstrating what I mean about drawing your voice out at 2:11 and 2:27.

Victoria City Rowing Club U17 Canadian Henley 2012

This is a recording where I question if the coxswain made them row better of if they would have rowed the same without her. This is a classic example of “cheerleader coxswain” who doesn’t sound sure at all of what she’s saying. It’s not bad coxing by any means … there’s just a lot of unnecessary cheerleading going on that could have been replaced by more effective calls.

The one thing that I liked that she said that I think we all tend to forget is “it will hurt to back down and it will hurt to keep pushing, so we’re going to keep pushing”. That’s a great call to make at the end of the race when you need to get that extra push from the crew.

You can find and listen to more recordings by checking out the “Coxswain Recordings” page.

Coxing Q&A Racing

Question of the Day

By readyallrow January 1, 2013

How does getting weighed in work during the spring season? I’m a coxswain for a collegiate men’s team where the weight minimum is 125. I’m naturally under 110, so what’s going to happen? Sand bags? Will it be a problem?

Nope, it’s not a problem at all. The weigh-in procedure may vary amongst regattas so you’ll have to ask your coach to find out the specifics for the ones you’ll be attending. Some require weigh-ins the day before (IRAs and Sprints, for example), some require it no less than two hours before your event, some don’t weigh in coxswains at all, and some have you weigh in each day of competition. It just depends on the regatta. If you’re under the weight minimum, you’ll be required to carry either sandbags, weight plates, or whatever you come up with to make up the weight into the boat with you. They must be placed in the coxswain’s seat with you, NOT distributed throughout the boat (that will get you DQ’ed). At the end of the race the officials will ask that you hold up your weight so they can see that you brought it with you and that it’s in the coxswain’s seat, not somewhere else in the boat.

If you know ahead of time that you’ll be under the weight minimum, you’re almost always allowed to provide your own external weight. It has to be in the form of sandbags or plates though, not extra layers of really heavy clothing. This is highly suggested by most regattas if you require more than 10lbs of extra weight, that way they don’t have to give you all of their sand to carry in the boat. Most regattas also require that you label the weights you use with your name and/or team, regardless of whether they are yours or belong to the regatta.

Here’s a PDF from the IRA that details their weigh-in procedures for coxswains and lightweights if you race there. If you scroll down to page 6 you’ll find the information about coxswain weigh-ins. That should give you a decent idea of how the process goes.

Racing Rowing

Sprint races vs. Head races

By readyallrow December 29, 2012

Winter training is slowly trudging along but before you know it, the spring racing season will be upon us. If you coxed or rowed in the fall but haven’t done a spring season yet, you’re probably wondering what the differences are.

Head races

Head races are run over a course an average distance of 3 miles. Instead of being a distance race, it’s raced against the clock, with the goal being to have the fastest overall time with as few penalties as possible. Crews are started 10-15 seconds apart, allowing for faster crews to overtake slower ones along the course. Due to the length of the race, the cadence is much lower when compared to a sprint race. Head races are aptly nicknamed “the coxswain’s race” due to the winding turns along that river. Navigating these turns as efficiently as possible aids the crew in achieving a fast overall time. In comparison to the spring season, the fall season is usually shorter in duration – crews might only do two to four races starting in late September and ending in early November.

Sprint races

Spring season is the best season. In college races, rowers cover a course of 2000m whereas in most high school races, rowers cover 1500m. They’re rowed somewhere between five and a half and eight minutes and at a much higher stroke rate than head races. Anywhere from 4-8 boats are lined up at the starting line, either through a floating start or on stake boats, after which the starting marshal will utilize one of the various starting calls followed by “Attention, GO” to begin the race. The end of the race (250-300m) is an all out, balls to the wall sprint.

The season itself lasts from late March or early April until the beginning of June, and crews will typically race in seven to ten races during that period. The training is much more intense and unlike fall racing, begins a few months before the actual season starts, a period classified as winter training where the athletes primarily train indoors on the erg.

Coxswains employ a different strategy with these races compared to head races because there is less distance to cover, which translates to the amount of time you have to make move running out very quickly. It is imperative for coxswains to have good control over the steering of the shell to ensure it travels the straightest line possible. If he/she is slaloming down the course, it can cost their crew a win. The intensity of the race overall is also heightened – it’s pure adrenaline from start to finish, which is an experience you can’t really comprehend until you experience it.

Image via // @rowingcelebration

Ergs Q&A Racing Training & Nutrition

Question of the Day

By readyallrow December 24, 2012

Where I live we are in the mid of racing season and obviously have the Christmas break off from set trainings. I am planning to lose a little bit of weight for rowing, hopefully have finished just after mid January when we have seat racing planned just before summer camp. I am only aiming to lose 6kg and I have already nearly lost 2, I might not quite get there but yeah. Our coaches generally only weigh us at the start of the season (as we are too young for weights). Should I ask to be weighed before the seat racing so it doesn’t affect the results? When doing seat racing do you take into account rower’s weight? If I lose weight, will it affect my erg score? I am ‘lightweight’ but we don’t race under weight categories, but under age & gender.

If you only race under age/gender, I don’t think it would matter too much. If you’re racing against another “lightweight” they’re just going to look at whether you’re under 130lbs (or whatever lightweight is for you) and go from there. They won’t care about the specific weight. If you want to weigh yourself, you can, but I doubt your coaches would take it into consideration. It’s a question worth asking them though just to be sure.

If you lose weight but maintain or gain muscle in place of the fat you lose, then no, I doubt there will be a change in your erg score since you’ll be maintaining your strength. If it is affected in some way, I would assume it’d be positively because hopefully you’re losing weight through proper diet and strength training, which means you’d be building muscle. Increased muscle mass = increased power = lower splits. If you lose weight (typically in an unhealthy way) that causes you to lose both muscle AND fat, then yes, your erg score will probably be negatively affected.

Q&A Racing

Question of the Day

By readyallrow December 21, 2012

Can you explain Canadian Henley to me? People keep telling me it’s a national team thing.

Canadian Henley is held at the beginning of August in St. Catharines, Ontario – it’s one of the three big summer regattas (the other two being IDR and Club Nats). It’s fairly large too with something like 3,000 rowers competing – it’s similar to the Henley Royal Regatta except on the other side of the pond. It isn’t strictly for national teams, although I think some do compete. I doubt any raced this year since the Olympics were happening at the same time but in non-Olympic years I’m sure some go. A lot of junior and college rowers will race with their club programs or U23/senior teams at Vesper, Penn AC, Riverside, etc. When I worked at CRI over the summer a lot of the junior rowers that were training in the latter half of the summer were preparing to race there.

The athlete’s anaerobic threshold, the point at which the body’s muscles have exhausted their oxygen store and start burning other fuel. For regular folks, reaching that threshold is quitting time; anaerobic work is 19 times harder than aerobic work. But rowing is all about harder. Elite rowers fire off the start at sprint speed — 53 strokes per minute. With 95 pounds of force on the blade end, each stroke is a weightlifter’s power clean. Rowers cross their anaerobic threshold with that first stroke. Then there are 225 more to the finish line.

Coxing Novice Q&A Racing

Question of the Day

By readyallrow December 11, 2012

Hey! I’ve been rowing for a few years but now I’m a coxswain but I’ve only been doing it for a few months and I’m soon entering my first race as a cox. Any tips on how much to shout/what to shout to the crew?

OK well, first piece of advice is don’t shout. One of my biggest pet peeves with coxswains is that they think their job is to shout at people, so that’s all they do … they just shout. Don’t do that. If all the rowers hear is you yelling at them with no substance or meaning or reason behind it, they’ll tune you out.

Have a race plan that so that you’re not ad-libbing the entire race as it happens. Race plans give you some structure and make it easier to come up with calls because you’re going to have different focuses throughout the race that based on what’s happening around you, where you’re at on the course, what you’re seeing within the boat, etc.

Spend some time listening to recordings too – that’ll help you learn how other coxswains handle races, as well as what they’re saying, how they’re saying it, and how often they’re saying it.

I know there aren’t any specific calls in here but once you’ve established a race plan and what your boat wants/needs to focus on during the race, you’ll easily be able to come up with a set of calls that work for you and the crew.

Coxing High School Q&A Racing

Question of the Day

By readyallrow December 2, 2012

Hi, I’m 14 and I’m from England. I’m a cox (obviously) and I often cox the years above, and today we had a head-race, and its pretty likely at we’re going to get disqualified, and I feel terrible. It will all be my fault and all the coaches will hate me as will the crew and I’m just terrified and I’ve been crying for the last hour and I don’t know what to do…

Why do you think you’re going to get DQ’ed? What happened?

They’re not going to hate you. If they hate you over something like getting DQ’ed from a race, you need to join a different team. They might be annoyed but that’s it. Talk to your coaches and rowers and explain what happened. Explain why you did what you did. If you had a reason for doing something, even if it got you DQ’ed, that’s a lot better than NOT having a reason … like, you hit a bridge pier because you got squeezed out of your line by passing crews and misjudged the distance between your oars and the pier vs. you hit a bridge pier just because you weren’t paying attention.

Don’t be scared and definitely don’t cry. If you’re allowed, go down to regatta headquarters and see if there’s an official you can talk to who can explain why you were or might be DQ’ed or what you did wrong. Get as much information as you can and then study it. Figure out what you could have done differently compared to what you did, that way you know in the future what to do if a similar situation arises. The race has happened, and whether is was good or bad, the only thing you can do now is learn from it.

FOLLOW UP
Basically as part of the course there’s an ait (I don’t know if you have that in America but its like an island) and you have to go to the right of it and you cant overtake in it. For quite a while we had been gaining on this crew, and by the time we got to the ait we were pretty much level with them. My cox box was broken so I was shouting and passing on messages through bow (it was a four) and they were doing some sort of motivational shouting like ‘push cmon!’ so we were starting to pull ahead and this Marshall was like ‘your not allowed to overtake, move towards the bank!’ so I did, but I think according to the rules We can still get disqualified.

That sucks that your cox box was broken. Was it broken before you went out or did it happen once you were on the water? When something like that happens, you have to adjust your whole strategy. Were you in a bowloader? It’s fine to use your bowman to pass on things like power 10s, etc. but other than that no one should be talking. Even though it’s hard for them to hear you, they have to be quiet and not try and cox themselves. More than anything else, it’s a safety issue.

The situation you were in is actually pretty common. You pull up to a crew and right when you want to pass them, you hit the “no pass zone”. If that happens, the only thing you can do is tell your crew to back off. They’re going to think you’re insane but you have to explain to them that you’re entering a no pass zone and you caught the crew in front of you too quickly. They need to power down so that you stay either RIGHT behind them or RIGHT beside them. You have to have PERFECT steering to maintain that distance between your two boats. As SOON as you exit that no pass zone, you GO. Power back up to 110% and take a 20 to walk away.

It doesn’t sound like you did anything that explicitly broke the rules. The marshal was just doing his job, so don’t take it too personally if he yelled at you when he told you to move. He’s gotta make sure you hear him, which is why he probably yelled. At most, I would think you might get a penalty, but I don’t see any reason why you’d be disqualified. If you just sat even with them, I don’t think that’s a violation of the rules because technically you didn’t pass them. I would talk with your coaches and see what they say, but it sounds like you did what you were told to do by the marshals, so you should be fine.

FOLLOW UP
We didn’t get disqualified, we won our category!

Congrats!

Coxing Q&A Racing

Question of the Day

By readyallrow December 2, 2012

Interesting question: How often do you think a cox should talk during a race? I feel really awkward and useless if I stop talking for more than a few seconds, and when I rowed our cox would talk almost constantly during races. However, at a regatta briefing the other day the OU Captain of Coxes implied that coxes should only be talking every few strokes. I guess it depends on the standard and nature of the crew, but what do you think?

My personal opinion (and how I was taught) is that the coxswain should always be talking unless they’ve told their crew that they’re going to stop talking for a period of time. Maybe that’s just an American thing but I don’t feel like there’s ever any point when you shouldn’t be talking during a race. When I’ve talked about this in the past with some of my crews they say that even if they zone out on what the coxswain is specifically saying, they’re still listening … that voice is what keeps them IN the boat and not looking around at everything that’s going on or whatever else.

I’ve heard coaches tell their coxswains during head races that if everything is going fine there’s no reason for them to talk all the time. To me though, on the flip side of that, it seems like they’re saying that if everything is going to hell the coxswain should be talking constantly. If that’s how your team does things and your rowers learn that style of coxing, how are they supposed to differentiate between when things are going well and when things are going horribly wrong? I don’t know if that makes sense, but that’s how I picture it in my head.

During practice pieces for Head of the Charles, right after the Weeks turn I’d have my crew take a silent five just to regroup, refocus, and get ready for the second half of the race. I wouldn’t count or talk … those five strokes were theirs to do what they needed to do. It always worked out well because after Anderson we were always much stronger when we did those silent five strokes. We did it enough during practice that we didn’t have to do it during a race and I kept talking right through the point where we normally do it. In race situations, I just feel like rowers need that constant bug in their ear reminding them of what they need to do. If they don’t or they don’t like coxswains that talk all the time, let me introduce you to the coxless 4, the 2x, the 2-, and the 1x. Take your picks and enjoy being stuck in your own head for 2-6k.

I agree with you in that I really think it depends on what kind of crew you have. I don’t think coaches should ever tell coxswains how to cox or what to say or how often to say it because the likelihood that they were a coxswain is slim. More than anything else, I think it’s a style of coxing that is specific to each individual. Some coxswains might be OK with not talking and others are chatterboxes. As long as those who talk all the time are saying useful things and not just blabbering away, I don’t see a problem with it. I’d talk to your crew too and see what their input is … after all, they’re the ones you’re talking to!

Coxing How To Novice Q&A Racing

Question of the Day

By readyallrow November 13, 2012

Hi! I will be doing a 2000m race with my crew tomorrow. I’m my team’s coxswain. It will be my second race, but my first 2000m race. I understand steering and such, and I know what calls to make for technique, and I know our starts, but my coach hasn’t really gone over the race itself, I guess. What I’m trying to say is that I need some guidance on how the race should go. Also, stake boats terrify me. Any help you can give me would be amazing!

Stake boats aren’t as scary as they seem. Have you practiced them at all during your practices? The best way to figure out how to do it is to practice it with your coach. Have them (or a teammate) lie stomach down on the launch (which should be sitting stationary, obvs) and act as the stake boat-holder, while you row up and try and back it in. It’s not going to be EXACTLY the same because you’ll have the current of the river moving the launch as well as the boat, but it gives you a GREAT sense of how to do it. Plus, your coach can see exactly what you’re doing and give you pointers on how to correct it.

Here’s a pretty good video that explains a lot about how to get into the stake boats.

As for everything else … it’s pretty straightforward. You row up to the start, get locked on, and go. It’s a straight 2k (I’m assuming) so you won’t have to worry about steering around curves or anything. You want to steer as little as possible so pick a point in the distance and keep it right off your stroke’s ear or shoulder and shoot for that down the course.

Pay attention to what they tell you about the starting call in the coxswain meeting. They’ll either do a quick start (“Attention, GO!”), a countdown start (“5, 4, 3, 2, 1, attention, GO!”), or a polling start (“Harvard, Penn, Cornell, Dartmouth, Cal, we have alignment, attention, GO!”). If it’s very windy or the weather isn’t great, they’ll most likely do a quick start, otherwise they’ll probably stick with a countdown start. That’s been my experience anyways.

Last minute tips:

As soon as you get locked onto the platform and start getting your point, raise YOUR hand and have your bow raise THEIR hand. Unless the marshal’s say they aren’t recognizing hands, they cannot start the race until everyone’s hand is down. If they’re standing on a platform above where you are, it’s easier for them to look down and see the bowman’s hand than it is to see yours, so make sure they’re both in the air.

Find out what the rule is about breakage. Typically if it’s in the first 100m, they’ll call all the boats back to the platform. Breakage has to be legitimate, like a wheel came off the seat or the oar broke. Oarlocks that aren’t closed, crabs, or popping a slide don’t count as breakage.

Also find out what the rule is about flags. Typically they use a white flag to signal the start. In my experience, we were told to go on the flag drop, NOT the call “GO”. If the flag drops before you hear “go”, you can start. Find out the rule for your specific regatta though.

Take a deep breath at the starting line and shake out your shoulders. RELAX!! 2ks are the best kinds of races in my opinion. I’d choose a sprint race over a head race 10 out of 10 times. There’s probably a million other things I could suggest but I don’t want to overwhelm you too much! Have a great time and good luck!!