Teammates & Coaches Video of the Week
By readyallrow
What better way to kick off the year than with a clip of Bryan Volpenhein talking about what it means to be an oarsman. Good stuff to keep in mind as we head off on our winter training trips and continue grinding through those erg pieces for the next two months.
By readyallrow
This would be a good video to share with novices at the start of the season to introduce them to the different types of shells.
By readyallrow
So uh, note to all the coxswains and bowmen out there … don’t run your boat up onto the dock.
Ergs Technique Video of the Week
By readyallrow
This is a talk that Bill Manning (formerly of Harvard, now with the Princeton lights) gave a couple years ago on using the erg as a tool to help develop better rowing technique. It’s a long talk (an hour and twenty minutes) but for coxswains who are looking to develop a better understanding of the stroke and technique in general, this would be worth watching and taking notes on, that way when you get back from your training trip and are back inside on the ergs you’ll be better able to coach the rowers if/when necessary.
By readyallrow
This was another race that Michiel talked about this summer at the Sparks camps. The second 500 wasn’t a good one for the Dutch – they fell down to fifth – but they came back in the second thousand, mainly in the last 500, to finish second behind the Russians. Less than a second separated 2nd through 4th place at the end.
By readyallrow
This is from series that British Rowing did leading up to Rio and focuses on the two coxswains, Phelan Hill and Zoe de Toledo. They talk about the coxswain’s role on the team and in the boat, developing boat feel so they can coach the crew when their coach isn’t around, the things they’re observing about the rowers on any given day, their temperaments, dealing with the “what do you do” and “you’re just here for a free ride” banter, etc.
By readyallrow
What more explanation do you need?
Training & Nutrition Video of the Week
By readyallrow
I had to take a lot of physiology classes in college and every time my professors wanted to use an athlete as an example for something we were discussing, they’d pick rowers for all the reasons discussed in the video. If you haven’t ever delved into what happens to your body as you get more fit and continue training at higher levels, it’s a pretty fascinating subject to learn about.
By readyallrow
“All you can do is trick the guys into pushing harder when they really don’t want to.” That, and steer straight.
By readyallrow
I didn’t know who Alan Shealy was before I watched this video but the fact that it started with Patton’s Speech and ended with an interview with Harry Parker (that was shot just a few weeks before he died) got me interested in who he was and what his relationship with rowing was. After some Googling I found out that he’s a seven-time national team member, a two-time Olympian, and a three-time IRA national champion, in addition to being the stroke of the infamous “Rude and Smooth” crew in 1974 and 1975.
This paragraph from this article in Sports Illustrated made me laugh too. I can’t imagine anyone being able to get away with this nowadays…
“And the familiar cocky voice was that of Harvard’s Alan Shealy—brilliant at stroke, profane (though less so than last year) and Washington’s pet hate. To the forlorn Huskies, the posh trappings of Harvard rowing and the abrasive Shealy were symbols of decadence that had been fuel for the fire that possessed them. All week they had taken turns stoking the blaze.
And Shealy, enjoying himself, played them like a puppet master. Two days before the big race, during a coxswains’ race, he sat aboard a moving launch and manned Harvard’s funnelator, a powerful sling devised for launching water balloons, and one of them squarely hit a Husky cox.”
Or this (from this New York Times article)…
“The Huskies from Washington know Shealy well. In a dual regatta at Seattle last June, Shealy yelled out, “So long, Huskies,” as Harvard took command at 500 meters and rowed away.”
