Serious Sculling

Catch as Catch Can.

You’ve been waiting patiently for the catch, and we’re finally there.  (Remember, on the recovery, at steady state, it should feel like it takes a long time to get to the catch).  Let’s start with a metaphor:  To help themselves imagine how to drop the blades in, some scullers like to think of there being a slot for each blade behind them, into which they will slip their blades as they row, without scraping the sides of the slots.  I’ve heard more than one coach use this image, and I think it’s a good one. 

But here’s the thing about the catch:  Ideally, your blades want to go into the water perfectly vertically.  This means that you can’t be pulling on the handles.  That would create a lot of frontsplash, and would signify that you wasted some of your slide on a half air stroke.  Dropping your blades in vertically means that you can’t push the blades into the water with stiff arms, either.  That would create a lot of backsplash, checking your boat down violently and probably making you tip.

So far, this probably makes sense to you, which is good.  But then you think about it a little more, and you realize, “Wait.  It’s fine to think of these blade slots being there to receive your blades, but the damned things are moving past you.  How in the name of all that is holy do you put your blades into them without using a little of your slide?” 

That is the secret of the catch, and it all starts with grip.  A relaxed grip will help your arms and shoulders be relaxed.  It is with these relaxed muscles of the shoulders and the hands that you will absorb the movement of the handles toward you as the blades bury themselves. 

Think of your biceps and triceps being taut, not tight; and in balance with each other.  You can feel what this is like, if you can’t imagine it, by pointing to something outside your window.  Most people don’t lock out their elbows when they point (unless they are gesticulating wildly, which isn’t what I am talking about).  When you point, you’re using just the minimum of energy with your arm muscles to extend your forearm.  That’s what you’ll do before the catch, too.  Some people even take the catch with their elbows slightly bent – this is all right, as long as they stay bent.  It can even help you lock in with your lats better.  But if your arms were to straighten out when you tried to apply pressure to the blade, it would mean you were missing the connection and just using your legs to push your arms straight. 

Your shoulder muscles should be taut but not tight at the catch as well.  They should act to stabilize the joint but not to “grab” right as you apply pressure.  I used to do this grabbing, possibly because I have very flexible shoulders, and my college coach (Mayrene Earle) used to hound me to have relaxed shoulders.  I think I took this too literally, because I would let my shoulders relax so much that I almost felt like my shoulders were coming out of joint.  Soon after, I started to have rotator cuff pain.  Luckily, I finally figured out that there is a happy medium when it comes to shoulder relaxation. 

So:  fully square blades enter the water as your seat stops.  If you’re rolling your wheels “uphill” and making sure your blades are squared before that last rotation of the wheels, you’ll be in the perfect position to place the blades in the water as your seat alights in the stern.  My friend Kate calls this “catching with your butt” – the idea that you don’t wait until your seat has stopped to place the blades, but begin to place them slightly before the wheels have stopped.  In fact, you might want to think of your wheels stopping because your blades have entered the water. 

Now comes the magic, which requires a small digression. 

If you sit relaxed in the boat on a flat day and place a squared blade in the water, the oar will be neutrally buoyant in the oarlock.  That is, the blade will float in the water and the loom of the oar won’t touch the sides of the oarlock, because you won’t be pulling or pushing on the handles, and the water will be supporting the blade.  You will be able to feel this buoyancy by wiggling the oars in the oarlocks – they will rattle back and forth because they won’t be pressed up against one of the sides of the oarlock.  Try it sometime when you’re stopped, after your drink of water.  And as long as your boat is stopped, try something else.  Drop one blade into the water, letting completely go of the handle.  The blade will fall into the water and then fall over onto its side, feathering itself. 

You can make clever use of these phenomena at the catch.  BUT:  They both require a very relaxed grip and upper body.  Coming up to the catch slowly will also greatly aid your ability to use these cues. 

Here’s how it goes:  Your blades are square, your upper body is motionless, and you’re just starting the last rotation of the wheels into the stern.  You slightly raise the handles to place the blades in their imaginary slots.  Since your boat is moving, it’s a good thing that you’re rolling up so slowly, because this means you can stop your seat the second you feel the blades touch the water. 

Your arms are hinging from the shoulders so that the blades go in without your trunk moving.  You drop the blades in the water relatively quickly, just by letting them fall, and allowing your grip to loosen up just a little in the process.  As the water catches the bottom edges of the blades, it enhances the blades’ natural tendency to feather themselves, and you will feel the blades wobble a little as they go in.  Your fingers are just firm enough on the handles to stabilize them so that the blades won’t feather, but will stay square. 

A split second later, you’ll feel the water pressing against the back of the blades and pushing the handles gently into your hands.  Let this happen. You can lower your shoulders and pull them in toward yourself slightly with your lats to absorb the movement.  Once you feel the oars “bump” just a little as you lock on, you can start your drive. 

The key here, and the hardest part, is having the patience to wait for that signal.  It’s also frankly difficult to time that micropause with your seat for just the amount of time it takes your blades to get covered.  At first, you’ll feel like you have to pause so long that you check the boat down.  This is okay, because the the drill sequence I will lay out in the next post will help you practice this skill, gradually moving toward normal timing. 

I’ll finish with an anecdote involving John Riley, famous among American Eastern Seaboard rowers and scullers for his, uh, curmudgeonly personality.  He was my coach in the late 90s.  We went out for a 1:1 session one morning in early April, when he taught me to do just what I’ve outlined above.  It took me a while to get what he was talking about, and I’m sure I only got about 30% of the idea.  After working with me for most of the hour, the last 30 minutes of which was just him riding alongside my boat calling out “Yes!” or “No!” as I did or did not take the catch correctly, he told me to pull over.  When I’d come to a stop, he drove his launch over to me and said, “I feel good about you as an athlete because you’re coachable.  I mean, you’re not Michael Jordan coachable, but you’re coachable.” 

Wow!  What praise!  I think I rowed back home above the water that morning. 

John was going to be away for the better part of a month, so I used the time to work on the catch.  I was going to be perfect when he got back.  I would succeed because I was hardworking, perceptive, and intelligent.  So I knew I would be able to master this new skill. 

I saw John on the water a few weeks later while I was going upstream and he downstream.  He liked to give all of his scullers mini lessons as they went by him, no matter who he was officially working with, so even though he was leading a session for the scullers of the boat club he was working at, he shouted over to me. 

“Hey!” he yelled. 

“You think you’re doing it?" 

"‘Cause you’re not!” 

It took me the entire season to master the catch.  I hope that you will be able to do it faster, but don’t beat up on yourself if you can’t.  Just keep at it. 

Almost There.

We’re almost to the catch.  Just one or two issues remain.  I’d like to recap what we discussed in the previous posts about the recovery and move on to blade placement.  We’ll undoubtedly spend a few posts talking about the catch, as it’s perhaps the most challenging part of the stroke to get right. 

We talked about recovery timing, and using a guideline of 1-2-3-4 (1=hands away, 2=body angle, 3=half slide, 4=blades in the water) to help lengthen the amount of time it takes you to roll up into the catch.  This past week, I was working on this with my friend Annette, and we came up with a nice variation on the counting theme that worked even better for her.  You might want to try it, too. 

Instead of thinking about the whole recovery, think instead about just the slide portion of the recovery.  Once you’re in your body angle position, give yourself a count of 1, 2, 3 to get to blades in the water.  Repeat as needed:  Body angle, 1, 2, 3.  Blades go into the water on “3”.  This variation can make you feel less robotic, and it still gets the idea of ratio across. 

It’s important to think about ratio in two ways:  First, and most obviously, is the idea that the ratio between time you spend on the drive and time you spend on the recovery should be around 1:2 (at steady state).  But it’s equally important to think of a ratio on the recovery between the time it takes you to get to the body angle position and the time it takes you to get from body angle to the catch.  This you can think of (again, at steady state) as being more like 2:3.  When you are getting it right, you’ll feel like you spend most of your time during the stroke in the body angle position – you just flick open on the drive and then flick right back into body angle for the recovery. 

I’ve also seen that, for many of the scullers I work with, the idea of relaxing their legs almost completely on the recovery and allowing just the pressure of the heels in the heel cups to draw the seat toward the foot stretchers creates an excellent ratio between the body-angle and the slide portion of the recovery.  It almost seems backward:  how can using your hamstrings to actively draw you into stern make the recovery more relaxed?  It happens because actively using your hamstrings regulates the speed at which you approach the catch.  Using them prevents your hamstrings from being uninvolved, and if they are uninvolved then you will tend to fall into the catch with no resistance whatsoever. 

Another friend, Marisa, had a breakthrough as she practiced this.  We had been talking about how coaches have told her for a long time that on the recovery you need to move into stern at the same speed as the boat moves through the water.  This was hard for her to gauge and it didn’t make sense to her.  But as we played around with drive/recovery ratio and body-angle/slide ratio, things began to fall into place.  It might have helped that we were rowing together on a nice quiet afternoon when we could hear the bubbles underneath the boat.  But all of a sudden she turned to me and said, “I get why you have to slow down as you approach the catch!  It’s because the boat is slowing down.”  This was an excellent insight, and one I hadn’t thought of before.  But it seems to work.  If you aren’t moving sternward faster than the hull is moving bow-ward, then you won’t have to counteract the movement of the hull scooting forward underneath you when you start the drive.  In other words, you won’t check the boat when you change directions. 

Well, we’ve spoken about what you do with your body as you approach the catch and practiced some drills to polish up this aspect of the recovery.  But we haven’t spoken yet about what you do with your blades.  And this is important, of course, because blade placement is half of an effective catch. 

So let’s talk about blade preparation. 

You know that you have to have your blades off the water so you have room to square up before placing the blades in the water.  But how high off the water?  Optimally, a blade-width off the water.  So that, when you square up, the bottom edge of your blade is right there, ready to drop into the water.  Of course, a lot of scullers don’t do this.  A lot of scullers have their blades on the water, and they have to lower the handles in order to have room to square up, and only then place the blades in the water. 

But that’s sooo much work. 

If you have trouble keeping your blades off the water, try one of the drills I recommended a long time ago:  Lazy Square.  This time, you’ll be thinking about the height of your handles as you keep those blades skimming across the water ALL THE WAY until the catch.  If they lift off the water just before you place them in the water, you’ll have something to work on.  If you alternate 10 Lazy Square with 10 regular rowing, then you'll more effectively integrate the optimal handle-height into your normal sculling. 

I occasionally see scullers who carry their blades very high off the water, 6 inches or more.  I think this is okay, as long as their blades go into the water in a way I’ll describe in a bit.  That is, as long as the blades are right at the surface of the water when you’re getting ready to put them in, I personally don’t care how high they are off the water before then.  In fact, I think that every sculler should develop the ability to intentionally vary the height of their blades off the water.  I used to have a coach who coached a group of women’s eights in the afternoons.  Every evening during my second row, we’d cross paths and he’d wake me.  Not intentionally, of course; he was driving a boat with a v-shaped hull that put up a large wake and no matter how careful he was every other boat on the water would bob up and down for a few strokes as he went by.  Since I couldn’t avoid these wakes, I turned them into a “pop quiz” for myself.  When I heard the sound of his engine, I’d know I had a few strokes where I would have to press my handles down especially far to get my blades up and over the waves.  At first I wobbled around and sometimes got stuck in a wave if I wobbled too far.  But eventually I got used to it and could row through the wake like a knife through butter.  And except for the occasional shot of water onto my kidneys, I was good with those pop quizzes. (Now that I'm a coach, I do sometimes intentionally wake my scullers -- precisely for the purpose of having them practice rowing in chop). 

So, now that you’ve practiced the Lazy Square and you’re used to carrying your handles at a height that keeps the blades about a blade-width off the water, we can talk about squaring up.  Again, we’re going to recall some of what we said about grip.  If you’re carrying the handles with your wrists bent, you’re going to have to flatten your wrists before the drive, and generally this means that you’re going to flatten them as you square up.  But think about what happens if you hold the handle in your hand, bend your wrist up, keep your forearm at a constant height, and then bend your wrist down.  The other end of the oar, the blade, flips up as your hand flips down. 

This is unfortunate, because flipping the blades up as you square is moving them in exactly the wrong direction.  You want the blades to go down toward the water, not up in the air. 

Luckily, you’ve been practicing the grip drills I listed earlier, so you now have the handles under the big knuckles on your hands, stabilizing them with your finger pads.  And your wrists are nice and flat.  So what you’ll do to square the blades up is roll your fingers down into your hands.  My friend Jenny compared this action to how you roll up the neck of a paper lunch bag.  You sort of curl your fingers down and into your hand when you do that, and the motion you use to square the blades up is similar. 

The most important part is that both your wrists and the handles stay at the same level when you’re doing this, all other things being equal.  If you want to, you can think of the isolated squaring motion as keeping the handles at a constant height, and your wrists rotating up and over them, as if you were trying to show someone off your stern the face of your wristwatch. 

Of course, all other things are not equal when you’re squaring up, because not only are you squaring the blades, you’re also getting ready to put them in the water.  You want to square up early enough so that they’re fully square before they enter the water, but not so early that you’re rowing square blades.  (Unless you want to row square blades, of course.)  So what you’ll do is square by curling the handle into your hand, and at the same time place the blades by lifting the handles.  When you place the blades, it’s by hinging your arms at the shoulder, not by opening from the hips or waist.  This can be difficult for some scullers, and will be its own topic in a post or two.

But for now, we’ll just concentrate on the square-and-lift feeling.  My old rowing friend Ted liked to compare this motion to how you open a door with a doorknob.  You turn the knob and push the door around in an arc at the same time, and the motion is a little like square-and-lift. 

This motion has to be timed perfectly with another event in the stroke.  You have to make sure that the squared blade goes into the water just as your seat stops in the stern.  That’s part of the magic of the catch, and we’ll discuss it next time.