Serious Sculling

The Drive (Part 1 of Several).

I think that we’ve arrived at the action here.  We talked a lot about the recovery, in terms of the ratio between it and the drive and between the first part of the recovery and the second part.  And we also talked about how to magically manage to plonk your blades in the water as their “slots” move by you, by squeezing your seat in place at the catch while the blades drop into the water.  

So now we’re at the drive.  

As with the other parts of the stroke, there’s so much to say and so many details to get across.  But I’m going to start today with a discussion of sequencing on the drive – when to use your legs, your swing, and your arms.  (Only, we won’t get to the arms part today.)  

And having listed the elements of the drive in that order (legs, swing, arms), you now know that the body parts actually do operate in that order.  One common inefficiency on the drive that I see is that many scullers tend to begin the body swing earlier in the drive than is effective.  That is, they tend to begin the swing immediately the blades go into the water.  Some people even place their blades in the water by swinging from the hips, instead of hinging the arms from the shoulders.  

I suspect that this is an effort to use one’s back muscles less.  However, that’s not necessarily an optimal goal when one wants to propel one’s boat across the water.  In fact, using your back muscles more won’t necessarily hurt them, but relying instead on the connective tissue in one’s back to take the force of the drive IS a good way to promote injury.  Briefly (can you sense another blog entry forming?), rowing with your back curved (“hyperflexed”) is bad for you in two ways.  First, as mentioned, you are taking the force of your drive with your connective tissue, putting the vertebrae at angles to each other, instead of taking it with your muscles.  And while your muscles get stronger when you use them, your connective tissue does so to a much, much smaller extent.  So you won’t help yourself improve if you don’t actually rely on your muscles.  Even worse, though, is that when your vertebrae are at angles to each other because your back is curved, you’re in prime disc-popping position.  Think about how you would pop bubble-wrap:  You don’t do it by putting your finger right in the center of a bubble and pushing down in the middle.  You do it by pressing all the air in the bubble to one side, so that the plastic bulges out on the side across from your finger and eventually breaks with a satisfying pop.  So make an effort to sit up tall from your lower back as you row, and hinge from the hips instead of the waist, because the pop you might experience as your discs burst is a lot less satisfying.  

In any case, to paraphrase Ecclesiastes and The Byrds, there is a time to swing and there is a time to refrain from swinging.  To understand when to swing, I like to think about two sources of efficiency on the drive, and then I like to match them up.  

One source of efficiency is the swing itself:  that is, the extension of your trunk as your legs also extend.  This motion, which you could think of as a sort of hinging action at your hips, generates a tremendous amount of power.  It’s what Olympic lifters use to accelerate the bar so that it will rise high enough in the air that they can then jump under it to catch it.  It’s used in many, many other sports, and in fact is at the core of many maneuvers in many sports.  In sculling and rowing, it’s the main driving force of your propulsion because you’re using your legs and back at the same time.  

You can actually verify for yourself how much of an advantage it is to open the hip joint by extending the trunk and legs at the same time by not doing this, and watching the decrement in speed on your speed coach.  Row so that you “shoot your slide”, or get your legs flat before you swing open, and see how much slower you get.  That’s because you’ve removed that biomechanical source of efficiency from your stroke.  

The second source of efficiency is that of the boat and oars.  It makes intuitive sense that the oars are going to be most efficient at propelling you bow-ward when they are perfectly perpendicular to the boat.  When you’re at the catch, you’re effectively pushing water out from the hull some, in addition to propelling your boat toward bow.  Likewise, when you’re at the finish, you’re pushing water toward the hull in addition to propelling yourself toward bow.  But right in the middle, at that “sweet spot”, it’s all bow-ward motion.  

So the way I like to think of the drive is that I want to match those two sources of efficiency up with each other.  In other words, I want to time my swing so that it starts as my oars approach the perpendicular point in the drive.  In practical terms, this is around half-slide on the drive – but we’ll get to that.  For right now, realize that if I want to save my swing until some later point in the drive than the catch, that means that I have to initiate my drive without swinging open.  I believe that this is what coaches are trying to get at when they say “delay the swing” or “legs first”.  

And using your legs only, for the first part of the drive, is one thing that is challenging about the drive.  I have seen coaches assign scullers the “legs only” drill, only to see the scullers in fact swinging open (and the coach not telling the scullers how to tell if they were swinging open).  So the first skill that’s necessary in creating a vigorous, effective drive is to learn how to row legs-only.  

It’s not easy, especially in a single, so you might want to  recruit a friend to go out in a double with you and set the boat while you try the drill.  But here’s what you do:  Start at the body angle position – legs flat, body over the legs, arms extended.  Notice where your handles are in relation to your legs.  For me, my handles are at low shin level, or ankle level.  For you, they might be at mid-shin level.  They should definitely be past your knees – even the least flexible scullers I have met can manage that.  [Another future topic:  how much body angle you need, or don’t need].  

Now, with your blades flat on the water for balance if you want, roll your seat into the catch and place the blades in the water to take a stroke.  Row, keeping your body in its forward position and your arms extended, until your legs are completely flat.  Then, take the blades out of the water by hinging your arms down from the shoulders.  Don’t bend your arms, and don’t swing open.  

If you’ve managed to row using only your legs, then your handles will end up in precisely the same place at the end of the legs-only stroke that they were at the beginning of the stroke.  Monitoring where your handles start and where they end up is an excellent way to self-coach for legs-only.  And rowing legs-only is an important skill to practice, not because you will be literally rowing this way, but because it is vital to develop the ability to separate the various actions on the drive and perform them each alone.  Doing drills correctly creates in your mind a more detailed model of how the stroke works.  That, in turn, means that you not only will be able to create good technique and reliable self-coaching cues for yourself, but also to adjust your stroke moment-to-moment to adapt to wind and water conditions.  [Yes, Virginia, how to row in chop does deserve its own blog entry].  

So where I give sequences of drills, I believe that it is important to work through all of them, even if you already know how to do the drills.  I’ve tested these sequences on several scullers or groups of scullers, adding or omitting parts to see what’s the “active ingredient”, and while I wouldn’t say that I’m completely scientific in my trials, I do notice a difference when I’ve left some drills out of a sequence.  The end result is that a reduced sequence often isn’t as effective in changing someone’s technique or helping them really understand the details of the issue at hand.  (Having said that, I continue to tweak my drills and drill sequences, so keep in touch for further developments).  

If you have trouble rowing legs-only, try this:  Sit at body angle, blades flat on the water.  Now, roll your seat into the catch and roll it back.  That’s all.  Just seat in, seat out.  The rest of your body stays still.  That’s the same motion you’re aiming for on legs-only; just with a load on the blade.  Some people like to think about there being a big elastic connecting your foot stretcher and your hips as they do legs-only.  The only way to stretch that elastic is to push your seat away from your feet – swinging open is irrelevant for moving that elastic.  

Once you are comfortable rowing legs-only, and can do so without opening your back or bending your arms, you can try this home-grown drill.  It’s pretty hard, and a little weird, but try it anyway.  Here’s what you’ll do:
1.    row a legs-only stroke, then pause with blades feathered.  
2.    without changing your position, put the blades back in the water and row an arms-and-back stroke, then pause again at body angle with blades feathered.  
3.    continue to alternate legs-only and arms-and-back, pausing between each one.  

The idea here is to think about the stroke not divided into two parts horizontally (drive vs. recovery) but vertically:  front end vs. back end.  Granted, the front end isn’t really legs-only, and the back end isn’t really arms-and-back only, but it is useful to think about the stroke that way.  

In doing this drill, we are continuing to work on the ability to separate the leg drive gesture from the swing-open gesture.  At the pause position, after the legs-only stroke, you shouldn’t have to “regroup” to get your blades in the water and in the right position for the arms-and-back only stroke.  You should be in just the right position for it, and the only mistakes should come from forgetting which half comes next.  Which you will do – hell, I invented the drill and I still sometimes forget which one I’m on.  

For the next drill you’ll take out the pauses, but you will still make the “legs” part of the stroke separate from the “swing” part.  So, row so that your legs get all the way flat on the deck before you let yourself swing.  A couple of comments here:  First of all, if you’re doing this drill correctly, you’ll see that your speed is still a lot lower than your speed when you row normally.  That’s because you have removed that biomechanical source of efficiency, where you open the hip angle by extending the legs and the trunk at the same time.  Instead, in this drill you’re extending the legs and then extending the trunk.  The second comment is that I frequently see people try this drill, but not actually get their legs all the way down before they swing.  They actually end up with a timing of the swing that is very like what I am aiming at for their regular rowing later on.  So push yourself to do the drill correctly, even though it’s an exaggeration.  

After you master these two drills, which teach you how to use legs separately from body, practice the part of the stroke where the legs and body work together.  You can do this by rowing half-slide, or something between half- and quarter-slide.  At this point, remember that both your legs and your trunk want to move away from the imaginary center line dividing them at the same speed.  You can think of them bracing against each other.  You can think of yourself as a hinge.  Or you can think of your body as extending itself during that part of the stroke.  Your body just straightens out, almost as if you were standing up against the foot stretchers (except you’re at more of a diagonal, and your trunk and legs don’t end up at 180 degrees from each other).  If I know the sculler I’m working with has children, I compare the motion of their body during this part of the stroke to what a colicky baby will sometimes do: their bodies will sometimes stretch out and go rigid when they’re that angry or upset.  [Update, as of practice this morning:  the quad of masters men I coached this morning rolled their eyes when I gave them the colicky baby metaphor.  Two comments are in order.  First of all, I bet your wives get this metaphor.  Second, eye rolling is not part of the drill and will not help you go faster].  

Really, what you are doing is more like what Olympic lifters do to accelerate the bar high enough to catch.  I haven’t looked extensively, but I did find an interesting picture from the Olympics that shows some of this.  Look at this multi-exposure shot of Chinese lifter Cao Lei.  The plates on the bar block her lower body, but if you imagine doing what she’s doing, you’ll get the idea that her body is just going to almost hyperextend in order to put as much velocity into that bar as she can.  Another good example of this is in the women’s 63-kg Session A slide show:  the second picture is that of Ruth Kasirye of Norway, and she’s finished extending her body here and is just beginning to jump under the bar.  But look at how she’s straightened out her body to get the bar where it is.  That’s the feeling you want to mimic in the boat:  Hips forward, butt squeezing the body open. 

When you’ve gotten the feeling of extending your body to propel the boat by rowing at half-slide, do some legs-only again.  That will help you contrast the front end with the back end.  Finish off your drill set with some steady state, a nice swing row.  Think about the fact that the stroke can feel like you’re doing a little legs-only at the first part of the drive, and then doing that body-extension half-slide right after it.  Feel how, if your arms and shoulders are just relaxed enough, you get a kind of whipping action as you start that swing.  What you’ve been able to do is to store up some energy in your arms and shoulders during the first part of the drive.  By keeping that tension on your upper body by keeping the feet pressing and the trunk bracing, you carried that stored energy with you until you started the swing.  Then when the swing started your handles came kind of snapping back toward you, releasing that energy right at the sweet spot – the perfect place to use it, because you got the most forward velocity from it. 

I love that feeling.  

Lights: An addendum

Some friends were getting rid of their pile of rowing magazines, dating almost (but not quite) back to The Oarsman, a publication from the 1970s.  So, naturally, I took the opportunity to tear out the articles that looked interesting, for my files.  (Thanks, Lynn!  Thanks, Pris!) 

Here’s an excellent idea I got from American Rowing, (January/February 1997).  It’s a short piece by Bill Smith of American Sculling that describes how to use panty hose to attach lights onto the end of a trailer, so you don’t have to use tape.  But it seems like a good way to attach flashlight-style boat lights to the bow and stern, too. 

What you do is to put the flashlight on (say) the bow of the boat, with red on port and green on starboard.  Then, take one leg of the hose and put it over the light and the bow together, so the bowball and light are in the toe of the hose.  Gather the rest of the leg around the bow above the water line, and use the other leg to tie the whole thing on.  Because you’ll have pulled the first toe really tight, it’ll be translucent and won’t interfere with the light coming from your bow light.  You may need tape if you’re doing the same thing with the stern light, but I’ll bet you can figure out a way to tape or tie the whole assembly to the point of the stern without the tape touching the hull. 

Safe sculling. 

Boat Lights

Since the days are beginning to shorten here in the Northern Hemishphere, people are having to use lights on their shells when they launch for their (shudder) 5:30 am workouts.  And it seems like every rower I coach has a different model of boat lights.  So what’s best?  As someone who spends a lot of time straining her eyes to see singles in the dark, I thought I’d weigh in on the subject. 

Let’s start with regulations from the U.S. Coast Guard and the Charles River (Boston, MA , USA) Users Committee.   I imagine that regulations in different parts of the world or the U.S. are slightly different, so you will want to check your local regulations.  But much of what is here is pretty sensible anywhere, and a good place to start. 

The U.S. Coast Guard’s Boating Safety Circular #75a states that an oared vessel on inland waterways “may exhibit the lights prescribed in Rule 25 for sailing vessels, but if she does not, she shall have ready at hand an electric torch or lighted lantern showing a white light which shall be exhibited in sufficient time to prevent collision.”  Stopping just before a collision to grab your flashlight and turn it on is not particularly feasible, so let’s take a look at Rule 25.  It states that sailing vessels must display
1.    Sidelights, and
2.    A stern light from dusk to dawn and in adverse visibility conditions. 

A stern light is “a white light placed as nearly as practicable at the stern, showing an unbroken light over an arc of the horizon of 135 degrees and so fixed as to show the light 67.5 degrees from right aft on each side of the vessel.”  A sidelight is similar, only it’s attached to the bow and is split between red and green. The Charles River Users Committee also endorses the use of a white stern light and a split red/green bow light.

Well, that’s a good start in terms of knowing what to buy.  For a more detailed look, think about what the lights are for.  From the Coast Guard again, “Under ordinary conditions, {navigation lights} tell boatmen something about each other’s size, speed, course, and kind of boat.”  Now, that’s helpful. It tells us that we need a different light for stern and bow so that an observer can tell at a glance which end of your boat is which.  (Before you snort with derision, let me tell you that this is not nearly as easy to determine in the dark as it seems. In fact, it's hard enough during daylight that they used to paint warships in World War Two with busy and misleading patterns specifically for the purpose of confusing the people who were trying to figure out where they were going.)  The split red/green light helps indicate which way your boat is facing.  Combined, the white stern light and the split red/green bow light give the watcher information about where you’re going and how fast.  That’s important, because others need to know this if you’re crossing the river – which you have to do at least once per row, if you’re coming back to where you launched. 

There are other considerations, too.  One is that your lights be bright. When I say “bright”, think “headlights”.  Notice how bright those are?  Granted, boat lights that bright on a small craft wouldn’t be optimal because you’d blind yourself just looking toward your own stern. But make sure the lights are bright enough to be seen across the river and preferably for a distance of 1000m.  LEDs are very good for this. For illustrative purposes, I invited my friend Igor along for a pre-dawn photo shoot a couple of years ago. 

a single on the water at 5:30 am, from less than 10 meters away

You see what I mean?  When it’s dark out, your little bitty light blends in with all the reflections from the streetlights, moving headlights, bridge lights, and so on.  So the bigger and brighter your lights are, the better. 

Some scullers in Boston have bought what they call “frog lights”, LEDs in red and green that they clip to their port and starboard riggers, respectively.  While these seems like an optimal solution, especially for those rowers tall enough to reach the oarlocks while sitting in the boat (and without tipping over), they are in fact less helpful to other boaters than they seem.  First of all, these lights are not bright enough to be really visible from more than about a boat length away.  That doesn't give other boaters enough time to stop if they're heading toward you.  Second, they are only visible if you’re pretty nearly in line with them; they aren’t visible from other angles.  Finally, these lights tell a viewer how wide apart your riggers are, but give no information about your bow and stern.  And the length of your boat is a really useful thing for other boaters to know, so that if they want to cross your path they can do so without clipping your bow or stern.

I’ve seen other scullers use the kind of flashing red lights that cyclists use on their helmets.  I’m sorry to tell you that these are also no good for scullers.  On the water, everything’s flashing – because the water is moving and the reflections flicker.  Use solid lights so that I don’t mistake you for a reflection and drive over you. 

What about wearing a bicycle or hiking light on the back of your head?  Alas, not good either.  When you turn around to look at another boat (because you’ve seen their nice, bright lights) all of a sudden you have no light!  Why?  Because the light is on the back of your head, which is now facing away from the other rower.  If your head’s averted while the other rower is looking in your direction, they could miss seeing you, which would be unhelpful.

From the Coast Guard and Charles River Users Committee rules, you know you should have your lights as close to your bow and stern as possible.  This tells the observer where those parts of your boat are, so – again – they won’t get driven over.  Many scullers put their lights near their cockpits because it’s easier to then turn them off when the sun comes up, and you save battery life.  But if your lights are in your cockpit, it’s harder to tell where your boat begins and ends, and thus harder for others to avoid your bow and stern.  Luckily, LED lights nowadays are very efficient, and you don’t have to worry that they will dim during your row.  One evening after dark two years ago, I saw a stern light in the water near shore that had fallen off someone’s boat.  When I drove by the same spot the next morning before dawn, it was still there, bobbing just as brightly in the water.  (It’s mine now).  Plus, if you get rechargeable batteries you won’t need to keep buying new ones very often in any case. 

The best lights I’ve seen are shaped like flashlights, only they have suction cups on the bottom.  Attach a white one to your stern deck using the suction cup, and tie a shoelace around it that you also tie to your boat somehow.  That way, if the light falls off it won’t float away.  Alternatively, you could tape the light to your boat near the end of your stern deck, using electrical tape or duct tape.  Any residue can be removed later with a product like Goof Off or a marine cleaning product, which will remove the stickiness without damaging your hull.  (Test it first on an unimportant part of your hull so you won’t be surprised, though).  Attach a split red/green light to your bow, also tying it to the bowball so you won’t lose it.  Make sure the red half faces port and the green half faces starboard.  In the U.S., you can purchase these lights from a companies like West Marine, which sell Aqua-Signal Series 23 portable LED lights. 

So let’s recap:

What:  Very bright lights, white for stern and split red (port)/green (starboard) light for bow. Steady, not flashing.

Where:  On your bow and stern deck. You can attach them with bungees, tape, or suction cups.  Or you can get the kind that goes in your bow clip, though these aren’t as bright as the Aqua-Signal ones. 

When:  Between dusk and dawn, and during times of adverse visibility.  In other words, any time you’d use headlights. 

Why:  To make you OBVIOUS.  Not just visible.  OBVIOUS.  Take a look at the river one early morning or late evening and find someone whose lights are bright.  Ask them what they have. Buy a set, and USE THEM.  And don’t forget to look over your shoulder more often after dark so you can avoid those other poor chaps with their faint, invisible lights.  

Safe rowing, everyone. 

Steering the Green Mountain Head.

A tangent this time:  The Green Mountain Head.  This is a stake race that takes place in Putney, Vermont, USA every fall.  In Boston it’s quite popular, not only because it’s a good warmup for the fall racing season, but also because it’s just plain fun.  And the post-race lunch is pretty superior, in my estimation.  Their website is http://www.rowgmh.com/ just in case you’re interested. 

There is always a lot of discussion about the best way to take the turn at GMH, since it consists of two large buoys a mile and a half from the start/finish line.  I’d like to present what I think is an efficient way to do the turnaround. 

The first thing to realize is that your boat has a minimum turning radius.  It doesn’t really, because you can turn on a dime; but that would involve stopping dead and doing a river turn, which is not efficient time-wise.  Instead, what most scullers do is to row almost to the buoys and begin their turns by taking longer strokes on the side away from the buoys (starboard, in this case) so as to angle their boats toward the buoys (port, in this case).  At some point they check the boat down on port and lean to that side to rotate the boat around that squared-and-buried blade while they furiously row arm-and-back on starboard.  Once pointed perpendicular to the racecourse, they pick it up again full slide for a couple of strokes and repeat the process to complete the u-turn and head back toward the finish/start line. This procedure represents a good compromise between speed and turning radius. 

The thing is, if you get right up next to the first buoy to start your turn, you’ll end up traveling farther past the turnaround than if you took the turn a little wider.  I’ll show you what I mean.  Imagine this is your turning arc, minimized as above: 

Now, imagine that these are the buoys:

You have to choose where to start your turn, which means you have to choose where to place that arc relative to the buoys.  Let’s say you want to hug the first buoy (the one on the right, here, as you’ll be traveling from right to left as you turn).  That would look something like this:

Taking this path results in traveling the following distance past the buoy line, represented by the black arrowed line: 

Now, however, imagine that instead of approaching the buoy and trying to turn just next to it, you plan to set up for the turn a little wider, like this:

 

Now let’s draw another arrowed line to represent how far past the buoy line you travel: 

Let’s compare the lengths of those lines.  (I made these diagrams in Word, so all I did was to ungroup the objects, copy each little line, and paste the copies next to each other – I didn’t draw new ones or change their lengths).  They represent how far past the buoy line you travel.  Remember, it’s a distance you want to minimize. 

The extra distance past the line that you travel when you start your turn really close to the first buoy is on the left; the extra distance past the line that you have to travel when you take the turn a little wider is on the right.  And the distance on the right is less than the distance on the left. 

The first time I tried that race I actually got “beat” to the buoy by another sculler.  I was a little disappointed that I couldn’t get far enough ahead of her to take the inside of the turn, and ended up having to set up wide for the buoy line.  Imagine my delight, then, when I snuck right by in between her and the buoys after our turn, and made in back onto the straightaway before her.  Ha! 

Once you understand that your boat has a minimum turning radius, and that you have to carefully consider where to place the arc of your path, it makes you think differently about a lot of different corners or turns.  In the case of the Green Mountain Head, I think it makes sense to try setting up for the turn a little wide.  You travel less far past the turnaround line, and you have the satisfaction of passing people who haven’t read this blog.