Training by Pace.

Most of you will have rowed on the erg.  And most of you will know what I mean when I say I hated the erg all throughout my competitive career.  I hated it because it showed me just exactly how much I was deteriorating throughout a piece or workout.  Rowing on the erg made me feel like a workout was just something to get through, rather than that I’d built fitness or anything else. 

A few years after I retired from competitive 2K racing, I decided to try something I’d toyed with for a while.  I decided to train for the 500 meter dash.  I feel like I’m predominantly a strength athlete, which is not such a great trait when you are a female lightweight sculler (remember, our races take the longest of any boat class, biasing this event more toward the endurance athlete than the strength athlete).  The stress not just of making weight, but of maintaining it throughout the year when I was also worn down from training, made me wonder what it would be like if I could just row – no making weight.  So I emailed Ed McNeely, the physiology consultant for the Canadian National teams. 

If you haven’t met Ed, I’ll tell you about him.  He’s a strength athlete, too! so you can see how I took to him right away.  He’s also tremendously knowledgeable, empirically-minded, and a wonderfully supportive coach.  The workouts he assigned me were phrased in terms of splits, derived from a 20’ piece I did every 6 weeks, that I was to keep up for a particular workout.  These splits represented 5 aerobic (and 1 anaerobic) training categories, and you can read more about them in Ed’s book Training for Rowing.

I’d like to talk today about what was so useful about training by these splits.  I think that using this system makes it possible to learn pacing, it helps maximize the efficiency of the stroke, and can make an athlete feel much more positive about him- or herself. 

It is fairly straightforward to use these training splits on the erg.  Let’s say your athletes were planning to do some Cat VI, the “easiest” level of steady state, representing “all intensities up to and including the aerobic threshold.”  (McNeely, p. 32).  This level of effort specifically targets the slow twitch muscle fibers, and is the kind of long, easy workout that one can even chat during.  For many, rowing this low is difficult.  These athletes like to pull relatively hard at steady state, and they end up in something more like Cat V, which is between aerobic and anaerobic thresholds.  That’s a kind of “vigorous steady state”, where one can get out the odd word now and then but not really chat.  But pulling too hard on steady state cannibalizes aerobic development, never allowing that part of the metabolism to be targeted specifically.

Being given a specific split to maintain provides a very specific goal for athletes to work toward.  Keeping up a consistent pace for an entire workout allows them to feel how the perceived effort varies – increases – toward the end.  The “traditional” way of rowing at a constant perceived effort means that you watch your pace slow as the workout wears on.  I think this is counterproductive in two ways.  First, it makes the feeling of pulling harder at the beginning and going slower throughout the piece too familiar.  Second, it associates doing pieces with getting slower, in a sense.  But maintaining a constant pace is not only more metabolically efficient, it also gives athletes a real sense of “I did it!” after every piece. 

Of course, to maintain a constant pace, athletes will have to slightly increase the perceived effort over the course of the piece.  The most straightforward way to make that happen is by increasing the rating as the piece goes on:  one might start at a 20, for example, and end up at a 24.  It is quite productive to set a goal of staying at the initial rating a little longer each week.  If the athletes are on a training plan where they test every six weeks or so to obtain new training splits, then the workouts will feel easier each week after the first one (until the beginning of the next six-week cycle, that is).  The feeling of adapting to the workouts by doing them is another morale-booster. 

Even in workouts where the rating is to vary widely, as in pyramids, experiencing how it feels to keep up a particular pace at a 20 and the same pace at a 26 is instructive.  At the lower end, you must maximize your efficiency in order to keep the pace where you want it.  By watching the numbers and correlating the small variations in your movements over the course of a workout, you really will get a better idea of how your movements make the flywheel spin faster (or not).  Over time, you will center on a more efficient stroke.  Having figured it out yourself, just by watching the tiny fluctuations in the numbers, makes it more likely that you’ll retain the new technical adjustments. 

At the top end, maintaining a constant pace even as the rating increases teaches you how to decouple pulling hard from rowing high.  This is important because it teaches you how to row high and light, without rushing and without building up too much lactic acid on any one stroke.  This is a key to better racing – keeping up the boat speed by chipping the boat along, rather than by jamming the legs down hard on every stroke. 

Keeping a constant pace that you are assured of being able to hold helps teach pacing at higher speeds as well.  You can get used to how “easy” the pace feels at the beginning, as well as to how the pace feels when it starts getting to the point where you wonder if you can keep it up.  But since a constant pace is more efficient than going out too hard, that point happens much later in the piece than it used to, if it happens at all.  Once you internalize this new pacing strategy, using the numbers as a guide, you can then rely on it in racing. 

When you train by pace on the water, however, there are a lot more caveats to be aware of.  On the water, more factors affect boat speed than just level of effort.  Chop and going around turns slows the pace that a speed coach shows, but wind can work either way.  Current won’t affect the pace from a speed coach, because it always measures speed relative to the water.  Sitting motionless on a river, floating with the current, the speed coach will register zero. 

So when you trains by pace on the water, you have to take your splits with a few grains of salt.  To calibrate perceived effort with a particular pace, find a windless (or less windy) straightaway with no other boats and row on it.  Then, memorize how hard or how easy you have to pull in order to maintain the correct pace.  In wind, or going around a corner, you can just keep the perceived effort constant and return to watching the speed coach’s pace when the wind dies down or after steering. 

In a boat, there will be more moment-to-moment variability in speed than there will be on land.  You will need to think more in averages than in moment-to-moment numbers, and that encourages planning the pace for an entire piece or race, not just the “I’m doing a power ten” mentality. 

If you are in your single and don’t wish to switch to a training plan where you test every six weeks to obtain new training splits, you can still train by pace.  When you do a piece at a particular level of effort, if it’s a calm day you can note your average pace.  The next time you do that piece, aim to keep the pace constant at your average pace.  If you can raise that constant pace by a small amount over time, so much the better.  Regardless, you should be able to use your speed coach to help you with the tiny refinements in technique that come from associating your movements with changes in boat speed. 

Try it!

Comments

[Joy]

Karen, I love your blog and am glad to see that you're back at it. The posts on Proxies and Training by Pace are really interesting to me because they get at why I've always loved the erg so much. Training by splits is really motivating for me, but I've never really cared much about splits on the water because I never knew what to aim for and just went by perceived effort. So I'm eager to give this a try with my HOCR training.
Kick me if this is answered in your posts, but can you give some guidelines for determining goal splits based on the 20' or 30' on the water test? How many seconds should be added for the different category levels? I've particularly struggled with figuring out how hard SS should be.
Thanks for writing!

Joy

[Karen Chenausky]

Hey Joy!

Wow, you like the erg. Interesting.... I thought it would be because you are so tall, and therefore can do really well. Not that I'm jealous. No, not at all.

The way you do a 20' on-water or on-erg test and get your splits is relatively easy (except for doing the actual test). The second hardest part is remembering to shut your timer off right after twenty minutes.

Then you calculate or find your average split (time per 500m) from that piece.
Category VI (easy steady state) is 13 seconds slower than your average
Category V (vigorous steady state) is 8 second slower
Category IV (~head-pace) is 2 seconds slower
Category III (~2K pace) is 2 seconds faster
Category II and Category I can be determined from the average, but it's not that accurate or needed, since these are usually all-out for the distance or time (2'/500m and <30", respectively). You can find more information in Ed McNeely's book "Training for Rowing."

If you want to do this kind of training, give yourself a rest-and-test week every 6 weeks (5 weeks on, 1 week off). During that off week, no more than 30' of easy steady state per day, except for the day when you redo your 20' piece.

Can't wait to see how you do this year!

Karen