Serious Sculling

Wiggling Around at the Finish

My friend Sam and I were doing a double together.  She wanted to practice being bow, because she was going to be steering during a race that coming weekend.  So I was stroking and she was following – following, and steering, and trying to figure out how to be a good bow seat. 

One thing about rowing bow in a double or quad is that practically everything is your responsibility.  It may or may not be your fault, but it sure is your job to fix it.  That’s because, in that seat, you’re able to see what’s going wrong in front of you, and you can see behind you a little more easily than stroke can.  Also, you’re farther from the skeg and therefore have more leverage and more influence on the boat’s set.  It’s as if stroke was trying to open a door whose doorknob was in the middle of the door, while you’re doing it with a knob in the usual place.  It’s a lot easier for you. 

Having more influence over the set of the boat is a “whole ’nother sock full of worms”, as a friend of mine (not a native speaker of English) so eloquently put it one time.  Because while there’s really very little you can do to make the boat set, there sure is a lot of stuff you can do to make it not set. 

Many, perhaps most, of the things you can do to make a boat not set happen around the release, too, which is soemthing I was trying to get across to Sam.  I started with the general things:  You want to be sure your own blades aren’t washing out (that almost always makes the boat wiggly) and that they are coming out of the water at the same time.  It’s best if your hands aren’t right one atop the other as they come away from the body, or you’ll put yourself down to port already.  Instead, make sure your left hand releases the water by coming down enough to make the right hand come down too, brushing the heel of your left hand against your right knuckles.  That slightly staggered position helps ensure that the handles are the same distance apart as the oarlocks are.  If your left hand is directly over the right, the handles will be farther apart than the oarlocks are, which is what makes you go down to one side. 

But there are also a lot of things about the release itself that are much more specific and dynamic, that vary from stroke to stroke – not from stroke rower to stroke rower, I mean, but literally from one stroke to the next as you scull – that you have to deal with as you row bow in a double.  And, assuming that both of you are rigged high enough to get all of your blades off the water, and there’s no external cause of one or another blade needing to be on the water, it’s really bow seat’s job to make sure that every blade can get off the water. 

If the boat doesn’t feel stable, then stroke seat will want to keep her blades close to the water so the boat doesn’t lurch one way or the other.  Then again, some people like having their oars close to the water.  So you’ll have to do a little observing here.  If stroke seat has her oars on the water, is it because she doesn’t have enough room to get them off?  Or because she’s used to carrying her blades close to the water’s surface?  Or is it because the set is rocky?  --You’ll be able to feel it if it’s the last one.  You can ask your stroke about the first one – set the boat yourself and have her sit blades square, with her handles on her thighs.  Look to see how much room there is between the bottom edge of the blades and the water.  You’ll want a couple of inches at least; generally more, so that wobbles don’t cause knuckle-smashing.  But if there’s sufficient room and the stroke’s blades smack the water right after she feathers, there’s a pretty good chance that she’s washing out and carrying the handles too high (and slapping her own puddles). 

If the set is rocky, you have the unenviable job of compensating for it.  It doesn’t really matter whose fault the bobbles in the set are – if you’re in bow, you get  to fix ‘em.  Unless you agreed before setting out that you would tell stroke what you see, it would be like back-seat driving to say anything.  On the other hand, if your partner is willing, you can try this drill, one by one.  Have one person sit out, holding their blades out of the way of the other person’s, with the handles butted up against each other and blades OFF the water.  As the other person rows, the one sitting out sits straight up and down (not compensating for any listing of the boat). 

This drill is oddly different from rowing a single, because the extra weight of the person sitting out seems to make the boat do its listing more slowly.  On the other hand, the weight of the oars flapping out there will increase the boat’s sensitivity to balance.  I can’t give you any formulas here on how to avoid disturbing the balance of the boat as you row with the other person’s oars out of the water, only tips.  You’ll have to play around with it a little to see what you find.  But here are a few things to keep in mind while you’re rowing:

+  Take the blades out of the water while your feet are still pressed up against the footboards. 

+  Keep absolutely still except for the movement of the handles as you make the release.  Think of your body as being taut but not tight – just a little firm so that you don’t introduce any extra wiggling into the system.  At the same time, avoid being rigid, or you won’t be able to damp down any wind- or water-induced wiggles; you'll transfer them to the hull instead. 

+  Experiment with feather timing.  See how it alters the set of the boat if you feather the blades out versus extract them while they’re still square, or if you use delayed feather. 

+  Vary your pressure , keeping rating the same, so your boat speed will increase a little.  As it does, make sure you extract the blades faster so they don’t get stuck in the water. If you're feeling really ambitious, you can try increasing the rating as well. 

+  Experiment, too, with microscopic changes in the timing of each blade’s exit from the water.  Basically, if you leave one blade in the water after the other is out, you’ll tend to pull the boat down to that side.  Usually, of course, that’s a bad thing – but in bow seat you can exploit it by holding on to the water with, say, your port blade if the boat feels like it’s threatening to roll to starboard. 

+  Play with how much you weight the handles down on the recovery – see how just the most subtle of changes in handle height can make the boat list to one side or the other. 

+  Once the blades are out, you can also press down gently with the back of one blade or the other on the surface of the water to keep the boat from rocking down to that side.  Of course, this is antithetical to the goal of getting all four blades off the water at once, but if you really think the boat’s going to suddenly flop hard to one side, you might still want to take the option. 

A final suggestion:  Don’t let yourself get to the point of frustration, either with yourself or your sculling partner.  Try the drill for a little while, then just row.  Then try for another little while if you feel up to it.  You’re not going to solve all the balance issues in one practice.  And you’re not going to learn anything if you’re mad, so work to a point just shy of getting hot under the collar (or hot under the heart rate monitor, as the case may be).  Then pick something else to work on.  Or get a drink of water.  Do some birdwatching.  Or tell your stroke a funny story.  Catch your own resonances – you’ll probably pick up the skills faster, and you’ll certainly have a lot more fun doing it. 

 

Shoulders, Entry, Catch

I've gotten a couple of comments in response to my post about where and how to "take up the slack" when you're placing the blades in the water, and they've caused me to screech to a halt and do some more homework.

I proposed that the slack – the slight movement of the handles toward you – as the blades enter the water should feel like it’s getting taken up by having your shoulders feel like they’re coming more into joint.  Steve from OH pointed out that videos like that of Zac Purchase and other technically proficient scullers don’t show evidence of a fore/aft movement of the shoulders, like I describe. 

It’s a good thing he pointed this out, too, because it raised some useful issues that needed to be discussed.  One is that I don’t necessarily mean to say that how I describe the way sculling feels to me should be taken literally.  Fine:  but how would you know this?  Especially when I do quick web-searches to try and justify my intuitions.  Well, you have to ask (like Steve); or rely on me to self-police, -educate, and -correct. 

In the spirit of providing accurate information for you all, then, I thought I’d check with my friend Denise Frost, who’s a physical therapist and sculler.  She works at Spaulding Rehabilitation in Boston and has a private company, Coordination Dynamics, as well.  Though she and I have clients in common and often refer people to each other, I have no stake in the financial success or failure of her company, nor she mine. 

She's written a paper called “Cuffs and Slingshots” (sorry; I'm not able to link to it today, but I will do when I see that the website is up again.  Either that, or I'll ask Denise if it's OK to link directly to the pdf).  It describes a common set of problems that scullers and rowers encounter.  It’s also what we’ve been trying to think about!  Its largest point is that when you initiate the drive, the rest of your body has to be firm, and your joints well-supported, in order to transfer the force you’re generating with your legs through your body, to the blades, and out to the water.

The next important point is that the small muscles of the shoulder that I mentioned last time aren’t up to this task by themselves.  It’s the larger muscles around the shoulder that should be taking care of this, muscles like the trapezius, the serratus anterior, and the latissimus dorsi.  If those large muscles aren’t engaging properly, whether because of injury or habit, your posture as you come into the front end will look curved, not upright.  As Denise says, you’ll have “rounded forward shoulders and a slumped upper back.”  The muscles that stabilize your shoulder blades will be elongated, which puts them into a position where they can’t effectively stabilize the joint and transmit the load from your legs to your blades.  Instead, your powerful leg drive will just make the muscles and connective tissue stretch more.  You may feel like you're hanging on the oar – but because tendons and ligaments are not well suited to the task of stabilizing joints, you might also feel like your shoulders are stretching out of joint, almost.

Muscles are perfect for stabilizing joints, as long as they’re in the right position. If you’re over-reaching or slumped coming into the catch, instead of having the large muscles extrinsic to the shoulder stabilizing your shoulders, the small, deep intrinsic muscles of the shoulder will be trying to do so.  That’s not efficient from a rowing point of view, and it will greatly increase the probability of injury, which may give rise to symptoms like the ones Denise describes in another of her documents: 

• numbness & tingling in hands and fingers
• radiating or shooting pain throughout your arm
• elbow pain
• neck and/or upper back pain
• shoulder pain due to the “ball” of your upper arm bone mashing your rotator cuff muscle (the supraspinatus) against the acromion, which is next to your collarbone and above your humerus. 

One of the technical corrections that Denise recommends is: “at the commencement of the drive, ensure that the scapula is engaged against the rib cage and that the latissimus dorsi is engaged.”  That’s the clue that we were trying to figure out, and it seems so obvious because “use the lats” is such a frequent refrain in coaching. 

If you look at the video of Zac Purchase that Steve showed us, you can see (faintly, because of the lighting) Zac’s lats jump out at each catch[1].  I think that it’s this feeling which I’m calling “feeling your shoulders come more into their joints”.  My previous shoulder movement example, with the invisible glass wall, was a way of trying to evoke the sensation for you all, but emphasized the action of the wrong muscles. 

Let’s recap:  Steve asked how you get your blades into the water without either (a) checking the boat down and flipping or (b) missing water.  I said, among other things, that you need to have your arms and shoulders relaxed and taut as you place the blades, to a level somewhere between God and Thanksgiving. Your belly-button is pressed against your thighs, and your chest is up and open. 

You also need to be stabilizing your seat in position (I have this down as a future topic) so that, as the water you’re moving past takes your blades, you’ll be able to absorb some of that feeling of movement of the handles toward you by getting a good grip with your lats – this is the feeling of your shoulders coming more into joint.  Maybe a better term would be “the feeling of your shoulders stabilizing themselves”.  If your hands are gripping the handles only as much as needed to prevent the oars from rotating as you lock on, and if your biceps and triceps are equally balancing each other out but not clenching – again, if you’re stabilizing your elbow joints, not immobilizing them, per se – you may feel the oars bump against the sides of the oarlock.  First you’ll feel them bump against the sternward side of the oarlock, then against the bow-ward side.  At least, you might feel this at steady state, when it’s calm, you’re not steering, there aren’t too many sunspots, and Mercury is not in retrograde. 

If you were peeking at your blade on one side, you’d see a pretty symmetrical splash, as long as you weren’t initiating the drive yet.  Only once the blades are fully under the water, and you’ve felt the oars moving around in their sockets, are you allowed to start the drive.  That’s what we’ll talk about next time. 

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[1] Or at least near the catch.  Since for the majority of the video we can’t see both the shoulder and the blade, we don’t know much about the timing of the two.  Let’s be charitable and assume that they happen at the same time. 

The Essential Randomness of Life.

If you want a certain thing,
You must first become a certain person.
When you are that person
You will no longer want that thing.
        Zen koan (adapted)

Clearly, we’re going to talk about how to row in rough water.  I know you knew that – just from the title alone you guessed it, and the koan was just for flourish. 

I clearly remember the day I learned to row in chop.  It was actually during my second-to-last year of serious competition in my single, and it came after years of training in the basin of the Charles River with my friend Rudy, because Rudy has a Filippi and he hated having to steer upstream during pieces (I’m not bitter.  I’m not bitter).  I have a van Dusen from 1984, which is no trouble at all to steer, but is, I believe, physically impossible to set.  But I needed somebody to do the pieces with, and Rudy was on the same workout plan, so into the basin we trooped.  Despite all those pieces in the basin, I didn’t actually learn how to row well in chop until Canadian Henley one year. 

I was actually watching the 1000m masters races, and the racecourse was in the throes of a fearsome tailwind.  We were all lucky it was a tail instead of a head, but it was still almost unrowable.  I was absently watching heat after heat of masters struggle in the waves, trying not to be nervous for when my 2000m races would come around.  I noticed something very interesting.  Some of the people looked like I felt:  They would hit a wave with one oar, rocket over to list on the other side of their boats, struggle to take a few clean strokes, and repeat the same process – over and over and over again.  The people who were making progress looked like they were just getting their blades up and over the tips of the waves….

Right!  Getting their blades up over the waves!  By getting their handles down lower! 

My college coach’s words came back to me like one of those echoing flashbacks in Seinfeld:  Mayrene’s voice saying, “Get your handles down a little lower!  lower!  lower…” 

I felt liberated and stupid, all at the same time.  But I did better in my race than I had in any other piece in chop I ever had before. 

So that’s one important technique you can use (yes! you too!) to row in chop.  The wrinkle is, or course, that you have to have the trust in your own balance to keep your blades farther off the water than usual.  In chop, actually, this is a win, even if you don’t think you have good balance.  That’s because if your oars are close to the water you suffer mightily, as you probably know from bitter experience.  But if your oars are above most of the waves, you suffer less. 

Another useful trick for rowing in chop is to keep your arms and shoulders very relaxed.  This is a process, not an outcome; you’ll discover yourself getting tight after a couple of strokes, and have to take a deep breath to relax.  That’ll last until the next wave goes over your gunwales and hits you in the kidneys, and then you’ll have to start all over again.  That’s okay.  You’ll get used to re-relaxing yourself stroke by stroke, and then it will look from the outside like you’re just staying relaxed. 

The reason you need to keep your upper body relaxed is so that you don’t transfer the force of whacking into a wave to your hull.  Remember when we were talking about your core, and how it wants to be nice and firm so that it transfers all the force you generate with your legs to the blades?  Same thing, only in reverse, for the arms and the hull of the boat.  You’ll feel more tippy if your hull rocks than if your oars just wave around in the air.  And if you’re stiff with your upper body, any impact between the blade and the water will be more efficiently transferred to the hull.  But if your upper body is more relaxed, then it will absorb more of the shock, and that’s to your advantage. 

If the water is scary-choppy, just row three-quarter slide or even half-slide.  My husband once did that during one of his “three hour tours” (sing that to the tune of the theme of "Gilligan’s Island").  It was in Clemson, South Carolina, U.S.A., and he rowed out on the lake they have there for an afternoon jaunt.  He’s been rowing since he was in high school, and loves exploring.  But it got windy during the row, and his trip really did turn into a three-hour tour.  I think he had to row back arms-and-body only.  (Of course, he’s still faster at arms-and-body than I am at full slide, but that’s because he really has freakishly long limbs).

Basically, if you’re too nervous about the water you find yourself in to row normally, then just stay in the middle of the stroke – you can avoid getting all the way up to the catch by rowing three-quarter slide, and you can take your blades out before your hands get to your shirt so you don’t get stuck.  Remember that you’ll have to have some larger-amplitude movements in chop.  That is, you won’t be able to cheat like you do in flat water and feather the blades out, because you stand a good chance of slicing your blades through a wave and getting stuck.  You’ll have to extract more of the blade before feathering.  And if you’re listing to one side or the other, you’ll have to hinge from the shoulders farther to get both blades in the water. 

In my recent poring through American Rowing articles from yesteryear, I found one by Shirwin Smith, who used to be the director of the Open Water Rowing Center in Sausalito, CA.  Her advice is sage, and not just for rowing in choppy water. 

She advocates the opposite of feeling like your handles are on a tabletop.  The tabletop idea is fine when the water is as flat as a tabletop, but when the surface of the water is dynamic, so must your handle height be.  “Instead of thinking your way through rough water,” she says, “feel your way through it.”  You can’t assume that the motion you make at the catch will be just this big every single stroke, because in rough water it won’t be.  Sometimes you’ll be squaring up right at the water, sometimes you’ll be what feels like a foot off the water as you square. And sometimes you’ll be both – one with each oar.  Especially at the catch you may feel like the handles are far apart in height.  But put your mind into your blades and sense them like you were taking handholds of water, and then pry yourself past those handholds. 

Even during the drive you’ll fare better if your hands and shoulders are relaxed (but not limp).  If you rock into a trough and your shoulders are stiff, you’ll be more likely to wash out and take an air stroke on one side.  But if you’re more relaxed and like a stiff bungee, then your blades will stay buried.  You’ll have to be sensitive to where the water is and adjust to it. 

The basic idea to take away is that the water determines where the blades are, the blades determine where the handles are, and the handles determine where your hands and shoulders will be.  Realize the essential randomness of life, and just go with it.   

On the recovery you can still use level hands (though also low hands) to return the hull to its balance point.  Make sure to brush the knuckles of your right hand to the heel of your left hand so that you won’t meet up with your fingernails and so that you find that level point.  If that doesn’t do the trick, think about pressing slightly with the heel in the higher side to return your hull to level. 

With all of these tricks, perhaps the most important one is just to stop caring about the chop.  You’ll hit waves.  You’ll get wet.  Your oars will get taken by the wind and your hull will rock around.  But it’s just not that big a deal.

If you want to row in chop as well as you do in flat water, you first have to become the sort of person who doesn’t care about rowing in chop.  And when you have become that person, you may stop wanting to row in flat water and discover the joys of open-water rowing. 

Catch Drills.

Before I begin explaining the drills I like to use for practicing blade placement, a disclaimer.

Many of these drills are going to involve rowing (at first) with very little boat speed, placing the blades in the water, and then pulling through only when you have determined that the blades are fully in the water.  Because you’ll be rowing slowly and pausing blades buried at the catch, you are going to feel unstable. So don’t do them on your first day out of the week – we all know that when they aren’t being rowed, singles get skinnier and more tippy.  Pick the flattest, most mirrorlike day you can, and bring all your patience with you.  And if you hate me for assigning you these drills, that’s okay.  I can take it. 

Arm circles for blade placement:  Start by working on a good blade trajectory.  Sit with one handle braced against your middriff, blade feathered, and leaning slightly on that blade.  With the other hand, row arm-only or arm-and-back only, square blade.  As you approach the catch on these short strokes, raise your handles so that your blade curves down toward the water and plunks in just at the furthest point in its trajectory.  The bottom edge of the blade should trace out a path like this:

Crucially, the bottom edge shouldn’t travel like this toward the water:

If it does, then you’ve missed water and shortened the arc of your stroke. 

Even if the blades do start to enter the water on the top trajectory, though, you have to be careful not to start the drive until they are completely buried.  If you don’t, you’ll start the stroke with a half-blade of water, which is the rowing equivalent of skidding.  Think about when you ride a bicycle.  If you’re on a sandy patch and you start pedaling, you have to pedal very gently at first, so that your tires stay in contact with the ground and push against it, instead of just spinning in place.  It’s the same thing at the catch.  You have to wait till the blades are enough so that they aren’t going to tear through the water half-buried.  You also have to push just enough right at first to keep a good grip on the water, not so hard that you rip through the water.  –But we can talk more about initiating the drive in a later post. 

The feeling I have when I place the blades is sometimes like I almost just stick them in the water when I’m ready to take the catch, even if it’s a catch at arms-and-back only.  But because my hands, arms, and shoulders aren’t rigid, it’s okay.  I’m all ready to make the turnaround from recovery to drive, I insert the blades into their imaginary slots, and am immediately ready to press spoon side of the blades up against the water. 

When you get good at placing one blade into the water, try doing the same thing with two at the same time, just at arms-and-body.  At first, try it with isolated strokes:  Place the blades in the water, pull through with no effort, and let the boat run until it’s out of speed or check the boat down before trying the next stroke.  When you feel that you’re able to consistently reproduce the top trajectory instead of the bottom one, you can try it with a little boat speed. 

When you add boat speed in the equation things become more complicated because you won’t be able to pause as long as you want with the blades buried unless you want to check the boat down.  And if you were to do this, your hands, arms, and shoulders would have to be rigid – and that’s exactly what we are trying to avoid at the catch. 

So when you practice blade placement at arms-and-body, be ready to sense the back-pressure of the water pushing the handles back at you.  Plunk the blades in the water nice and quick, feel how the shafts of the oars “loosen up” in the oarlocks (or even wiggle them back and forth once or twice), then pull through.  Plunk, wiggle, pull. 

It’s important to be pretty decisive when placing the blades in the water, or you’ll end up dipping the bottom edge of the blade in the water, sensing when it is buried, and then starting your drive with a quarter blade of water.  While that’s better than starting the drive with the blade completely out of the water, it’s not all that much better.  So be sure you’re getting the whole blade in the water before you go.  You don’t have to raise the hands fast or jam the blades in the water, just let the blades plunk in on their own like dropping a rock.  Practicing this at arms-and-body is good because you can more easily look at the blades as you put them in, monitoring their depth and correlating that with the feeling of the handles in your hands, before you initiate your drive.  While it’s possible to do this at a full-slide catch, it’s really hard at first and could result in flipping.  And then you’d really hate me. 

As you get better at sensing when the blades are buried, you can pull through with more and more pressure.  But if you’re new to this drill sequence, try it with zero pressure at first -- just go through the motions, don't really move the boat.  Once you’ve assured yourself that you can do it with little or no boat speed, you can easily move up to a paddle pressure.  But take the time to check first that you really can plunk and wiggle first before you pull. 

You can stay at arms-and-back while practicing the plunk-and-wiggle or plunk-then-pull until you get to full pressure if you want.  I like to do this because it’s so much easier to watch the blades and correlate the splash pattern, trajectory, and the feel with each other.  But some people prefer to move right to the slide portion of the recovery, and I think this has a merit as well.  Recalling my friend Kate’s “catch with your butt” dictum, it will be important to be able to create the correct placement timing and drive-initiation timing with the slide, not just the arms and hands. 

But once you introduce the slide into the equation, it does make things more difficult.  First of all, you’ll be in a tippier position, and that makes it SO much more tempting to jam the drive right away in an effort to relieve that tippiness.  If you have the opportunity to practice blade placement on the slide in a double with someone sitting out and balancing the boat for you, or to practice it in a learn-to-row single, take it.  You won’t regret it.  The worst thing that can happen is that you’ll discover you did really know how to do this after all, and then you can feel superior.  And if people tease you for rowing a tubby single, you can smile calmly as you row easily past th, watching them hack at the water. 

Regardless of in which boat you begin to practice blade placement on the slide, though, check the boat down almost to a stop between strokes at first.  Practice putting the blades in, waiting for the back-pressure of the water to signal “blades buried”, and then pushing.  That feeling, that patience, is the crux of what you’re working to develop here.  It’s a hard skill – I think perhaps the hardest one of the stroke – but it results in a big payoff.  When I get my catches right, I see an immediate 3- to 5-second improvement in my 500m splits.  That’s nothing to sneeze at. 

To recap a little:  start by practicing blade placement one arm at a time.  Then move to arms-and-body, checking it down between each stroke at first, then moving to zero pressure continuous arms-and-back rowing.  Keep hands, arms, and shoulders relaxed as you place the blades so that you can feel the water gently pushing the handles to you.  You can even use your lats to lock the blade in the water and press the shaft up against the pin.  This will have the effect of lowering your shoulders and rotating your elbows slightly down and to the sides.  It’s okay to take the catch like this, even though you might think your arms are bent and that’s a no-no.  It’s okay because your arms will stay like that through the first part of the drive; they won’t straighten out and make you lose connection. 

When blade has the right trajectory and you know what it feels like to place then pull, move to arms and body.  Plunk blade, wait for back-pressure, pull.  Check down.  Repeat.  As you become more practiced, don’t check down, but do use very little pressure.  Increase pressure as you become more used to the correct timing and waiting for the blades to tell you they are buried before you initiate the drive. 

Then move to quarter-slide or half-slide, using very little pressure at first and checking the boat down between strokes.  Leave out checking down the boat after you achieve the right drive timing, but still use zero pressure.  Take the pressure up gradually, but keep a very low rating to keep the boat speed low.  Always make sure the blades are fully buried before you press, by waiting for that back-pressure signal in your relaxed hands and shoulders. 

When your timing is stable, you can work up to doing this drill at full slide.  All the same caveats apply, but the one about increasing pressure exceptionally slowly is even more important here.  That’s because as you start imitating normal rowing, you’re going to more easily fall into your old motor habits.  So make sure that you are conscious of performing the motion correctly, even if it’s so deliberate that it’s awkward at first.  It will get better, but you don’t want to compress the amount of time you have to test that the blades are buried too much at first.  You can play with the rating later on; for now just increase boat speed with pressure and keep the rating below a 15. 

If you’re sitting waiting for someone to show up for pieces, you can try the drill my friend Aleks does.  He sits at three-quarter slide, squares his blades as he comes into the catch, and places his blades in the water right as his seat stops -- or stops his seat by putting the blades in the water.  Then he takes them right out again and goes back to three-quarter slide.  He does that over and over again, just practicing the placement and seat timing.  It’s an advanced drill, so maybe you want to wait until a hot day when you might not mind tipping over anyway. 

But if you row on a body of water you don’t want to fall into, you can try what I think are called “rustys”.  (I usually just call them "finish-to-catch drills").  You start at the finish, blades squared and buried.  Release the blades, feather, come up to the slide using your perfect recovery technique, and place the blades in the water just as your seat stops.  Wait a split second, then press your feet to the footboards and row through, letting the boat run afterward.  Check it down and repeat.  Again, the issue is going to be to practice the timing of placing the blades into their slots on the water just as the seat stops in the stern, and letting the blades slot completely into the water before starting the drive. 

Happy catching!

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.