Serious Sculling

Ratio within ratio within ratio

Been thinkin’ about ratio recently.  “Ratio” usually means “the amount of time you spend on the drive, compared to the amount of time you spend on the recovery,” and it should be small – that is, it should feel like you spend more time on the recovery than on the drive, at least at moderate-to-low pressures and ratings.  “Ratio” is also used to refer to a sensation of having enough time to do what you need to on the recovery, without feeling rushed or hurried. 

But of course I  think there’s more to it than that.  (I’m pretty reliable like that.)  In addition to the drive:recovery ratio, I actually like to think about the ratio of time spent getting into the body angle position to time spent on the recovery as a whole.  And I like to think about the ratio of time on the first part of the slide vs time on the second part of the slide.  I’ll discuss each of these in turn, then speculate as to their source.

Just to tack things down a little and make things (slightly) simpler, let’s imagine a low stroke rating – say, 22 or so.  Things change as the rating rises, as we know. 

I like to get into the body angle position pretty fast on the recovery.  I think of handle speed into the body as determining handle speed away after the release.  Actually, pressure and/or rating determine handle speed into the release, which then determines handle speed away.  And handle speed away just after the release determines how fast I have to get to body angle.  All of this is written with the proviso that the hands lead the body.  Just as the hands finished off the drive, they begin the recovery.  The amount of time it takes me to get to body angle on the recovery is shorter than the amount of time it takes me on the slide.  I like to think that the quicker I get to body angle (without exaggerating things) the more time I have to roll into the front end. 

Then there’s the slide itself.  Because I want as little momentum going in to the front end as possible, I want my slide speed to end up being very slow, so I have very little deceleration to do before I stop.  Momentum, of course, is mass x velocity.  I can’t change my mass on the recovery; I only have velocity to play around with as I adjust my rowing.  So I imagine my seat as rolling uphill on the second part of the recovery, coasting gently to a stop as my wheels come to a halt.  That’s where the sense of ratio within the slide comes from:  The first part of the slide happens faster than the second half.  This has a lot of benefits – less force needed to slow myself down, so less sternward push needed when my blades aren’t in the water yet; more time (mentally, if nothing else) to feel for blade placement and lock-on.  All this makes it feel as though the time I spend going from body-angle to half-slide, say, is shorter than the time I spend going from half-slide to the catch. 

Here’s a little graphic illustrating the stroke, which might help.  The top is the recovery; the bottom is the drive. 

 

There are two ways to think of this diagram:  On the recovery, if the time it takes to get to hands-away takes a time unit of 1, the time it takes to get to body angle will be another 2 units, then yet another 2 units to half slide.  Finally, it takes another 3 units to get to the catch, for a total of 8 time units on the recovery.  Compare that to the 4 time units on the drive: 2 for the leg drive and 2 for the swing.  Or you can think of the drive as having a beat of two – first beat is legs down, second beat is swing body over.  In that same cadence, give yourself a count of four or even five on the recovery. 

But where does all this come from?  Why should it be that way? 

I think it comes from handle speed.  I imagine, though I’m not positive, that a constant angular velocity (i.e., speed around the arcs) of the handles results in the lowest momentum for your body weight coming in to the front end.  I’m not that great at physics, having been a humanities major, so I’ll have to leave it to someone else to do the equations.  (If they come up with a different result, I’ll have to rethink the theory, ack!). 

Next, you have to imagine that, while the handles go around those arcs at a constant speed, they don’t have the same speed along the length of the hull as they go from release to catch.  Instead, think about them this way:  If the handles move toward or away from the long axis of the boat, they aren’t going to be moving along the long axis of the boat as much.  Imagine the handles’ shadow on the seat deck of the boat.  That shadow moves fastest along the deck when the handles are perpendicular to the boat and slowest when they start to spread apart at the catch. 

Feeling this is possibly the trickiest of all.  It might be relatively easy to think of getting fast hands away, but getting into the body angle position lickety-split is less intuitive and hard to square with the idea of not rushing.  That’s because, for many people, “not rushing” means “slow movements”.  So achieving the kind of movement I’m talking about on the recovery might require a re-evaluation of what you think “not rushing” is. 

I remember when I first started learning this.  I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew there was something difficult about following my friend Anne W., who was really good.  She was faster than me, so I tried to make my stroke match hers exactly.  At first, I made sure my slide started at the same time as hers.  But I kept noticing that when I did that, I’d only get to about 3/4 or 7/8 slide before she was at the catch and putting her oar in the water.  So I’d recalibrate on the next stroke and try to get my oar in the water at the same time as she did.  But then I found I had to start my slide before she started hers, and I felt like that was rushing her.  I finally managed to get it right by not thinking about it too hard but just absorbing her rhythm, and only after that did I start to understand and be able to articulate what was going on.  The feeling of being assertive, shall we say, with my slide speed was novel and a bit unsettling.  It really called for careful use of my hamstrings on the recovery in order to consciously regulate my slide speed. 

What drills are there to help yourself learn this rhythm? 

First just try rolling up and back on your slide, with your blades flat on the water.  Try to get the feeling of rolling uphill and alighting to a stop, not falling downhill and landing at the bottom.  You’ll need to actively use your hamstrings to control and adjust your speed.  You can make the speed back as fast as you want; your blades won’t be in the water, so it won’t matter much. 

This one I think I’ve listed before, but bears repeating.  Use the drive cadence to determine the recovery cadence:

1.  Take a few strokes to get up and going at a 20-22 spm.  Then count “one… two” to yourself on the drive, where “one” is the leg drive and “two” is the swing.  Memorize that beat. 

2.  Now, on the recovery, you’ll count “one… two… three… four” to the same beat.  Here, “one” is hands-away, “two” is body angle, “three” is half-slide, and “four” is blades in the water.  Better yet, have someone else count it for you – someone in a launch or on the dock as you go by. 

If you really want to push yourself, try a 5-count on the recovery to the same beat:  hands-away = “one”, body angle = “two”, half-slide = “three”, three-quarter-slide = “four”, and blades in the water is now “five”. 

You can also try bringing the rating down by 2 beats every minute or so, staying at a constant pressure, but keeping the time it takes you to get to body angle the same, and letting the slide portion of the recovery stretch to accommodate the lower rating.  This is hard, though; you’ll be tempted to achieve the lower rating by pausing at body angle, which is the opposite of what you want.  Instead, think of making a micro-pause (like a flash photograph) at half-slide and then at three-quarter-slide as you row.  You could even imagine that time itself stretches and slows down as you get closer to the catch. 

Let me know how it goes! 

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. 

Picking up as if I'd never been away...

Thank Steve from Ohio for today’s post, in all senses.  Feeling a vibration in the ether that apparently told him how I stammer and get all awkward when someone gives me a compliment and how I then gush and shower the person with tokens of appreciation, he emailed me to say that he’d sure enjoy it if I started blogging again (my words, not his, but the sense is the same).  Well, I asked, is there anything you’d like to hear about?  Turns out there is, and that’s the topic of today’s post. 

Steve, like many of us, was interested in the catch.  Specifically, he wanted to know how to get the blades in the water without missing water or tipping over – both excellent questions and difficult skills to master.  –-By the way, the fact that the catch is difficult shouldn’t discourage you if you’re working on the catch.  Instead, it should make you feel better for having it take a long time.  Because it will, and that’s OK.  That’s just how it is. 

So let’s think about the catch in reverse and in slow motion first.  While our trusty filmographer is rewinding the tape, let’s define a few terms, too.  What does “missing water” mean?  I take it to mean that you use some of your leg drive (i.e., move your seat away from your heels) before you get your blades fully buried in the water.  As long as I’m at it, I’ll also define the catch as that moment when the blades become fully buried:  perpendicular to the (ideal) surface of the water, with about ½” to 1” of water over the top edge of the blade.  And maybe I’ll call the interval of time it takes for the blades to go from completely out of the water to completely buried “the entry”.  [Boy, I really hope this is consistent with things I’ve said before.  Maybe someone with more energy for research can check?]

So:  Set your mental video on the catch, pause it, and let’s think about all the elements that are present.  Blades are fully underwater with the right amount of water over top of them.  Your body is all compressed up there at the front end – you’re up on the balls of your feet (most likely), your belly button is pressed firmly to your thighs, and you’re squeezing your hamstrings to keep your seat stabilized during the entry.  Your chest is open, your arms are extended and wide, and your chin is high (because you’re looking at the horizon, not your speedcoach). 

There are a couple of other things in there, too, that aren’t obvious from the picture.  One, of course, is that your boat is actually moving through the water.  This is important, because if it weren’t, the catch would be a whole lot easier.  Rowing would also be a hell of a lot less fun, too – oh, but you already knew that, because you’ve erged.  Yeah. 

The thing about your boat moving through the water that makes the catch so danged hard is that pesky entry.  It takes a while for your blades to enter the water, right?  But your boat is moving the whole time.  So once the bottom edge of your blade enters the water, the movement of your boat is going to mean that the water sort of pushes on your blades, which means that you’re going to feel resistance in your hands, arms, and shoulders.  So if you’re holding all your muscles sort of clenched while this happens, then the second your blades start their entry, you’re checking the boat down and, as likely as not, initiating not the drive but instead the much more humiliating process of falling into the water. 

Luckily, however, this is a mental image, and as long as we’re imagining things we might as well imagine them all excellent and superior.  So the other part of this freeze-frame image that you can’t see is how your arms are kind of relaxed, not clenched; and how the pressure of the water on your blades and your blades in your hands is actually making your shoulders feel like they’re coming more into their joints. 

Phew!  There’s a lot there, and we haven’t even really started working backward yet.  We won’t for a while, either, because there are a few things we need to understand first, like:  When I say “your arms are actually kind of relaxed,” what do I mean?  Because if your arms were relaxed, they certainly wouldn’t be holding oar handles and extending out from your body.   Nope, they’d be in a hammock, maybe even clasped behind your head, and waiting for the Sandwich Turtle to arrive [30 Rock reference.  Possible picture here]. 

So let’s take a moment and construct a spectrum of arm relaxation.  In the hammock is one end.  At the opposite end, let’s say you’re doing a pushup and pausing at the top.  (Leaving aside why anyone would want to do this.)  A little below that is how relaxed (or not) your arms would have to be to push open a really heavy door.  Below that might be how your arms would feel if you were pushing your plate away at the end of a lengthy and filling Thanksgiving meal.  Below that, how they’d feel if you were pushing aside a gauzy curtain.  Below that?  Pointing like God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  And below that, pointing like Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. 

How should your arms feel, then, as your blades enter the water?  I’m leaning toward a region somewhere between God and Thanksgiving.  Just enough tension in the deltoid muscle to keep your arm extended out from your body so it stays there, and just enough reciprocal tension in your biceps and triceps that your arms is more or less straight but your elbow’s not locked out.  Like, if I were to inexplicably pull a prank on you by pushing your handles toward you all of a sudden, I’d encounter some resistance and your arm would push back into your shoulder (gleniohumeral) joint. 

By the way, have you ever done that? Pull your am into your shoulder joint, I mean.  Actually, wait:  don’t answer that – I feel like either answer is just as incriminating in this context.  But do try it.  Find a private place.  Lock the door.  Point to a spot directly in front of you with one or both arms.  Now, make your arm move as if I’d just pushed your hand toward you, or like you’re a mime pretending that the invisible glass wall that your fingertip is resting against just got an inch or so closer to you.  It’s sort of like pulling your shoulders back.   A quick visit to Wikipedia suggests that what we’re thinking about is actually very much like “scapular retraction”.  What it looks like is that your arms are straight out and your shoulders just kind of go back and forth, or in and out.  So do that a few times, until either someone knocks on the door and asks what the hell you’re doing in there with the door locked, or you get sick of it. 

These two things – being relaxed at a point between God and Thanksgiving, and having your shoulder come more into joint – are what your arms are going to do during the entry.  (The amount of movement won’t be as much as you did when you were practicing just now, and there will be some involvement of the lats, too, but it’s helpful to think of the previous exercise as you’re placing the blades.)  So go back to your freeze-framed catch image.  Now, rewind slowly to just the beginning of the entry, and mentally watch your arms.  They’re extended, they’re stabilized but relaxed at the elbows, and all the back-pressure of the water on the backs of your blades while the blades enter the water does is to push your arm back into its shoulder joint a little. 

So cool. 

Because, think about it:  What, really, are the other options for how to “use up” that little bit of distance that your boat travels during the blades’ entry?  Well, if your elbows were hammock-relaxed, the handles pushing at your hands would make your elbows bend.  And that would suck because when you started the drive, you’d either have to let your arms straighten out again (ineffective) or clench your elbows  to keep them in that slightly bent position for pretty much the rest of the drive (ineffective and tiring).  Or maybe your arms are really rigid.  And nothing, but nothing, is going to bend those elbows.  In this case you could let the back-pressure of the water open up your body angle a little for you.  But that would make your blades go too deep, I bet.  Plus, it’d use up some of your body angle at the front end, when it could be put to much better use later on in the stroke.  So really, the only other option left is for your whole body (except your hamstrings) to be so rigid during the entry that the back-pressure of the water just pushes your seat away from your heels.  And now we’re right back where we started, before we defined terms.  You’ve just missed water.  You used up some of your slide, or leg drive, while the blades were getting buried. 

Let’s recap for a little bit.  We were thinking about how in the Sam Hill a person could place the blades into the water at the front end without either missing water or tipping the boat over.  Two very important pieces of this are that your arms and shoulders are relaxed between God and Thanksgiving, and that you compensate for the movement of the boat by retracting your scapulas just a little bit.  Next time we’ll continue thinking about this process, and I’ll try to invent some drills for y’all. 

 Cheers!  As always, questions and polite dissent welcome. 

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.