Serious Sculling

Feet-Out Drill

In response to my last post, about what I’ve come to think of as the “Mosquito Drill”, where one person in a double sits out with her oars off the water while the other rows, reader Michael writes (in part):

“…I guess the goal is to maintain consistency from stroke to stroke.  I’ve been working on my finish the last couple of weeks on the water, giving special attention to how it can help me maintain the set of my boat.  I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on the “feet out” drill and if you have any advice on incorporating that into one’s drill repertoire.” 

As usual, when someone’s asked a question or brought up an interesting point in the comments, I got all obsessed with it and then had to go off and think about it and play with it.  So here’s what I came up with. 

First, Michael, I’d like to gently correct you on one point.  Yes, it’s good to maintain consistency from stroke to stroke – but remember, it’s a dynamic consistency.  Because you will be subject to all sorts of perturbations, and because you are a person, not an automaton, it will not be possible for you to be perfectly consistent from stroke to stroke.  I know you know that, but I mention it in the service of leading up to my next point. 

The goal – well, one goal – of developing good technique is to become able to have what you might call “dynamic self-correction”.  You’d like to be able to row in such a way that you maximize your output for a given level of effort, while at the same time not being beset by excessive irrelevant movements.  This is what you do when you learn to ride a bike, for example (or walk, or drive a car, or any number of other motor activities.)  As you ride your bike, you might lean this way or that to avoid the anticipated trajectory of that car door.  Or, as you walk, you’ll adjust the length of your steps so you won’t step in that puddle.  It’s like that in rowing, too:  You adjust how exactly you take the blades out of the water so as to damp down little wobbles as you feel them happening. 

To move to the feet-out drill:  this is not the easiest drill out there.  It’s not the hardest, either, but it has a special challenge:  Not flying out of the frickin’ boat, heels over head, as you do it. 

A main point of the drill is to practice a certain kind of posture at the release.  It is a release position during which you are balanced, trunk vs. lower body, on the back of your bum, so to speak.  In that sense, it’s like sculling situps, where your shoulders and feet are both off the floor the whole time, but you’re alternately extending and retracting your legs (and so your trunk has to rock back and forth to compensate and keep your balance).  It’s unlike them, though, because in actual sculling your feet are lower than your seat.  If you have a rock wall or sturdy bench available, try this:  Sit on the edge of said wall.  Lean back a little, extend your legs, and don’t use your hands to steady yourself on the wall.  Keep your back straight so you feel your abdominal muscles, all tensed up like cords running from your ribs to your hipbones.  That’s the feeling you want as you release the blades from the water. 

How does this help you have dynamic self-correction?  It helps because you are using the large muscles of your body to stabilize larger movements of the boat.  You aren’t changing where your center of mass is as you release the blades and make the turnaround, so you won’t be directing any force downward into your hull, bouncing or creating large bow waves.  And your hands and lower arms will be relaxed enough so that they can take care of the fine-control issues they are good at – like minutely adjusting the timing of the release to counteract wind, waves, or your double partner; and yet not letting the oars get stuck in the water or feather under water. 

If you’re new to feet-out, try it with just one foot out of the shoes.  You’ll still get a lot of the feeling of the drill, without the abject fear that comes from the certainty of going man-overboard.  Some things that will help you do this drill well:

1.  You won’t be able to do this drill unless you’re sitting up nice and tall.  If your back is all curved at the finish, you’re going to have to curve over even more to avoid shooting out of the boat.  In other words, you’ll end up absorbing the force of the handles into your gut. 

2.  So that you don't sit with your back all curved, create your body angle and compression by pressing your belly button to your thighs as you roll into the catch. 

3.  Open your chest wide at both the back end and the front end of the stroke.

4.  Assertively use your swing on the drive, but only lean back as far as the weight of your legs allows you to.  

5.  Now, so that you don’t absorb the handles, make sure your sternum comes to meet the handles subtly as you finish off the arms-only part of the drive. 

If you do these things, your nice firm midsection won’t absorb the force of the handles, sending your flying overboard.  Instead, it will reflect the force of the handles, giving the water a last little push just before the blades come out.  And, miracle of all miracles, you'll find that you can make an almost normal release even with your feet out. 

Here are a couple of hierarchies to try out.  With one foot out,

• row ¼ pressure, < 20 spm for several strokes,
• at same rating, go to a solid ½ pressure for 5 strokes,
• then to ¾ pressure for 5 strokes,
• and then to full pressure for 5 strokes. 

When you feel comfortable with that, try going both feet out. 

If you don’t feel comfortable with taking both feet out yet, try rowing one foot out, starting at a 20 and ½ pressure, and then increase the rating every 5 strokes to a 26 or 28. 

If you really want to push yourself, try one or two feet out, square blades.  Talk about developing a quick release – that’ll do it for you. 

Enjoy! 

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.