Westerville Crew

I appreciate our coxswains very much; our rowers do also.  It shows at the beginning of each season as different boats pass subtle, and often not so subtle, hints to Trish and me.  This coxswain holds a better line, that cox has a great eye for the stroke, this one more organized, that one more motivating, while another is exemplary in team-building.

In fact, these are all attributes which we wish to have in all of our coxswains.   Coxswains are integral to a boat going its fastest.  While technically, the challenges don't seem particularly hard-- middle school geometry tells us that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.  If a coxswain steers the shortest course, then the job is done. 

Steering the shortest course is the least of their challenges.  The psychological and stroke work challenges are substantial.  How do you cajole a rower into changing an obviously bad, but comfortable, habit into better bladework?  Or bring a rower into the fold who is a loner?  Or quiet the obnoxious rower who believes he's the substitute coach in 2 seat? Or increase the pain threshold of a rower who really joined crew for the social aspect? Or best integrate the rower who was bestowed a set of genes that imparts a fantastic VO₂max, but lacks the drive to take full advantage of it? 

How does a coxswain take a bunch of ninth graders who can't see past the goals of the hour, if any, to set their sights on taking a place on the medals stand at Midwest Championships?  Or being introspective enough with each of their 2000 strokes of that evening to show some modicum of improvement?  How does a coxswain keep the rhythm in the boat flowing seamlessly from stroke to stroke, all the while praising that rower and admonishing another?  Or maintain a rock-steady course while oar-tip-to-oar-tip with a competing boat in the midst of calling out a power-ten.

I have a very high regard for our coxswains.  I marvel how they all congregate in the back of the erg room at the start of an erg workout, getting organized with all of their record keeping of the day.  Who is getting lactate tested?  What about weights on the lights?   Are we recording random watts on steady state today?  What about batteries in that erg, for that heart rate monitor?  And about that geometry math problem-- yup, there is a fair amount of tutoring going on back there too.  And as the workout proceeds, they walk among the ergs coaching, particularly on the slides.  And they take new coxswains into their fold and impart as much knowledge as they can.

So I will take this opportunity to say thank you to our coxswains and please Lord, help me to never utter another, "Taylor, what are you doing? You're killin' me!"

When we're in the erg room, we don't do much in interval training.  Instead, the workout regimen is typically long and slow.

Interval training is best described as training at an intensity so high that the work effort must be broken into intervals with a rest break interspersed between hard efforts.  The harder the effort, the shorter the interval.  The shorter the interval, typically the longer the relative rest and the smaller the number of intervals.

Interval training has a number of advantages, including increasing a rower's peak power, improving cardiovascular performance, and teaching the rower to endure discomfort, among other benefits.  In the popular fitness literature, there is a drive to use interval training to achieve a greater fitness level in a shorter time frame, and of course, that message is well accepted among recreational athletes balancing work, school, family, and some semblance of a social life.  The problem is that, while it's benefits are quickly noticed, they are rather short lived.  As with many things in life, if it was that easy, everyone would be doing it.

There is one benefit that I greatly appreciate and is only derived through interval training-- fine-tuning the heart for maximal performance.  I'll explain.  In 15 years of coaching, particularly as a proponent of the "steady state school of aerobics", I've noted a phenomenon that is rarely discussed in the exercise physiology literature and that is coughing after an intense athletic effort.   Watch this Saturday and you will see rowers coughing following their erging event and when asked, many of these rowers will have a faint taste of blood in the back of their throats.  The pathophysiology is a little complicated but hopefully I can explain it in layman's terms. 

Think of the heart as being right and left-sided-- one heart but we'll call it the right and left heart.  The "left heart" pumps blood throughout the body, except the lungs, and during intense athletic effort, some 90% of the oxygen and nutrients are used by the exercising muscles.  It has a big job.  The "right heart" just pumps blood through the lungs in order to oxygenate it.  It's job is far more circumscribed.  Immediately after blood is oxygenated in the lungs, it moves through the left heart pumping station to be delivered to the rest of the body.  The right heart's work is less and if  you could measure the blood pressure of the right heart, you would find that it is far lower than the left. 

During steady state rows, the majority of our workout time, we are under-utilizing the heart but instead, pushing the aerobics of each muscle cell to perform in an ever improving manner.  That is, we wish to improve blood flow to each muscle cell by increasing the capillary count around each cell.  If we did muscle biopsies, for example, we would find over time that our athletes increase their capillary count from one or two capillaries adjacent to each cell, to maybe four or six.  That's huge as the capillaries deliver much needed oxygen to each cell.  We could also count the mitochondria in each muscle cell and see a dramatic rise over time.  This is important because the mitochondria are the "blast furnaces" that produce needed energy for muscle contraction, but like all blast furnaces, a mitochondrion is dependent upon oxygen.  In short, the hours of steady state that we love have their benefit most closely tied to the individual muscle cells. 

While our steady state has profound effects on millions of muscle cells, it does not fine tune the heart as much.  Remember, steady state is a conversational pace.  While the heart is taxed a bit, it's still not using the last 25 - 30% of its capacity.  That is, we're putting some load on the heart, perhaps driving it at highway speeds, but there is still plenty of pedal left for moving to the passing lane.  We're not really pushing it to maximum capacity.

And then we do a 2K test and we do stress the heart to its maximum capacity and what happens physiologically is interesting.  The heart receives signals to go full blast.  In only seconds, it rises to its maximum rate and begins delivering blood at its maximum capacity.  Trouble is, the "right heart" delivers blood to the lungs faster than the "left heart" can remove it to pump it to the rest of the body.  The pulmonary vessels become engorged with a little too much blood and some leaks out of the capillaries lining the airway.  That congestion in the airway causes a cough.  I remember one athlete telling me, "I like that taste of blood-- it makes me feel like I worked out really hard."   I don't like it and try to avoid it by including enough interval training training in our schedule to stress the "left heart" enough that it can deliver the load that is presented by the right heart's easier job.

So that slight cough after an intense event is a marker that insufficient interval training is being done at sufficient intensity.

We're back safe and sound from Boston where I took 6 varsity members for Crash B World Indoor Rowing Championships. 

We left Friday evening immediately after practice, all 7 of us fairly comfortably seated in my Suburban's  three rows of seats.  Originally we were going to drive straight though leaving early Saturday morning, but at the last minute the Harvard lightweight coach, Linda Muri, extended an invitation for us to attend the Newell Boathouse open house at 4:00 on Saturday.  Described as "the elder statesmen of the Charles River boathouses", a tour through Newell was an opportunity the we couldn't ignore.  You don't go to Egypt without visiting the Pyramids.

I couldn't ask for a finer group to travel with.  I had perhaps a twinge of anxiety when I received a phone call, then a text early on Friday on who had dibs on ridding shotgun. Thinking back to my childhood, growing up with 6 siblings, an argument over riding shotgun could devolve into thermonuclear war, or at least an ER visit.  I wondered how this might play out, but the fastest erg score won with Ben taking ownership of that seat.  The real test, I thought, would be the first gas stop/bathroom break.  Since possession is nine-tenths of the law, would Ben eschew the, well how might one put it,  the parasympathetic signals of an expanding bladder and sit tight, or would he exit the SUV?  The parasympathetics won but no war ensued. Ben retained title to the seat on his return.

Just hours before we left, I received a cool gadget from Amazon that allowed us to play any audio device through the Suburban's ample stereo system.  Connecting through a 9-pin connector built into that stereo system, it offered full fidelity, so entertainment was a breeze. Jon brought along "Eisnstein: His LIfe and Universe" by Walter Isaacson as an audiobook and my brother sent along "Shantaram" by Gregory David Roberts.  With a 5 hour break for some sleep in a mid-state NY hotel and good entertainment, we all agreed the trip up seemed to go faster than a 3 hour trip to Lake Harsha.

Nick, a former CRJC rower and now a sophomore at Harvard provided a tour of the Newell Boathouse.  The boathouse is so old and storied, that he described the second set of rowing tanks as "the new tanks", and those were constructed in 1973 according to the plaque on the wall.  It was fun ducking into the lightweight locker room and eyeing their weekly workout schedule posted on the dry-erase board.  There were a couple of OMG's expressed-- was that a real workout schedule or quickly penned in by some lightweight going for the fear factor.  It was outrageously hard.

We found a hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant not far from the boathouse for some "carbohydrate loading", but alas some of the guys were too concerned about their weights to dig in with the zeal that Ben and I showed.  That was the best hole-in-the-wall meal I've ever had.

The Lecorgne's picked our hotel on Massachusetts Ave.  It had very nice accommodations, with the rowers on the second floor and I on the third.  As we ascended in the elevator, the guys clicked the second floor button.  The doors opened and I sort of gasped.  The shapely behind of a woman in the shortest of miniskirts was aimed directly at the elevator door as she peered into her reflection on the large darkened window looking down on that night's street life of Massachusetts Ave.  It looked like she was attending to some last minute detail of her mascara.  My thought was this was too nice a hotel for prostitutes to be plying their wares in the hallways.  I  think I heard one of the guys start humming, "Fat bottomed girls you make the rockin' world go round" by Queen.  I delicately brought up the subject the next day and one said, "Oh, they were shooting a music video and she was in it.", and another added, "And you saw her good side.  The other side didn't look so pretty."   Wow, I escaped the scorn of concerned parents on that one.

Sunday's competition went well.  Whenever anyone on our team does a 2K, there is always expectation of PR's (personal records) since PR's abound.  Disappointment was palpable when only 2 of the guys PR'd, but  I didn't want to treat the Crash B's as a significant competition where we would go through a peaking schedule in altering the intensity, duration and frequency of our practices to be our fastest on that day.  Just 2 days before, the guys noted that they were sore and aching from our much earlier than anticipated on-water workout schedule. 

Still, the experience was worth the trip, with competitors from all over the world.  Jon, as an obvious student of the Romance languages, I think got maxed out after talking with competitors in French, Spanish, and Portuguese.  I talked with several of the German coaches, but only in English, thank you.  Despite Ben not PR'ing, for example, there were a steady stream of officials rushing over to his erg as he kept his first 1600 meters at an astonishing 6:08 pace but suffered badly on his last 400 meters, ending four seconds off of his PR.  It won't be long before Ben is under 6:10, but it will require some special race prep starting several weeks before.  That we didn't have  in our strctly early season "aerobic base building'.  Still, it was fun and rewarding to attend the event.

The trip back was straight through to Ohio.  I clicked on the GPS, pressed "Go Where", picked "Home" and it dutifully displayed in sequence the turns to get on the highway.  Only when we passed the Connecticut state line did I ask Ben, our navigator, now recovered from his 2K, to check where I had "Home" set.  Darn, it was still set to last summer's Youth Nationals in Oakridge TN.  We had been driving south for several hours.   Ben retooled the GPS and we started heading west as the guys cranked up Queen's, "Fat bottomed girls make the world go round..".  It was a good trip.

I receive emails from parents wondering about the progress of their kids.  The underlying theme is how can their rower improve their standing?

My last post is clear regarding attendance.  A day missed, for all intents and purposes, is a week without gains. Often it's simply unavoidable due to illness.  Other times, it is avoidable.  We have rowers who can seemingly never make it a full two weeks without missing an erg workout for some reason (the roads are slippery, I'm uncomfortable with the air temp and you're on the water; doctor's appointment; school function, driver's education, etc, etc).  We have other rowers who seemingly never miss, but if they do, it's minimized through good scheduling.  Of course, once on the water, attendance improves because a rower does not want another rower taking their seat for a day, and perhaps winning it permanently.

What about those who rarely miss, but have inadequate gains?  Chances are your rower is not, assuming they attend the varsity hour, taking full advantage of lactate testing.  That is, they are not consistently testing to find a new (and higher) intensity at which they can row their steady state.  And this is  important:  The intensity that we determine is best for each rower at steady state is not a difficult intensity.  It is conversational, like taking an easy jog.  The intensity is capped to prevent too hard an intensity that will put them into the anaerobic zone (our zone 2) but just hard enough to improve their aerobic system. 

Bottom line is that I am happy to entertain any question from any parent (or rower) regarding progress.  I prefer to have those questions during the day, hopefully by phone call (565-9199) when I have our tracking program available to review the data.  For parents of novices, we do not offer lactate testing to novices due to the relatively high cost but we do have testing regarding anaerobic versus aerobic ability.

Yesterday I blogged on genetics and VO₂max, that some had their ticket stamped for the express train, and some for the economy train.  How do you change trains?

Some individuals are endowed with a first class aerobic system and most are not.  Your VO₂max is a measure of your aerobics, representing the maximal rate at which your body can process oxygen.  That value can rise and fall, depending upon your training structure, but the maximal rate that you can attain under the most optimal training regimen is determined by genetics.

Fortunately for high school athletes, VO₂max pales in comparison to work ethic, stroke mechanics, rowing economy, team dynamics, and so many other factors. This allows an athlete with an otherwise average VO₂ max to compete with those who might someday become elite athletes.  (Essentially, an elite athlete is anyone who has medaled at the U23 World Championships or been a member of the US senior National Team.  So, for example our former rowers Chris Yeager and Jessie Leidecker.)   All elite rowers have a world class aerobics system, an unwritten requirement

So what are the rules of the road to achieve to the highest levels as a high school athlete?  First, don't become stale.  Staleness is the lack of progress or progress that comes at a snail's pace.  There are two primary contributors to staleness, the first being putting in too few meters.  The obvious example is missing workouts and believing that workouts will be "made up".  The truth is, those workouts are rarely made up by staying for the second session, when we're on the ergs, or by erging extra when we are on the water.  As I was able to demonstrate during lactate testing this winter, for those who took a week off for family travel plans during the Christmas school break, it takes about 2.5 weeks to make up that loss.  For example, someone pulling 175 watts at steady state who takes a week off during break will not be back to that level of watts for nearly a month.  During that time, that rower could have achieved a new level of 185 watts at steady state.  A week off is a month of no gain.

Before I get protest emails from those who love their family vacation time, I am not decrying having such family time, but the fact that it hinders progress is worth noting.  It can be avoided:  As one family did, they checked to be sure that their cruise ship had a Concept II rowing ergometer.  (And I'll bet it's not the first such call that the cruise line received).  Lost workouts hinder progress significantly. 

Let's take another example of lost workouts.  For example, we had several rowers who were absent 1 day per week during the winter due to scheduling conflicts (ski club is an example) and all 3 rowers showed poor progress.  The first's watts increased less than 5 over the winter; and the other two started and ended at the same watts.  If you follow the mechanism, for each day lost, it took 2.5 more days to make up the loss.  Since one of those workout days was a high intensity day, these rowers had only 1.5 day per week to build their aerobics.  Progress was never achieved.

Again, I am not decrying doing other activities but rather pointing out for those who wish to achieve to their highest level, one fact is obvious-- you must put in the meters and lost time is lost opportunity.  You won't make it up.

The second factor in preventing staleness is rowing at a proper combination of intensities.  This ties in with missing workouts.  It is convenient to believe that a missed workout can be rectified by simply rowing harder in the next workout.  It doesn't work.  You simply elevate your zone 1 workout to a zone 2 level and exacerbate whatever staleness you achieved by missing a workout.  It's the double whammy of a missed workout.  If you missed 15 or 20,000 meters of long and slow, then you either make it up as long and slow, or write it off as a  loss because the fastest way to staleness is zone 2 workouts.

Running on the white sand Vanderbilt beach in Naples, Florida won't make up for the loss either, though it's a beautiful long stretch of meticulously groomed white sand, the surf crashing, seagulls fighting over a morsel of food, and sandpipers doing their short sprint intervals to avoid the cascading surf. Yea, great place to workout if you're on vacation, but it won't make up for meters lost.

But you protest and say that you have no reason to be stale.  Your lactates are right on, you never miss a workout, and you follow the plan.  What can you do?  Just put in more meters because, while your parents might have endowed you with a great mind, your VO₂max might be a standard deviation below average.   Only extra meters will rectify it.   Examples abound.  We have rowers who put in extra meters at home in the morning and we have rowers, when their watts-at-lactate is not improving, who stay for part of the second erg workout.  There are no rowers among these who fail to improve.  Any rower can achieve those extra meters at erging by simply not taking an extra long break between their erg pieces.  Over the course of a week, these rowers could likely have the equivalent of an extra 15K of long and slow, all without spending an extra minute at crew  These meters add up and these meters make a difference.

There is no shortcut.  If there was, everybody would be doing it.  Weight-lifting will not work, though it will certainly elevate the eyeball count on you while running on Vanderbilt beach.  Brutally hard workouts, of the type that put 16 University of Iowa football players in the hospital for rhabdomyolysis, won't help.  Crossfit won't do it.  Ergogenic food aids won't do it. Calling a ski trip to Colorado "living at altitude for a week" won't do it.  Only meters feed the beast.

Are there shortcuts to quickly gaining speed in the aerobic sport of rowing?

There is one.  It's called genetics.  If your parent's gene pool endowed you with the makings of a great VO₂ max, then you can take the fast train to Georgia (OK, a weak play on a Willie Nelson song), but if your physiologic endowment is of a plebeian order, your ticket will be stamped the same as the masses. You'll have to slog it out with everybody else on the economy train, not the express.

But let's just say that you do have the first class ticket on the express, how far will it get you?  Only to the first stop.  Thereafter, whether your ticket is stamped first class or coach is up to you, not your genetics.  Genetics, at the high school level, will only get you to the first stop faster.

Here's what I mean.  Every early spring we attend the OSU erg championships and every spring there are a group of new novices competing there for the first time (as you can only row novice for a year).  We know that some might have started rowing nearly a year before, and some might have started just weeks earlier.  That will clutter the results with outliers, some really fast and others slow, but it still provides some basis for determining just how many rowers arrive to rowing riding the fast train to Georgia. 

Ben Leonard, 2 years ago as a novice, had the fastest erg score of the day, beating not only all novices but also all varsity rowers with a time of 6:34.5.  He clearly had his ticket stamped for the fast train.  But there were others on the fast train too when reviewing the results for both women and men, light and heavyweight, including Jon Weiss with a novice lightweight time of 6:55, and Ashley Bauer at 7:36 winning the women's novice heavyweight race.

Those who were not on the fast train as novices include Danny Just with a second place in the men's novice lightweight with a 7:17.9,  Ryan Kesselring with a 7:17, Dave Caspers with a 7:47.0.  How did these economy class rowers fair a year later?  Danny dropped his time to 6:45, winning the men's lightweight division.  Dave Caspers dropped his time to 7:05, a full 42 second drop from his novice season a year earlier, and Ryan Kesselring to 6:49.1 for nearly a 30 second drop.  None were on the express train a year earlier as novices, but they certainly did some catching up by the second stop.

But Ben Leonard did have the genetics with a blazingly fast 6:36 as a novice and interestingly, he had a neck-to-neck race with another novice, obviously with a similarly stellar VO₂ max, besting that competitor by only 1.5 seconds in the final 250m sprint.  A year later, Ben pulled a 6:25 and that same competitor, was a second slower than a year earlier, taking a third in the heavyweight division.   And Danny Just, riding on the economy class train, well he dropped his time another 13 seconds to win the lightweight division in a very fast 6:32.

So, if as a novice you view the landscape of your boat and you long for the genetics of someone faster, remember that while your ticket might not be stamped express, you have the means to catch a ride on the fast train later.  But that will be another post.

As a coach, it's great to be surrounded by so many motivated rowers, but sometimes exuberance hinders progress. 

The basic tenet of our workout plan is that we do the majority of the our workouts as "long-and-slow", otherwise called "steady state".  Steady state is zone 1 of our 3 zones of intensity.  Zone 2 is harder and where most endurance workouts are performed by recreational athletes-  there is always an element of breathlessness and desire to finish the piece because it is just uncomfortable enough.  That is, zone 2 is the zone where a recreational athlete feels satisfied that optimum gain is achieved in that 20 or 30 min workout.   Zone 3 is hard, and so hard in fact, it can only last for minutes before fatigue dictates that a rest is needed.

While 90% of a recreational athlete's workout is in zone 2, we prefer to segregate our workouts into zone 1 and zone 3, with little in zone 2.  Of course, to get to zone 3, you must travel through zone 2, and sometimes (and actually more often than we want), zone 1 workouts edge up into the low end of zone 2, particularly on days where one boat will play "leap frog" with another boat-- even the rest breaks become hard because the rowers wish to keep the overtaking boat at bay.   It's hard for a coach to denounce competitiveness for the sake of remaining in zone 1.

But as data accumulates, a pattern is emerging that will come into clearer focus in the next couple of years.  We have kids who clearly row at an intensity during steady state that exceeds our recommended range and they do it for most of their workouts.  While this would be applauded by almost all coaches, the data suggests that it has the effect of stalling progress.  I will show two graphs that support this, both from the same rower.

The first shows "Lactate over time".  The rower in question has lactate tested 23 times in the last 15 months.  Here's the graph of his lactates:

The magical horizontal line is defined by the lactate value of 2.0 on the Y-axis.  Most lactate testing should be at or below 2.0 mmol/L.  Only two values meet that criteria out of 23 lactates, and both were last year.  Additionally, 2 of the 4 values just above 2.0 were also last year.  So this rower is almost always in zone 2 and sometimes even in zone 3 for what is marked as a "steady state" workout day (the only days on which we get lactates).

What effect might this have upon the rower's progress?  Here's the graph:

You can see that last year, when the rower performed more workouts in the proper range, he had greater improvement.  This year, improvement has slowed, and in graphs shown in earlier blogs, he is being overtaken in his steady state watts by rowers who demonstrate greater allegiance to our workout plan.

After adding these graphing functions to our data tracking program, I can view the graphs of each rower very efficiently and this visual representation of the data is revealing.  Over-achievement comes at a price when that exuberance is allowed to run rampant, consistently rowing in zone 2.  The rower becomes stale.  Achievement is stalled. 

My plan is to apply more statistical analysis to the data so that we can find patterns early to help each rower achieve to the level they desire.  It is a shame to have a rower workout 6 days per week, week after week, and stall out in their quest for rowing faster.

On Friday's blog, I showed a graph of 30 rowers' "watts at lactate" versus 2K test scores.  Today, I will show some graphs of individual rowers' progress graphs.

Friday's graph was instructive in showing that there is a very high correlation between those watts at lactate and the rowers' 2K scores.  Very high indeed with a great predictive value. 

For the record, correlation is not causation.  What does that mean?  We know that shoe size, for example, correlates well with intelligence.  It's obvious in that a two-year old would not do well on the SAT test, but also has a small shoe size.  A twelve year old would score better, and, of course, a 12-year old's shoe size is bigger too.  By the time a student gets to a size 12 shoe, that student would obviously score even on the SAT..  So, while the shoe size correlates, simply somehow figuring out how to grow big feet will really not provide a high SAT score.  That would be borne out in taking all high school juniors and plotting their shoe size to SAT scores.  There would be little correlation.

There is a saying among statisticians that if you torture the numbers enough, you can make them say anything.  So we got to be careful that we aren't water-boarding the numbers to try and make them fit our model of workouts.  The good news is that I'm not sophisticated in torture.  But I am a pretty good programmer and so I added some graphing functions to our data tracking program.  It allows me to click on a rower's name and see their graph (soon to be graphs).

Here's a progress graph:

Each red dot is a lactate test.  Ryan started testing (day 0) about 15 months ago. He had a flurry of tests during the winter months then, and no further testing until this November.  (That's a logistics issue with our erg room 5 mi from our rowing site and we do no lactate testing on the water).   The number of days is on the X-axis.  His watts that he pulls during steady state are on the Y-axis.  We can see that he started at about 145 watts some 15 months ago and is now at 215 watts (his newest "watts at lactate" level) where he will test this week.  It's helpful for newer rowers to see how there are initial  gains, perhaps a flattening period of a month or two, and then resumption of progress.  This is typical.

Here's another lightweight rower:

Johannes is an exchange student who rowed for his local team in Germany.  He arrived physically fit, but not terribly "aerobic".  That concept is important to us and his graph shows just how hard it was to develop that aerobic base.  For 60 days, Johannes showed little improvement in his "watts at lactate" and then improvement started.  He's now rowing his steady state at 190 watts (that last right-most value is 185 watts, but obscured by the border of the graph), so a 40 watt rise over the winter and more to come in the next couple of weeks.  That is, once that aerobic base is built (by day 50 here), improvement comes faster.

Here's another,  Mary Stump"

Mary, like Johannes, did not test last year, but she has rowed longer on the team than Johannes.  Her graph reflects a rower who is anxious to improve her watts at lactate and so after a test where her lactate is low enough to meet our criteria, she would boost her watts of intensity too high before the next test, have too high a lactate and have to step back again for a week or two.  If a rower works at too high an intensity for too long, they just eat away at their aerobic base and unfortunately have to step back in time and build that base again.  But Mary is getting better and better at judging her increments each time she's successful on lactate testing.  She's now at 165 watts at steady state rowing, beating most of the JV male rowers.

As the sophistication of our data gathering improves, so too does our ability to plan a workout regimen that meets our goals of improving the athlete in each of our rowers.  I'm particularly interested in showing our younger rowers how each of our current juniors and seniors were once at their level (or worse!) and that achievement can be made through long, steady gains.

If you have ever seen our erging facility, you saw our 51 ergs, with the 51st elevated on a platform at the front.  We do at least part of the workout each night with all 50 rowers following the stroke on the elevated erg.

In addition, we have a great sound system and wireless microphones.  I call out the workout, for example.  But with the microphone, I can also pose questions.  Last night I asked, "How many of you sit down with your parents at night for dinner?".   Lots of hands went up.  Hopefully, our rowers share their progress over the winter.

Today I'll shed some light on the technical aspect of monitoring our rower's progress.  At first, it would seem to be an easy-- just have the kids perform a 2K test every week.  Unfortunately, doing a 2K test, week after week, never makes a team better, despite how intuitive it might seem, because it quickly leads to staleness.

Instead, we use lactate testing.  Here's a graph of about 30 rower's "watts at lactate" versus their 2K time.  (Or to be more accurate, times are converted to paces and paces to watts; that is, if a rower does his 2K in 7:00, that 7:00 can be converted to a pace ( 1:45 per 500m) and in turn converted to watts of intensity (300 watts).  Here's the graph:

As you can see by the data (and confirmed by regression analysis), there is excellent correlation between our "watts at lactate" (called SSWatts or steady state watts) and our 2K watts.  This correlation is given a name because scientists are always interested in how well variables in a dataset correlate.  We use a popular method called Pierson's coefficient.  Depending upon the number of rowers, we have correlations as high as .95.   Any scientist would be thrilled to have this graph and correlation.

What does this graph mean to a rower?  It's pretty simple.  Improve your "watts at lactate" and you will improve your 2K score.  There is a very high probability that a significant improvement in "watts at lactate" will result in a similarly significant improvement in 2K score.  The correlation is so high, in fact, that we can predict with lots of certainty what our rower's next 2K will be based on their last "watts at lactate".

With the latter half of this week back in the erg room, we've done lots of lactate testing and the results have been heart-warming.  Lots of kids discovered their lactates are so low, after 10 days of not testing, that they can increase their intensity.....and that means PR'ing on their next 2K.

So parents, ask your son or daughter how they are doing on their "watts at lactate".  It will provide a window to their next 2K test.

When college coaches look at our rowers, one attribute they are likely to point out among the array of rowers, are those who "connect".  Connection refers to connecting the leg drive to the oar handle, and the oar, in turn, to the water.  That is, if your butt moves an inch, so does the handle.  And the butt moves only when the blade is buried in the water.

Both Trish and I have had the pleasure of hosting lots of college coaches and they are quick to recognize the connection attribute.  I first understood their high regard for it when a college coach traveled about 500 miles to watch one of our varsity rowers, but asked, "Who is that with such great connection?".  Our answer, "Oh, she's a novice." and that novice went on to stroke the Clemson varsity eight as a freshman and to win two medals at the U23 world championships.  Good connection is an important attribute.

In our quest to "get the legs down fast", we have emphasized the importance of the legs as the primary musculature driving the boat,  and the need to use the legs early and quickly.  In our rower's quest to achieve fast and early legs, some have discovered a trick to getting legs down faster:  Just don't connect the oar to the water.

Here's a photo of a rower with obviously good connection:

His leg drive is firmly connected to the oar handle and the oar is in turn firmly connected to the water.  The evidence is a long bend in the oar shaft.  He's even producing a wall of water in front of his blade.

There are two concepts here that are important.  First, after reading yesterday's blog, you know that the connection of the blade to the water must occur early, as the last part of the recovery much like the contact of the boxer's glove on an opponent's face at the finish of a punch.  There can be no pause interspersed between throwing the punch and making contact.  Ditto with the blade connecting to the water.  A pause before oar is buried is happening among too many of our rowers.  The end of the recovery is inappropriately thought to be composed of a hang of the blade inches above the water, paused there for an instant, instead of the correct position buried several inches below the water.  And it is precisely during this pause that these same rowers initiate their drive.  As the legs start to unwind, providing what should be explosive power to the oar handle, the oar is unfortunately not planted in the water.  The blade accelerates rapidly, pushing only air, and finally hits the water some 12" or 18" inches from the intended catch-point.

If the analogy with a boxer did not strike a chord, so to speak, perhaps an analogy to "mailbox baseball" will.  Go to the link:  Youtube- mailbox baseball.  As you can see in the video, each "player" must exquisitely time the strike, made more difficult by their car traveling at 35 mph. The don't swing, pause, and then bury their Louisville Slugger into the mailbox.  It is one clean sweep of their bat in their quest to score a home run (4 hits).

The second point is that once the blade is firmly connected, the drive is initiated with the legs, not with the back and not with the arms.  In the above photo, some coaches would criticize the arm bend because the legs should unwind first, then the back, and then the arms, but in actual testing between rowers who have this early arm bend and those who don't, the habit does not appear to hinder their erg scores.  So we'll consider that early arm bend a red herring (for you young'ns, a red herring is a fish that is dragged across the path of foxhounds, in their pursuit of a fox, that is meant to distract the dogs, to throw them off their path.  The dogs are beaten silly if they go for that bait instead of the scent of fox. The analogy ends there. We don't beat our rowers silly).  So the quick and early leg drive is crucial to bending the oar shaft.

So connect the blade to the water as the last part of the recovery, and connect the legs to the oar handle.  You'll never bend an oar shaft pushing air.  And you won't accelerate the boat without good connection.