Rowing as Craft
This fall, I spent a great deal of time (and just about all my energy) training out of California Rowing Club (CRC). When planning for my Dartmouth off term, one of the things driving my decision-making was the desire to see how good I could get. Knowing that my competitive rowing timeline is limited (with lightweight rowing out of the olympics, opportunities — and accordingly my enthusiasm — for rowing beyond college are limited) to the next two years made pursuing the sport to a higher level appealing. This time is in all likelihood the last time in my life that I’ll be able to focus so intently on rowing, and I wanted to make the most out of it. It’s a farce to think that a few months training at an elite level is enough to actually see how good I can get in absolute terms. In terms of seeing how far I can advance in two years, though, it’s a step.
My decision to commit time and effort in hopes of improvement is a continuation of a pattern that began during high school. In junior rowing, improvement is extraordinarily linear — and I reveled in it. Setbacks were short-lived, personal bests were set on more workouts than not, and apparently, in retrospect, our bodies were made of rubber in their ability to bounce back from monstrous workouts. At its simplest, rowing meant showing up to practice, dialing in, taking a ton of hard strokes, unwinding during the carpool home, and crashing hard. We battled every day in big boats racing side-by-side, an intense and highly emotional affair. And you simply got better: the more hard strokes you took, the more you improved. It was awesome.
Somewhere along the way, though, this ceases to be entirely true. The reality of rowing at the sub-elite level (in my case, sub-sub elite) is that, on the scale of days and weeks, improvement becomes nonlinear. It becomes far harder to improve, but also to recognize that you have improved at all, because any gains are incredibly small.
Part of this is physiological: as bodies adapt to training, it only becomes harder to make more adaptations. Long plateaus are common in elite athletes, as are periods of worse-than-usual training. When viewed from a shorter timescale, there’s often no perceptible improvement.
Another part of this is technical: the basics of the rowing motion are easy enough to learn over the first few years. But it’s incredibly hard to improve as the years go on — the scale of technical changes only becomes more and more precise, and accordingly, the difficulty rises. Also, I’m not as neurologically flexible as I used to be, and my years of habits are difficult to shake.
On the water, any sense of improvement is based on feel alone, because absolute speed is difficult to measure due to the flow on the Oakland Estuary or the Connecticut River. Frustratingly, the feeling of an improved stroke rarely sticks around for long, and one spends an eternity chasing the memory of a certain sensation. I can still vividly remember a two-minute stretch from 2019 that felt like the best sweep (one-oared) rowing I’ve ever done, but have since found it impossible to replicate.
Frustration is amplified by rowing in a single, as I have all fall (and in the double, which I rowed all summer). In eights, there are a million factors influencing the course of a row, many of them outside of your own control. Agency is limited. In the single, though, you’re entirely accountable to yourself. It’s empowering, but it can also drive me insane.
In order to see any improvement, it’s necessary to look past the daily and weekly ups-and-downs and trust that consistency will be rewarded. At this point, I’ve spent nine years with a near-daily routine of exercise, and am incredibly hardwired to at least complete every workout in front of me. Completion is only one piece of the puzzle, though — there’s an important distinction between completion and focused completion.
Completion alone is easy enough. Training for completion implies the totally linear relationship between time and improvement: if I complete every workout on the training plan, then I will get faster. This fall gave me a renewed appreciation for this falsehood. All around the world, there are athletes training on similar training plans, completing similar workouts. But at the end of the day, some of them come out on top. Those athletes — like those at CRC — are those who consistently take focused, high quality strokes.
A saying I first heard in high school is that “practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect.” At this point, going through the motions of a workout is of limited value. As a young athlete, rowing 20 km will make you faster no matter what. Today, though, completing the same workout is no guarantee of improvement.
The challenge of “perfect practice” varies depending on the workout. For a long row, improving the specifics of the rowing motion is typically the goal, along with a certain level of physical effort. Shorter racing sessions combine that goal with improving toughness and efficiency at higher speed. Every training session has a different goal, a different aspect of perfection to pursue. In all cases, it’s possible to hide and go through the motions with less-than-perfect practice. But focusing and having a high mental engagement with the goal at hand is critical for any improvement at this stage. It’s a waste of other time otherwise.
This shift over years of training is the evolution to rowing as craft. Daily training for rowing no longer means loud battles in eights with intensity and ferocity. Those elements still need to be there when the time comes for eights racing season, and are still core to the sport. But as I train in the single and other small boats, day in and day out over hundreds of kilometers, it is to develop craft. Each morning, I’ll take around two thousand strokes — two thousand opportunities to improve, focused on perfecting the smallest bits of motion negligible to the outside eye (but glaring to those who know). Perfecting is a funny word, because my stroke is so extraordinarily far from perfect. As with all things, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know. The better at rowing I become, the further I realize I have to go.
Adding to this sense of shortcoming is being surrounded at CRC by the highest caliber group I’ll ever train with. Each has been fighting these daily battles for years, weathering obstacles, setbacks, injuries, and sickness. Even for those that have competed in multiple Olympiads, the incredible thing is that they’re not “there” yet. Each has their own technical struggles, their physical disappointments, their good days and their bad days (at their level, though, bad days are damn close to good days, imperceptible to the outside eye). It’s truly a never-ending search for the peak. The summit will never be reached, and yet we all pursue it anyways.
Training with this group has demystified the process of athletes whose achievements I’ve admired for years. They don’t use secret supplements, technologies, or training plans. At the end of the day, rowing is brutally hard, but it’s simple. Plain hard work. Consistent, gritty work. Day in and day out, completing sessions to physical and mental maximums. All honing their craft.
I recognize that I should count myself lucky compared to the elite athletes I’ve been surrounded by this fall at CRC. I look back wistfully at high school, wishing I could improve fifteen seconds in a year over 2km. Now, I’d be incredibly happy with four, or even two. Meanwhile, Michelle Sechser, a 37-year old US rower with a decade of national teams under her belt, recently said “we’re talking, can we go 0.8 faster? Can we go one second faster?” She has spent years chasing those final decimals, while I still have hopes for seconds. Especially in the single — where four years in I am still relatively new — it’s not unrealistic to aim for ten or more seconds. Compared to Sechser, I’m a young gun with enormous unrealized gains.
Returning to Dartmouth, I’ll be heading straight into the heart of winter training, where craft isn’t seen as easily off the water. Long aerobic ergs must be completed, minutes are tallied, and rowing is easily simplified to output alone. But still, the lessons I’m writing about can still apply in order to truly maximize the benefit of this training. When it finally comes, spring will bring race day emotions, pressure, big boats, regattas, and power. There will be side-by-side racing sessions in eights, seeking out gains at high speed and focused group cohesion. That’s a part of the rowing craft, too — just an element that hasn’t been developed as much this fall. Each day, week, month, and season brings a new challenge, all in the pursuit of inches.
