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If a way to the better there be, it exacts a full look at the worst.

Thomas Hardy

the ultimate measure of a man (or woman) is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

martin luther king, jr.

a storied story: how to treat hands

i am currently in gainesville, ga, in the middle of our 4-week training camp that culminates with NSRI. there are a few perks to being here:

former Olympic course

an excellent buoyed course the whole time that we’re here

fairly protected

john ferriss

every boathouse community has to have their somebody. it may scale up or down, but they generally film the room they need to fill whether they want to or not. at lake lanier rowing club, you’ll meet a dutiful and trustworthy squad of elderly gents that help to keep the place in working fashion. they do everything from maintain the launches to putting in 15 miles of cabling and buoys for the course. the tallest of this pack generally wears flip-up, clip on sunglasses and carries himself in a manner that lets you know he’s been in the sport for a while. this man is john ferriss, an IRA champion, a former coach of the Cornell lightweights, and an author of rowing books among many other things as well.

the year before in gainesville, stew had tipped me off to his rowing lineage, and this year i’ve gotten to know him better as the GRP assists with course maintenance. knowing the possibility of his sage-like wisdom, i didn’t hesitate during a launch ride to ask him a question about hands on behalf of one my sculler’s bloody mitts. following the question, i was graced with one of those moments when a storied coach drops a story on you with a bow tied right around it.

in comes, boo ferriss.

boo ferriss was a cousin of john ferriss. he was a contemporary of john’s father’s, and as such, john inherited many lessons from boo via his father. one of those very lessons pertained to the maintenance of hands.

boo was an exceptional pitcher from mississippi. he was the pride of mississippi athletics for quite some time. to perfect his trade, the legend has it he carved out a hole in the side of his family’s barn that was not much larger than a baseball. on the other side of that hole, he situated a tin can. he found the strike zone so readily in major league baseball as the result of threading this barn side needle.

boo explained that calluses were key, but that you still had to maintain feel. as such, you needed them, but had to tend to them. as a pitcher, your hands go through so many repetitions and such work that soft hands could not survive a day in the life. at the same time, a pitcher must still be tactile and sensitive to the needs of a ball in order to throw different pitches accurately. the same could be said of a rower and his or her oar.

here’s the boo ferriss guide to tending to your hands:

pour some rubbing alcohol into one of your two hands

rub your hands together and cover both hands in rubbing alcohol

let them air dry

repeat steps 1-3 another time

using an emery board, sandpaper, or a metal file, shave your calluses down so that they are slightly raised above the surface of your hand

the point of the first four steps is to dry your hands out and remove all the oils from them. this will allow you to more easily work on your calluses. for step 5, you could also elect to snip or cut the calluses off, but have to take more care to not do too much in one go.

john also shared another personal tradition for tending to hands. when your hands are hot, take to the dishes. by cleaning dishes and using soap on wet hands, you can also dry out your hands and rid them of oil.

lastly, john validated the notion i had heard of holding black tea bags or putting your hand in cooled black tea. this is probably the best approach for raw hands with open wounds. the idea is that the tannic acid will both dry out and toughen your hands while also making them more supple. did you know that tannic acids are used to tan hides? we ain’t nothing but a handbag.

fine line between teaching & not.

i have email upon email to myself of things that i want to post about and ponder. this is something that just came to me as i listened to my teammates talk to each other in a busy, close-quartered kitchen where we will be for 4-6 weeks as we prepare for the first NSR in princeton.

there’s a fine line between teaching and being passive aggressive. that probably sounds like a really bad word association rather than an adage with relatable meaning. however, i feel like the line is closer than we think, but our mood or disposition makes it feel as if the two things (teaching and passive aggressively instructing) are an ocean apart.

when people are milling about a kitchen, each trying to make their own meals, each hungry and tired, each operating from a place that they’ve operated from years due to their upbringing, they are understandably not in a place to teach. even more directly, they are literally in the process of executing an action with its own intention (namely, prepare food that can soon be eaten). as a result, it’s no surprise that when one teammate witnesses another teammate preparing food in a manner that is different from them OR even a teammate preparing a type of food for the first time, it is a challenging task to truly teach them what to do. instead, we resort to quickly and defensively dictating lessons or orders through passive aggressive comments. instead of saying, “so first you want to prepare the pan,” we’re more apt to say, “you might want to warm the pan a bit first and throw some oil on it while you’re at it.”

the same is true out of the kitchen and say... on the water (or near it for that matter). as a coach, you probably should condition yourself to be in the mental version of the athletic ready position. you know your role and place is to teach, so you should be ready for that approach from all sides. however, say your motor boat doesn’t start? say you are sitting in the pouring rain and howling wind? or toughest yet, say your athlete is resistant to your original approach and rejects or ignores it? any of these curveball road blocks can stop you in your tracks. it’s easy to be creative when there’s no obstructions to your creativity. it’s much harder to be creative, thoughtful, and instructive when you must do so immediately and from a challenging or disadvantaged position.

so then what? to cultivate change within yourself when it is something scheduled and predictable is one thing. to try and change your spontaneous reaction to situations is something entirely different. while neither is easy, the latter is daunting. the moment i started to entertain coaching, i visualized myself as a very genuine, authentic, and extemporaneous coach. i didn’t want to be a coach that would repeatedly state the same technical call regardless of its adaptation or not, nor did i want to be a coach loaded with canned hallmark sport phrases and readily served quotes. however, i think my judgment of those practices was a little to swift. when presented with a complex situation, the best thing to do is say something simple. one time early on the water at craftsbury, i coined a phrase in terms of a sculler’s stroke. i said, “boil it all down to the simplest, sweetest form. boil your stroke down to maple syrup.” trying to know the right organic response to each of the challenging situations listed earlier is probably an undoable task. saying a stock phrase or something simple may not get you out of the jam, but it probably stands the best chance to do so. athletes often harbor a lot of internal stress or juggle many thoughts at once. the simplest things will resonate the loudest. additionally, you safeguard yourself a bit from the stressful process of trying to perfectly talk out every unique situation on the spot. that being said, you still have to remember a phrase.

the last paragraph was trying to give myself a direction as much as any reader. how would you snap yourself back into teaching mode when you know you’re at risk of falling out of it? i’m all ears.

This was a great interview telling the story of Steve's rise through the sport and his experience at the "Last Chance Regatta" in 2016 leading up to the Olympics. We had a couple of issues with audio

so mostly plugging this for a philly rowing friend, mike lacombe, who has started doing rowing interviews. he both likes it and is good at it. wish my vermont landline deserved as many complements.

down south training and still hopefully to get back on the posting wagon.

testing. one, two.

i don’t expect anyone surfing the virtual world to pass this port, considering the prevailing silence and steady inconsistency of late. i finally take time to write not because of less work, but as the result of more work.

january has served the purpose of a visitation time for the Craftsbury GRP. our humble numbers are hunkered down for the month, and so, despite being what seems like an inopportune season, it has been an opportune time for us to welcome visitors and prospective teammates. it helps to break up the long, steady training block for the team, but also exposes visitors to some of the uniqueness of Craftsbury. i could go into endless depth on this. a mere synopsis of this weekend would shed some revealing light on it. we had 6 visitors total this weekend. some collegiate, some post-collegiate. various weight classes and genders. all of them arrived either on thursday or friday and had a weekend filled with this:

3x1500m

skate ski lessons (plural)

strength/power lift

integrated work hours into the Craftsbury Outdoor Center community

3 meals a day of the freshest and most locally sourced food possible for an athlete

a biathlon lesson

a sculling sermon on knees and elbows

a lactate step test

a race on skate skis

a discussion on training zones

optional yoga

...and more

add hosting on top of my usual duties, and it was a non-stop MLK weekend. somehow, thanks to muses unique only to Craftsbury, that busyness only lead to more discovery. to start off the training zone discussion today, i made an adaptation to a prolific MLK quote. the original masterfully reads:

Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.

i tweaked that quote to serve rowing. This is not supposed to make light of the more important topic of the original quote. However, it is simply a reapplication of amazingly poetic and powerful words:

Power without technique is reckless and abusive, and technique without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is technique implementing the demands of winning, and winning at its best is power correcting everything that stands against technique.

there is much more i could and would say, but for now, i will sign off with that linguistic turn and sense that we must continually strive for a greatness that results from the thoughtful and difficult blending of competing attributes.

coaching clips

“you can’t put in what God left out.” -- Ric Ricci quoting Jim Barker

now, ric nor i may agree with this exactly. however, the notion is one to consider. can you cultivate a crop that there isn’t a seed planted for? are there certain bare minimums that an athlete needs to have in order to make it? physical? psychological?

coaching clips

i have a lot to share, but not much for now.

this was a collaborative coaching clip. troy was retelling a valuable story that i’ve heard him tell before of talking to a former swimmer that was a camper at a sculling camp. he inadvertently brought up the association between catch and entry. many coaches call them one in the same thing. when justin moore was up this summer, he loved to distinguish them. he did so with the same enthusiasm that larry gluckman refuses to call the finish the finish and insists it is only a release! i agree though and think that the catch is something that happens after the entry. it is when the blade face gets loaded.

anyways, troy was describing things to this camper, and in that moment, he expressed how he would really like to stop calling the catch the catch with her and switch it to the entry for illustrative purposes. well, then the ex-swimmer goes on to explain how swimming has both. you enter the water but there is a waiting period and a float that happens as the movement of your body carries your blade through the water. slightly different from rowing because of how are body is moving, but still... a revelation. you have to ride the glide.

so now, here we are telling this story of nuance to a new rower who also used to be a swimmer. in this case, the story was used to relate how technical people can be with one thing and less so with another. this guy was a DI swimmer who probably refined technique beyond belief to swim as fast as he did. now though, he’s a big man in a new sport that is allegedly for big men, and the easiest thing to see is the physiology to gain.

in steps my creative writing minor...

a swimmer feels the water with his or her hands. it is tactile. you feel the fluid nature of water directly on your body. then, you come to rowing, and you hold a carbon shaft with a shovel on the end. oops, there goes my metaphor. the inclination is to treat swimming like sculpting or potting with your hands. meanwhile, rowing is just shoveling dirt. we need to rectify this and be sculptors that simply utilize a tool. a tool that we try to make an extension of our selves.

(promise not all coaching is metaphor... techy stuff to come)

buzz.

michelangeloes

i swear i will post some non-text stuff soon enough. have things in the works. are we nothing if not our words though?

so i had a plan when going to the water this afternoon. we practiced starts during our tech row yesterday afternoon. today, i wanted to somehow touch upon sprinting without sprinting. i knew that i wanted to have rowers alternate between full slide strokes and pointedly abbreviated strokes like half arm-break or cutting the lay back or heels down strokes. we did a few different renditions of alternating 10 full and 10 of a particular abbreviation. then... i came to the final thought that started expanding and developing the more i talked about it.

they would come to be known as: MICHELANGELOES.

many have heard the quote or legend or story of what michelangelo said in response to the question, “how did you manage to carve the statue david?” he simply responded that he cut away all the marble that was NOT david. in the same sense, whittling down the rowing stroke to sprinting strokes is more about whittling away what is not 100% essential to the stroke and the propulsion of the boat than it is finding some new type of stroke to end a race. whittling down is the other phrasing i love.

how to do a michelangelo

-take 10 full slide, steady state strokes at your traditional steady state pace -note your 500m split -take 10 strokes with less body swing and maintain the same split -take 10 strokes with less body swing + half arm break and maintain the same split -take 10 strokes with less body swing + half arm break + heels down (or 90 degrees behind the knees) and maintain the same split

the stroke rate will naturally rise up some, and the effort may rise marginally as well. however, you are never really overworking it since you didn’t attempt to increase speed or effort that much. interestingly enough a sprint is more about not going slower when tired and inefficient than it is about gaining speed. people rarely go faster during their sprint. it’s more a matter of who bleeds out less.

what i love about this 40 stroke sequence is that it is focused and simplified in that the directive is simply to maintain your S.S. split. additionally, it allows the rower to go through subtle rhythm shifts without reinventing the entire stroke.

i’ve always struggled with a notion of how to insert purpose and limited work into an aerobic session without totally squandering the aerobic efforts. i’ve heard stories from coaches like larry gluckman, mike teti, and ted nash about how a crew never left the water without a minimum builder at the end of practice. michelangeloes allow a rower to work on his or her sprint, strole through different rhythm shifts, and execute a clear technical focus without breaking the aerobic bank of a workout.

c.v.t.

i don’t know much about cars, but i’ve heard about this. unfortunately, the power of a coaching metaphor is only as strong as the background knowledge of the metaphor. what’s the point of using a something foreign in order to articulate something else that is unknown?

consequently, i wind up having to use metaphors in the same manner with which i deliver jokes. fortunately, if i do it well enough, it’s endearing enough to reel in the attention.

anyways... can you guess what the continually variable transmission is within the rowing stroke? i think it is the core/gut/belly/abs. teaching anti-extension core work is pretty much the trending diet for strength and conditioning. as a result, most people have heard of dead bugs.

within a dead bug, an athlete is supposed to keep his or her low back glued to the ground. this is supposed to be done via core engagement that originates down low in the abdominals and pelvis (instead of crunching from up above). as one moves an appendage, biomechanics pull on the spine in an attempt to put the low back into extension. for instance, if an arm moves, it shifts the shoulder blade further down and onto the back, which leads the rib cage to rise in order to accommodate this range of motion. meanwhile, if you lower a leg, it lengthens the hip flexors. some critical hip flexors attach to the front of the lumbar spine or the front side of the hips. as a result, lowering a leg also encourages the back into extension. core stability really refers to the ability to provide consistent and steady support of the spine and pelvic girdle via the abdominals.

so, cvt? in a cvt car, a constant application of the gas pedal leads to movement and/or acceleration of the car. however, the engineering advancements of the cvt allows for steady acceleration and no sense of shifting gears. the car moves constantly forward without even slight, perceivable transitions between gears. it constantly adjusts without stuttering to deliver a driver a continual, smooth driving experience. in actuality, it is still shifting but the driver cannot perceive it on the tachometer or otherwise.

when we do dead bugs and actively move our arms or legs through a range of motion that influences our biomechanics, we need to continuously adjust our core’s activity in order to constantly maintain a flat back on the ground.

the same is true with rowing. during the course of a rowing stroke, we not only change our body posture but also change the speed with which we move. if we want to have constant core engagement throughout the stroke in order to transfer energy from the blade to the foot boards and back again, then we need to have a continuously varying core engagement in order to account for acceleration and change in body position.

meta metaphors

3 metaphors that i think have useful applications to coaching:

test metaphor - i have integrated a handful of psychological inquiry into the SBTC program whether it pertains to personal conversations with athletes or post-race surveys. i know from my personal experience as an athlete just how resistant someone can be to a psychological or existential inquiry into his/her athletic endeavors. i felt i knew why i did what i did and resisted anyone that tried to examine it with me. it also may just feel plain unnecessary at the time to an athlete, and here’s where the metaphor comes into play. examining why you row and who you are is like coming to the one question on a test that you didn’t know you didn’t know the answer to. many times, you take a test and motor through all the questions. every once and a while, you come to a test where a question just leaves you staring blankly at the page because either the teacher purposefully quizzed you on something beyond your current abilities OR it was just something you overlooked in your preparation. either way, this is what personal inquiry into your athletic endeavors can be. we often may not realize that it will be on the test. we don’t prepare for it either because we overlook it or see it as unnecessary. however, then it comes to race day and either directly in our thoughts or indirectly through our performance we may be asked the question. knowing the answer can make all the difference.

MTB metaphor 1 - i am not fanatical about the trending culture and hyperbolic language that surrounds mountain biking. however, that is another story for some other blog. i do think there are some valuable athletic and life metaphors hidden within this melodramatic past time. when you approach an obstacle that is challenging to pass, you must work even harder to pass it. it is a somewhat irrational concept but at the same time a very inspirational one. if you come to a steep uphill, a sea of knobby roots, a pit of rounded and uneven boulders, or a tabletop feature, your logical inhibitions to be careful will fail you. what’s more is if you fail at the obstacle the first time and come at it with more calculation and apprehension, you will only fail further. instead, you must typically grind the pedals more adamantly and firmly. you must send a more decisive message that you will persist. you must set those wheels rolling so confidently forward that nothing will change the underlying intention of progress.

MTB metaphor 2 - this is closely tied to the first one. you must always look where you want to go and not where you are. often if you are in the middle of an obstacle or a feature, you fixate on it. for this, you pay a price. if you’re traveling across a narrow bridge and look at where you are, then you give yourself no sense of where you want to go and ironically make it harder to stay straight in the immediate moment. if you are tackling one root and spend time while on that root to worry simply about that root, then you will not be prepared for the next root that comes immediately after it. you must have a long view and look down the road. if we fixate on what is in front of us, then not only will we not realize where we would like to go but we will also wind up stuck in one place.

for the record, i still prefer road biking despite these invaluable lessons...

creative mindset vs. administrative mindset

i have been quickly realizing that the mental aspect of coaching can fall into two competing parts of your brain. when managing a group of athletes or even just one athlete, it is important to coach creatively when trying to observe what an athlete needs to improve. however, it can be very difficult to create a platform from which to be creative when you have many external factors coming into play at once. as a result, organization becomes a major task. the more you have things structure, tidied, and organized, the more you cultivate a platform from which to be creative.

if one is stressed or under pressure because practice did not run well in an organizational sense or because something occurred beyond ones control, it is not easy to be open, observational, and creative in that moment.

i wish the science to back this was as simple as talking about the left and right halves of the brain. people used to believe that the left side of the brain was realistic, analytical, practical, organized, and logical, while the right was creative, passionate, poetic, and vibrant (and of course, if you were left handed, you were right brained too?). that’s been more or less debunked. however, i can work from an experiential standpoint and realize that i have traits from both sides of that theoretical brain map. even so, i rarely find situations where i fire two of those opposing traits simultaneously.

as i recognize this paradox, i have witnessed coaching environments where it is easier and harder to be creative. in many collegiate settings, it is hard. stew and i pulled off some creative stuff at Colby this year, but it’s not easy. students lives are busy. schedules change. limited people are managing a much larger group of people (2-3 coaches to 70+ athletes). nailing down a schedule in a constantly moving and fully loaded collegiate calendar is incredibly hard. the harder it is to establish a framework and ease organizational tension ahead of time, the harder it is to be creative in the moment.

meanwhile, the craftsbury sculling camps are a mechanized system. coaches literally receive a grid that outlines not only their responsibilities and duties but also the actions of the campers down to the minute. while this sounds restrictive, the schedule, habit, and system aids coaches in being exploratory and creative with their on the water coaching. it is hard to be inquisitive with your own thoughts if the world around you metaphorically yelling at you.

coaching the SBTC at Craftsbury, i find myself in a bit of middle ground. i’ve implemented a good amount of structure that i do think has yielded some actions of creativity from me. however, at the same time, even a dozen athletes presents challenges when properly managing my wake or understanding an athlete individually within a very short period of time.

how do you create a platform for creativity when there are outcome pressures and barriers to setting up an organizational framework for success? challenging colleges are a great place to try and figure this out.

coaching clips

both for myself and others, i will try to periodically post “coaching clips,” which will be snippets i’ve taken from other coaches. Craftsbury is obviously an ideal place for this with a revolving door of coaches from different backgrounds. you can’t simply use any of these and expect success. this dovetails into my first coaching tidbit...

“you’ve gotta coach in your own voice.” -- mike teti via linda muri

i’ve always thought about the sage like coaches that i would love to emulate like harry parker. however, i also know the type of person i am and how i operate. i will never be exactly like harry parker and questing to do so will leave me and those around me deprived of a better, more genuine experience. i’m coach too personally and talk too much to simply assume that stoic approach. teti’s point is you can’t try to be someone else with your coaching. you should still most likely inform yourself, better yourself, and grow, but not try to be someone you’re not.

“roll through your hips not up and over your hips.” -- buzz congram

now, buzz has a very particular philosophy of the stroke. i don’t know if i subscribe to all aspects of it, but i think he does have a very good delivery of his stroke and a well constructed philosophy behind it. he coaches a curved back and staying low in the boat at all times. he also wants you to “fall away from the oar,” which is a beautiful line for initiating the drive. however, this calls for more back opening than most coaches could stomach. regardless of whether or not you subscribe to his low, rolling suspension, the idea of rolling through the connection instead of up and over it is a great concept for stringing together a sequential drive no matter how exactly you do it. the oar doesn’t need to feel us shifting gears.

“keep your ribs knitted into your abdominals.” -- buzz congram

in this day and age of proper posture, people often coach posture to an extreme extent that lends itself to rigid sculling with an OVER extension of the spine. we get so tired of looking at curved backs that we coach the few mobile people into a point of extension rather than simply neutral posture in the boat. on top of that, ribs, ribs, ribs. need to solve this epidemic, and it’s so hard to until it’s a problem. i really like the idea of making sure the spine stays neutral and knitting your abs into your abdominals since it both protects the ribs and creates the thought of engaging your abs.

“i’d rather leave you puzzled than have you be mislead.” -- ric ricci

ric and i were talking about hip movement today in light of a new demonstrative toy that i got (to be revealed later). what way do you think the hips are moving on the recovery? gut response always has people saying to the stern. however, ric thinks we ALWAYS must remember our movement relative to land. even when we shift to the recovery, the seat is still moving forward relative to land. from the moment we take the first stroke of a race, our hips are continually moving to the FINISH (unless you started at the release on the first stroke). so even on the recovery, our hips are gliding across the water to the finish, but simply at a different rate than on the drive. ric goes way further down this wormhole with provocative thoughts about the stroke, but we can stop here for now. when he drops something like this on a rower, he explains that he’d rather have you not get something than think you get something that is not fully correct. at least when puzzled, there is inquiry, and as i say, there is no life without inquiry.

to continue on the hips thought, recognize that when we run we know with every single step that we’re moving geographically forward. with rowing, we face backwards and trace a cyclical pattern within the boat that mess with our geographical perception. we get so caught up in ourselves that we forget the childlike wonder of racing from point A to point B and in an incredibly graceful manner no less. it’s similar to when you hang upside down and your understanding of up and down are muddled, or when you do the hand game of clasping your hands, flipping your arms in towards yourself and over, and try to identify a finger that someone points at. don’t forget the big and most real picture.

we are defined more by what we want than by what we already have

my adaption of a quote previously posted by kahlil gibran

coaching comments

so, i will try to get on top of this again. the list of things i’ve wanted to consider is a mile long by now, so i will simply start with what is freshest in my mind.

collaboration.

i think that collaboration is critical. one who collaborates is likely to adjust, innovate, and most importantly LEARN.

this summer i am helping coach Craftsbury’s small boat training center (aka their U23 program). there’s plenty to be discussed there and within how we’ve been operating, but i’m going to stay with the theme of collaboration that i started. this past weekend i took our 3 open weight women to mix it up with the U23 open weight women at Saratoga Rowing Association. while very different places, both Craftsbury and SRA are attempting to further sculling and small boat skills in the US through supportive U23 and Senior programs.

the weekend was a success in a lot of ways, but i’m just going to rattle off some of my observations of why it was beneficial:

the women involved were invigorated and engaged by the low pressure opportunity to mix it up with others

the increased energy level amongst the athletes allowed for more physical work within the short window

i found out about, but can’t quite justify the expense of getting one of these: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000C1XSM/ref=s9u_simh_gw_i3?ie=UTF8&fpl=fresh&pd_rd_i=B0000C1XSM&pd_rd_r=MDEM9V6YY6PPXD5TEH50&pd_rd_w=JJmvY&pd_rd_wg=9YBDA&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=&pf_rd_r=VRPAZJ2WS7QNSJZK8N3R&pf_rd_t=36701&pf_rd_p=781f4767-b4d4-466b-8c26-2639359664eb&pf_rd_i=desktop

it was interesting to watch for collective commonalities amongst a group of scullers and then discuss with their coach things that he tries to emphasize

watching any other coach for how they conduct a practice logistically can help inform you of how you do it and could improve. their coach, brad, did a great job of providing even-keeled tone to the entire practice no matter disruptions or unforeseen circumstances. he also did a good job of calling audibles when necessary, while still managing to maintain the original mission and keep practice productive.

it was interesting to see how a body of water can affect the execution of a practice and that made me reflect on the various places i’ve trained and how coaches adapted to it. fish creek (Saratoga) is wider than than hosmer (Craftsbury) for the most part, and it allows for a group procession at parts of practice.

ok, it’s late, so the main kicker... our final practice we did a funky piece in singles. it was essentially 2k with a stake turn in the middle, but went like this:

row 900m to a buoy

spin 180 and back your boat 100m until you bump a specified colored buoy with your stern that was in a row of buoys

row 1000m back to the finish/start line

complete a 360 turn at your discretion at ANY point in the piece

the piece itself was creative and innovative and the brainchild of brad. it had a lot of hidden gems though like:

incorporating both racing strokes and boat handling skills into one piece

providing direction for lanes despite the lack of lanes as the women steered incredibly well through an open body of water with the mere notion of heading towards a specific buoy

it presented a way to train race psychology that i had been searching for after watching yet another New Zealander “race from behind” by even splitting. i had been trying to think of ways to practice the purposeful scenario of making a comeback or at least a perceived comeback. what do you do though? ask one of your athletes to row hard so they fly and die while another one even splits? start someone ahead but restrict their rate? put a bungee on someone’s boat? the discretionary turn allowed people to choose their own adventure. if they spun at the beginning, they knew they were working from behind but also knew with confidence that those ahead would slow down (due to turning later). those that spun at the end tried to race from ahead and keep it that way. those that turned in the middle tried to negotiate some sort of middle ground. while this idea was mixed it with a handful of other ones, i think it’s an interesting one to stand on its own as well.

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