April 2002
An early start to racing?
Maybe I am losing my memory. But it seems to me that the beginning of the collegiate racing season in the US is now much earlier than it used to be. When I was an undergraduate, the spring season was about six weeks long. My collegiate regular season was on the short side – only four weeks of regular season races, all in April, followed by Eastern Sprints (the championship race) in mid-May. But basically we were looking at pre-season regattas (such as the San Diego Crew Classic or the Augusta Invitational) in March, a regular season in April into May, and then championship races. Some of the more southerly programs did some racing already in March, earlier than we dared because we were later getting on the water due to ice. But even those southern programs only extended the season a couple of weeks to get in some early racing.
When I returned to the US in 1996 to coach, I found not much different. Since I was then at a southern program, my schedule usually had a couple of races already in March. Six years further on, however, I’ve been scratching my head at the results boards. Races are now happening in February on a regular basis, and even northern programs are racing seriously by mid-March. What is happening?
There is absolutely nothing wrong with racing, of course. Look at international seasons, for example, and they will go on for months leading up to the World Championships. Even club seasons in most countries last a while – in Switzerland, the first spring regatta is in mid-April as part of a series of regular-season regattas leading up to the national championship in mid-July. In Britain, the timeframe is similar. US collegiate rowing could be heading in the direction of other countries’ club seasons.
But at the international level, folks are training at a much higher level and are doing so year-round. They also have a much broader perspective of where their training fits in and why they may (or may not) do a certain regatta. Some folks do not do the whole World Cup regatta season – they only do those leading up to the World Championships, or they only do one early-season and one mid-season race to gauge their progress.
Of course, there are also those crews which do exceptionally well in the World Cup and even win it, but then fizzle to nothing when it matters in the championship race. Did anyone notice the non-performance of the Austrian squad at Sydney Olympics?
Even in a short regatta season, I have often seen collegiate crews, which were blazing during the season, fizzle when it matters. As the US collegiate racing seasons grow longer, I expect to see more and more crews emulating the Austrian performance of 2000.
A human body cannot maintain its peak for too long a period of time. One of the tricks in coaching is getting the crews to peak at the right time. It may be easier in a single scull, because there is only one human being. It is much harder in an eight, when it is the crew which needs to peak, a crew often composed of a group of athletes with sometimes widely dissimilar physiologies. It is not even correct to say that the eight individuals must be timed to peak at the same time. They are not individuals in this sport, but a crew. It is that crew which must be maximizing when it matters.
Early season regattas serve two purposes. They allow crews to gain race experience as crews, and even if there are to be line-up changes over the course of the season the experience racing allows the crew to develop (the bodies may change, but the crew is still the crew). And they allow the athletes to learn. As I tell my athletes, if it were only about showing up at the championship and seeing who wins, we would not have a season at all. The races, in my opinion, are to allow the crews to perform better when it matters – at the championships.
It is this point that often gets forgotten, I think. The pressure is on to win. First, crews are sent out to race too early, which means that they are in race-season mode before they have had enough time to cement the basics. This is why northern crews started their seasons so much later – they required more water time. A crew which holds back from early racing and develops the basic skills is more prepared later.
Second, the objective of a race is not always to win. By that, I do not mean that a crew capable of winning should not win. I mean that the results of a race are normally measured by winning or losing, when they should not be. To be as fast as possible at the championship race requires making progress towards that goal. I judge a regular-season race a success if the crew has learned something, even if it has lost. I judge a regular-season race a failure if the crew has not learned something, even if it has won. Experiments can be tried, new strategies developed, race skills fine-tuned, and weaknesses exposed so that they can be worked on in practice. Week by week the crew must develop. Changes should be made where they matter – often rowers develop over a season under race conditions in ways that could not be foreseen in Fall or Winter training.
My college coach is known for having ok seasons followed by championships. People have often asked me about that. One of the many things I learned from Charley Butt was how to effectively downplay the season. This is not to say we were not ready to race or that he did not want us to be going 100%. He had us ready and going 100% - if we were going less than 100%, we would not have lasted long. But going 100% does not always mean winning early in the season. If we gave everything, we put ourselves in a position to learn. In that way, our 100% became worth more and more each week, culminating when it had to.
Conversely, quite often I have observed crews flying off the blocks in March who are already at full speed and have nowhere to go. They win races and everyone talks about them. Come the championships, they are not in the hunt. Either they reached top speed early and then everyone else caught up and overtook them, or, worse, they reached top speed to early and then faded. It is nice to have a lot of notches in the win column, but I’d rather have the championship.
My freshman year in college, my crew was undefeated heading into our last race with Princeton and Yale. Princeton took us apart, beating us by open water. Two weeks later, my crew was sitting having ice cream the night before the championship race (after weigh-in, of course). My bowman looked up from his cone. He summarized things for us right there: we had a big race the next day, and we had a choice: either we came first or second. Second was the reliable choice, and we could go home and our friends would ask us how we spent our year. We could say “rowing” and they would ask how we did. We would reply “we had a great season, losing only to Princeton, and finishing second to them at the championships.” And they would respond “that’s nice.”
Or we could say we were national champions, to which no response would be necessary. The next day, we went out and finished two and a half lengths ahead of Princeton. It remains one of the most exciting races of my life.
In four years as an undergraduate, I never did manage to beat Princeton during the season. But I never lost to them at the championships, either. One year, after a rough season which included a couple of miserable races, my bowman waxed philosophical the night before the biggie (different bowman, but it is always the bowmen who get philosophical). He told us it had been such a miserable season and we had learned so much that we had to win the championship. I think the final margin the next day was about two seats in our favor after Princeton threw everything they had at us in the final sprint, but when the flag dropped the margin was indeed in our favor.
These sorts of races convinced us that it really did not matter what the results were during the season. What mattered during the season was that we were prepared going in, that we tried our best all the time, and that we learned something from every race. We had to be ready, honest, and open. The preparedness came from working hard all year. The honest effort allowed us to learn – it is impossible to learn anything unless the crew tries. And the openness meant there was always a way to get faster.
Some crews break off the preparation phase when the racing begins. This means they are no longer prepared at the end of the season. These crews may be fast early, but they don’t have the base to build from week to week. They are seeking to improve their won-loss record, living in the present, rather than thinking to the season’s end. No one remembers the won-loss record. Everyone remembers the big race.
I am less worried about the dishonest crews, the ones which are not giving 100%. They just will not have what it takes when it counts. Crews may get away with a single dishonest race – underestimating a weak but spirited opponent and coming away with a shock – but they’d better not repeat that mistake.
And as for the crews unable to learn, that goes back to preparedness. Preparation for the big event happens even in springtime.
So, should crews be scheduling these early races? It depends. If they know what to do with them, then early races are fine. They can provide measuring sticks. They can provide experience, especially for less-experienced crews. And they can provide a chance to experiment and learn. Some races are best “trained-through,” that is the crew does not prepare for the race but practices as it would without the race there. The crew’s overall training goal remains further down the season. There is no taper for the race, indeed no special race skills, just basic boatmanship. Early in the year, there may not be any race-rate pieces done in practice to prepare for racing either. The race is just there, and taken for what it is.
One year at William & Mary, I opened my season with a race against Virginia Tech. Atypical winter conditions had hit Virginia over our spring breaks (snow in Virginia? in March, no less!), and both programs had been beset by flu bugs. As a result, we had not ever tried a racing start and had not done pieces longer than two minutes at anything resembling race rate. The Tech coach and I joked that we should cap the rating at 24 strokes per minute, possibly with a rolling start. But we went ahead with the race as scheduled, and both crews made it down the course successfully in an exciting – if not pretty - race. We won, but who won or lost was not important. What was important is that both crew could go to practice the next day with a good experience under their belts, ready to build on it for the following weekend’s race.
In Major Leage Baseball, the Seattle Marriners won 116 (of 162) games during the 2001 regular season, but were eliminated during the playoffs and did not even reach the World Series. That's a lot of games won to not be champs. But at least in baseball, it is important to win throughout the season just to reach the playoffs. In rowing, all that matters is the championship race. The regular season is subservient to that goal. The races during the season are there to allow the crew to gain the experience it needs to do its best in the championship race. If those races are used with that goal in mind (and that means not only how the crew approaches them, but also whether the crew races in them at all), then they are useful. If winning those races is a goal in itself, then they may not be so useful. The trick is finding the right balance.