We had an unseasonably warm fall in Zurich, but this winter has been quite cold by local standards. We suspended much of our water-training as a result, and have been looking for other ways to keep active. This concept is familiar to most folks, of course, so I need not dwell on it. What I can do is think outside the box a little.

We are, of course, doing all of the usual winter routines - ergs, weights, and so forth. Our club has instituted a squad run on Thursday evenings, but when the weather turned especially frigid I changed the folks I am looking after to a swim instead. My club, though open to the public and operated as an autonomous organization, happens to have been founded by and is still owned by SwissRe, one of the world's largest reinsurance companies, whose headquarters are a block away from our boathouse. So we have access to their corporate gym. Although it is not the same as a fitness club or a university gym, it does have additional options for us, such as a pool.

I've also found it gives a needed change of scenery. My club does not have its own gym. We set up ergs and weights right in the boat bays themselves. So it is good to get out, so to speak. Doing some of the ergs and weight routines in SwissRe's gym is a welcome change and makes the same old routines less tedious. This is especially true for the junior rowers, who more than anyone need to be inspired to come to practice in the winter.

On Wednesday evenings, the club's head coach runs a session for the juniors in the Re. Since most of them do not do weights - generally not a good idea for juniors, depending on build and development - they need the same sorts of exercises or else they'd wear out sitting on ergs all the time. Body circuits are not fun for kids, although they do them. In addition, though, what Holger has them doing are basically games. We can use Swiss balls (not sure why they are called Swiss balls, especially since the ones in the gym are made in Germany), medicine balls, erector sets (for jumping over or squatting under hurdle-like obstacles), a half-basketball court, and what-not to keep them moving and sweating and having fun all at once. When they are done, they can all go jump in the pool for more exercise disguised as fun.

We also made a big push to encourage the juniors to come on our cross-country skiing camp. The Swiss are a notoriously outdoorsy and active people, so they come equipped. We chose a location in Austria because things in the European Union cost significantly less (as in half price or less) than things in Switzerland (traveling to the EU is like a trip to the Third World, especially since they switched over to play money on January first). The head coach of the club is also Austrian, and I personally have a hard time passing up the opportunity to spend time in that country, if only to eat properly without having to cook myself (ate my fill of dumplings of all descriptions, game lunches, pastries and coffees, whipped cream on everything, and apricot schnapps to wash it all down - the perfect reward for doing four hours a day of cross-country skiing). I am a big fan of fat and cholesterol, although I did start to cut my intake down when I began to gain weight for the first time in my life about five years ago (as an aside, I have to wonder if the decreased intake is responsible for my weight gain; I used to eat constantly in order to keep my hyperactive metabolism burning, and when I tried dieting or was ill I tended to gain weight; therefore, it is possible that by limiting my intake I have put my metabolism to sleep and thus gain more weight. The logic works in my mind.).

We did promise the participants that they would have some time off to go downhill skiing. I am not a fan of that sport as a form of cross-training, as it leads too easily to injuries. Too many American college rowers I have known have trashed their season due to accidents on the slopes. But Swiss people grow up on the slopes and seem less prone to injuries. And without the incentive, they would be less likely to come along for the cross-country.

Cross-country skiing is a great exercise, and a great all-around workout. For teams which look to do something different with their winter training, such an excursion is a great possibility. But it does have to be weighed against the other possibility: a rowing training camp in warm-weather. We are a rowing club, after all, not a skiing club, and so this needs to be part of our rowing training.

I think one other reason clubs are put off by cross-country skiing trips is that so few folks know how to do it. But the basic idea is simple and the rower on skiis need not be fast to get a workout. I learned to ski cross-country while I was in high school in New Hampshire, but did not do it again until I moved to Switzerland. I also learned classical-style and not the now-faddish "skating" style. And I learned on pristine trails, not on the rails often dug where there is more traffic. Going to an out-of-the-way part of Austria meant better classical trails than I have ever seen in Switzerland, but they were still rails when the snow let up. I'm not exactly fast, and classical is slower than skating, but it is not the speed rather the work. When I was an undergrad, I used to go for 20-mile bikerides on my old beat-up three-speed. The bike was obviously slow, but I was working hard for a couple of hours. So, with cross-training, it is not the speed, but the variety and the enjoyment while physically working, which produces the benefits.

There are several issues to consider before setting out on a ski trip, however. One is cost. Being able to drive six hours to a remote valley and set up there for a week is one thing. The transport issue is simple: we only needed room on the roofracks for the skis, and did not need to bring a trailer full of boats. The cost of a week in Austria was cheap. To train, we just needed to hope the weather was cold enough, walk outside, strap on skis, and head off down miles and miles of powdery trails through the valley. To go find warm water and reliably good rowing conditions would have required a much greater distance and time, not to mention expense and the vagueries of wind conditions. We row year-round, so taking time to do something else is good and allows people to bond in non-rowing ways as well.

It is also worth noting that a training camp of some description allows the rowers to bond. This can indeed be valuable down the road. It can also be valuable in winter just when people's moods tend to sag. The bonding, though, does not need to come in the form of a roadtrip.

I suppose the mid-winter training camp has been taken to an artform by collegiate crews. Their racing seasons are earlier in the year than club crews because of the nature of academic terms. Therefore, it would, in theory, be more pressing to get on the water earlier and not lose time to cross-training. However, I do see the winter as a chance for athletes to beat themselves up physically in order to emerge better-conditioned in spring. And cross-training provides a little more variety than rowing every day, and the variety makes doing the hard work a little easier on the brain. The brain, in fact, is the biggest obstacle to performance, so we have to trick it.

But if someone is sitting in, say, Virginia, and has the option of spending a week in January cross-country skiing in New Hampshire or rowing in Florida, I suppose the cost/benefit analysis kicks in and it is probably about the same, in which case rowing makes sense. But if someone is in the Alps already, a week spent on the trails is probably more efficient than searching for training sites in Sicily. There is still a reason to do a camp format, however, since it is important for training to get away from a routine. Telling folks to stay in their own houses with their own friends over Christmas and New Year's and to come to the boathouse twice a day just does not focus the energy towards training the same way as isolation does.

When I was an undergraduate, winter training camps were just beginning to come into vogue for collegiate crews. I remember Princeton doing them. There were others, but I do not remember who. We always wondered if they violated league rules, since the crews going on them would not have been permitted to train on their home water, but we left those issues up to the coaches. When it came to Spring Break, most other colleges headed south. We stayed at home on the "Sunny Rio Carlos" (as my frosh coach called it when handing out the year's plan in September, to try to trick the unwary into thinking we would be heading somewhere exciting). But I became a fan of this training camp at college. Although we did not go anywhere, everyone else on campus left, so we actually had fewer distractions than we would have had in Florida or someplace. We had access to our books and could make sure we were on top of our coursework before racing season set in. And we saved time (for travel) and money that could be better spent on other things.

I do note now that Harvard has recently started a Florida training trip in the winter, but Harvard does it about a full month after everyone else, in the gap between the semesters (Harvard still uses a term system abandoned by almost everyone else, so the gap between semesters falls in late January and early February instead of the normal US tendency to have the break fall over Christmas and New Year's). This is a time when the Charles River is usually still frozen, but it is close enough to thawing out so that the training camp can be bridged into a return to the water soon after. It seems odd for programs to train on the water in Florida in late December or early January, only to have to return indoors for up to two months when they come home. Harvard still spends spring break rowing in snowy Boston (the Charles usually melts in mid-February or so, but that does not mean the snow stops).

I should point out an additional benefit of a Christmas camp for collegiate programs which suffer from overly-long breaks (the Brits will especially appreciate this): without them, the sport becomes more individualized and training drops. There will be folks who train just as hard on their own. There will also be slackers who would slack off anyway. But most people fall in the middle, and will train harder with others around. If you can get them all away from their homes and lock them up together, they will bond and they will train harder. The mental training is actually more valuable than the physical, and will enable improvements in the physical. The main issue to consider, then, is cost. With an unlimited budget, fire away. But most people do not have an unlimited budget, so it becomes a matter of allocating resources. If a coach thinks that sending an entire team on a camp is more important than buying that new boat or a bunch of ergs, then that is what gets done. If the athletes themselves have to pay their way, then that is also a consideration.

I have always suspected that winter training camps involving rowing are a bit over-rated. The main benefits are the mental ones and the chance to row on better water than what is found at home. But the benefits to the rowing are not as great in and of themselves. If crews return home and get off the water again, the continuity is lost and spending the week with extra-hard cross-training would have been more productive. There is also the danger of peaking too early, something else I have seen with crews which use their rowing camps to get up to speed earlier on the water and then cannot maintain that speed until the end of the season when it matters. A coach considering a mid-winter rowing camp needs to keep these aspects in mind.

Then there are the little pleasures. Upon returning from Austria, I went on another excursion. Every year, my rowing club has an exchange with another club up on the Rhine. This was our turn to go there. It was an outing populated by the recreational rowers in the club, most certainly not a competitive event. I tagged along for the fun of it. We split into quads (two rowers from each club) and took out big fat wooden boats along the Rhine for the afternoon. The weather was frigid but calm. We saw some wonderful scenery which tourists would normally only see from the dry land. We also saw some spectacular birds (including some amazing kingfishers). My hair froze (or at least the sweaty bits sticking out from under my ski cap). Food and schnapps were waiting for our return. I went incognito and did not tell the host club that I was actually a competitive rower once. I stroked a quad (I still don't feel comfortable with two oars in my hands, but oh well), and the folks behind me asked where I had learned such a long stroke and if I had ever tried to compete. The point was, I was not there to race, but I still got a good steady-state workout in (rowing one of those wide wooden boats is also good weight training), I got to enjoy the scenery, and I got to remember why this sport is fun. Everyone should take some time for that.

Back to Charles Ehrlich's Letter from America.