Lots of meetings yesterday and today, so not much time to update. I'm trying to train pretty hard, but after a while it just gets to be too much - for instance, I'd rowed Friday, Saturday and Monday, including extra distance on Monday, and gone ot the gym yesterday. Today I was planning to row, but had a 7:30 telecon, so I decided to erg instead. There was at least a possibility of waking up at 4 (well, waking up at 4 when Rudder got up was a given, but getting out of bed was a possibility) or 4:30 so I could get some decent distance. I was definitely starting to feel burned out and just plain tired, though. Instead I slept until 5 and only managed to get in 5K on the erg. I'm going to take tomorrow off completely, row Friday, and go to the gym on Saturday. That will be similar to last week's pattern, which worked fairly well in having me feel strong and energetic for the last several rows.
Next week Rudder will be off traveling. I need to not slack off while he's gone, but rather hit the training pretty hard, because the week after that I can begin s slight taper for the lake Tahoe race. It's a bit of an anomaly, though, a longer race at a time in the year when we're usually doing sprints. I'll be rowing it in a double with Dr. Bosun. We went out last Saturday in the double belonging to Old Salt that we're intending to row in; we had to make a lot of adjustments to both the boat and our rowing, but it felt much better toward the end. We only rowed at a light pressure, though. We're going to row again in Rudder's double next week to see if it feels better, and I hope we can row a bit more at race pressure.
Dr. Bosun tends to do a lot of coaching while rowing; I don't think she means it as "I'm better than you and am telling you what to do" but as "this is what I see in your rowing, please tell me what you see in mine". I think some people have tended to assume the former rather than the latter and to get annoyed, but she was eager to hear any feedback I had for her, and in fact one of her comments was a useful change for me to make in my single as well as in our double. Fortunately she said it in a way that worked for me. If she had said, "You should begin pulling your arms too late" I would have assumed it was only a style difference and might have changed it in the double but not in my single. What she said, though, was, "I feel a check in the boat; I think it happens when you start bringing your arms in." A check in the boat's forward motion is always a bad thing, no matter what style you use, and when I tried bending my arms sooner she said she wasn't feeling the check anymore. That's something that's a big deal for me in training: saying the thing in the way that makes sense to the student. There is no one right way of training, because there is no one way of learning that works for everyone. For me, in rowing, I'm only going to listen to you if what you're saying makes physics / biomechanical / physiological sense.
At any rate, I think this race is more about a chance to go out rowing in a beautiful place than about any fierce competition. Still, feeling you did your best is always a good thing and winning a medal is even better.
Posted by dichroic at May 24, 2006 11:51 AM