By GRP Row Coach S. Hap Whelpley

I have had plenty of coaches look at me with raised eyebrows as I suggest an athlete's insecurities prohibit his or her sculling. There are certainly other inhibitors as well like coordination, flexibility, or strength. But if you meet an athlete where he or she is at, I think you will find the biggest roadblocks to better technique are insecurities.

As a sculler, I could feel the rows or times during a row where my priority was something other than moving the boat as well as I could. Shoulder season rows atop thirty-eight degree water or brutally windy days would have me prioritize not flipping over moving the boat. When something else takes our focus away from moving the boat, it inhibits our ability to do so. I often remind athletes of feats where a talented athlete flipped and found success shortly after it. For example, a great sculler, Sam Stitt, flipped in November on Carnegie Lake in his warmup to a USRowing Fall Speed Order. He got back into his boat in cold wet clothing, got to the start line, and won the event. Similarly, Andrew Campbell, Jr., flipped in his quarterfinal of the Lightweight Men's single in 2014. He had to get back in his boat and finish the race to not be disqualified from the regatta. He went through the C/D semi to the C final that he didn't belong in. There, he set a World Record. Those athletes and more didn't waste time worrying about flipping. They just focused on what they had to do to move the boat.

Culturally, I think "insecurity" is a very loaded word. In this instance, I am not referring to the significant economic and sociological issues of insecurity. I'm more referring to an individual's internal and personal psychological insecurities. Insecurities that are more akin to what you might feel when entering a crowded dining hall in search of a friend oasis or when looking at a daunting physical task. Two basic definitions for insecurity are:

uncertainty or anxiety about oneself; lack of confidence
the state of being open to danger or threat; lack of protection

In sculling, I put insecurities in two general categories that easily pair with those definitions:

Insecurities around performance
Insecurities around safety & comfort

If I haven't lost you yet, you've made it to the hook. These two sculling insecurities affect three parts of the stroke: the placement, the catch, and the release. The placement is often affected by the second type of sculling insecurity: safety & comfort. Even with the aid of Troy Howell's Ease and Comfort in the Boat, many of us still find ourselves in a precarious position at the front end. It could be physically restrictive due to mobility issues, or it could still feel too unstable to be at ease. As a result of discomfort, we often misplace or flub the perfect entry out of a primitive mode of self preservation. The placement often happens too rigidly, roughly, or short because that's all we have to offer at that point. To alleviate this, we need to work to make the position more biomechanically and psychologically accessible. To make it more agreeable with your body, you can do off-water work to improve your mobility and balance. You can also explore different rigging options to make the position more conducive to your physical restrictions. On the psychological side of things, you can reread Troy's book and work to make time in your sculling to drill more at the front end. I also personally found that I had to rationalize away any psychological inhibitions I had. For instance, I would go for a swim adjacent to the row to remind me that I'm a solid swimmer, or if the water was cold, I would bring a flotation device as extra security. Let's not talk about the era on the Schuylkill when I tried to affix headlights to my single to make me more comfortable in the dark.

While the catch was already affected by our possibly stilted entry or placement, it typically undergoes even more shortcomings as we compensate for the unknowability of a job well done. What on earth does that mean? In simpler terms, we often overwork the front end for fear of underworking the stroke. The catch is the beginning of the drive. Water gets pressed against the face of the blade, and a cavitation develops behind it. We are catching water on the face of the blade and thereby catching the boat on the pins to give it another impulse forward. 9 times out of 10, people take the catch very aggressively, and I posit that it happens in large part because we start our stroke worried if we'll ever get enough done. The problem is a sculling shell always has an acceleration and deceleration as part of any stroke cycle. The most efficient physical movements recognize this and work in a manner similar to the acceleration of the boat. I always say lines to myself and others like:

merge with the speed of the boat, then accelerate
match it, then change it
find it, then move it
crescendo
be dynamic
finish faster than you started

However, it is incredibly hard to not exploit the mechanical and biomechanical advantage we have at the front end. We want to just hit the baseball out of the park right at the start of the stroke. In 2013, when I roomed with lightweight sculler Andrew Campbell, he told me one of his biggest considerations for going fast was "not over pushing" the front end. Do you have enough patience and confidence to let the stroke unfold? Are you able to consider emphasizing acceleration and movement over force and effort?

The same insecurities around performance often don't go away by the end of the drive. The release will be a future topic for a tech tip, but for now, it is often missed because we believe our work is never done. Unsure if we've moved the boat enough, we often keep the handles going well beyond our typical physical curb stops in our body. Even more, we keep the blade in the water with the hope and assumption that doing so will keep the boat happy long after we have positively accelerated the boat. Plenty of times, our insecurities about having done enough on the drive keep us from a clean extraction of the blade. We need to find a way to let go of a stroke with enthusiasm and without any signs of resignation, much like Elsa in Frozen. "Let it go." After all, you get to take another one.

What do we do about it? For starters, you name it. If you name an insecurity, then you can understand it. If you can understand it, then you can work with it and ultimately own it. If we went back to me on the Schuylkill in the dark, I realized I was rowing short and inhibited. My stroke grew punchy as the light grew thin. I realized that it stemmed from a fear of rowing in the darkness, so I worked to make things brighter. I went through several iterations of rigger mounted flashlights and countless days of locker room punchlines, but eventually, I found a setup that made me more comfortable.

Another great example of working around or working through an inhibition was Justin Keen. Justin manufactured custom pontoons to provide slightly more stability for front end drills. As he did drills like top quarter, Justin could feel himself grow tenser in a way that not only inhibited the action itself, but also the ability to feel what he was searching for at the front end. Consequently, Justin built some simple pontoons that could be raised and lowered mid-row so that he could practice more precarious drills without also raising his inhibitions. Here are some pictures of Justin's custom solution:

In order to feel the boat, you must solve for both physical and psychological insecurities. To do this, you first have to recognize it, and then, be ok with thinking about it. I still have a ways to go on the dance floor, but I took one of my biggest steps while living in Philadelphia. There was a late night club above a dive bar that was just packed with casually dressed people, dripping sweat on the floor to any tune that came through the speakers. It was so crowded that no one could really take note of what anyone else was doing. I finally realized that the moment I stopped caring about what people thought of my dancing was the moment it got a lot better. Remove the roadblocks from just feeling what your boat is doing and what you do to it.

Tech Tip: own your insecurities to own your stroke