New York Times: Sports
From a Workout on the Water to a Rhapsody on Blue
August 11, 2000
By JOE GLICKMAN
Chris Nilsson rowed for New Zealand at the 1972 Olympics. He has a
full head of silver hair, a dashing eye patch and hands as thick
as hams. When Mr. Nilsson, a former Oxford coach, talks rowing,
people tend to listen.
Addressing 30 of us during a video session at the Craftsbury
Sculling Center in northern Vermont last month, he hit the
freeze-frame button, pointed to the sinewy torso of 6-foot-7-inch
Rob Waddell, the single-scull world champion, and said: "See how
he squares his blades at the front of the stroke? Right-oh! Once
he gets connected to the water, boom, he drives with his legs!"
That someone as big as Mr. Waddell could row so fluidly at 36
strokes per minute in a sliding-seat single scull that was 10
inches wide and probably weighed less than one of his legs left
me in awe. During my first sculling lesson earlier in the day, I
had settled my 6-foot-4 body in a "stable" intermediate shell and,
even using a near-comatose stroke rate of 10 to 12 per minute,
wobbled like an ice skater with weak ankles all over Great Hosmer
Pond, near Craftsbury Common, Vt..
Sculling and crew are two very different forms of rowing. In team
boats, crews of four or eight row backward with two hands on one
12-foot oar, following the commands of the boat's forward-facing
coxswain. Single sculls, the tippiest, most volatile craft in the
rowing world, require two nine-and-a-half-foot oars.
Like the backstroke in swimming, scullers travel blind -- seeing
where they've been and not where they're going. To navigate one
of these 27-foot nautical string beans, you must continually peer
over your shoulder, checking watery obstructions with the
vigilance of a traffic cop. In "Assault on Lake Casitas" (Shark
Press, 1990), Brad A. Lewis, a sculler and Olympic gold medalist,
writes, "Every practitioner of the sculling game eventually
collides with something -- a bridge abutment, a navigational buoy
-- pray it's not another sculler."
Part of what has always intrigued me about sculling is the total
body fitness the sport requires. Along with cross-country skiers,
elite rowers are among the best-conditioned athletes on earth.
Halfway through the videotape of last year's 2000-meter World
Championship race in St. Catharines, Ontario, two rowers
challenged Mr. Waddell for the lead, grimacing like galley slaves
under the whip. "Rowing, particularly single sculling," writes
David Halberstam in "TheAmateurs" (1985), "inflicts on the
individual in every race a level of pain associated with few
other sports." With 500 meters to go, Mr. Waddell, still looking
silky smooth, cranked it up a notch and left the field in his
wake.
As the video ended, I knew what I was supposed to do. A few more
sessions, I thought, and I would be a major threat in the "Head of
the Hosmer," the two-mile race that would be held at the end of
our weeklong camp.
The sculling camp is situated on the 140-acre campus of an
abandoned private school on Great Hosmer Pond (known to the locals
as Lake Hosmer). It was born in 1976 when Russell Spring Sr., a
former Yale oarsman (class of '50) who was operating a
cross-country ski center there, decided to add the sport that was
his first love to his offerings. Given the quality of coaches,
consistent flatwater, a picture-postcard setting and the best
all-you-can-eat meal plan I've ever encountered, it's no surprise
that the program is well known in the rowing community.
Although many of my fellow scullers had rowed in college, my
résumé in the sport was brief. As a child, I was
swept out to sea in a wooden rowboat in the Long Island Sound and
had to be rescued. And two years ago I competed in an indoor
rowing regatta -- a surreal event where exhausted competitors
routinely fell from their ergometers to the floor, writhing like
fish out of water. Now I was looking at three rowing sessions a
day -- starting at 7 a.m. -- as well as nightly video sessions and
lectures on hot topics like increasing my anaerobic threshold.
But thanks to Steve Wagner, the head of the program for the past
22 years, the mood at the camp was light. As we introduced
ourselves at our first gathering, Mr. Wagner, a 45-year-old former
lightweight oarsman at Rutgers who has been the men's crew coach
there since 1983, took pot shots at Canadians, Philadelphians and,
come to think of it, anyone who didn't row for Rutgers.
To the casual observer, rowing looks simple. The stroke is
divided into three parts -- catch, drive, and recovery. Rowers
sit on a seat that slides on grooved tracks, and at the beginning
of the stroke your knees are pulled up to your chest, the torso
bent slightly forward at the waist and the hands extended like
Superman in flight.
With the oars behind you and nearly parallel to the boat, you
square the curved "hatchet" blades with a gentle flick of the
wrists, slip the blades in and literally "catch" the water.
Pushing against the "foot stretcher" as if you were shoving a
chair out from under a table, you drive with your legs and only
then pull the oar handles. At the end of the stroke, the blades
emerge from the water and the boat glides forward. The recovery is
all finesse -- a (theoretically) smooth move that prepares you for
the next powerful stroke.
Compared with, say, pole vaulting, the mechanics are relatively
easy. But I found linking more than a few efficient strokes
together maddeningly difficult. First, I had to constantly remind
myself to relax my hands. ("Pretend you're carrying a briefcase,
not swinging a sledgehammer," Mr. Wagner said.) Second, it's
essential that the legs do most of the work. Perhaps it was my
seven years of competitive kayaking, but I kept initiating the
stroke with my arms -- an error with all sorts of disastrous
ramifications.
On the second day, an instructor named Marlene Royle, a
36-year-old Olympic hopeful and author of "Technical Drills for
Sculling Performance," rowed up to me in her $7,000 carbon fiber
shell and said: "Rowing is a horizontal sport. Think of reaching
out and sliding your forearms across a tabletop." Almost instantly,
my stroke flattened out and I enjoyed that elusive sensation of
"swing" that scullers rhapsodize about. As I congratulated myself,
I smashed the blade on the water ("catching a crab," in rowing
parlance). After half a dozen butchered strokes, I regained my
focus, glided blissfully and -- whack, splash! -- resumed the
tortured process all over again.
It was not physically draining, simply because I lacked the
technique to work hard enough to get tired. But after an hour on
the water my brain was sapped from concentrating on the technique
and balance. My problems didn't stop there. Perhaps, as
Kierkegaard said, life can be understood only backward, and I
couldn't get used to the world in reverse.
On the second day, I turned around to see that I was on a
collision course with an overhanging branch. I jerked an oar out
of the water and was flipped into the lake. Scrambling back on
the boat, I recalled what Mr. Wagner had said during our first
lesson: "Use the oars like training wheels. As long as your hands
are side by side, you can't fall in." The problem was keeping my
hands together while applying anything close to full pressure.
Each morning we split into groups with one of the six coaches and
dissected another phase of the stroke. After breakfast, we were
back on the water for another lesson. We rowed until lunch and
gathered at 2 p.m. to watch ourselves on video. During one
session, Mr. Wagner gazed at my balky stroke, paused and said,
"Really nice hat, Joe!" At 4 p.m. there was an optional row.
Dinner was at 6, followed by activities that ranged from yoga to
talks about oar construction or boat rigging. By the end of the
third day, I was so steeped in rowing consciousness that I felt
like walking around the campus backward.
Crew culture, I learned as the week progressed, is a quirky world
of early morning workouts with plenty of pain and virtually no
individual glory. Part of it, my fellow scullers told me, is the
love of hard work and discipline. Part of it is the precision the
sport demands. Most rowers are analytical, people who thrive on
breaking down the whole into many parts. There are also the
aesthetics of a sport that has changed little since Oxford and
Cambridge first raced in 1829. Watching the sun burn the morning
mist off the lake, feeling the water rush beneath the hull while
you try and coordinate your legs, back, arms and shoulders.
"It's the instant feedback of doing it correctly," Ms. Royle
said, "the feeling of synchronicity when it all comes together,
even though it might last only a few strokes, that keeps scullers
sculling."
Our sixth and last day was the moment of truth. At 7 a.m., I
rowed unhurriedly to the far end of mirror-flat Lake Hosmer, where
the two-mile "Head of the Hosmer" was to start. The format was
simple: the slower rowers, as handicapped by Mr. Wagner, would
start first, heading off in 30-second intervals. Given my
nonseamless sculling stroke, Mr. Wagner sent me off second, behind
a fit 57-year-old grandmother in a beginner's shell.
After a shaky start, I focused on finding a rhythm, visualizing
my blades as extensions of my hands. I sped by the grandmother as
two powerful strokes became 10. The bow of the boat arched out of
the water and I was launched, nearly hydroplaning over the lake.
I saw myself challenging Elijah White, a former varsity Harvard
oarsman who was favored to win the race. Distracted by visions
of glory, I whacked the water like a mother duck feigning an
injured wing. Though no one in the staggered start passed me, my
progress was erratic at best -- moments of kinesthetic pleasure
followed by a stroke only a lumberjack could love.
My time of 16:44 placed me 15th out of 30 -- nearly four minutes
behind the Mr. White, the winner. At the awards ceremony (I won a
bar of soap and a kazoo), I pondered what might have been if I'd
had sound technique. Then I remembered something Mr. Nilsson told
me the day before the race.
"Don't worry, mate," he said in his chipper accent. "I've yet to
make the perfect stroke. That's what's so addictive about this
damn sport."
| For information about the Craftsbury Sculling Center write
P.O. Box 31, Craftsbury Common, Vt., 05827 or call (800) 729-7751. The
camp runs through October. The Web site is www.craftsbury.com.
Weekend sessions range from $425 to $485; weeklong sessions from $730 to
$830. The cost includes food and lodging. |
For customized training programs call Marlene Royle at
(802) 793-9195. Her Web site is www.RoyleRow.com.
|
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