Some NHRCs may not be familiar with the activities of New Haven Rowing Club’s West Coast annex, sometimes referred to as SLO Rowing. Here is the Annual Report.
San Luis Obispo is the headquarters. The home training course is 1800 meters long on a small lake within the city limits. Club membership has remained stable in the last three years with no resignations or defections, and with the addition of an adjunct member who is a national caliber flatwater kayak racer. He makes for very competitive training pieces in his 21-foot Van Dusen. A scull usually beats a kayak after the first 500 meters, but in this case the twenty-two-year age advantage brings this younger kayaker to about even in full pressure sprints.
The West Coast fall competitive season included the Head of the Marina in Marina del Rey on November 4 and the Newport Autumn Rowing Festival in Newport Beach harbor the following day. In masters single sculls the New Haven Rowing Club took second place in the Marina and won at Newport, both in a Hudson lightweight. Parts of both race courses go between rows of anchored sail and power boats of such a size and scale as to amply demonstrate the effectiveness of the current administration’s tax reduction policies. In Marina del Rey, the sponsoring California Yacht Club traditionally serves a lavish awards brunch to all competitors, where each can analyze their perfections and flaws from a continuously running video of all racers on the big screen. Those who run Eastern regattas could learn much from the management of this regatta and its recognition and hospitality towards rowers who have trained hard and traveled long distances to compete.Easterners may not believe that the 2007 rowing season has already begun, but indeed it has, with the Desert Sprints in Tempe, near Phoenix, on March 10. This regatta draws sweep and sculls competitors from Western States and some easterners over 1000 and 1500 meter courses on Tempe’s five-year-old dammed lake. Five masters single scullers were lumped together without regard to age but with official USRA age handicaps to make things interesting. They were.
Please accept the shift into the first person to further describe this story and to summarize its lessons. The Phoenix area, being desert, abounds in strong and unpredictable winds. A headwind, especially, is no friend to us lightweights as the previous day’s warmup row demonstrated clearly. Things looked bad and no local would forecast the conditions on race day, other than the need for sunscreen, but the soaring turkey vultures were grounded as it turned flat calm at starting time and what lightweight could ask for more than that?
Increasingly I find myself the senior competitor in masters races, as in the Marina and Newport regattas, and was the same in Tempe by some margin. My main competition, Michael Glick from Philadelphia, is a fit 52 and with his double sculls partner beat John Saxelby and me at the Head of the Schuylkill not long ago in windy conditions. Here, there were five of us, including Michael and me, for a floating start, in 90 degree temperatures, 15% humidity and no wind.
One question is, or should be, how fast to start on a 1000 meter sprint, meaning how much energy to expend in the first 20 or 30 strokes. One theory has it this way: go maximum pressure from the very first stroke if you can keep the boat level, and that effort won’t hurt you later. That’s based on the theory that, if you are fit, a different energy system kicks in part way down the course which overrides what seems like recklessness in those early strokes. The idea is to keep your drive going and your rating up, be patient, accept the pain and you’ll recover as your body shifts into aerobic peak. The alternative theory is that a full pressure start for the first twenty or thirty strokes inevitably costs you too much in the last 250 meters – that’s where the aerobic debt comes due, just when you most need an extension of credit. The question is not an idle one in view of the number of races won and lost by seconds or less.
And the issue becomes more complicated with lightweights. For us, our boats constitute a higher percentage of our weight and therefore take more relative effort to accelerate. For example, my boat constitutes nearly 20% of the total mass I have to accelerate in the first few strokes. For those heavier than I but still at the 159 pound men’s lightweight limit, the boat makes up only a little more than 16% of the total mass and for heavies at, say, 185 pounds, the boat goes down to about 14% of their starting work load. I’ve had success with both. Earlier I favored holding back the starting pressure a little because I wasn’t sure I could keep the boat level and on course at that critical time, but over the past year I have found that full pressure starts have given me an edge in the races that most mattered to me, despite the toll as the finish line approached. All this, of course, assumes your technique and fitness level are where they should be. Otherwise, the question is moot and what you do makes no difference.
At Tempe, I felt my fitness might be a little suspect for an early March race, so I held back slight pressure for the first twenty strokes, conceding some boat speed for that part of the race. My main and younger opponent predictably got way out ahead by 500 meters but I hoped my 20-year handicap against him would make up for his youth. The course was buoyed only every 250 meters which means, under the stresses of combat, that you can’t really see the next buoy for at least half the distance to it and on this slightly curved course, staying within the lane was an ongoing challenge. I had to interrupt my stroke twice to lift a blade over buoys I cut too close, but my cheering section of my wife Pat and a friend gave me inspiration to regain pace. As it turned out, I beat Michael by nine seconds.
For the next weekend I had been asked to sweep in an eight with the San Diego Rowing Club in the Long Beach regatta. This was two races, at 1000 and at 2000 meters. In fields of five we managed 2nd place in each over the rowing course built specifically for the 1932 Olympics. The Long Beach home crew was simply too fast for us. Still, I found that sculling skills are mostly transferable to sweeps even with limited practice, and fitness almost completely so. Here ends the report, but more may come.
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