Part 1

About a week before NSR began, I finished writing a post recounting the last few months including but not limited to my trip to Seattle to see Ben, the Chula Vista camp, and how things were going in the single leading into racing. I probably should have just posted it, but I guess I felt like I didn't want to do any talking with anything other than my rowing in the Final. Here is that post including a recap of last week's racing.

When I last posted, I was on my way out to Seattle and coming off of a challenging but really productive two months indoors in Princeton with the women's team. For the most part, I was really enjoying the structure of the training and was motivated by the fact that I was training more than I ever had; however, looking back, there were plenty of times when I found myself mid-erg dreaming of cross country skiing in Craftsbury-- a much more enjoyable training alternative. By the end of January it seemed like my body had adapted to the volume. This was most apparent in the quality of my afternoon workouts. Don't get me wrong, I love cross country skiing and I think the injury prevention and body balancing aspects are especially useful for rowers, but for me especially, its possible to hide in an afternoon workout on skis. By that I mean, it's possible to keep it light and not have to produce power. The erg demands you produce power all the time and I think putting in 200k a week specifically on the erg actually helped my body become more robustly strong and not get off easy. I don't think there is a one size fits all path to the best version of yourself, more likely everyone needs different stimuli at different times depending on where they are coming from. For instance, I don't know if its something I need to do every winter, but I do believe it helped me to get stronger in these specific set of circumstances. Just like cross country skiing helped make me a significantly faster rower in 2013. This all being said, when January came to a close, I was very eager to get out West and get on the water.

I arrived in Seattle on Super Bowl Sunday and was just in time to head over to Yaz Farooq's house for what is now very memorable party. Between Colin Sykes' Duck Chili and Yaz's margaritas, I was well fueled for the game and the week of training that lay ahead. Coach Callahan was great about letting me use a single and letting Ben get out in the double with me a couple times. Unfortunately, Ben was battling some tightness in his rib, so we didn't get as much rowing in together as we would have liked, but it was still very much worth it to feel the double again. We took a couple awkward strokes off the dock, but then after five minutes or so we could have easily been paddling to the start line at Worlds. It goes without saying that not being able to train together all year is not ideal, but being able to sit in the boat together even for a short time and shoot some energy down the right neuro pathways helps to at least keep our chances in the double alive. There's no question Ben is fitter and stronger than he's ever been and continuing to improve, so we just need to make sure he's touching some sculls every now and then.

 When I wasn't with Ben, I went out with Carlos and Conal's group of scullers that train out of Seattle Rowing Center. I am not crazy about how bouncy the water is out there but it truly is a special place to train. The views of the city and of the mountains from Lake Union are incredible. This was only my second time visiting the pacific northwest, but its definitely a place I could see myself living in the future. I feel like I am a little too much of a city boy to live in the northeast kingdom, but too woodsy to live in a city. Seattle is a perfect blend. You can get all of the upside of city life and culture while still being able to quickly and easily escape to national parks and mountain ranges. My week in Seattle was capped off with an all out 20k piece at 22 spm in the 1x with Carlos's group. What I did not factor in was that I would row 7k to meet up with the group and 7k to get home to UW after the piece. Luckily, Seattle Rowing Center had some Pop Tarts they could give me to fuel the remainder of the 34k row. I clocked the 20k in just over 82 minutes or around 2:03 split. Given cold water, current, and building headwind for the last 5k this was a really good piece for me. This is not a workout I would want to do very often, because it's very depleting, but looking back, there's a lot of value to the technical endurance it requires and the mental space it puts you in. This piece showed me that, even though I was far from race ready, I had laid a good foundation this winter.

Sunday morning, I flew from Seattle to San Diego and got settled in with my host family in Chula Vista, about 10 minutes drive from the Olympic Training Center. While I was extremely fortunate to be able to come out on the women's team's training trip, as an unfunded athlete I was still responsible to pay my own way, so staying at the TC was not an affordable option. I was very lucky that I was able to stay with Kara Peter and her family. For 6 weeks, they went above and beyond in every way to make sure that I was taken care of and I can't thank them enough. Kara Kohler also stayed off campus with the Peters and I was able to hitch a ride to practice with her everyday. Suffice to say, without the two Karas this trip would have not been possible.

In 2012, when my brother Peter was training in Chula Vista for the London Olympics, I remember him telling me how special of a training location it was. He called it Craftsbury of the West. With San Diego and Tijuana so close, the analogy doesn't really hold up, but when you are out in the single on Lake Otay on a calm, quiet evening, with the mountains surrounding you, its true that it stirs some of the same emotions you feel on a peaceful summer night on Hosmer. Although, I do think the similarities lie less in the landscape and more in the set up of the OTC. It is laid out with the sole purpose of high performance. Physical therapy, dining hall, strength training, dorms--everything within walking distance. It boggles my mind that we don't just set up shop out there all year. It's 70 and sunny every. single. day.

Looking back at the specific training over the 6 weeks in Chula Vista, there was really nothing remarkable about it but it was just very consistent and solid. I did not get sick or injured or miss any workouts. It was a rare period where the training schedule would have resembled my training journal exactly. For the most part, we were doing two hard water workouts a week and a 2 x 6k erg on the weekend. I really enjoyed getting to match up against all the other boats, pairs, singles, etc, on percentage every week. It was very helpful to gauge how training was going both on the water and then on the erg. I had my fastest 2 x 6k ergs the first and second week we were there and then I stagnated for the next four weeks. Tom said it was pretty typical for it to plateau as you get more accumulated fatigued throughout the camp but it was a bummer not to keep the progress going. I would say, however, that even when I wasn't PR'ing, all my performances were close and there was not a big swing between my best and my worst. This is a signifiant change for me and something I've been working on a lot. In the past, my best has been decent, but theres a big drop off. I need to be able to qualify for the Olympics even when I'm not having a great day.

A bad day for me would typically include a swollen forearm or an imbalance in the boat that held me, my partner, or my boat mates back from performing to our potential. Whenever something like that would happen, for example not being able to row the last 250m of Nationals last year due to a complete forearm failure, I would just chalk it up to gripping too tight or bad luck. Somehow I would reason that magically the next time I raced everything would be fine without any extra work. When Felice and I moved to Princeton, she urged me to seek out Marc Nowak, the USRowing PT, to address some of these issues. Days went by, weeks went by, and I never went in and made an appointment with Marc. I guess I felt like I was largely healthy and had not been had to stop training because of these problems so why should I go see anyone about them?  Sometime in early December, Marc came up to me and said he had an open time slot that night if I needed any work done. I showed up that evening and it was the beginning of a beautiful bromance. Working with Marc this year has been such a wonderfully pleasant surprise and a huge reason why I have been able to handle the training this year and why my forearms and hips are looser than ever. It was not an overnight fix and he would remind me that I have a long ways to go, but he showed me that you cannot just ignore what your body is telling you. He likes to say, " You wouldn't not change the oil in your car...why is your body any different? " Or the famous, " Tight hips sink ships."

Another resource I have been trying to make use of is Liz Fusco, the team nutritionist. She did my body composition a couple days after the Spring Speed Order, made a couple of recommendations, but I was moving around so much during the summer that it was difficult to make implement the changes. She tested me again this November and we set some concrete goals for the winter and spring. I told her that in an ideal world I could be racing at 185 instead of 175-177. She thought that was a lofty but realistic goal for the spring and she set out a plan to help me get there. I think being in Princeton and not traveling too much this winter really allowed me to set up a predictable routine and make lasting changes. The main change she had me make was to eat a bigger breakfast and to eat more frequently throughout the day instead of three big meals. The change felt significant. I was eating smaller meals but more of them and I never felt hungry. The idea is that your body can only process a certain amount of protein in a given window, so when you eat a big meal, most of that energy cannot be absorbed and is instead absorbed as fat. If you, instead, eat a smaller meal every three hours or so, you will absorb all of the nutrients and the net absorption of protein will be far greater than eating three big meals per day. This subtle reallocation and balancing of my diet had a profound impact on my energy in training throughout a day and throughout the week. In the past, I have had a lot of trouble keeping weight on during the week and was always run down towards the end of the week. Since I have been eating this way, my weight has been very predictable and steady even late in the week when it would have plummeted in the past. After three months, Liz tested my body composition again and I was 6 lbs heavier at the same body fat percentage. I successfully put on a substantial amount of muscle. This was particularly exciting for me because I put on muscle while also doing more volume. This past week at NSR,  I raced at my goal of 185 lbs. I'm hoping that this weight and new method of fueling will help me to stay strong throughout the summer and fast through the long grueling week of racing at World Champs.

Adopting a more professional approach in training, physical therapy, and nutrition has clearly been helpful in enabling me to get in the boat feeling healthy and strong, but it's important to remember that these things are still peripheral to what I am doing inside the boat. I can be the fittest and most flexible I've ever been and still go slow.  If I were a cyclist, it would be as simple as building wattage throughout the winter then lose weight and maintain wattage during the racing season. But it's the unique blend of power, endurance, body awareness, feel, and technical endurance that make rowing such a challenging sport to prepare for. A shortcoming of my current training set up with the women's team is a lack of hands on coaching, so I have been really fortunate to have the NK Empower oarlock to help provide some objective data about how I am rowing.  I was a little bummed that they do not have an interface to look at the data from both oarlocks at once for sculling, but I'm not sure I would be able to handle all that data at once. 250 meters into my first row with the oarlock, I was paying such close attention to the numbers that I hit a huge buoy, my oarlock popped open, and I flipped! As a result, I began doing my 3k warm up before turning the oarlock on. At that point I figured I was ready and aware enough to handle the feedback. Before NK came out with this product,  the only way to get this type of biomechanical feedback would have been to pay Valery Kleshnev to rig up your boat with telemetry and measure your catch/finish angle, wash, slip, force, work and other metrics. Kleshnev is an incredibly valuable resource because he has tested many top crews in the World and is able to compare your biomechanics to that of the best in the sport. Kleshnev demystifies and quantifies parts of the stroke so that an athlete can make concrete changes that bring them closer to the gold standard. This is something Gevvie did very well last quadrennial. She worked with Kleshnev every year and brought her technique and power numbers closer and closer to what the top girls in the event were doing. As an amazing athlete and fierce competitor, Gevvie already had the prerequisites to be great, so once she had the information about what it would take to reach an Olympic medalist standard from a biomechanical standpoint, I feel like it was only a matter of time until she got there.

The NK oarlock does not come with Kleshnev's analysis but it provides the objective feedback to learn the anatomy of your stroke and the root of your speed. I would say that even just bringing a rower's awareness to these metrics will yield improvement. Once someone can see the real time correlation between a technical change and the corresponding change in boat speed, they can begin engraining it and repeating it. For me specifically, a chief interest of mine in using the oarlock was to settle on a rig and set up in my new boat. This Fall, I sold my X08 and got a slightly smaller hull, an X16, which was the boat I raced at WC1 and Henley last summer. It is made for an 80-85 kg rower and is the hull that Kim Crow won the Olympics in. I had three set ups in mind that I wanted to test and the oarlock was an incredible tool to help rank each set up over various distances. Interestingly enough, the ranking changed based on the distance of the piece and I ended up settling on the equipment and rig that was the fastest at 2k race pace. It is definitely tempting to go for the low hanging fruit of what is producing the most speed at low rates and long distances, but in my experience this is a trap-- unless your main goal is the Head of the Charles. After 4 weeks of compiling numbers, I chose to row with C2 plain edge smoothies at 289/88 and 161.0 spread. This rig  was slower over 3k and 6k time trials at 24-26 compared to the Fat2's at 282 and 160 spread, but was faster over 2k( 1k @ 30 spm, 1k open). The most encouraging thing was the profile of the piece and what was happening in the second thousand at the open rate. As the rate was coming up the splits continued to drop and drop. With the fats, I was able to produce a faster first 1k and considerably faster low rate speed over long distance, but then would stagnate as I got into the mid 30's and above. The oarlock's data showed me that I was producing more joules( work) with the Fats but I was not able to replicate that work as I went up in rate. With the Smoothies I was able to hold close to constant joules throughout the 2k even as the rate came up significantly. It was satisfying to see clearly when, where, and how my stroke was breaking down and then see it remedied. The process of exploring different rigs showed me that there is not just one magic number out there for everyone. We all have our own unique set of circumstances and its important to take that all into account and set things up in a way that works for you and not against you.

Tim McLaren once said to me when looking over my boat and rig, " Oh its all wrong. There's certain biomechanical principles you've got to pay attention to, I don't care what blade you use." One of those principles is sculling a particular arc length. I have never paid much attention to catch or finish angles, probably because I didn't have the tools to do so, but this has been a major focus now that I am getting real time angles from the oarlock. I am typically around 67-68 degrees at the catch and around 47-48 degrees at the finish. The target angles for the M1x are around 70 and 43-44. My first reaction was that I couldn't and shouldn't row the same catch angle as Mahe Drysdale or Ondrej Synek. However, as I've done a little more research about the target angles, it seems like it is really important to be close to the target from a mechanical perspective. The wash value is the number that showed me that my relatively long finish angle of 47-48 is not actually doing much for me. It feels like you are moving the boat with the extra few degrees of blade travel to stern at the release, but really I'm putting on the brakes, particularly at higher rates. As I began to focus more on finishing more in front of the body and hitting the target angle of 44, the wash value dropped significantly. The most exciting thing about that change was that if everything else stayed the same and the wash value dropped, the split would always drop, as well. As the six week camp came to a close, I took a moment to bottle what I had learned and make note to trust the changes I had made once we return to Princeton.

Ben's backside. 

Evening in Chula. 

Lake Otay. 

Cross training in San Diego.