Merry Christmas from Boathouse Row!

A few weeks ago US Rowing (the national governing body for american rowing) held its annual fall speed order. A speed order is a race in the smallest boat possible (single for scullers and a pair for sweep rowers) to see who has a level of fitness and speed as well as technical ability. Its too hard to identify great rowers from good rowers in bigger boats - hence the small boats. This is used as talent identification for prospective spring/summer camp invititations. If you do well, its as close to all because of you as you can get for rowing... way to go. Do badly and its as close to all because of you as you can get... stop sucking.

Fall racing is Head Racing, usually over a distance of 5k. Like cross country in the fall and track in the spring. To check each rowers level of fitness the race is 8k, the extra 3k is some version of fun. Is there a catch? Something tricky? Surely thats it! Well, no theres more. Its held in Princeton on Lake Carnagie, which is about 5k long.

"But Professor, how do you race 8k on a 5k long lake?"
"I'm glad you asked Timmy!"

You TURN. This is not so tricky right? WRONG.
Getting an object that is 15-20' long and 12" wide and designed to go down a 2k course straight to turn 180 degrees quickly ranks right up there with parallel paking your Ford Valdez SUV. (For those of you too young to remember the Exxon Valdez just pretend its funny.) Your clock never stops running so turning fast can help you make up time of faster rowers who turned slow. Turning slow will make you lose time, making you suck. The obvious question is why not stop the clock and then restart after the turn? The race is to be continuous, to check for fitness, if people can take their time turning and cath their breath its an unfair advantage.

I have included some pics of the turning sequence (as shown by some of my PACRA racing teammates.)

Bryan Volpehein and Beau Hoopman show its as easy as 1,2,3... row like hell, turn 90 dregrees, row 2 strokes and then turn 90 degrees, row like hell again. Below Julie demonstrates the proper "dig" to get the boat to turn adequately in a short amount of time.

Where it gets complicated is the back of the pack where people are overtaking others during the turn as Evan will show you below:

Pimp or be pimped.

That being said, Merry Christmas, Chanukah, Holidays, and of course...

HAPPY TRAILS