Musings on a Decade of Rowing
A “retirement” reflection.
Rowing and Life: Culture, Purpose, and Structure
Team Visions
Rowing and team sports more generally present an extraordinary dual opportunity for human development. It’s an opportunity to create a highly functioning group around a shared mission. It’s also an opportunity to create a caring community that will last a lifetime. These opportunities are often seen as a give-and-take. Ultra-competitive team environments can fracture socially by driving individuals hard against one another, while gentle community-focused teams might not generate adequate effort and results. Luckily, I have been part of a team that has achieved both, and believe that it’s possible.
My college head coach, Trevor Michelson, often encouraged us to be the “ultimate training partner” by constantly pushing one another. The ultimate training partner always has a one-seat lead when racing side-by-side and drives others to achieve their best. This comes naturally to many of the intense personalities that rowing attracts. The hard part is “leaving this on the water” and not retaining any of the bad blood that can form when battling one another. Many coaches generate these environments by regularly encouraging individual competition through public rankings and clear hierarchies. “Encouraging” here is a gentle word; many rowing coaches are not known for being gentle.
These environments can be effective at generating results, but regularly beating down your companions emotionally and physically makes it far more difficult to build a shared mission and community. Rowing in team boats is predicated on the belief that you are greater than the sum of your parts: an eight is faster than eight singles taped together. Highly emotional competition can be a powerful motivator on an individual level, but it ultimately degrades team cohesion. Nine people seeking individual glory is not as powerful as nine people striving for team glory. A team or an eight with a singularly unified mentality is close to a religious experience. My career has shown me that there is no chance of this completeness without interpersonal unity and deep relationships. Many slow boats are filled with individually fast, highly motivated athletes.
Setting the arena without prodding the gladiators yields extraordinary results with the right group. In my years, Dartmouth Lightweights lived and breathed competition while growing progressively more unified. It’s not that we were never opposed to one other — we regularly seat raced — but that there was no obsession over our internal hierarchy. By comparison, my high school carpool ride home on “erg days” — a West Coast anomaly in which you only train indoors once or twice a week — was entirely focused on how different people performed compared to one another, mirroring our coach’s rhetoric. We had all the same information available to us in college — every seat race, single trials, and erg — but they were not front of mind. If I asked someone how they did on a given day, they never talked about their ranking on the team. They would discuss how they performed relative to their hopes and expectations, how they strategized, or when they struggled. Any reference to another athlete was purely in retelling the glory of an impersonal battle, of two people pushing one another towards a common goal.
The visibility of results is key for recognizing work and making it clear how to advance within a program. It sometimes irked me that the same people who never looked at ranking spreadsheets also complained about not getting a chance in a higher boat. Granted, I was in a privileged position within the Dartmouth program, but the requirements for advancement were as clear to me then as during my time in lower boats in high school. I vividly remember the first time I cracked the top 24 in high school, an achievement that set me up to race in the third eight. The organizational system was the same at Dartmouth, but coaches were less vocal about prioritizing individual hierarchy. The lack of obsession over internal competition was not due to detachment; it was due to fixation on external competition. Using the Tribal Leadership terms, we were Stage 4 (“We’re Great”) through and through. We drifted towards Stage 5 at the end of my last season, as demonstrated by our final race. We were truly internal while racing because we were fixated on being one of the best Dartmouth Lightweight crews ever, never mind what was happening around us.
I concede that this philosophy breaks down some when applied to the largest teams. Large, hard-driven teams raise up many mediocre athletes through extremely strong group norms and fastidiousness. There are great lessons to be learned in this militaristic style. Fastidious group norms often decay in complacent and gentle organizations. A hands-off culture-forward approach to managing a 60-person team can cause many athletes to slip through the cracks and not reach their potential. Coaches need to be somewhat economical in their approach to a large team, outlining a clear hierarchy to make all athletes feel valued and able to contribute to team success. However, the top of these programs still require cultural unity to succeed. Talent is not enough, a fact that is proven year after year at championship regattas.
Unity and Care
Something I experienced in increasing amounts over my years at Dartmouth was steady growth in the demonstrated care for one another, something I believe was key to our success. In a way I have never seen elsewhere, teammates were unabashedly willing to do anything for one another, in or outside the boathouse. It was and is truly powerful. I’m stuck on the chicken-and-egg problem, though: did this result from powerful commitments to a shared mission, or did deep care enable powerful commitments? I don’t have an answer, but the two are undoubtedly intertwined.
Many people reading this might counter my approach with personal experience succeeding in other ways. There are many ways to make boats go fast, a truly beautiful part of the sport. Rowing has not converged on a single stroke, training plan, or team philosophy. Provided there is belief in the course of action, there are many paths to success. However, less collective approaches miss an opportunity to build community and lead in a way that allows for transference into the real world. Some businesses thrive on cutthroat attitudes, but that’s not a pleasant way to work or exist as a human being. Competition can be valuable for extracting the most output from people, but the true lessons in rowing lie in driven collaboration and collective world-shaping, not individuality.
Individual Mindset: Positivity, Gratitude, Belief, and Honesty
However motivated, individual contributions compose team excellence. Individual goals can be highly motivating milestones. Many people write about achieving these goals through discipline and organization, but I think it’s more interesting to look at mentality more holistically.
Positivity is not natural to me when looking inward. I had two truly satisfying individual performances in the entirety of my last year of rowing. This difficulty has grown for me. Constant discontentment — an attitude of “it’s not enough until you win the national championship” — drove some success but took a toll, especially as improvement became more difficult and less linear. It was easy enough for me to look on the bright side when looking at my teammates, but I was much harsher on myself.
Looking back at my training logs from my sophomore year of high school, it wasn’t always this way. There is a childish love for every practice, an excitement at every opportunity in front of me. At one point, I write: “Yay, Tetis again!” What was I on?! Teti’s — race intervals of unknown length — are one of the most miserable workouts I can think of. That level of love for rowing is not something I have found since high school. In that obsession was relentless positivity.
“The first session was really cold, with a lot of wind, too. In the pit it wasn’t too bad and the sun poked through a little bit.”
I was literally seeing the silver lining wherever I looked, and it drove me to love the sport and excel within it. Beyond a positive outlook, these logs show my appreciation for the opportunity to row. For me, gratitude is more useful than positivity when it is hard to be positive. It is easier to find things I am grateful for than to be positive by default, a strategy that helps to give purpose to a pursuit when the silver lining is difficult to see.
Positive belief is one of the most tenuous but necessary components of a successful athletic mentality. The social and collective nature of positive belief in rowing adds inertia and makes cultivation even more challenging. It must be carefully and consistently constructed, relying both on legitimate markers and trust in the (high-quality) process.
Honesty is the requisite check to positivity. If constant positivity convinces you that you are on track to achieving your goals when in reality you are not advancing those goals, you are fooling yourself. Honest, frequent reflection and benchmarks maintain the quality of the process. I have kept training logs throughout most of my career, partly for this reason. Honesty makes positive belief more robust by grounding it in the tangible.
What’s it all for?
“I knew who I was and I was not just a speed skater…. I believe that it was the value I created outside of the sport, and not the success within it, that made it worthwhile to live in this manner; to face the horrific fact that only one of us will win the competition and all the others will lose; that injury or sickness can sabotage four years of work. It was not my success that justified my sacrifices, it was my friends, and I owed it to them to try to live up to my full potential…as it became clear to me why and how I wanted to skate, I learned to handle the distractions, I learnt to apply discipline and it made me free. After learning how to master discipline, the meaning I created in my life, outside of my sport, no longer distracted me, instead it made me comfortable with the idea of losing, and so speed skating became much more relaxed and a lot more fun. There was no longer anything to fear. In the long term, the meaning I created apart from my sport made me like my sport more, because suddenly it enriched my life rather than limiting it. It also made me more determined to work hard, because training was not my last resort, it was my voluntary choice endured at my own conditions” — Nils van der Poel, How to Skate a 10k
Ultimately, a rower needs to discover why rowing matters to them. It is freeing to recognize that the sport is inherently trivial. All this time just to move a skinny carbon fiber boat backwards over 2km! Competition is special to me in part because a group of people around the world have decided to devote enormous effort to this trivial pursuit. Success in rowing is rare (and no one cares) making it a poor motivator. The everyday pursuit should have inherent value without that reward; otherwise, it is a quick path to misery.
Centering gratitude and joy went a long way for me in finding purpose. Rowing is too miserable to not have fun; so we built a college team that enjoys training together. Community is rewarding. Sustainability and consistency brought consistent purpose in addition to better results. Zoning out was often my way of getting through training, but practices with full mental engagement and courageously reaching for the last drops were always the most rewarding. This mental and physical leap requires vulnerability in the same way that full commitment requires vulnerability. A willingness to fail and for that failure to be painful. That dangerous possibility makes the pursuit more worthwhile.
If my footplate broke halfway through the IRA final, it still would be worth it. That is my marker for success in my final years of rowing. Amusingly, it feels much more “worth it” after a successful final IRA final, but I’d like to believe I found enough inherent purpose in this trivial pursuit without that medal.
Rowing Lessons
Many far better writers have written on this, topic, so I won’t spend too much time here. These are some of my favorite other opportunities for learning through rowing:
Focus on what matters: relentless, unified pursuit of quality work.
Being outside every day helps make people happy
Lessons can be found at every stage. When you start rowing, you quickly realize you can’t even put the boat in the water without working together, and that necessary cooperation becomes a fact of life. Rowing allows you to push beyond perceived boundaries, manage social dynamics, and lead an organization. Rowing presents an opportunity for lifelong learning
It is more important to move together than for one individual to do the “correct” thing.
The impact of small actions is often underestimated. Intentionality goes a very long way.
Take care of your tools as if they were an extension of yourself
Enjoying training is easily converted to enjoying the process, an unoriginal saying but one that is deeply true of any Pursuit
No matter how successful, predecessors are forged from their struggles. Don’t believe the narrative that they were flawless. Everyone has moments of weakness; no one is infallible.
Training
This section is probably more interesting if you are a rower or another athlete interested in the specifics of training.
General Approach
Fortunately, rowing remains a simple sport and has partly avoided the hyper-technical optimization found in many other endurance sports. While this is rapidly changing, crews regularly find enormous success with straightforward approaches. The group mental and physical training is ultimately most important, especially at the youth and collegiate levels. The priorities I believe in are as follows:
Be a dog
Do the training
Everything else
Results don’t come from doing (2) without (1). Focusing on nutrition (3) doesn’t matter without adequate training. Elite rowers are not elite because they get a massage every day, use high-tech lifting equipment, or eat turmeric. They are elite because they have dedicated many years to their craft. These minor factors get a lot of attention and can make a minute difference at the highest levels. However, for most, this focus distracts from the mental fortitude that has sat at the center of the sport as long as it has existed. Fortitude and relentless pursuit of quality remain essential.
There are two truths at the center of training at an elite level. First, you can repeatedly exceed what you believe are your true limits. Second, there is a limit to the amount of training your body will respond to. The challenge is to train in a way that tests your limits and enables you to produce true maximum efforts when it is important, all while avoiding overburdening your body and reducing your training response. Many athletes become unable to produce a full effort because they spend so much time training at lower intensities. Other athletes reduce their training response through overlong high-intensity training blocks. I have made both mistakes at different times.
Succeeding at a higher level in endurance sports — once (1) and (2) are addressed — requires eliminating limiting factors to the point that your body is capable of responding to as much quality training as possible. These factors are often time available, sleep, injury, fuel, or mental energy. This is a brutal challenge in a college environment, and not much easier in high school. In short: Avoid travel like the plague. It’s not worth training in the morning on four hours of sleep. Take care of mental health. Take early off-seasons off, crosstrain, do pre-hab (or rehab if needed). Elite athletes structure their lives entirely around eliminating these factors. This lifestyle is impractical for most, but can be a North Star.
On Specification & Cross-Training
Crosstraining was essential to preserve my physical and mental enthusiasm for rowing. Focusing on improving an entirely different sport was enjoyable, knowing that I was becoming a better rower in the process. By the time I was in college, crosstraining was usually more fun than rowing itself because of the mental break it offered. Some rowers and coaches near-exclusively prioritize the rowing motion, but that would not have been physically or mentally sustainable for me.
I grew to trust crosstraining more when I was unable to row due to injury. I spent most of December-February of my senior year on the stationary bike and returned to rowing stronger than I entered. Long aerobic hours and repeated 60–90’ interval sessions at 3.5–4.0 mmol/L were very productive. Seeing improvement from 367W for 30’ in October to 437W for 20’ in January gave me more confidence in my return to rowing.
I learned I could not effectively use more than two modes of training at once. Winters that I regularly erged, ran, nordic skied, backcountry skied, and biked were broadly less effective. Cycling between so many modes meant a lot of time with low lactate, but high HR and RPE, all the while becoming muscularly sore and inhibiting top speed for the priority mode, rowing. Other athletes have different experiences, but focusing simply on biking and erging (or biking and Nordic skiing, in the case of my senior winter) meant that I saw significant improvement in both rather than stagnating across all modes. I could train more precisely on familiar modes and two modes were enough mental variation for me. This also meant that I could continue to crosstrain effectively during racing season without significant soreness or fatigue, thereby maintaining aerobic base without depleting myself for the important rowing sessions.
While it might be nice for rowing to parallel Nils Van Der Poel’s method of crosstraining all year, I don’t believe it does. The “touch” required for rowing is unique and easily lost. Especially in larger boats, crews spend months and months together before reaching peak speed. This development would be impossible if all rowers were only cycling for nine months. I believe that rowers should be more comfortable resting and crosstraining than they typically are, but only so long as it is possible to “keep in touch” with the rowing stroke.
Strength Training
I am a massive believer in strength training, especially early in an athlete’s career. There are clear benefits to output and explosiveness, but perhaps even more important is learning the rowing stroke through lifting.
Deadlifts and cleans are particularly effective at engaging the correct muscles and training the rowing motion when done correctly. This can also prevent injury — I found I was most resilient when I was strongest. Many rowers feel that their athleticism decreases as the years go on — strength training can help maintain that as endurance training volume increases.
Strength improvement depends entirely upon quality. Reaching a baseline strength and resilience is the most important. Rowing returns are diminishing as you get much stronger; aerobic training remains the most important.
For lightweights, my best theory is to combine injury prevention lifts, explosive lifts with < 4 reps, and longer endurance weight circuits. Lifting during spring helps maintain strength and muscle. I’m not a strength coach, though, so don’t trust me on this.
Racing
All races are either a murder or a suicide. Too often, it is a suicide: a crew giving up because they think the race is lost, shifting into survival mode. Even when behind, maintaining an attacking mentality is key for producing a complete race. If you’re going to lose, make them commit murder. Always attack, never survive.
Racing was usually something I dreaded, which was not very helpful for my performance. Especially during my last two years, I had a strong fear of exposure as a bad athlete, which made me much more inclined to pace precisely and not take risks or “go for it.” This fear of racing meant it was less joyful, and I tended to focus on preparation and other tangential things instead of directly confronting the challenge of racing. Here, mental preparation and repeated visualization were key for me to face racing head-on. I usually wanted to get it over with, but persevering through an entire race visualization ultimately led to a calmer, faster race experience. Finding relaxed joy in racing is a valuable aim. I can’t say I felt this aside from my two most successful races, but in those instances, calmness and precision were deadly. I was usually too amped to feel this.
Noel Wanner relayed a Steve Redgrave adage about racing. Paraphrasing: if, in the 3rd quarter of a race, you don’t know if you can sustain your pace, you’ve done it right. If you know with certainty that you can or cannot, you’ve done it wrong. Finding the ragged edge where the rowing stroke is barely intact and you are just hanging on — that’s where peak performance lies.
On Genetics and Training
No athlete wants to admit that their success is due to their genetics. Why would success be attributable to anything beyond work ethic? Especially in rowing, progress is strongly correlated with the quantity of quality work put in. Inevitably, though, the truth is somewhere in the middle: a combination of genetics and training. Growing up on a heavyweight rowing team, I always viewed myself as succeeding in spite of my genetic disposition, able to sneak into boats as the smallest person who could punch 40 pounds above his weight. This mentality remained even as I later raced as a lightweight and was still able to differentiate myself against similarly-sized athletes — perhaps more silly in that context.
It remains an open question in my mind: did I respond well to training naturally, or was it because I tried to train more than any other high schooler in the country? Again, the truth is somewhere in the middle, and I don’t think I will ever gain a satisfying answer.
Heart Rate, Wattage, Lactate, and RPE: Load Management and Intensity
Monitoring training intensity has rightfully gained attention in recent years. However, it can become a distraction. The most common error I see is making decisions based on low-quality information: garbage in, garbage out, as data scientists say. The data people often use (e.g., wristwatch HR) is not of sufficient quality or meaning to inform decisions.
The general approach I finished with was to triangulate between Heart Rate (HR), Lactate, and Rate of Perceived Exertion (RPE). Because tests are expensive and my lactate tracked so consistently with output, I used output as a proxy for lactate.
The unfortunate thing about getting fitter is that your bodily efficiency means that “low intensity” actually hurts quite a bit. When my Z2 reached above 300W, I had to accept that my legs would constantly hurt. I prioritized watts and distrusted my body during my last winter training when I was quickly making significant bike adaptations. As I relied on watts, I gradually found it easier to understand what zone I was actually in. When not adapted or conditioned to a specific mode of exercise, it’s difficult to accurately interpret RPE. Being well-conditioned to a mode, it’s easier to understand the sensations you are feeling. Red flags should be raised when you are well-conditioned and find it difficult to reach top end speed, not when you are poorly conditioned and it’s difficult to find top end speed.
I found that my HR and RPE were regularly much higher in the morning. A physiologist could tell you more about this, but it meant that I prioritized lower-intensity training (0.8–1.2mmol/L) in the AM and higher intensity in the PM. Conveniently, this was aligned with my collegiate training schedule.
I used TrainingPeaks to consolidate my training data. I recorded HR using a Wahoo chest strap or Polar Verity Sense for nearly every workout in my last five years of rowing. I would use this to occasionally spot-check. I did not obsess over it during training as I found it had little bearing on my actual output/lactate and was mostly a distraction. My senior winter, I took to biking outside to make it more comfortable. New Hampshire winter lowers one’s heart rate, so I averaged in the 130s for Z2 bikes at 315W. HR is not very useful here.
The amount of training I could respond to was generally dependent on the training hours and the scenario I was in. I could successfully train 25+ hours during school breaks. During a hard midterm week at school, it was more like 12.
There is a window of opportunity for young athletes to see extraordinary training adaptations. Filled with hormones (I don’t know what), you can bounce back from frequent high intensity. If I were to do my high school training plan today, I might not last more than a week without injuring myself or putting myself in a deep physical hole. Getting fitter and more highly trained is just getting better at hurting yourself. You can withstand more for longer. 6ks hurt from start to end, instead of the 2nd half. You can push through 2 hours at intense wattages. But reaching true top end speed repeatedly is extremely exacting and does not trigger the same training response as a high schooler going all out every day.
Quality is still the most important. Quantity will only get you so far. Aim to do the highest quantity of high-quality work.
Injury
My attitude to do as little as I could get away with was not exactly a recipe for success. As I finished my collegiate career, it felt like I was a rusted old lemon with spare parts falling off even as I worked enough to manage persistent pain and avoid any long-term injury (in the lightweight league, a broken rib doesn’t count). Balancing training and injury prevention, I could’ve done with ten minutes less steady state each day and added ten minutes of strength or balance work. The most enduring effect of my reduced state was the number of top end workouts missed. As a more aerobic athlete, what I needed most was to develop my peak power in the rowing motion. Injuries frequently drove me to bike mileage instead of rowing-specific peak power workouts or lifting, which would have been more beneficial.
For some reason, it is instinctively difficult to build the roof when the sun is shining, but it’s the best way to go about it. I prefer general strength and circuit work to “build the roof” compared to traditional core exercises. Maintaining lifting during the racing season was helpful for resilience and is something I would recommend in some capacity. As a rule of thumb when increasing volume, building no more than 10% per week worked for me.
Sometimes, injury prevention exercises are not the correct response. Preparing for U23 World Championships in 2023, I spent 1–2 hours each day warming up, stretching, or doing other exercises to manage my ongoing pain. In this case, the other limiting factors dominated and prevented my training response to injury prevention work. There wasn’t enough time or food and too much training to realize any actual injury recovery during that time. In retrospect, I should have reduced the overall training volume and prioritized strength to improve performance. Persistent injuries are common for lightweights in part because inadequate fuel and energy prevent the body from prioritizing recovery.
I’ve come to appreciate genetics as a central factor in the ability to withstand high volumes of training over many years. Training with elite athletes at CRC, I saw a wide range of attitudes among equally successful athletes. One rower would do a handful of banded standing hip thrusts while sipping chai tea before practice. Another would start yoga 40 minutes before getting on the water. Both achieved similar training responses given their genetics, but the more injury-resilient athlete was able to work full-time, while the other required so much time towards rowing that they worked far less.
Supplements and Nutrition
These tools are useless without the core of the sport. Many gritty, successful crews have thrived on a diet of corndogs and light beer. At its best, these are tools for minute improvement. In rare cases, adjusting nutrition can remove a significant roadblock to progress. The roadblock is most often simply getting enough fuel for training at the proper time, but there can also be specific deficiencies.
More often than not, they are a distraction from what truly makes boats go fast. I fine-tuned my routines for before hard erg pieces and races over the years to seek a small edge that is otherwise gained through hundreds of hours of training. However, the missing piece in performances was far more often mental than the precise dosage of caffeine. Fixation on extraneous things sometimes prevented me from focusing on the movement patterns and toughness required to execute a piece as close to my potential as possible. I see the opposite pattern in the corndog-type athlete, whose high-level performances are partially driven by an ability to focus intensely on what’s in front of them and “turn off” mentally outside of the boathouse. I have seen many brutally hungover athletes execute extraordinary workouts (though I have not had one myself), when the mental benefits of alcohol exceeded the physical drawbacks. I wouldn’t outright recommend repeated binge drinking before workouts, but for some, the ability to find the mental intensity required to perform at the highest level is predicated on some mental release.
My approach is that nutrition is useful up until the point that it becomes a distraction. I absolutely believe in the role of nutrition to maximize improvement, prevent injury, and promote general health. All else remaining the same, good nutrition enables good things. However, the culprit for underperformance is almost always training-related, not diet. Being honest with yourself about your actions and the quality of the training is a more reliable solution than looking outward at what you are putting in your body.
For those curious, my pre-race supplement routine was as follows, mostly based on AIS guidance:
Maurten Sodium Bicarbonate 19 90’ before race start
Caffeine, dependent on timing of race. I often drank coffee early and then had a small red bull 60–80’ before a race. This was the supplement that I struggled most with, as I overdid it in a handful of cases and lost some motor control
Nitrates, sometimes.
Carbohydrate. Not a supplement, but more important. Low-GI early in the day followed by a combination of gels and liquid carb in the 90’ leading into the race.
Other notes:
I cycled 6–12g/day beta-alanine for my final two college racing seasons. It is difficult to know if this was effective.
Would generally recommend following USRowing / AIS guidelines and sticking to certified safe for sport supplements
If I were to get a TUE, high doses of albuterol and adderall would doubtless have helped me
I would not take melatonin or any other sedative the night before a race
Small doses of caffeine are helpful on the tail ends of long aerobic sessions to maintain output
Creatine is useful for building explosive power. I saw a rapid 20% increase in my explosive lifts when beginning to take a loading dose of creatine.
I used Tylenol for several hot races as it is known to be an effective core temperature suppressant. However, I experienced tactile loss on two occasions. This may be more likely a different part of my pre-race cocktail, but it was bad enough that I did not attempt it again.
Preworkouts can be great, but I don’t think any ingredients other than caffeine are important. It is also more difficult to know precise dosage with preworkouts because of the different densities of ingredients.
For the AM/PM race at Eastern Sprints and the double weigh in at the IRA, I did not use bicarb for the first race. At the Sprints, I used a very low dose of caffeine for the first race and added more for the second.
The routine is worth something — I usually chose to drink coffee instead of a more precisely caffeinated drink because my body was used to the process of brewing, smelling, and tasting it, and knew what to expect. Ultimately, the mental response to supplements is just as, if not more important as, the physical response.
For rowing and any sport with a short race, I would strongly recommend against a fat-dominant diet during racing season. Some athletes have found it useful to fat-adapt over long, mileage-heavy training blocks, but a low-carb diet has been shown to dramatically hurt one’s “top gear”- the gear which I already struggled to develop. I attempted this half-heartedly once during a monthlong block of 20–30h bike weeks. Perhaps I did not give my body enough time to adjust, but my main response was physical discomfort. Because I already dealt with GI issues (as my teammates can attest), there seemed to be no reason to continue. I reverted to my favorite low-budget strategy: eating dining hall hot dog buns stuffed into bike jersey pockets.
Weight
Rowing is hard; lightweight rowing is harder. The added weight constraint affects everyone differently, but it certainly doesn’t make the sport easier. For one, the mental load of weight-making in racing season decreases the mental load available to execute rows. Athletes are also disproportionately at risk for disordered eating — nutrition fixation can easily turn into a disorder.
My journey in collegiate lightweight rowing was reasonable enough for my first two years. That’s not to say that weightmaking was easy or pleasant, but it did not dominate my psyche. The turning point was my decision to pursue international racing during my Sophomore Summer. For those unfamiliar, a boat must weigh in at an average of 70 kg/153 lb two hours before race start, as compared to 155 pounds the day before. In practice, this means that athletes must naturally shed real body weight as opposed to using more extreme acute weight loss strategies (e.g., sweating). To meet this with my double partner, I reached a 69 kg weigh-in, with my real body weight around 70–71 kg. I took a long and steady road to get there, but I began to see many RED-S symptoms as I dipped below 160 lb/72.5 kg. I was constantly exhausted, emotionally flat or down, and my metabolism slowed dramatically. My body shut down in many ways, my ability to withstand injury collapsed and I was in constant pain. I was faced with an opportunity I dreamed of for years — representing the US on the international stage — but had no desire to take a single stroke. By the time I reached worlds, I was a shell of myself.
As with many athletes in prolonged periods of LEA, these symptoms stuck around. My hormones were significantly out of whack for at least six months, my metabolism seemed to stay suppressed, and I still struggled with the desire to train. When it came time to make weight the following spring, even at 167 pounds I felt the beginnings of many of the same symptoms — also a common occurrence following RED-S. Perhaps the most enduring effect of that summer was general anxiety and mental noise around eating, which I have not shaken. That fixation made making weight far more difficult in the following years. One potential criticism is that I could have fueled more precisely to prevent the worst symptoms. However, I believe I was diligent and that it was simply too much weight loss for my body to function well.
This is an extreme period, and I believe my experience would have been reasonable had I stuck to Sprints league racing alone. Many people have happy and relatively healthy collegiate experiences. In another sense, the whole thing was not “good” for anyone’s body. I weighed 173 pounds at the end of high school while training full-time; maybe I shouldn’t have been lighter than that. I will always be grateful to lightweight rowing for allowing me to compete at the highest level in the world, but that opportunity came at a significant cost. I would encourage any high school student naturally over ~165 pounds to think twice about rowing lightweight in college.
Random Tips
Blistered hands are an unfortunate part of the sport, and acceptance is the first step. In general, I found filing down large callouses and using thin tape on fingers with open wounds to be helpful. Everyone is different. Batting gloves work very well for some teammates, though my ego prevented me from ever touching them. Dry hands blister less frequently, if you can tolerate scaly hands, don’t moisturize. I found wrist sweat cuffs to be helpful, especially for sculling.
If a speed coach clip doesn’t fit quite right around a wing rigger, loosen it and wrap it twice around the rigger (courtesy of Trevor Michelson)
Wear sunscreen; avoid cancer
Carrying a lacrosse ball around is a good way to roll out whenever you need to
Voltaren can hide a whole lot of pain
*glute* skin pain: hibiclens to prevent infection for anything open, regular bandage changes, butt pad, gentle body wash
I don’t think I could’ve finished my senior year without the Citius Remex PROW High
Hydration is overrated. Just drink when you’re thirsty
Get an aisle seat — standing up often during a flight helps manage pain.
Fasting until breakfast in Europe was helpful for resetting circadian rhythm and metabolism, the one time I tried it
Ice baths, heat, normatec, theraguns, stim, cupping, ultrasound, needling, massage, scraping, cryo chambers, etc.: if you think it works, it does. Sleeping works better, so do that first.
Readings
Assault on Lake Casitas by Brad Alan Lewis
How to Skate a 10k by Nils van der Poel
Endure by Alex Hutchinson
The Amateurs by David Halberstam
Range by David Epstein
Eleven Rings by Phil Jackson
Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan, Halee Fischer-Wright, and John King
Open by Andre Agassi
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
Good to Go by Christie Aschwanden
Shut Up, Legs! By Jens Voigt
Row Like Pigs (Documentary)
A Fine Balance (Documentary)
