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I'm sure at this point you're near tired of hearing about this sport that you know almost nothing about. Guess what, I get tired of it too. I get up at the butt crack of dawn almost every day to physically suffer for nearly 2 hours only to come back in the afternoon and do it again. You think I'm crazy? Maybe you're right, but remember, you have no idea what rowing is about. There is almost no glory in the sport. I will not go on to make millions of dollars and I will not be famous. Good news is that these things have nothing to do with why I row. I am up before it's light outside, yes; but this means that I get to see some amazing sunrises. I work 20 hours a week all year for only about 5 regattas in the spring and races that last just over 6 minutes. I row because those 6 minutes of what I would argue is physical torture, brings me to a place where I believe that I can do anything and nothing can stop me. But the question becomes how do you make it through the year? Well, you learn how to absolutely hate February and you take a hammer to the ice when you get desperate. You make a damn good playlist and thank God that all your best friends are also on the team (see photo below). Unfortunately, boredom still sets in. When you come to practice and you row a 10,000 meters (this takes about 45 minutes) with no drills and nothing to break up the monotony, you mostly rely on all the procedural memory that you have to get you through.  Procedural memory is the memory system associated with knowing how to do a skill and is usually automatic Once you've been on the team long enough, you don't need to focus so much on how to sequence your body or how hard to push off.  When most of that information is stored in procedural memory, you can rip away on the erg and chat with the girl next to you.  You can take a few thousand strokes on the water and watch the houses go by or try not to hit a duck with your blade.  You can appreciate all of the beautiful things about the lake and keep watching that sunrise when you have procedural memory and don't need to focus for every single stroke like a novice may have to.  As an expert, sometimes thinking too hard makes my rowing more garbage than usual, and I don't need that.  Being able to store the physical aspects of rowing in a memory system allows me to relax, and think.  Sometimes declarative memory (memory having to do with knowledge of facts) bites me in the butt. For example, when I'm trying not to rush the girl in front of me, I can tell my legs to slow down and understand the concept as much as I want, but until I actually do it enough times to move it into my procedural memory, I'm going to continue to push the girl in front of me up the slide faster than I should.

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Rowing requires a lot of mental focus. One of the things that makes rowing incredibly difficult is that not only does everyone in the boat need to know how to row incredibly well to make the boat go fast, but all 8 of the rowers need to do exactly the same movements at exactly the same time. This takes a lot of attentional focus. While I'm rowing, I often switch through different attentional foci. I have to think in broad and narrow widths, and also in internal and external directions constantly. Let me give you some examples. My coach usually gives the team a technical focus for the day; during the row, I need to apply that focus both to myself and to the entire boat because if I'm doing it by myself, it won't work. Additionally, I may be in the middle of that same row, thinking about that same technical focus from the coach, and my coxswain (the small woman that gets to just sit there and yell at me (their job is not actually that easy but it really feels that way sometimes when I'm physically suffering)) may give me a personal focus such as lifting my hands a little more to get my blade in the water sooner. In this moment, I have to switch back and forth between the broad focus of the boat's technique and the narrow focus of my own because I find it incredibly difficult to think about both simultaneously.  While that's going on, some moron in a speed boat passes us on the lake and now the boat is being thrown in all sorts of directions. My attention is supposed to stay internal: focus on the boat; but really the other half of my brain is thinking externally: please dear God don't let that wave come over the gunnel and soak my entire body. At this point, the second scenario takes over and my hands aren't high enough and I get soaked anyways; it's all my fault. Time to switch back to thinking more broadly about the technique of the boat.

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Here's the thing about rowing, most people have absolutely no clue what it's about. I can't blame them, I was exactly the same way. How did I get into rowing you ask? Funny story actually. It was fall of my sophomore year; volleyball season. I am naturally pretty self-confident and was a cocky a**hole in high school, so when my volleyball coach came up to me and said "I think you should try rowing, you would be great at it," my ears perked up and I thought 'obviously I would be good at it, let's give it a shot.' Summer rolls around and I sign up for a Learn to Row Camp in Milwaukee and fell in love with it in less than 2 weeks. Fast forward to summer of my junior year and I sign up for the 6 day overnight camp here in Madison. I quickly went from the barge (learning boat for novices) to the fastest boat in the camp. As I was turning in my dorm key to leave camp and go home, the assistant varsity coach here came up to me and says "Hey, I think you have a lot of potential in the sport, I want to recruit you to come to school here and row for us." Naturally that big head of mine just got larger. So now it's freshman year of college, I'm in a new place, in a new sport, and realize very quickly that I have no idea what I am doing. I was knocked of my personal pedestal real quick.  It was the first time that I was on a team and knew full well that I was not the best.  Now I still wanted to be, so it was time to bear down and start learning.  Every day I showed up and did the work.  Every day the coaches gave me technical instructions on how to make my stroke better and better.  The augmented feedback started with major changes like how to hold the oar handle, the sequence of movements, and body positioning.  This type of instruction came often and fairly relentlessly.  We talked about in class how getting feedback on every stroke can actually hinder your practice but I think that sometimes it can be very helpful.  Rowing has a lot of intrinsic feedback, or feedback that your body gets from performing the task.  The boat will fall off keel if your hands are in the wrong spot or if you drop your chest when you get to the catch.  My freshman and sophomore year when I was much more of a novice, I actually enjoyed when the coaches gave me a technical change and then on the next few strokes would tell me yes or no if I had made the technical change.  I think that this extrinsic feedback (feedback about the performance of a task from an outside source actually helped my body learn the intrinsic feedback cues that the boat would give me, but if consistent feedback on more than about ten strokes in a row could potentially do more harm than good.  Those major things that I was doing wrong moved to tiny details and the extrinsic feedback being much less constant.  Today, I might hear the coach give me feedback once or twice a practice and it's much more of her suggesting I move my hands less than an inch or move my legs a quarter of a second later; very small, detailed adjustments as I become more and more of an expert at the task. Since I had built up enough confidence with my own intrinsic feedback, the extrinsic feedback is not as necessary.

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When you start rowing, they don't just throw you in a boat right away because you would absolutely flip (other than the barge).  When you are learning to row, you start on an erg, or indoor rowing machine.  This allows you to learn the components of the stroke without having to worry about balance and all of the other factors that come into play while in a boat.  Apart from learning the actually movements of the stroke, the erg has tons of other benefits to learning.  The erg has a screen that shows you lots of information about the power you're applying, the effectiveness of that power, and how fast you're going to name a few.  For novices, this information is critical.  So, once you learn how to rip away on the erg well enough for them to trust you with almost $60,000 worth of equipment for a single practice,  they'll throw you in the widest, heaviest boat they own from sometime in the 1970s (don't get me wrong, I very much appreciate these beasts).  Thank goodness that there is a little thing called positive transfer, or we would have been in the water for sure.  As stable as these old gems are, they are not on a firm, flat surface like the erg is.  The identical elements theory says that if two tasks have more component parts that are similar, you will get more positive transfer than if the two tasks had fewer similar parts. This is critical in this part of learning the sport because there are very few elements of the stroke that change when you move from the erg to the boat.  Applying the identical elements theory shows that you could actually be decent at rowing before even touching a boat.  The fact that the only major differences between erging and rowing are balance and rotation, make it much easier to be able to transfer all of the other elements of the stroke to the boat.  This can only increase your learning in my mind.

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Everything about rowing leads to one thing: race day.  I can remember my first time at the Big 10 championships, my boat aligned with Ohio State, Michigan, Indiana, etc.  It was extremely exciting and nerve wracking at the same time.  The water wasn't looking good that day so all of the varsity races had already gone down the coarse while the water was flat; they let the novices race in the waves (hated that).  I had been rowing since September and Big 10s is mid-May.  That many months of rowing and trust me, I was still a novice.  I'm now in my junior year and have rowed almost every day since that September and sometimes I still feel like a novice.  One of the things that the varsity coaches have us do is mental imagery before races. In particular, our coaches have us use internal imagery, which is when a person imagines being inside their own body and doing a task, while feeling the same sensations etc., without actually performing the task. Picture the teams that you'll be racing the next day.  Feel the strength of the boat.  Listen to the crowd cheer as you come to the end.  Feel your heart rate.  Feel your legs light on fire.  Watch your boat win.  Our coaches have us use internal imagery the most.  Put yourself in the shoes that you'll be in tomorrow during the race.  Imagery has been shown to be beneficial to learning, and it absolutely is; in more ways than one.  We get to that start line and I feel like I've already done the exact same race.  I've already won this race.  Now, even if we're down at some point in the middle, I can relax, breathe, and make the boat go faster to get ahead; and it really works.