Welcome to myrow, a connected fitness experience that transforms your Concept2 rowing machine into an immersive fitness adventure! Featuring a beautiful 22” tablet, on-demand classes, enhanced stats & tracking, group rows, and more. Get ready to row into a world where every stroke brings you closer to your goals. Visit www.myrow.com to get started.
Hello again Reader
This week I got an email from a gentleman in Switzerland – he had found and listened to the Faster Masters Rowing Radio podcast and it had prompted a question about how to reorganise his club’s boat fleet.
Do you have rowing topics you’d like to explore?
There are two ways to ask me – hit reply to this newsletter (it goes straight to my in-box) or if you prefer a face to face meeting, book in some time in my calendar from our Concierge Page. It’s free – 20 minutes to answer your query.
Why offer this free service?
It’s a good question – as a commercial organisation we are here to make money as well as support the masters rowing community. These one-on-one sessions are really helpful because I get to know the unique situation you are in (and you can ask delicate questions in private). If you face a situation in your club, chances are others are facing the same.
As masters rowing evolves towards an improved future where we are accepted and enabled as a valued part of the rowing world, the things I learn from these conversations help me to track progress and find out where hurdles and impedances exist. Then I start to think about ways to solve for a better future.
Hand care for rowers
My friend Lisa gave me a piece of pumice stone she fished out of Lake Karapiro when were were racing there last weekend. I use pumice regularly to keep my callouses smooth and prevent them thickening.
Gloves are one of the best ways to protect your hands, prevent blisters and to get a better grip on the oar handle. Our friends at the Crew Stop design gloves just for rowing (the first in the world, I think). They have sweep and sculling designs with a silicone grip pattern on the palm to make handling your oar that much easier.
Sweep and sculling gloves with grip palm pattern.
I spotted one of the New Zealand juniors using Crew Stop gloves at the World Junior Rowing Championships a few weeks back – so these may not take you to the very top of our sport, but you’re in good company!
Led by Jim Dietz and Mark Wilson, this masterclass shows you using photos and careful explanation how to approach and dominate the finer steering points of this challenging race course.
Greg Benning is a multiple HOCR winner told me that he can shave 200 meters off of the course length with careful steering – so there’s a benefit!
Our most recent podcast
Get familiar with your heart rate – a daily measure when you wake is a free check on your readiness to train. Plus it’s an early indicator of illness too. Click the image to watch.
If you learn just one useful thing from our podcast, become a supporter from $1 per month. This helps cover overheads and enables us to continue our work to improve masters rowing around the world.
Boathouse Chat for the Weekend
Remember that first row??
Here in Pender Harbour…The first time in a sliding seat row boat can be intimidating, but potential for magic is strong. My friend Jim is an avid cyclist and I had a hunch he’d take to the boat pretty quickly. I gave him a 5 minute demonstration and suggested he take his time, let his muscles figure out the movement, and get a sense of the flow of it all. The morning sun, flat calm, and the sound of the hull through the water likely left a good impression.
There’s a fundamental underlying issue which is weight comparison. If you weigh more than me and we’re sitting on the water in single sculls – I have less load to heft down the race course than you do.
So power to weight ratio is an important consideration in coaches’ selection criteria for crews.
The best selection is to use single sculls on water – assuming still water, no wind and athletes with perfectly matched bladework skills. That’s hard to enable.
On land, a RP3 erg test will produce scores that are aligned against on-water times and is weight-adjusted and boat class adjusted. So you don’t need to use a spreadsheet. This depends on you setting up the RP3 not to use the default “erg” setting.
The Dutch coach Bert Cocu shared with me his spreadsheet for entering C2 scores and adjusting for weight.
Read the full article including the formula you can copy to create your own spreadsheet. Click the button.
Please note:
This action will also remove this member from your connections and send a report to the site admin.
Please allow a few minutes for this process to complete.
