Bruising erg test followed by head race? It has to be the fall Speed Order.
With a grueling 6k erg on Saturday afternoon followed by a full head race early Sunday morning, the annual fall speed order presents a fairly unique dual challenge for athletes, requiring two challenging peak performances in about 18 hours time. Sometimes you have a strategy, and sometimes you just jam on the footboards from the first stroke, see how it goes, then try to put yourself back together for the next one.
Light women's winner Michelle Sechser took an aggressive approach for sure, with impressive results - on Saturday she set the 30-39 6k world record on the erg, then came back and posted the fastest women's time of the day.
On the world record, Sechser just gave it a full pull, and then some – but didn't go in blindly, having done a little strategic research ahead of time.
"We're not too in touch with the erg at this point in the season, so I wanted to push my body as hard as I possibly could - and maybe a little beyond that - and see what the score was," she said. "I had looked up the World Records for Concept 2 before the piece, so I did have that number in the back of my mind. It's always exciting to hit a lifetime PR this early in the season, but it's important to not lose sight of all the other important pieces to the puzzle. The best part is really the confidence this instills in my training program and work, so I can keep moving forward.
Come Sunday, Sechser treated the turnaround in the same way she might approach the compressed progression of a World Cup regatta.
"The races felt spaced out enough that I could max out my efforts on Saturday and still be ready for Sunday," Sechser said. "It requires discipline to properly execute the weigh-in, the recovery fueling, and the cool down row, but these are key components to being successful at any multi-day regatta (especially a World Cup where the LW1x & LM1x has a Heat, Rep, Semi, and A Final in a 36-hour period)."
Open women's 6k and 1x winner Kelly Pierce took a similar approach to the two-day challenge.
"I simply went as hard as I could on day one, and woke up on day two and did the same thing," Pierce said. "It is very rare at an elite-level regatta to have the speed and luxury to pace yourself through heats, quarters, and semis to make the A-final; I wanted to approach this Speed Order as practice for any future races where I would need to put out a max effort in the semis to make an A-final, and then turn around the next day and have to produce another max effort in order to secure a medal."
Men's single winner Justin Keen admitted the turnaround can be hard to pull off, so he tried some unorthodox recovery tactics for good measure.
"It's definitely tough, there's no way around it," men's single winner Justin Keen said. "Usually you build up throughout a regatta, with one flat-out race at the end, so going full-tilt out of the gate is quite a shock to the system. I just tried to take it one day at a time, stayed out of my head and executed the erg piece on Saturday, then pulled out all the stops to get it back together for Sunday. I jumped in the lake with some of the other athletes after practice,that helped jump start the recovery!"
Light men's single winner Peter Schmidt stuck to a familiar path through the weekend, leaning on his standard routines to get through it.
"My approach going for the max effort is to have the same mentality anytime I'm racing, whether it is NSRs, trials, or Worlds," he said. "Right after my race, make sure I get a good cool down in, so I went for a swing around the course, and then made sure to ice my legs and then put my compression recovery tights on, put my legs up, and to do all those little things to get back to as close to 100% as I can. It also really helps that you just have to one weigh-in at a speed order, so I was able to have some good food for dinner with my host family."
(Athlete host families are one of the unsung heroes of United States rowing's underfunded programs and athletes; Schmidt stayed {and refueled} with Patrick and Marian De Deyne.)
Not everyone had their best piece, and used the 6k's brutal honesty to try to get on track the next morning.
"For me the 6k Erg was actually a bit of a let down," said Jordan Vanderstoep of the winning men's pair. "I was 14 seconds off of my college PR and that put a fire under me to come back and perform the next day. I was disappointed to have lost some fitness and I wanted to show that I do deserve my spot at the Training Center."
With the 2016 Olympics still very much in the rear view mirror, athletes are nonetheless not afraid to say they wanted to place some markers for the upcoming millennium, if only for their own purposes.
"My college coach at Princeton, Lori Dauphiny, used to tell the story about Lou Gehrig; how he filled in for an absent Wally Pipp one day at first base, and wound up keeping the job," Pierce said. "That's how I wanted to approach the new quad. Spaces have been opened up by retirement in the immediate post-Olympic year. As an athlete with national team aspirations, I would be crazy to try to not take advantage of that!"
"I made a big push for Olympic Trials this year, moving down to Florida and training basically on my own for 2 months, but couldn't keep it together in the final (at the Olympic trials)," Keen said. "Coming that close taught me some valuable lessons though, and definitely gave me a rolling start into the new quadrennial. I was fortunate enough to learn a lot from the more experienced guys down there, especially Steve (Whelpley) and Sam (Stitt), so I'm excited to take the torch as they move onto coaching.
"I believe that, regardless of whatever people are saying about the Training Center, it is still just that, the Center," Vanderstoep said. "I believe that the best place to be for selection is right here in Princeton, and getting in early and familiarizing yourself with the training patterns will assist me in success going forwards. I do realize that four and even one year(s) is a long time and putting in the work early on is what leads to success in the long run."
Schmidt took a broad view of the event, working on race tactics and technique in a competitive situation – as well as trying to have some fun.
"Fall racing is basically the only time in the more or less year-round training grind that the races that I go to are more or less fun, so I try out new things, see if it'll work, and decide if I want to incorporate that into my spring racing plans. It could be how I approach recovery, or maybe try something new for post-weigh in, that type of thing.
"So One thing that I tried this time around was to let the pressure off myself and to get out of my head a little bit; to say 'I'm going to go out, I'm going to row, and I'm going to have fun with it.' That's why I started rowing, because I liked it and I enjoyed it. I tried to get back to that a little bit, and I think it helps."
As a National team vet, Sechser was mainly looking to improve on past successes.
"A big learning point I'm employing right now is something I learned from training with Gevvie Stone last season in Austin, TX," she said. "Consistency and continual improvement. She never had massive ups and downs in her results each week. She was very consistent, always improving, and never seemed to have glaring 'off' days or setbacks.
"That is my goal right now: focus on the basics, consistent training without setbacks, and continual improvement each week. It's a long road ahead and I feel incredibly fired up to keep working for more speed. Coming to the Speed Order was just a way to look up and check-in that my training is on track before putting my head back down and getting back to work."
The winners have very varied experience in their boats; Schmidt has been in both the US light eight and quad the past two years, while Keen has been in and out of the single and double this fall (having won the HOCR); the others have been a bit more locked in in their boats of late, however.
Sechser approached the singles race as respite from the discipline of her daily training schedule.
"My current training program revolves around low SPM, rate-capped training sessions that emphasize power-per-stroke, so I was really looking forward to Sunday's water piece as a chance to take the reins off," she said. "As soon as the piece started I felt like a puppy waiting by the door who was finally let out to play. It was exhilarating to go as high and as hard as possible.
"The conditions required a bit of skill out there," Sechser continued. "The first 2k was a bouncy tailwind that required you to maintain stability and really capitalize on the front-end speed, then as soon as you turned the corner you were hit with a headwind. I think the key to succeeding in these conditions was the ability to be chameleon-like with the mechanics and adjust to the changes without losing speed."
Vanderstoep has had past success in the pair, and still finds the boat to his liking.
"The pair has always been my favorite boat class simply because it is the closest a sweep rower can get to a single-type triumph," Vanderstoep said. "Everything you achieve belongs to you and your partner, and there is no hiding like you can sometimes do in an eight. That can be both hugely fulfilling and humbling.
"The piece itself was quite good, we just focused on settling into a hard, sustainable rhythm and then bringing it home fast after the last turn. Andrew and I had been rowing for almost three weeks together and had been fairly dominant in the group that is currently at the Center. We really enjoyed the opportunity to have some new guys to go up against who are quite established in their own right."
"The more I row the single, the more I understand how little I actually know about rowing" Pierce said. "Every once in a while I will take a stroke that is 'oh-my-god-is-THIS-what-its-supposed-to-feel-like,' and in that moment I realize everything I have been doing to that point is wrong. But that is also the beauty of the boat, too; when you have those moments in the single, you know that it's you taking the good stroke, and not someone else in the boat pulling your ass around.
"Mostly, though, I can boil what the single has taught me to this point down to two bullets: 1) patience pays off and 2) the boat isn't gonna go if you don't go, so you better [expletive] go!"
The Carnegie is home waters for Princeton grad Pierce, but she still had some lessons to learn over the course.
"The Carnegie is a pretty innocuous and forgiving course for head races, but I was taken a bit aback by the dramatic shift in conditions after the big turn, and I got sloppy at the end trying to figure out how to cut through it. Still, I think I was able to work on making some improvements I've been trying to make, and to get good practice in executing a race place over a long stretch where there is more opportunity for the wheels to fall off. I'm happy I won, but I recognize that there is SO much more speed to be found."
For Keen, all his recent boat changing has added to the fun.
"It's a challenge that I've really enjoyed the last 6 months, learning how to adapt from land/water and between different boats," he said. "Sean (PennAC coach Hall) likes to throw erg tests into the schedule pretty regularly with no preparation, so we've gotten used to just doing those live. It took some pretty big adjustments to get the quad moving this summer, but if you can figure that out and get comfortable in the single, you can kind of just hop in a double with the right guy and take off. We'll keep rotating through team boats at practice, especially once the water gets cold, to keep it interesting and help the younger guys out.
"For this race, the weather was beautiful, the rowing not so much," he continued. "The erg affected me more than I realized at the time, leaving me really tight and heavy on the toes. I just tried to keep driving the legs and to nail the course, which I've been told by folks who were on the bridge was probably my saving grace. It was really a toss-up between the top couple guys, so I'm excited about the concentration of speed here in Phllly and look forward to racing with the boys in the spring!"
Schmidt notes that switching boats and disciplines is part of the routine at his home club, but still acknowledges the doggedness that rowing the single requires.
"In terms of developing truly talented oarsmen, oarswomen, that you should be able to row a single, a double, a quad, a four, an eight, and it shouldn't be that big of a transition," he said. "The way our training group at Riverside has been approaching our technique is to have a rowing stroke that can translate across all these different boat classes, and thinking about the rowing stroke in a very simple way - early engagement with the hips, not putting the weight on the oar handle, and then having a really big acceleration off the catch.
"That method applies pretty well to rowing the single, and there's a lot of overlap for when the type of rowing stroke that we were going for, when I was rowing in the eight in 2015, and the same when I was in the quad in 2016.
"My one suggestion about the single is there really isn't too much of a shortcut," he notes. "I got into a single after I graduated college, and it's not going to be pretty. Your first three to six months in there, it's just putting in miles and getting comfortable in the single, and after some time, just trying out new things. Eventually you're going to find something that clicks, and the boat's just going to start to pick up - and that's when the magic really starts to happen."
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