Re: Conibear style surfaces


Nick Suess wrote:
<paul_v_smith@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1155077335.959791.168670@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Frank Cunningham has been coaching this "flip catch" over the last few
years that I'm aware of. Which is strange in that I don't recall it
being anything we were particularly aware of back in the early 80's,
when I started rowing, and he was "The Man" as far as rowing technique
went. Perhaps it had gone out of fashion for a time and is now back;
and so the cycle of "not learning anything" regarding rowing technique
goes. [;o)

Now, guys, just for clarification, does this means squaring in the
microseconds immediately prior to the catch, rather than steadily over the
last half second of the recovery?

What I'm seeing, and hearing from the rowers, is more like leaving the
blade feathered until it hits the surface of the water when at the
fronstops and let the water square it up when the pressure comes on.
It's exciting to watch, since you 'know' a boatstopping crab is going
to be next, though it doesn't materialize.

Personally I think taking 1/2 sec to accomplish squaring would be a
long time, but at least if it's the final 1/2 sec of the recovery, it
seems reasonable. I do like to have the rowers understand that
squaring (or feathering) the blade should be done the same as the rest
of the movements in the stroke "quickly but smoothly", start with
smooth and the quickness will develop.

Because I have to work so hard with my
mature beginners to stop them squaring as they sit at frontstops, with the
point of entry then being clearly astern of where the blade shaft was at the
extreme end of recovery, and thus giving away 15-20cm of length.

Charles Carroll and I both commented on quite the reverse technique being
employed by a very large number of Cambridge college crews at the May bumps.
There sure are some pretty weird coaching mantras running around the
boatsheds of the Fenland Polytechnic these days, include elaborately exotic
emperor's-new-clothes start sequences that last about 70 strokes, and
require a PhD to remotely comprehend*. Something like "7 draw, 6 paint by
numbers, 5 wind, 4 fart, 11 squeeze, 21 push, 5 pull, 8 send, 13 grind" and
usually they've been bumped long before they get to the end of it, and I
doubt that a single rower has the remotest idea of what those terms mean,
and they're blinded with science and some actually believe it all means
something.

Nearly fell out of my chair laughing. A good exercise is to watch the
eventual race winners (WC DVDs) coming out of the start. One thing is
almost certain, that they will be longer in the water and at a lower
rate than all the other crews. It's not as if you get a bonus for
leading at 100m, though many crews/coaches treat it that way.

But what we particularly saw there was a lot of crews, maybe the majority,
squaring almost at the start of slide recovery, so the oars were only
feathered for a microsecond, the precise opposite of a flip catch. The
sequence was extract, feather, hands away, square, body through, slide.
Might work well with a following hurricane, but otherwise, whose bloody idea
is this????

No idea who thunk it up, but we see this here too, and the squaring
motion is very mechanical looking, a kind of 'thunk' to square that
catches the eye. Perhaps it's a drill gone bad (kind of like "backing
the blade in", good lord!), after all the air has a bit of fluid drag
also, doesn' it? That said, I've seen and coached some crews that
make such a mess of feathering/squaring that staying square the whole
time would probably work out better for them, at least it nearly
guarantees a square blade at the catch.

- Paul Smith

*But not really, as they're all bollocks, of course.

.

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