Tell me about rowing!

In My Humble Opinion
1

A girl in a group I’m in at work was talking about how she’s always wanted to learn to row at lunch yesterday, and before our seminar was over the whole group got all fired up about it and have halfway decided to take an Intro to Rowing class with the local rowing club. Cool, right?

So, um, tell me about rowing! I browsed through the website and found that I’m a masters rower, which makes me feel absolutely, positively ancient. I mean, seriously? Isn’t that, like, 65 in golf? So evidently if you become a member of the club (which evidently is not too expensive) you can use their boats and all, which sounds nice. And the webpage is full of pictures of happy, healthy looking people. Looks like a good time, all told.

I get that it’s, like, really hard work and all, and that you’re learning how to work together and such. And it’s full-body exercise. But I know nothing about rowing. I didn’t go to a school with a crew program (well, I don’t think I did - if we had rowing it certainly wasn’t a sport I ever heard anything about.) Are there outfits? I like sports with outfits.

And, like, what do grownup rowers do? There’s a little on the page about competing in regattas, but it seems like mostly they just… row, recreationally. Outings, I suppose? With however many people you’ve got boat for?

And in those little one guy boats, how do they know where they’re going? They sit backwards and they don’t have the little guy facing the other way, right?

2

Rowing is great fun! I did it as a kid at high school. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is as much fun as simply messing about in boats.

I have a lot of mates who now row in middle age, and they have a lot of fun. I’m a bit past it now, but am very nostalgic for when I did row. (That said, my mates competed against - and lost to - a crew whose youngest member was 70 and whose oldest was in his 90s. I am nowhere near that.)

You asked what you do when you are a rower. The boats are racing boats - you can’t just decide to collectively go on a picnic with them - there is no room for stuff. Mostly what you do is train for regattas, but generally you can be as competetive as you want to be. Once you go to the club and sign on as a crew, just talking to the people at the club will let you know all you need to know about the mechanics of regattas and so on. Clubs always have those sorts of people who just love to be helpful like that. Ring the club; ask them how they deal with novices.

The hard part is commitment. When you are at high school, you go where you are told to be, but getting adults to the shed at 4.00 in the morning (the best time to train because the water is calmest) is hard. If you have a crew of 4 and someone doesn’t show, no-one can go out.

What generally happens in middle-aged rowing is that you build in some redundancy of numbers to account for that. Other crews will have the same problem, so it all tends to work out if you shuffle around a bit, especially if you are not overly committed to specialising as a bow side or stroke side rower. If the club you go to is big enough, you’ll be able to access some sort of coaching. Technique is very important (as is demonstrated by the crew of septuagenerians who beat fit middle-aged men).

Also, the mechanics in managing a boat into and out of the shed requires learning. It may seem obvious, but it is not. Organising people to be on the correct side of the boat at the right time, and then all get onto the same side, all while carrying it, so you can get it into the water, requires a bit of practice.

The thing that seems to be hardest for old farts is “sitting the boat up”. That is a large part of technique. They are skinny little buggers (the boats, not the old farts) with a tendency to roll. When all is still and the oars are sitting quietly in the water and the people are sitting quietly in the boat, all is well. But when you start to row and people are oscillating about and the oars are up out of the water half the time, the boat can rock quite alarmingly. Acquiring the collective skill to suppress this is pretty important.

I never did coxless rowing, but I gather steering is managed by turning around and having a look a lot.

And there are outfits. Not necessarily flattering, but they do exist. Looks a bit like cycling gear.

Here’s the Wiki on the set up of boats so you can follow their geography a bit.

3

Oh, wow, those are awful outfits. Don’t they know I want a sport with cute outfits? I went nuts with the credit card when I was taking golf and tennis lessons.

4

I crewed in an 8 in high school (8 rowers plus cox). It takes a long time to learn to be able to row in synch enough keep the boat level, and to stroke with power but gracefully enough not to get the oar-blade trapped underwater (‘catching a crab’). Because the seats slide, the power mainly comes from your legs, while control of the oar comes from your hands and arms - it takes a lot of concentration and the learning curve is steep. The rower at the very back of the boat (‘stroke’) sets the pace for those behind to follow, and if you don’t follow the pace, the boat will rock and you’ll find yourself in the water very soon. Have fun!

5

If you think the outfits are awful now, don’t google an olympic medal ceremony where Princess Anne gave medals to a winning men’s crew. One of the crew members seemed a little, er, excited to see Her Royal Highness. And the costumes concealed very little about that fact. :slight_smile:

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<snerk> That’s the first few results when you Google Image “Princess Anne rowing crew”.

9

My high-school aged daughter is in her 2nd season with a rowing team. We are still learning the ropes of this incredible sport! Her team participated in a regatta just today at our local lake. I will tell you that I look at some of the masters entrants and they vary from ripped to old duffers. The thing to note: this looks like a sport one can do for a lifetime!

Since she started on this team, I have entertained the idea of trying it out as well - I am fairly fit and I think I can do at least as well as some of these guys. However, I am sure there is a lot of skill involved in form and controlling the boat - lots of learning at first. It is more than just brute strength.

There are lots of combinations of boats out there: singles, 2x, 4x (coxed and non-coxed), 4x sweep and 4x sculling, 8x. And there are several levels as you probably noted: high-school novice and varsity, collegiate novice and varsity, and masters (those rowers not in HS or college).

The fall regattas are called “Head” races where boats race against the clock over a 5K course (Google ‘Head of the Charles’). In the spring the races are sprints of 2k directly against other boats.

As stated, your local crew team should be able to give you the skinny on everything needed to get started. If you want to get a feel for it, try out an “erg” (rowing machine) at your gym. Good luck!