feckandclueless wrote:Great compression and relaxation at the catch, my biggest technical struggle.
(See
http://www.c2forum.com/viewtopic.php?p=138799#p138799)
It may or may not be your biggest struggle to fix. I don't believe it's your worst technical fault. That remains your willful, near-total obliviousness to what you're actually doing, as opposed to what you think you might be doing.
No, wait. There's too much predicate...
I've got it: your worst technical fault remains you. Period.
Still, it's possible to isolate a few constructive criticisms. Out of the long list of odd things you're doing on the erg, mistiming the recovery and then jerking up on the early part of the drive is probably going to slow you down the most if/when you do it in a boat.
Here's you at the catch, from your latest greatest xxx-rated erg video.
Before anything else, note the damper lever, clearly set to somewhere between 6 and 7 on your Model D. You've been going on at length about how you're rowing at DF 123. On any reasonably well maintained D I've ever seen, that damper setting ought to yield a DF more like 140-150. Either you're wrong about your DF or you need to clean your machine or both.
Now, the stroke. Yes your shins are short of vertical and your seat is too far back. But those are the least of your problems.
Here's you .25 seconds later (six frames, at a frame rate of 24/sec):
The first thing to notice is how the handle height changes. You've moved the handle back, to be sure. But you've also moved it
up a good 4 inches or so.
As long as you're engaging the sprocket, the flywheel on an erg doesn't care what direction the chain that's spinning it might be heading. Your body and your boat however will care.
The only way you can raise the handle like that at the catch -- you've moved it farther than you've moved your seat -- is to pull up as well as back as you're pushing against the foot stretcher with your legs. This means you're using something in addition to your legs at the catch. So far into the drive it's mostly your arms, with some premature commitment of the back. Either/both present(s) problems.
Look at the early arm break. That inevitably weakens the strong connection you normally want to establish at the catch. Moreover, if you do this in a boat wile raising your hands on the drive you'll create problems with your oars. Depending on how you're rigged you'll either find yourself rowing your blades in (i.e. starting the drive before they're sufficiently buried) or digging your blades too deep, or both. And you'll be trying to manage your oars on what should be the strongest part of the drive with bent arms.
Here you are 5 frames later:
At this point you're sitting upright. The bent arms continue. You've already swung your back maybe 15 degrees or so from your catch position. Conclusion: Citroen is right. Contrary to what you've been asserting for the last 30-odd pages of this thread, you're still hauling anchor.
Look at the arc that the handle has been traversing so far. In a boat, you'll have got quite a bit of oar shaft buried along with your blades. All this does is add completely unnecessary drag, along with complicating the business of extracting the blades at the end of the drive. It's called "rowing over a barrel" and it will slow you down.
Finally, the finish:
The main thing here is the non-trivial up-down arc traversed by your handle. I've highlighted it in yellow to make it easy. Think rationally for a minute about oarshaft handles following the same erg-handle arc. Your oars are basically levers, with their fulcrums at the oarlock. Raise the inboard end and the outboard/blade end moves down. I don't know how you're rigged. But I'm guessing that Fluiddesign has you at 289 cm oar length with 91 cm of inboard. This 1:2.18 inboard-outboard ratio means that the blade tip will go down 2.18 inches for every inch you raise the handle. Lift your hands on the drive just 3 inches above square-and-buried at the catch and you're driving the blades 6 1/2 inches too deep Lift them an unnecessary 4 inches and they're going to be nearly 8.7 inches too deep.
That's approaching punting on the Cam, or maybe Venetian gondoliering. It's NOT sculling. I can assure you from personal experience: you want to lever the boat past the oar blades, not up over them.
There's plenty of other stuff going on (cf. the premature knee popup on the recovery, slamming into frontstops as you come into the catch, the praying mantis thing you do with your left hand, etc.). But the above will do. For now.
Here's the original post with the video, back on p. 98 of the thread:
http://www.c2forum.com/viewtopic.php?p=138192#p138192
What does he do, Handle down when his heart rate goes up as a preventative measure to avoid "training above (his) AT"
