Sure.Bob S. wrote:There seems to be a common misconception that skill at a sport and the ability to coach that sport are related. Nothing could be further from the truth. The coaches that I had at UC Berkeley in the 1940s were living examples of coaches who had not even participated in the sport of rowing — as oarsmen. Russ Nagler and Carroll “Ky” Ebright were each about 5’4” and 120#. I doubt that either of them pulled many strokes except when demonstrating a point to their oarsmen. There was almost no prep school rowing in California, so Nagler, the freshman coach taught almost all of Cal’s oarsmen from scratch. Then Ebright put them together in crews that won Olympic gold for eights in 1928, 1932, and 1948. There were also several years when the UCB varsity eight won the Intercollegiate Rowing Association Regatta at Poughkeepsie. As you might surmise, they had been coxswains and, as such, had learned to judge oarsmen well enough to do a topnotch job of coaching them. Ebright’s own coach, Hiram Conibear, inventor of the rowing stroke that was the most effective from the 1910s through the 1950s, had been a baseball trainer and got into coaching crew at the University of Washington even though, as he himself admitted, he didn’t know the first thing about rowing.
For the story of Conibear, check the following site:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/artic ... 86,00.html
A contemporary of Nagler and Ebright at Berkeley was coach Clarence M. “Nibs” Price. He was about their size and coached both football (27-17-3) and basketball (449-294).
Bob S.
But Pete's case is just the opposite.
The has a special talent for rowing, but he doesn't know how to train, much less coach others how to train.
He omits foundational training entirely from his training program.
You will never row your best if you have no foundation to do so.
He neglects technique.
You will never row your best unless you obsess endlessly about technique.
He avoids all of his weaknesses.
You never will row your best if you avoid your weaknesses.
So he never improves, even though he is in the prime of his life.
He just gets worse.
First thing for Pete, I think, would be to get a boat and learn to row OTW--right now.
He should work on this until he can rate 30 spm for 5K, rowing hard, with good technique, even if he doesn't want to be an OTW rower.
Second thing, I think, would be to get to 5-8% body fat, to see just how light he can be.
Rowing is all about skeletal-motor fitness.
I would guess that Pete is at least 20% body fat right now, perhaps as much as 25%.
40 lbs. of fat!
To row his best, that should be 10-15 lbs.
At 5% body fat, who knows, Pete might be a lightweight.
That would be interesting to see.
Then, to get better, Pete needs to learn to row well.
To learn how to do that, he needs to row a lot at 16 SPI, if he is a heavyweight, 13 SPI, if he is a lightweight, at least a couple of years, so that he can race at 14.5 SP, if he is a heavyweight, 11.5 SPI, if he is a lightweight.
Then he needs to learn how to row efficiently at 10 MPS until he can rate 30-32 spm at 10 MPS for 60min.
Then he could get back to his sharpening, and he would be fast as helll, about 20 seconds faster, I would presume.
ranger
