I actually feel much better after rowing. I don’t know whether it was the exercise that did it, or just being back on the water (being around water is always healing for me) or maybe the Sudafed I took beforehand. Either way, I wasn’t snorfling too much or hacking up gobs on the water, and I’m still not. My calves are burning from some nasty trackbite but the rest of me is decidedly happier.
It wasn’t one of our best rows, but it was productive. We rowed lightly the whole time except for three power tens, but even though the guy coaching us didn’t speak a lot of English, he gave us some good feedback. I hadn’t been on the water for two weeks, and we hadn’t been in a double together for more than a month, so we were definitely rusty. First he told us we were using too much body angle, which is easy enough to correct, so we did. Then he told us we had a pause at half-slide during the stroke (not the recovery) which is just an odd palce to have it. I think that the problem was that we (or maybe I) didn’t properly connect the leg drive with the body movement. He wanted us to open up the body later in the stroke. This is a harder thing to correct, because you don’t get a lot of feedback feeling when you make a change.
I totally cheated, sort of, and I can’t describe what a luxury it was for me to be able to cheat in this way. Instead of worrying about what to do when since I was in bow seat and Roeiste was stroking, I just followed her, making sure my body moved when hers did. That was a bit easier for me and I did get some feedback, being able to feel when we were in sync and swinging together. And it did work – the coach told us we had improved a lot, so she must have fixed her body and staying with her fixed mine. It’s just that with the sort of crews I’ve rowed in I’ve rarely had a chance to row with someone I could trust like that. This is the way it’s supposed to work, but at the club level it often doesn’t. It makes life so much easier when you can not only just work on yourself instead of worrying about compensating for others, the others even make it easier for you.
The two things I will miss most when we leave here are the cooler climate and the rowing club, and Roeiste is a big part of the latter for me.