TRC Winter Meters Challenge

Every year Matt Knifton, the owner of my rowing club, the Texas Rowing Center, throws out a Winter Meters Challenge to keep us motivated and in shape during the off-season. The challenge: row a million meters in ten weeks. Everyone who completes the challenge gets a club t-shirt, and the man or woman with the most meters overall during the challenge wins a one-year club membership, which is worth about $500.

If you know me, you know I can’t resist a challenge like this. The t-shirt doesn’t matter, nor does the $500 reward for first place (which works out to — at best — less than $5/hour for your labor). I just love endurance challenges, and I think the attraction is two-fold. First, of course, is the competition. I’d love to win the thing, of course. I keep constant tabs on everyone’s status, which Mark, our head coach, posts every week, and I play out several different strategic scenarios for winning. Should I crank out a killer week and demoralize the competition? But what if someone steps up their game and stays even with me? The challenge could escalate into an arms race, which wouldn’t be smart.

So, I decided I should probably just set a weekly goal that I think I can maintain, see how things play out, and adjust accordingly. I did 100,000 meters the first week, adjusted that to 140,000 meters the second week, to stay close to the front runners, and have just kept doing that every week so far. We’ve finished week 6 now, and I’m in the lead with a little over 800,000 meters so far — about 25,000 ahead of second place and pulling away.

This brings me to the second thing that attracts me to an endurance challenge: the joy of learning new things about yourself (or recollecting what you’ve forgotten about yourself) and what you can achieve, if you’re stubborn and disciplined and bored and boring enough to keep going.

I’ve been reminded, for example, how amazing our bodies are at adapting to stress. After the first one or two 140K weeks, I was exhausted, and bored to death. That’s a lot of meters. It’s mind-numbing, especially when you’re staring into a rowing machine monitor for hours on end. I should mention butt-numbing, too. Every contact point between body and machine becomes a friction point. Body Glide has become my friend.

But I kept going, and my body adapted to the workload, and the boredom, and the ass-blisters. I’ve cranked out 140K for the last five weeks now, and it’s become rather routine. I can go out and do 25K several days in a row now without feeling overly fatigued. It reminds me of my friend, Joe Prusaitis, an ultra-runner, who is able to knock out a brutal 100-mile race once or twice a month without any ill effects. He’s not especially gifted (sorry, Joe), but he’s been doing it for so long, his body has adapted. Anybody can do it.

I’ve also learned a lot about my rowing technique, especially on the erg (ergonometer, aka, rowing machine). When we started the Challenge, I had very little experience on the erg at all. In last year’s Challenge, I did every single meter on the water. This winter, though, I got inexpensive access to a rowing machine (at the local Y), started taking advantage of it during a cold spell, and have continued to use it. I think at least half of my meters so far this winter are on the erg.

With all those meters on the machine, boredom has led me to experiment with my technique, and I think I’ve gradually learned how to achieve power efficiently. I’ve settled on a fairly low drag factor (110), low stroke rate, and long, even pulls. The great thing about the erg is the nearly instant feedback you get about your technique. It displays your wattage output, and you can see with a second or two the effect of any changes you make to your technique. Simply snapping my wrists at the end of the drive, for example, produces an extra 10–15 watts of power.

More significantly, though, I’ve learned that “long and steady” is the secret to efficient power on the erg — and on the water, too. Speed kills, in a sense, for erg and boat alike. The resistance or drag on both machines increases with the cube of speed. On the erg, this is due to the wind resistance on the flywheel blades; in the boat, it’s due to the fluid drag of water. Consequently, bursts of speed are very expensive, and so the most efficient way to propel both machines is by maintaining your instantaneous speed as close to your average speed as possible. On the erg, this means spreading out your effort evenly throughout the entire drive phase, in other words, long, steady pulls, as shown below.

On the boat, it means the same thing on the drive phase — long, steady pulls, rather than short, abrupt pulls— but it also requires near-constant speed on the recovery, which doesn’t play much of a role on the erg.

This technique of maintaining speed during the recovery is what’s called “letting the boat run”. It requires maintaining a very, very steady change of momentum all the way from the release (full body extension) to the catch (full body compression), all while maintaining balance. It’s notoriously hard to do well and consistently.

I don’t claim at all to have mastered this skill of letting the boat run. As they say, it can take a lifetime to master rowing, because of both its physical and technical difficulty. But I feel like the last several weeks of training has given me glimpses, however fleeting, of what I need to focus on next.