Glorious Tuesday

Practice 2-3 from Sam Taylor on Vimeo.

Absolutely wonderful water this morning for our first actual morning row. One of these excellent February days; near freezing, no wind, no current, perfectly flat, and a fantastic sunrise to top it off.

Sent out a brand-new novice on her first row in a novice boat with volunteer coach Jim (reports are that she's going to be a powerhouse) and I took an eight of returning athletes to work on front end, front end, front end. As referenced back in the fall everything about a good catch relates to preparation; of the body, the blade, the rhythm. If everything is ready the catch is easy. We focused on handle heights and blade preparation today; our erg work has done a lot for body preparation already.

Our current practice split (Monday, Wednesday, Friday on the ergs, bikes, and weights, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday on the water) is really nice for this time of year. We're making a lot of progress on fundamental fitness, and now that we're rowing we're adding the technical foundation to go along with that. In about three more weeks when we start transitioning to more frequent rowing our technique and fitness should be robust enough to start supporting a bunch of competitive pieces and we'll start making some very solid gains in our boatspeed.