Wet roads, good company

Solid fall weather up on Palatine Hill today; wet fog, misting rain, wet roads all the way up on the ride to work today. I debuted my new, longer ride-- my old route was 40-44 minutes, depending on traffic lights. I've been wanting a slightly longer workout, so I plotted a new route and tested it today- sixty minutes on the nose, with less time spent sitting at lights, and a nice stretch along the river to keep me in touch with the water as we close up shop for winter.

Before the ride I met with most of the women's team for a winter training breakfast and distributed our recommendations for a solid winter program. This is Division III-- we cannot require anyone to train outside of our playing & practice season. There are downsides to this, most notably the lack of contact between coaches and the team (sad!). But the upside is the great educational opportunity for our athletes to develop their own work ethic and knowledge of training over the course of the next three months. I've done my best to provide the team with all the tools they need; now it's up to them to run with it. I was very encouraged today by how many small training groups were forming within the team; we also had a report that the whole men's team was at it in the weight room this morning. Good company makes consistent training easy.

Next task: clean up and prepare the erg room for the winter season!

Portland Fall Classic

I had a great time at the Fall Classic on Sunday; Station L Rowing Club and Rose City Rowing Club ran a fantastic event. We provided three launches and ran the start marshal area; the best part was being able to stay on shore with the athletes for the duration of the event and ride my bike down the Springwater Corridor, following the races from the start to about halfway down. I took plenty of photos but they didn't really turn out, so I'll direct you instead to Row2k's excellent gallery.

Our crews rowed well, which was the primary goal for the event. The men's team choose to boat up a fast four as their priority boat and raced to within eleven seconds of Oregon State's top four freshman- a solid performance. Our women's team took on the open eight and faced up to some very quick competition, but we succeeded in our goal to stay composed, stay long (rate ~26 throughout), and maintain our technique. Maybe not the absolute fastest piece we could have rowed but we 100% succeeded in capitalizing on the learning we've done this fall and set ourselves up for a great start to spring season.

The athletic department write up is here.

And now fall's done, and I woke up this morning with a huge rainstorm to announce the start of winter. Time to spend some days in the office, clean up the erg room and fix up all our ergs, and meet with folks Thursday at breakfast to talk about winter training.

I'll be posting less frequently for the next month or two, but will try to keep the updates coming 1-2 days per week.

Pioneep Novice Women

Photos from novice practice today; one of our novice women's mothers was out and proved rather talented with the camera. We did some nice racing pieces vs the novice men's four, but somehow she only got pictures of the women's eight.

Keep Portland Weird

Offered without comment, from the northern end of Ross Island, photo taken around five today.

Time for Class

Having a cup of coffee at home, just back from the office and some productive recruiting e-mailing with prospects. With the November 1st early action deadline coming up it's time time of year when I like to make solid connections with folks and try to help them communicate their strengths to the school as best I can. If there are any of you out there we haven't talked to in a while please do drop us a line and let us know what's up in your world.

Next on my schedule is the sculling class this afternoon; the above picture is from Tuesday. We've had some interruptions in the class (wind, fall break, and illness) but are back on track this week and looking forward to some good rowing. I've enjoyed working with this group-- in particular teaching one of our men's team coxswains how to row. Sculling is a great vehicle for getting smaller folks into the sport; it's more balanced and much easier for them to match, and the overall load on the body is much less. All good things.

Portland Fall Classic coming up Sunday, and with it the end of our fall season. I'll do my best to be an excellent journalist for the event.

Scrimmaging

Looking forward to Saturday we were confronted with an epic forecast; some of the projections called for up to an inch of rain between 3 AM and 6 PM. We girded ourselves, packed extra rain gear, loaded the trailer and drove to Tacoma regardless. Sure enough, as soon as we arrived the skies opened and we rigged our boats in a torrential downpour.



Luckily, the rain did not last as long nor prove as bad as forecast. After about thirty minutes things largely cleared up and we proceeded with the day. Puget Sound hosted and we proceeded to race three flights of competitive pieces; roughly 2 x 1500 meters for each grouping. It was a very nice day out on the lake.



Some of our boats did very well, some were certainly challenged. Most importantly for the nature of the event, everyone learned a great deal about what we need to do to race well against those that are some of our chief competitors come spring season. Our novices had an excellent day and were very excited to get some solid racing done.

Back to work this week with the Portland Fall Classic on tap for Sunday. Just six rowing days left in the fall season!

Bonus Movie! Getting ready to head over to novice practice this afternoon; final "race" preparations for our fall DIII scrimmage up at Puget Sound tomorrow. Here's thirty seconds from this morning; the sunrise as we docked was unreal. Do I sound like a broken record? Maybe, but it's worth it-- wish I'd had my camera.

Sunrise 10-16 from Sam Taylor on Vimeo.

Why Sport?

Great short video of Simon Whitfield, a two-time olympic medalist triathlete, talking about why sport matters. One thing I tell folks a lot is that whatever your passion is in life, it's the pursuit of doing that thing very well that makes it worthwhile. For me it's coaching, for our athletes it's rowing. When everyone is ambitious it's very easy to get fired up and put a great deal of yourself into the process.

Off the Mic

Sorry for the time between posts-- I've (personally) been rather busy and while I keep thinking up good topics to blog about, by the time I get to the office or home from practice things pop up. A lame excuse, one I'd probably hassle our athletes about.

Good row with the novices this afternoon. We worked hard on exploring the limits of what "HARD" is-- tapping into the sense of how much a person can put into ten strokes. This was preceded by a lot of work on front end, posture, and connection. The risk of asking someone to go very, very hard is that they'll try to take the load without connecting on the feet-- if that happens back pain results. By focusing on the posture first and making sure they locked the catches in well, we ensured that the power transmitted through to the water instead and saw some great run in the boat as a result.

More to follow. Last two weeks of fall are upon us, and racing is near at hand.

Awesome Morning

Great water, great weather, great rowing and racing this morning. Rather then blather on about it I'll just let the pictures do the talking. Great way to go into three days off for Fall Break!

Fall Break Practice 10-8 from Sam Taylor on Vimeo.

Sunrise

First off, our varsity men got their picture up on Row2k as photo of the day-- very cool.

Second, a (somewhat shaky) shot from practice this morning:

I was talking with a novice rower who'd just swapped out of the eight above. She mentioned that in the last couple days she'd seen the sunrise more then she had in the last few years. The Willamette at dawn is incredible-- flat water, sky aglow, hills lit up in the background. It never ceases to amaze me.

Best of Breed

I'm writing from the Las Vegas Airport, not my favorite place in the world, on my way back from the annual WIRA coaches meeting. We had a very productive meeting today getting our diverse association set up to ensure the high quality of the regatta continues into future years.

More fun even then that was the Head of the Dog regatta held yesterday. As mentioned in a prior post, this event has two themes-- the racing, and the contest for the coveted Best of Breed trophy. While we wanted our athletes to put forth strong efforts on the racecourse we also challenged them to make the most of the opportunity to put their creativity to good use.



One of the women's doubles dressed up as Peruvian Banditos (I think I got that right).



Another dressed up as trees, and got an honorable mention at the awards ceremony. This picture really doesn't do justice to the amount of ivy on the boat.



The tour de force, however, came from our men's four entry. These guys showed up at six AM, after several days of preparation, and spent two hours doing construction on the beach. The theme was Apocalypse Now, and most specifically creating a Vietnam-era Huey helicopter on the water.



The creation was substantial and encompassed all senses-- aside from the visual, they also piped Ride of the Valkyries through the cox-box, and set off smoke with about 500 meters to go. It was a full-force effort and they were rewarded justly with the ever-epic Best of Breed.



Tradition has it that the winning boat takes the trophy home and has the responsibility to add to it some memory of their prize then return the next year to judge and award the prize. This one is going to look good in the trophy case.

True Oregon fall weather has arrived; cool, damp mornings clearing into dappled sunshine in the afternoon. The leaves have started to turn and our daylight is rapidly disappearing. There have been a number of rain showers blowing through and the river has risen a couple of feet with runoff; more room to practice along with more debris to avoid.

We've had some excellent workouts and some excellent rows the last few days both discovering and addressing challenges. A lot of this revolves around defining the limits of our current fitness and figuring out how far we can go without loosing the ability to accelerate and drive the boat. This pays big dividends as we turn to racing; understanding how deep you can reach within yourself is at the very essence of long-distance training and racing. I spoke to the women's team the last couple of mornings about the beautiful truths that accompany exhaustive efforts, and the great challenge when you reach that point of exhaustion before you reach the finish. A lesson best learned in practice and applied to better pacing over the course of the race.