The end of my season was a whirlwind affair. I have been back at Stanford finishing my degree and had a busy couple of weeks traveling to and from the east coast for the Head of the Charles and then the Philly Gold Cup sculling race. They were both fantastic events and I am super glad I was able to attend both. I am also very grateful to CRI, West Side, my coach Sasha and many others for helping shuttle boats and equipment around for me.
I raced the Head of the Charles with my younger sister in an inclusion double. An inclusion double is when one of the rowers is a classified para rower (me) and one of the rowers is an able-bodied rower (Mary). This was the first year that medals were being offered for each individual classification in the inclusion double event and there were almost 20 entries. It was really awesome seeing so many para rowers racing in the US - a trend I hope continues to grow! Mary and I had a great race, passing 5 crews (although one of them passed us back), and won our event in 24:03 beating all of the PR1s as well as all of the PR2 boats! Mary did an awesome job adapting her full stroke to my slightly shorter stroke, although since I am so tall the difference wasn’t that large. She also did a fantastic job steering, with no crashes!
The following weekend I traveled to Philadelphia where I raced in the Blackwall Duling Challenge at the Philly Gold Cup. The Gold Cup race was first established in 1920 and attracts the best scullers from around the world and country. In recent years they have added para events to the Regatta. The para events were raced with a stagger so that all of the classifications could race at the same time. What this means is that at the start I was started first, because the world record time for the PR1 event (my event) is the slowest, and then a predetermined amount of time later the PR2 racer (Russell) started. The staggered time was determined by the difference in world record times between our two events. The time differential was pretty accurate because we ended up neck-in-neck in the last 100 meters and Russell just touched me out, winning by 2 seconds. These last two races of my fall season demanded a lot of travel and logistics with school but I am so glad I was able to make them happen with the help of my team and family. Following all the travel, however, I was definitely ready to settle into some consistent training back in California.
Staying motivated during the “off-season”
By far the hardest part of racing a single and not having a team for most of the year is keeping myself focused and accountable during training. When I was racing eights or at a training camp, there are other team members counting on me to show up, pushing me to go faster and train harder. For the past two years, however, as I have become more and more invested in para-rowing, and specifically the single, I am usually alone in my training. When my alarm goes off at 5:45 there is no one else waking up who will be meeting me at the boathouse, no one who knows whether or not I showed up. In California, this is especially true, because I don’t have a coach working with me whereas Sasha is usually coaching me when I am training out of Buffalo. This has definitely been a challenge for me in the past and is something I am constantly working to improve.
One of my goals for the next 4 - 5 months, my effective “light” season before I start ramping up for European races, is to be much more consistent and deliberate about my training. Racing at worlds absolutely motivated me to push myself even harder, and train as much and as deliberately as a professional athlete should. The past 4 weeks have been a great start to that goal and a couple of things that I have implemented that have really helped are consistency, scheduling, and flexibility.
Consistency
I am in the process of having a new shell delivered - I ordered it last October but due to supply chain issues it is just getting delivered now - and as such, have been off of the water and will continue to be off of the water at least for the next two weeks. Due to this, my training has consisted of erging and lifting. There are ergs in the gym on campus but I have been commuting to BIAC, the club I row out of, and erging there, because the consistency of that ritual - wake up, drive to the club, erg - takes out a lot of the variables. I tend to be lazy in nature and removing any opportunities for excuses increases the chances that I will follow through with my training that day. I have also become very consistent in my morning routine as well as my bed and wake times. Although some nights I have to stay up later to finish a PSet or prepare for a quiz, having a concrete wake-up time again reduces variables and options. If you wake up every day at 6 then that’s just what you do, there is no time to roll over and think “today I’ll start a bit later.”
Scheduling
Another area I am working on improving is my planning out of workouts as well as rest days, recovery, PT appts, etc. Fortunately, I have had a lot of help with this from my coach Sasha as well as the US Team strength coach for my lifting sessions. Not only does this make my time spent at the gym or boathouse more efficient (you would be amazed at how much time I waste if I go to the gym without a plan), but it also helps me visualize what the training week looks like and gives my rest days to look forward to because frankly, erging isn’t always a blast - who knew!
Flexibility
The last piece that I have found very helpful is building a little flexibility into the schedule. Usually, this takes the form of a weekly plan where I want to have 5 ergs and 2 lifts over 6 days, with a rest day built in there. This gives me a little leeway to decide which comes when in case I wake up one of the days feeling sick or worn down, or if I have to study for a quiz I will do a lift day as it takes less time.
The worst feeling is when I schedule out something and then skip it for whatever reason. By having some flexibility built in I can avoid that for the most part.
I have by no means mastered my training schedule and this is a schedule with usually one practice a day. As we move into the winter and spring months, we will transition to 2 practices a day and I am sure that will be tough. But as Churchill famously said,
“When going through hell, keep going!”
I will be writing about the different classification levels in para-rowing next as well as what some of my goals are for the next year. If you have any questions about my training, para-rowing, or anything else leave them in the comments!