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All adult row­ers should print out and com­plete the linked waiver form and give it to Dan or Ian before rowing.

SCSC Adult Appli­ca­tion and Waiver

SCSC Juniors Reg­is­tra­tion — Forms Only

Please click on the above link to down­load the packet of forms which should be com­pleted and handed to Ian or Dan.

Every­one seems to be weigh­ing in with their 2k erg strate­gies, so here’s mine.

Start

Fol­low­ing a good warm-​​up (very impor­tant!) you’re ready to go. Before the start, take a cou­ple of deep belly breaths and use the exhales to steady your nerves. Your focus should now be on the first two strokes only. Sit ready in a strong posi­tion; you’ll be mov­ing your body weight from a com­plete stand­still, so don’t row your first stroke too long – you need to get that fly­wheel mov­ing first before going after the next 5 or 6 strokes. I don’t advise going any fur­ther at such a high level of inten­sity; we’re tap­ping into the short-​​term energy sys­tem caused by hydrol­y­sis of phos­pho­cre­a­tine and ATP re-​​synthesis in gly­col­y­sis, which reaches its max­i­mum after about 5 sec­onds. After the 6^th stroke you should get quickly onto your tar­get aver­age race pace; at this point in the race, this pace is going to feel too easy. You must resist the temp­ta­tion to go faster than tar­get; the goal is to even pace or even neg­a­tive split as you get deeper into the race. So make sure that you stay calm, be really effi­cient with your move­ment and con­serve energy – because you’re going to need it later. It’s impor­tant to achieve your race pace at race rate – don’t drop the rate in order to get down to pace. You need to keep the machine “alive.”

500 meters into the race

So you’ve been click­ing along row­ing most strokes at your 2k tar­get pace. How­ever, due to that ini­tial start­ing burst, your aver­age split may be slightly ahead of tar­get. After the 1^st 500m you can allow your splits to get slightly worse, by per­haps 0:01/500m. This has the effect of giv­ing you some “breath­ing room”; but you can do this only if you under­stand in advance that when you reach 1,000m you have to com­mit to going faster. It is impor­tant that every time you drop worse than your tar­get split for this 2^nd 500 meters, you must push back imme­di­ately on the very next stroke. Keep those legs dri­ving, keep the han­dle mov­ing off the catch.

1000 meters into the race

This is where I like to play the “aver­ages game.” For most of the 3^rd 500 you should make sure that every stroke you row is at, or under, the cur­rent aver­age split for the piece. When­ever you fall off that split, you MUST get it back again on the very next stroke. This is where you have to keep the han­dle mov­ing quickly from the catch and over the knees and squeeze out that lit­tle bit extra at the finish.

500 meters to go

From this point in, every stroke is impor­tant. You must make every stroke count. What I like to do here is “chase the dec­i­mals.” Focus on bring­ing your aver­age split down, one dec­i­mal at a time. As soon as you get one dec­i­mal, imme­di­ately go after the next one, and the next, etc. When you get to 200 meters to go, you can shift focus slightly and chal­lenge your­self to see how low you can get your splits.

As a basic rule of thumb, your rat­ing should increase 1 or 2 beats each 500m, and sig­nif­i­cantly more in the final sprint when you’ve just got to get more strokes in.