Off the Water: CC Rowing team utilizes off-season for Winter Training

Members of the men's crew team practice synchronizing their strokes in Conn's rowing tank. Photo by Qimeng Zhao.

While a seemingly endless parade of record-breaking storms marches across the country and Conn Coll’s erstwhile snow plows bury our cars in North Lot and behind Cro, Camel men and women’s crew teams are busy preparing for the spring racing season.

For crew teams, the time between the end of the fall season on Halloween and the February 21 start of the spring season is an iffy period.  NCAA Division III rules prohibit coached workouts and practicing on the water during the winter off season. Coaches are not even allowed to sit in on workout sessions. The rowers, however, need to keep in tip-top shape, and they need to sharpen and improve their technique. So crew practice during the winter is unofficial and attendance is not technically mandatory—though frequent absences are frowned upon.  The women’s team has an interesting trick for motivating teammates to come to practice: whoever has the highest attendance rate gets a t-shirt.

Workouts during this period are organized by team captains and run by the captains and the coxswains.  The sessions range from fun and lighthearted—an hour of yoga—to grueling and intense—countless pieces on the ergs.

For those of you not up on your rowing terminology, here is a brief glossary:  The coxswain is the small, loud, bossy person who sits in the front of the boat. Some say the cox is the brains of the boat.  The cox calls the workout, telling the rowers what speed to go and for how long, when to take moves (ten strokes for power in the legs, ten strokes for quick arms, etc.), and helps correct technique.

Thought by some to be a torture device, an erg is an indoor cardio machine that simulates rowing—one of the closest things to being on the water when you can’t actually be on the water.  It has a computer monitor to record stroke rate (how many strokes per minute the rower is taking), split time (the projected amount of time it would take to row 500 meters at any given rate), time elapsed and distance covered.

A common erg workout for winter training would be three by ten minute pieces—three ten minute long stretches of rowing.  To get an idea of how a rower feels doing a piece, think of the steepest hill you have ever seen, then imagine running as fast as you possibly can up that hill non-stop  three times for ten minutes at a time.  The tank looks like a massive bathtub with an eight seat rowing shell anchored in it.  Where the erg lets an individual rower work on speed, timing, strength and endurance, the tank lets the full team work together on the techniques and synchronization that are essential to success on the water.  The teams supplement these workouts with weight lifting circuits, including exercises like pushups, wall-sits, stairs, squats, body weight exercises and some weighted lifts as well.

Said Katy Varga ’11, captain of the varsity women’s team, “The best part about it is being around your teammates who push each other every day. The bonding experience we have as a group is also really positive, and a fun chance to get to know each other better than we did in the fall.”  Both the men’s and women’s teams consider themselves truly tight-knit groups, and winter training is an opportunity for varsity boats and novice boats to come together as one.

The warm breezes, bright sunshine and green grass of spring may seem a distant dream from beneath the mountain of snow on campus these days, but Camel rowers know that the demanding 1000 and 1500 meter races of the spring season will be upon them all too soon. They are confident their winter time dedication to training off the water will pay off with Camel pride when their shells take to the water a mere six weeks from now.  The teams will be hosting an “erg-a-thon” fundraiser on February 18-19, where they will be erging for twenty-four hours straight and selling neon  “CAMELS” t-shirts.