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Faster Five Racing Racing foundation for masters athletes The Faster Five Racing document details how to improve your racing skills. Also included in this document is information about planning a 1000-meter race, and racing inspiration from Olympic singles champion, Xeno Müller. The following five parts provide the foundation of Faster Masters racing: ● Racing and speedwork ● Exercises for speedwork and starts ● Planning your race ● The anatomy of a race: Xeno Müller’s Olympic gold ● Faster Five pieces of advice Racing and speedwork The main purpose in doing speedwork is to help us work a little bit faster than base pace. We need to develop speedwork, for example, if we’re going to perfect our final sprint in a 1000-meter race, or if we’re rowing a short race like a 500-meter dash. Speedwork isn't intended to raise our base pace, which is our average pace for the middle of the race. Raising base pace is accomplished through endurance work. But there are times when we have to make transitions and raise stroke rates when we have to push, such as, the final 150 or 200 meters. At that part of the race, you’re fatigued, so in order to maintain or gain speed, you have to be able to go above the base pace. Most often we do speedwork faster than we do our regular base race pace. You wouldn’t row your whole race at this pace. You have to learn how to make transitions so that you can raise your stroke rate effectively. Ideally, when your stroke rate goes up, your speed goes up. But in later stages of a race, you may simply have to take more strokes to maintain your speed. It just depends on what’s happening in the race. You use speedwork to learn how to make clean transitions from one rating up to another. If you’re in a team boat, you have to do that altogether, ideally in one transition stroke. That transition has to be practiced well before race day. You also have to develop the coordination to take more fast strokes. You have to develop yourself from a neuromuscular point of view. You have to develop higher reaction times and better coordination to simply move faster. Along with that speed, you have to bring your bladework with you. When you start to move faster, that means everything with your bladework has to be faster and has to happen at a higher tempo. How do you practice racing? ● Time trials and local races First, do individual time trials. It’s important for you to be able to experiment with how you’re going to walk yourself through a race. But we don’t race in isolation so we need to do time trials with other rowers. Try to attend some small local races that might not be high-priority races for you, but they serve as great practice just to go through the process of getting up in the morning, getting your gear, going to the race course, thinking about how you’re going to eat before your race, and having race nerves. Even if it’s just a low-key race, you still have to go through that same preparedness and that’s something you have to practice. With small, local races you can experiment a little bit. Try different things in your race plan, or practice your pain tolerance, for example. If you’re at a club where you have a group of people who get together once a week, try to organize races where you do pieces together, side by side. Another option is a practice where you have handicapped starts and can race each other hard at the finish. Or you might have one heat and whoever wins a heat goes up to the faster group and the slower person drops back a group. During practice, these groups can run trials against each other. Side by side practice is very important psychologically to have somebody right there next to you, because often when you’re out training on your own, there isn’t somebody one oar’s width away from you. Having that close proximity steering is important to practice side by side, too, but just the psychological pressure or awareness that somebody is next to you is very different than when you train by yourself. Many more things that come into play, such as training your peripheral vision and training your awareness of the field of rowers. These racing situations are difficult to replicate, but you can construct them during practices when somebody lets you move through them or somebody holds you off. You can include some practice of different race scenarios and plan what you would do, such as which element of your bladework you will focus on and how high you take the rate up when you want to pass someone. ● Practicing parts of your race plan Practicing parts of your race plan and your workout is important. If you’re practicing 500-meter pieces, maybe you’re going to practice the first 500, the middle 500, and the final 500. Even if you’re doing a steady row at stroke rate 18, you can row through your race plan stroke by stroke. Think through your start, transitioning to ten high strokes. Even though you’re not rowing at race speed, you can practice your race plan stroke by stroke. Going through your race plan before you go to sleep at night helps because it works its way into your subconscious. If you think through the plan without emotions like fear and excitement, you’ll remember it better and learn it faster. Racing for experience If sometimes you find yourself in a race category or a race situation that’s a little bit over your head, that’s probably going to produce a lot of anxiety because it could be too far above what you’re prepared to do. So, you have to make a decision whether you want to put yourself into that situation. Again, these are all very individual decisions, but if athletes go to races where they don’t have any competition, they get bored. They want the challenge. They want to race people that they can be competitive with. So, there is a balance in terms of what types of races you choose. Although everybody is nervous to some degree about the unknown, one of the benefits of going to a race that perhaps you are not quite ready for yet is to accept that you are going to be tried and you can chalk it up to experience. So, you can put very low expectations on yourself. It’s exciting to see how you measure up. Maybe there’s a local person or someone who frequently goes to the same regattas as you who is a little faster right now, but they’re your marker. When somebody first starts racing a single, it's important to do a number of races just for experience. Exercises for speedwork and starts Exercises for speedwork ● Speed play, or “fartlek” ● Speed bursts ● Acceleration drills ● Short racing pieces set by time or meters Starts You will never win a race at the start but you can certainly cause problems at the start if you’re not careful. To improve your starts for 1000-meter events you have to develop skills that create stability, strength, and smooth coordinated movements. The basic purpose of a racing start is to get the boat moving from a still position up to race pace in the most efficient way. A well-executed racing start is calm and composed, the bladework is clean, and the hull tracks straight. Elements of a good start ● Get off the line cleanly and quietly with no major disturbances. When we’re talking about that first stroke, we just want to get the boat moving. We don’t want things to be too abrupt. You don’t want to kick the boat backwards or kick the boat sternward. If that first stroke is too aggressive, especially in a big boat like an eight, you can actually push it towards the starting line instead of towards the finish line. ● It’s important to try and stay on course in those first, say, we’ll define our start as the first five or six strokes. It’s important to stay on course, especially if you’re in a blind boat – like a single or a double – and it’s important to stay on par with your competitors. Maybe you’re not the fastest person out of the blocks but you have to stay in touch as you’re getting out of the blocks. ● A good start gets you off cleanly, starts to get your boat so you’re up to full slide by your fifth or sixth stroke, and then you start to transition into your rhythm. There are various transitions in terms of how many strokes people take high and then they settle to their base and we’ll be talking about this a little bit when we talk about race planning of what are some of the different ways to approach the start of the race. Bungee cord starts You can do bungee cord starts to work on explosive power for the first five strokes. The bungee cord gives you a lot of resistance so is good for recruiting a lot of muscle fibres. The boat is going to have a lot of resistance with the bungee cord on it, but it gives you a strengthening workout in a rowing-specific way.

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