This is a 500m sprint race with a team of adult athletes who practice once a week for a 12-week season. The boat includes people racing for the first or second time ever, as well as rowers with many seasons of experience. We took second on the water but were awarded a first place medal as the winners of the co-ed category, as the winning boat was technically in the open category.

STEERING: At some points it looks like I'm being lured slightly towards the port side of my lane, but overall I'm satisfied with how I maintained my point between the buoy lines. I've had far worse floating starts where I have to do a lot of steering correction right away, but this one went fine. We were also in a basically brand new shell with pretty responsive steering, so I was able to put forward my best as far as steering went.

CALLS: Sprint races are not my forte, and I often feel like 500m races go by before I can even process them, but listening back I'm reasonably happy with my execution here. I prepared the night before by studying the notes I'd taken over the course of our season and reflecting on our recent 500m practice pieces. Fortunately, that seemed to pay off in the form of me being able to deliver most of the calls I wanted to, even while operating sort of on autopilot, which is how I feel during sprint races.

START: I'd identified "build" as a useful word for what our coach wanted us to focus on during the first strokes of the start, but in practice I'd found that saying it threw me off when calling the start sequence, so my compromise was throwing it in between the stroke length calls. Our race plan involved doing a high 15 instead of the high 10 we assumed most of our competitors would be doing, with the last 5 being "silent" so as not to alert other boats that we were keeping our rate up for additional strokes. It did help us stay up on one boat, but they ended up beating us so I'm not sure whether that was an effective strategy or not. During practice pieces some rowers expressed that they felt we lost our rhythm when we lengthened (we also experimented with not lengthening at all, but ultimately decided to incorporate it), so I adopted a strategy of calling some catches right after lengthening. I've made better lengthen calls before as far as the actual shift is concerned, so that's an area of improvement for next time.

BODY: Because this race was so tight (a privileged place to be!), I spent most of the time updating rowers on where we were in relation to the other boats. I've been making it my goal to be more explicit about exactly what position we're in, and with three boats that was easy to do. I did about as much as I wanted to as far as distance calls, but I could maybe have given one more update about that around the time we sprinted, which we'd agreed to do at 150m left. I only mentioned rate once because it was higher than we'd practiced and anticipated being at, though I had previously normalized that for the rowers. In a 2-minute race there isn't much time for technical calls, but I did make a few that had been focuses of our season, such as timing. I don't know why I called a 10 for anything in a race this short, and in any case I abandoned it for calls to update the rowers on their positioning, which seemed more important. I notice that throughout I'm kind of doing an odd mix of "you" vs. "we" calls. I didn't give that any kind of overt thought, so maybe it was a subconscious attempt to provide variation in my language.

📍 Oklahoma River in Oklahoma City, OK

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