Rowing Faster

Get a length up on the competition with cutting-edge technique, training, and racing information. Let the top rowing coaches and scientists in the world steer you to ultimate success, starting with sound training and racing principles and adding increasingly advanced instruction, drills, and insights all the way to the finish. Rowing Faster is the most comprehensive and detailed guide for achieving excellence in the sport. Inside you’ll find technique, drills, and progressions used by World and Olympic champions to master every phase of the stroke; tests to assess your rowing fitness and workouts to develop an aerobic base, increase anaerobic threshold, improve VO2max, and build rowing-specific strength and power; a rowing periodization plan to sequence all the training components into a complete training program to maximize boat speed for 1000 meters, 2000 meters, and head racing; racing plans and tactics that have been proven successful at the highest levels of competition. Cut through the water faster than ever. Rowing Faster will boost your speed and performance to the highest level.

Slim Book of Rowing  

The ultimate guide to rigging—the book a generation of coaches grew up with—gets even better. The Tenth Anniversary edition of Nuts and Bolts Guide to Rigging adds pages and pages of more information to help you with your rigging. Covers all aspects of rigging —from the hardware to making adjustments to keeping the equipment alive. Includes sweep rowing and sculling. Written in simple step-by-step instructions with illustrations to help simplify this sometimes mystifying part of rowing. Over 400 pages and 100 illustrations. Mike Davenport, Ed.D., is the Head Rowing coach at Washington College, a Division III NCAA member institution. He has been coaching rowing for over twenty-two years, and has authored eight books. His company, SportWork, has a mission to "help coaches survive, thrive, and excel in the wild world of sports."
Mike was the boatman for the U.S. National Rowing team for many years, including the 1996 U.S. Olympic Rowing team. He and his family live in Maryland.

There is no greater terror or joy than to take the whole sum of who you are and express it in four minutes," writes Hall of racing a single-shell boat. In spring of 1995 Hall, a Long Island housewife with three children, experienced an epiphany when she observed a single shell moving on the water through the window of her car. This elegant and moving memoir recounts how she simultaneously fell in love with rowing and began moving away from a suffocating marriage wherein she was relentlessly belittled. Initially rowing before dawn in order to meet her husband's demands that she be available when he and their children awoke, Hall's love and talent for the sport caused her submissive attitude to wane. Offering lyrical descriptions of rowing, Hall details how she competed in and won master events (she is the 1998 World Masters Champion in the women's single shell). (Review from Publishers Weekly).

Whether you swim, run, cycle, cross-country ski, row, or compete in multievents, SERIOUS Training for Serious Athletes is the tool you need to become the best possible endurance athlete. Use these 7 components of the SERIOUS system to enhance your training:

(1) Speed workouts,(2) Endurance or Easy Distance training,(3) Race/Pace sessions to test your fitness,
(4) Intervals of high-intensity workouts on flat terrain, (5) Overdistance sessions of prolonged, low-level activity for base building, (6) Up/Vertical intervals to enhance mental and physical toughness, (7) Strength workouts for overall and sport-specific conditioning.

SERIOUS Training for Serious Athletes shows you how to design a personalized year-round training plan by modifying the SERIOUS plan designed for your sport. You'll finally have a sure-fire method to reach peak racing condition safely and predictably.
SERIOUS Training for Serious Athletes provides the coach, trainer and athlete with solid guidelines for designing personalized training programs. Author Rob Sleamaker has analyzed the world's best systems of endurance sport training and devised this program by combining the most effective elements of each. SERIOUS Training for Serious Athletes includes sport-specific training recommendations for cyclists, distance runners, swimmers, canoeists, biathletes, triathletes, and all other endurance athletes.

John McArthur is coach at a UK rowing club and has written a book for those who aspire to excellence in the sport. The book is up to date in areas of rigging, physiology, technique and training. What is more, McArthur explains the "why" and the "how" behind rigging and physiology - something usually skipped. This is not a book which will help beginners directly, but it will inspire and inform the beginner as well as the elite athlete. And I guess that's what I liked most about it: treating rowing as a form of athletic endeavour and giving the intelligent and committed rower enough information to enable him or her to understand every aspect of the sport and so to come to an informed, sensible position which suits their capacities and aspirations. (From a review by Keith Thomas, Cranbera, Australia).

A Textbook of Oarsmanship is a masterpiece and is considered the classic of classics for the rowing world. In designing the content of the book Bourne seemed to harmonise the text with the execution of a single stroke cycle - simplicity is paramount. The main parts identify and represent the key component of rowing, i.e., the Theory of Rowing, the Art of Rowing, Oars and Boats, On Coaching, and On Muscular Action in Rowing. The careful layout of Bourne's master plan subtly recognises the scientific undergirding of the sport, the ballet or ideal movement patterns of the sport, the mechanics and tools used by the athlete, the importance of a skilled mentor, and the recognition of the internal mechanics of the athlete's body. This book is an excellent companion reading to current sport and rowing literature.

This book is a comprehensive look at rowing training and technique,illustrations and photos provide the reader with everything they need to develop their skills and performance on and off the water. Detailed descriptions of the strokes and drills allow the reader to develop the finer points of rowing skills. Chapters on strength training, aerobic conditioning, program planning, and rigging will help rowers improve their performance in the most efficient way. The author, Edward McNeely, has been the physiologist and strength-training consultant to Rowing Canada since 1992. He has written chapters and articles for coaching manuals and rowing magazines in both Canada and the US, and is a regular speaker at rowing conferences and is currently the physiologist for the Masters Rowing Association.

An exhilarating story about the early days of the U.S. women's national rowing team. Noting that society in the 1970s was radically different from today's, the author details some of the obstacles faced by women attempting to enter the male-dominated sport of rowing, especially in the Ivy League. The reader also learns a great deal about the complexity of rowing eights, including the technique and teamwork involved. Boyne's story takes us to the 1975 World Championships, where the U.S. women's team surprised the rowing world with a silver medal, carries forward to the 1976 Olympics, and concludes with a where-are-they-now section. Well written, direct, and effective, this book conveys the rowers' and coaches' skill, tenacity, energy, and enthusiasm for their sport.

"The Shell Game" is a nice companion to "Mind Over Water" and "The Amateurs." Where "Mind Over Water" deals with single sculling, "The Shell Game" recounts Stephen Kiesling's personal history of rowing in eights, focusing especially on the Yale-Harvard race, the Henley Royal Regatta, and the preparations and selection camp for the national team for the ill-fated 1980 Olympic Games. Along with "The Amateurs," "The Shell Game" and "Mind Over Water" seem to make up a perfect trio of personal odysseys in the sport of rowing. Of the three, "The Amateurs" is certainly the best written (after all, David Halberstam, need one say more?), but "The Shell Game" and "Mind Over Water" let you peek directly into the minds and hearts of devotees of this weirdly fanatical sport. Focused on three specific events as it is, "The Shell Game" provides a look into a rarefied world of rowing races, from the hidebound tradition of Henley to the grueling trials at the U.S. Olympic selection camp, from the etiquette of international racing to the mechanics of testing athletes to determine not only their racing abilities but even their rate of oxygen exchange. (Review from Amazon.com)

(Novel) - The fifth in a series of novels about the fictional Dr. Fenimore, who fondly recalls his days of rowing on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. Determined to experience that sense of relaxation again, he renews his membership at his old boating club. The club is run by Charlie Ashburn, a fraternity brother from medical school and formerly a man of great rowing skill. Charlie had to give up rowing due to a heart condition, the greatest blow of his life. Now hes got his son Chuck under a strict rowing regime. Trouble is, the heart problem is hereditary and it may well have passed on to Chuck. Charlie's wife begs Dr. Fenimore to urge that the boy get checked out before the big regatta, much to Charlie's discomfort. The result? Dr. Fenimore takes his helpfulness to the next level, and now someone has plans to sink the doctor, good intentions and all.

The Henley Royal Regatta is legendary in the rowing community, this book (published 1990) provides a history with illustrations.

Two Million Strokes Per Minute: A Lifetime in a Race

With his last-gasp victory as part of the Great British coxless four team at the 2004 Athens Olympics, British rower Matthew Pinsent clinched an historic fourth Olympic Gold medal. In this uniquely exciting and evocative autobiography, Pinsent interweaves the build-up to Athens 2004 with the extraordinary story of his career and unforgettable rowing partnership. Plucked from obscurity at the age of 20, told to partner his hero, Redgrave, and trained to within an inch of his life, Pinsent's story is uniquely revealing about what it takes to be a champion and the mixed blessings of success. Culminating with a nail-biting final chapter detailing the team's extraordinary victory in Athens in blow-by-blow detail, A Lifetime in a Race is a sports book in a different mould.

Steve Redgrave has won a record-breaking four Olympic gold medals and eight world championships for his spectacular rowing achievements, and is consequently regarded with awe by rivals, crew-mates and top sportsmen alike. Now, at the age of 38, Steve is bidding to win an unprecedented fifth gold medal at Sydney. Win or lose, it will mark the end of a remarkable twenty-three year long career. This autobiography discusses Redgrave's partnerships, the difficulty of maintaining a balanced family life, and the strain of battling against the odds with the debilitating diseases of both colitis and diabetes.

George Pocock has achieved legendary status in the international rowing community, and remains a patriarch within the closer Pacific Northwest rowing community. As an immigrant first from Britain to Canada, and then from Canada to the Seattle area, he first built pontoons for William Boeing's first seaplanes, and then formed a lifelong partnership with the University of Washington, revolutionizing the craft of constructing rowing shells and developing the modern sliding seat so that the Univ. of Washington was a dominant player in national and international regattas from 1923 onward. This book reveals the life of this quite remarkable man.

The Amateurs

In The Amateurs, David Halberstam once again displays the unique brand of reportage, both penetrating and supple, that distinguished his bestselling The Best and the Brightest and October 1964. This time he has taken for his subject the dramatic and special world of amateur rowing. While other athletes are earning fortunes in salaries and-or endorsements, the oarsmen gain fame only with each other and strive without any hope of financial reward.
What drives these men to endure a physical pain known to no other sport? Who are they? Where do they come from? How do they regard themselves and their competitors? What have they sacrificed, and what inner demons have they appeased? In answering these questions, David Halberstam takes as his focus the 1984 single sculls trials in Princeton. The man who wins will gain the right to represent the United States in the 84 Olympiad; the losers will then have to struggle further to gain a place in the two- or four-man boats. And even if they succeed, they will have to live with the bitter knowledge that they were not the best, only close to it.
Informative and compelling, The Amateurs combines the vividness of superb sportswriting with the narrative skills of a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent. (Review by David Guy, Chicago Tribune)

This book is the culmination of more than forty years of rowing and coaching on the collegiate, national and international levels. The author's experience on the University of Pennsylvania Lightweight Crew during the 1960s leaves him with more questions than answers, about boats and about life, and those questions propel him on a homeric odyssey in search of inner peace and perfect rowing technique. This epic journey is full of peaks and valleys, occasionally tragic, often hilarious. The discoveries he makes along the way, the truths he shares at its end, will surprise, perplex and challenge rowers and nonrowers alike. This book is at once a fond reminiscence and a thought-provoking treatise on the metaphysics of life and of moving racing shells through water.

Some sports--the solitary ones, in particular--are simply more prone to mysticism and mystery than others. Golf, certainly. Long-distance running, of course. Fishing. Climbing. Each has a literature that confronts the essence of its lonely pursuit and explores the way the solitude and self-discipline these sports demand grow the spirit and fill the competitor. Lambert's graceful reflection on rowing is a lovely addition to the genre, part memoir, part narrative, part celebration of a relatively arcane endeavor, and utterly provocative. The superficial journey here is over water; the real one is internal. "Like Einstein," he writes, "we wish to know God's thoughts. We shall attempt to pry them loose with an oar. The raw elements of the sport are our teacher: the wind and the water, the boat and its oars, our own bodies and minds." Given those elements, it's no surprise that the education is a profound one. The surprise is how accessible and appealing it turns out to be. --Jeff Silverman

Each of the 10 chapters in this exciting look at female athletes focuses on a woman or group of women who have accomplished incredible feats on the water, including seven women who rode three canoes 630 miles up the Back River to the Arctic Ocean; the eight-person U.S. crew that won a gold medal in rowing in the 1984 Olympics; the 83-year-old ``matriarch'' of rowing who still competes in at least two regattas a year; the first woman to paddle a canoe around the Baja Peninsula; and a hard-driving member of Martha's Moms, a group of competitive middle-aged rowers whose insignia is an apple pie and crossed oars. Freelance journalist Lewis offers just the right amount of straightforward explanation about the sports themselves so that even the uninitiated can follow the action. The book is more than a collection of individual stories however. As a whole it illustrates the importance of sports and convincingly portrays how identifying, training for and achieving a goal permeates the athlete's entire life with self-confidence. At the very least, as one of Martha's Moms remarked after trouncing a collegiate men's team, "It sure beats watching the grandkids."

College Rowing Scholarships Book  

Essential Sculling

Essential Sculling is an authoritative, concise, and thoroughly readable handbook focused on helping the novice become an accomplished sculler. With time-honored advice and edifying anecdotes, Daniel J. Boyne, director of recreational rowing at Harvard University, offers the finest instruction-for men and women alike-on all aspects of the sport, such as: * Identifying and buying equipment * Beginner's technique * Drills for blending technique and power * Training for competition * Rigging * And much more. More than a brilliant how-to manual, Essential Sculling is appreciation of sport at its best.

Rowing Calendars - Text

Coxing