There are days when everyone is in the zone; and then there are days like today. I was bow seat in a 4 with Ira, Mark, and Ted at stroke. Some line ups work, others are OK, and then there are those that just don't work at all. The latter was the case today as we battled each other all the way upstream with every issue under the sun--er--stars.
We started off with a reverse pick drill by pairs. Immediately there were catch timing issues with stern pair--possibly attributable to the fact that Ted is about 6'6" with really long arms, and Mark is about my height or even shorter. When it came to bow pair, Ira and I were better matched, but hardly perfect.
Our warm up went up past Three Sisters whereat we picked up all 4 for what would be our exercise for the rest of the morning: 10 light strokes followed by 20 medium strokes and then 20 full pressure strokes. These sets were a struggle all the way upstream: 3-seat had his oar on the water all the way up and we were down to port the entire way. Port and Starboard timing was off on every single stroke.
For me, a difficulty was that stroke was not squaring up the blade early so every catch seemed to be a surprise. Because stroke seat has long arms and was getting hands away fast (as he should), the other 3 oars were not coming away from the finish at the same rate, hence oar angles were off. 2-seat was pretty measured in his recovery, but coming out of the finish, he was skying his oar on every stroke.
After we turned around at Fletchers, we did more sets of the 10/20/20 all the way back to the barn. Some of these sets felt OK, but we were unable to achieve any consistency and were often down to port. We must have done 5 sets before turning around at the Roosevelt Bridge to come home. I think the moral of today's story is that with a good line-up, many of our individual transgressions can be covered up; and with a bad line up, they are magnified 100 fold.
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