Looking back, I realize that I should have time trialed my athletes regularly
Generally I time trialed or seat raced athletes only when absolutely necessary: when I couldn’t select a boat based on attendance alone, or when I had no idea where someone stood on the team.
In retrospect, I think that the time trial is an essential part of the team: it keeps people conscious of their performance and accountable for their training, but in a certain (and very important sense) it’s rewarding for the athlete.
On a certain level, people don’t like time trialing. It takes a lot of time (which could be spent in the team boat) and it’s a lot of competitive pressure. For me, there have been a few times I’ve had time trials within a week of final exams—and I found the time trial way more stressful.
Time Trialing Might Benefit the Team
Cal had a large presence at the NorCal U23 tryouts: I think close to a third of our summer crew went. A lot of my paddlers actually turned down offers from the program! So why did they do it? Because they wanted to time trial and they wanted to see where they stood. I know people who were extremely disappointed with the program over the summer in that it didn’t do paddling-specific trialing.
Cal has a number of times lost very competitive athletes, and a lot of them actually moved to individually competitive sports. I think that at least some of these athletes could have been retained if the program, while a team sport, allowed an outlet for individual competitiveness. I myself would not have stuck with paddling if it weren’t for regular canoe erg and OC1 trials throughout my career. Retention was one of Cal’s biggest problems, and I think that whetting people’s appetite for individual competition could have helped this.
One question that’s been brought up from time to time is: The average paddler who starts out on the team has, in recent years had only one competitive goal, to make “A boat.” The team did fairly well, so for a lot of people, there probably didn’t seem like much room to improve beyond this. Could time trials have helped retain some of Cal’s most promising new paddlers in the past few years? (I honestly don’t know!)
And team competitiveness can be hard to maintain without feedback. People work their ass off for the good of the team, but they also want to see that what they’re doing has a quantifiable effect. Time trialing isn’t necessarily to see whether you can beat your teammate, it’s just as much to see how hard you’ve been training for the collective team. It’s good for confidence, it’s good to encourage people to put in hard work for the group, and it’s good for keeping the sport rewarding.
Breaking the Speed Ceiling
Adjusting times to Cal’s standard 300m, the fastest time I’ve ever seen is around 1:44 for men, 1:53 for women. In general, a motivated paddler could to this level after about 1 year of paddling. But it was very rare that anyone would progress beyond it.
Theoretically, anyone should be able to, after 2.5-3 years, hit 1:38/1:48 respectively on this course. I’m going to comment a lot more on why this is in a later post, but one major factor:
Cal’s competitive athletes didn’t have the benefits of regular time trials (ie every 6-8 weeks) to track their progress. This was probably a large barrier to breaking on-water performance plateaus: if you don’t know that your training isn’t paying off as well as it should, how on earth will you know to change it?
Conclusions
Cal needs fast paddlers, it needs to drastically improve its long-term retention, and it needs something fun to focus on during the off-season.
My suggestion: sacrifice a bit of time, and even if it seems useless, make OC testing a regular thing. It’s a pain, but I think it might actually be worth it.
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