You’ve come back from your Christmas holidays to learn that your first ever race is in a month’s time. Your training is going up to seven or eight practices a week. And you have your first 2k next week (you’re not exactly sure what that is, but the seniors all speak about it in hushed, dramatic voices). Welcome to your first racing season!
I would be lying if I didn’t say that most of my novice year, I felt like I was happily wading into a cult.
Starting rowing from scratch as an adult, whether at university or in a club, is an amazing experience. You bond with your teammates like nowhere else and, at its best, the sport builds confidence, and gives you a routine, a community, and a deep sense of purpose and fulfilment. There’s no denying, though, that jumping into intense training and a stiffly competitive atmosphere can be stressful if you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.
This is my advice to novices on how to make the most of your first racing season.
- The non-negotiables
When you’re suddenly training an inordinate amount of times per week and slogging back and forth from the boathouse at 5am, I would highly recommend first getting the basics sorted – if you can, before the season starts.
Food, sleep, water, cold weather kit – figuring out these logistics gives you one less thing to think about as training ramps up. I’ve found that planning out a routine that I can follow without thinking is incredibly helpful.
Think about your training schedule ahead of time. What time do you need to be up in the morning for training, and when do you need to be in bed? Can you prepare breakfast, tea, and snacks the night before? How often do you do your laundry, and do you have enough clean kit to last you that time? Try to plan or organise your meals in advance (don’t forget to pack yourself a treat for after practice!).
- Setting goals
The start of racing season is when sessions get tougher, scores and splits start to matter, and rowers’ competitive sides starts to show. Especially at the novice stage, this is a tricky time, because everyone in a novice programme is coming from different athletic backgrounds and fitness levels. At the same time, everyone has an enormous learning curve and improves a lot in a short space of time. It is an exciting, motivating and extremely overwhelming environment to find yourself in, but if you’ve already stuck with rowing for the first few months, you are well able to make the most of this challenge.
While it can be tempting to reach for particular times and splits, especially in this period of seemingly endless improvement, it is really important, long-term, to think about your broader motivation for rowing. Particularly if you’re a perfectionist, chasing splits can quickly lead to burnout, pressure and anxiety as improvement slows down.
In this sport where training and competition are intensely numbers-based, the phrase “don’t compare yourself to others” becomes meaningless. Instead, I think it’s worth being intentional about the comparison you are making and setting goals across sessions that are about more than hitting a particular split.
For me, this has looked like implementing a tech fix consistently across a long and tiring session, trying to maintain consistent splits across interval pieces, or on bad days, simply completing the work instead of jumping out of the boat and swimming for home. In my novice year, looking back at the improvement and discipline that I’d built over a short few months was incredibly motivating, and this mindset has helped me with the mental side of rowing ever since.
- Support and socialising
As training ramps up, the people on your team, if they don’t already, quickly start to feel like a family – how dysfunctional that family may be at times does vary.
I don’t think I have ever experienced camaraderie quite like that of my teammates. It is unique, I think, to have a group of people who vary so wildly yet have the same mindset and goals. A few years from now, you’ll barely remember the races you won or lost, but you will remember the banter-filled drives to the course, the post-practice breakfasts, and the 4am chats after a night out.
With that in mind, be nice to your teammates. Hopefully this is something anyone reading this will dismiss as bare minimum, because it really, really matters. You are all quite literally in the same boat, being inducted into the same cult-like world. You are probably the only people in each others’ lives that ‘get it’ – the intense obsession mixed with bitter complaints and a dash of deranged joy that comes from doing this sport – and your relationship with your teammates is the making and breaking of a fulfilling novice year.
- Balance
Getting into this sport is a wild time, especially in a novice programme where the learning curve and training ramp-up is incredibly steep compared to people coming from junior rowing.
It’s really important to keep perspective on other commitments: your degree, friends, hobbies outside rowing, work and family. People who are living away from home, at university, for example, will of course have a different relationship to the time and the physical, mental and social commitment that rowing entails than someone still living in their hometown or with family.
But, either way, for your long-term mental health, please try and keep perspective throughout your novice season, and don’t completely abandon your old life for your new rowing life.
- Enjoy the little things
At the end of the day, despite what some coaches and teammates might think, it’s not that serious!
Starting new hobbies is supposed to be fun – yes, even competitive ones like rowing. It’s easier said than done, but try not to define your novice year by your splits, your wins and losses, or how you stack up compared to your teammates.
There’s the beauty of a sunrise on the river. There’s sitting on the bank eating ice cream with your teammates after practice, or commiserating together after your first 2k. There’s the feeling of nailing a piece or a race as a crew. For me, a lot of the joy I found in my first year wasn’t from winning or from being the best – I lost every race I took part in – but from the everyday routine of training, being active and outdoors, and the support and community of my teammates.
The competitive, intense nature of rowing as a sport can make it really fun, but it can definitely tip over into being detrimental to your mental health and sense of balance, if you’re not careful.
If you are a novice reading this, enjoy your year, but please remember that you are more than your erg scores and your race results, and that there is much more to your novice year than competition. Try and enjoy every part of it, and take care of yourself.
