Tech Tip: On the Release and the Feather
by Troy Howell, COC Sculling Camp Coach
One of the benefits of having continued to work on my own sculling throughout my adult life has been that I never stop gathering empirical data on what works and what does not. In that vein, I was recently able to note that my ongoing work on my own sculling had finally paid measurable dividends, and I came to the conclusion that it probably makes sense to devote considerable time and attention to these three items, and probably in this order:
1) Clean up your releases.
2) Refine the way that you apply force to the handles, stretcher, blades, and pins during the drive.
3) Improve your entry and catch timing.
Arguably, these three things also happen to fall in order of increasing difficulty, trickiness, and complexity: any fool can clean up his releases fairly readily with minimal sweat equity, because the results are immediate, can be felt, and are instantly measurable.
Application of force on the drive, while straightforward, takes you head-on into your own stubborn neurological habits and so demands real patience to resolve but is generally rewarding as you go through the trial-and-error period of replacing old habits with new ones.
Entry and catch timing (yes, they should be two separate events) is exquisitely elusive and difficult to master for a variety of reasons, chief among them that better timing often initially feels "wrong" and may make you slower before it makes you faster. The latter two items will have to wait for another column, because this one will be devoted to the release.
My go-to, first-line drill for teaching the release has always been the tapping drill and its many variations because it teaches us immediately that when the port and starboard blades in any shell exit the water simultaneously, the boat achieves a dynamic stability and when they exit the water at different times, instability follows instantly. That said, the tapping drill can't suffice on its own because the boat is not moving bowward. Once the boat is in motion, there is additional complexity and we need a means of addressing that, and my second step has long been something that I learned from Larry Gluckman, whose talent for distilling technical points into unforgettably pithy phraseology was unmatched, and his phrase for the release was one of his best: "Square out, and feather away."
As with the front end of the stroke cycle, in which the entry and catch can and should be performed as two separate events, the stroke's back end also involves two moments - the extraction and the feather. Most scullers blend the two to a greater or lesser degree, and LG's phrase serves first and foremost as a cautionary admonition that it is usually bad practice to allow too much such blending. Coaches everywhere can and do argue about how accurate "square out" is and how literally it ought to be taken, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a coach who advocates feathering while the blade is still in the water.
I won't attempt to resolve the first part today, apart from stating that at the very least, the extraction should commence while the blade is still on the square. Eliminating the tendency to feather while the blade is fully buried is a comparatively achievable task for nearly any sculler who is motivated to do so, and if the first task of cleaning up one's release is coordinating the port and starboard blades to release simultaneously, the second is elimination of the underwater feather.
The "feather away" part, though, is often the trickiest element, and I confess that the first time I heard it, I was confused as to its intent. Because my visualization of the release had long revolved around the bottom edge of the blade's travel, I wrongly assumed that Larry was speaking of the tendency of most scullers' and rowers' blades to travel toward the stern/starting line as the release and feather were happening, which, however short, is a waste of valuable time. If the blade is no longer propelling the system bowward, there's no good reason for it to be moving toward the starting line.
Fortunately, I was attentive enough to nuance and to coaching to realize quickly that he was referring to the handles rather than the blade, i.e. as the blades are feathering, the handles should be traveling away from the sculler's body. In other words, the sculler should think of the handles traveling away from the body and/or of feathering the top edge toward the bow rather than the bottom edge toward the stern. This eliminates the few hundredths of a second of time wasted at the release, which is a significant source of inefficiency that adds up to seconds lost over the dozens or hundreds of strokes taken in a given piece or training session.
Finally, it is worth noting that the release and feather are arguably the most critical moment(s) in the stroke cycle: you just did a substantial amount of work on the drive, and a sloppy release and feather represents a semi-conscious decision by the sculler to give some of that work back. By not ensuring a clean release, the sculler is literally putting the brakes on the system, however subtly it may be happening.
Further, a firm, clean release sets up stability and allows the boat to run in a way that a sloppy release cannot help but destroy. The choice is yours: stability and run or instability and interruption of flow, and it is arguably the easiest of the three items detailed above to achieve. For today, let's clean up the release and feather in order to set the stage for creation of better stroke rhythm on the drive and chasing the holy grail of entry and catch timing at a later date.