Articles
Why Discipline Beats Motivation in Sport Every Time
Motivation fades, but discipline always shows up.
Articles
Steering Through Time: Coxswain chronicles of rowing history, racing, training, leadership, and general interest
Articles
Why Power to Weight Matters More in Rowing
Discover why watts per kilo matters in rowing, and how power-to-weight, stroke rate, and efficiency move boats faster than raw erg power alone.
Articles
Medals and Meaning – Rethinking Success in Masters Rowing
I was inspired to write this article following many conversations over the years in boat parks and around the rowing community, and more recently in particular, which prompted me to put pen to paper on what may be considered a sensitive topic. In rowing, success is not a single definition, Read more
Articles
The Explore vs Exploit Dilemma in Rowing
I’ve always been an athlete that likes risk. Why? Because it’s fun — simple. Sport, in my view, should have an element of risk in it. I remember a quote from Greg Welch, Ironman World Champion in 1994: “If you want to win, you’ve got to be willing to take Read more
Articles
What Makes a Crew Fast? It’s Not What You Think.
I’ve been coxing competitive rowing crews for a long time. And in that time I have sat in fast boats and slow ones, cohesive ones and fractious ones, crews that seemed to have everything on paper and went nowhere, and crews that had no right to be as quick as Read more
Articles
UT1, UT2, and Heart Rate Zones: Rowers Doing Their Own Thing
We all know the idea of training zones — many athletes follow heart rate zones religiously, keeping track of Zone 1 through Zone 5 (or more, depending on what methodology you follow) to ensure they’re working at the right intensity. Yet in rowing, you’ll often hear the terms UT1 and Read more
Articles
W/kg – It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog!
For as long as rowing machines have been part of the sport, split times have been the currency of comparison. Whether it’s the average pace per 500 metres over a 1km trial or the dreaded 2k test, split times are familiar, easy to understand, and have long been the standard Read more
Articles
What does it take to be a truly special coxswain?
It’s a bit of a “how long is a piece of string?” question. Every crew and every athlete responds differently to how they’re coxed (just as they do to coaching). But with so many of us glued to YouTube right now — or lucky enough to be over in London Read more
Articles
Row or Train? – The Hard Truth About Winning
Let me start by saying this clearly: this article, like many I write, will probably stir some emotions. It might surprise, challenge, or even lightly upset some readers, but it’s an important conversation we need to have. And before we go any further, let me be absolutely clear: there is Read more
Articles
Sweep Oars vs Sculling Oars – A Physics Perspective
In this short article, I thought I would cover an interesting question I was recently asked about sweep boats versus scull boats. The question boiled down to energy required to move the boat: considering that sweep oars are larger than scull oars, does it require more power to get the Read more