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There are few words that can truly express the experience and the feel of rowing in a setup boat. We found this video in our Rowing Videos feed page and thought it might be useful for those looking to jump into the sport as well as coaches hoping to show crews some of the technique they want to achieve. The video takes you through an entire 2000 m. race in a coxed four, and allows you, the viewer to experience a “start” as well as the settle and the sprint at the end.
The video cam is mounted on the rower’s head so you can instantly see how much or how little he moves his head in the course of this race. Most videos are taken from the coxswain’s vantage point, from the shore, or from a coaching launch. Notice how smooth the boat moves, as the catches and releases are all in synchronization, and you’ll see the good posture of the rowers and the turn and reach at the catch. We’re not sure if it is the wide angle of the lens but it seems to show the oars bending in the drive (the stroke). This is truly a unique chance to experience rowing in a rower’s shoes ….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK5mC8HZ5TU
Credit: YouTube video by cyclebikes taken on 5/21/2011: Merrimac River Rowing Association Men vs. Narragansett Boat Club Men, Open 4+. 2000m.
We hope cyclebikes will keep his video available for all to enjoy. It seems that the minute a rowing video is featured or referenced on the GLRF website, the video publishers scream “ahhhh, gay people, run away” and they take their videos down … Our reference to this video does not imply any type of sexual orientation.
Vancouver; Although rowing is not a featured sport at the 2011 North American Outgames, there is a two-day masters rowing event that is scheduled for 23 – 24 Jul 2011, the weekend preceding the 2011 North American Outgames, 25 – 31 Jul 2011 . So if you were hoping to attend or participate in the community events surrounding the 2011 North American Outgames, rowers can still get their rowing fix.
2011 will mark the second year of the Cascadia Masters Regatta. Hosted by the Cascadia Masters Group, a confederacy of master rowers from various rowing clubs in the greater Vancouver area, the regatta is slated to be held on the Deas Slough in Delta, British Columbia. That venue may change since there was talk of the regatta being moved to a different location each year.
The 2011 event is listed as offering two masters categories: masters and adaptive. The 2010 regatta offered entries to 8+, 4+, 4x, 2x, 2-, and 1x. Regatta Central’s statistics show 207 entries from 19 clubs.
Currently, the regatta is scheduled to open registration on 01 Jun 2011 and close registration on 06 Jul 2011. What little information that can be found is on Regatta Central, and these two pages of the Rowing BC website: scheduled event and story.
GLRF had previously met with the Executive Director of Rowing British Columbia last year in order to propose a GLRF promotional partnership in support of the Cascadia Regatta. In addition, GLRF sent an email to the regatta director this spring, detailing our desire to promote the regatta with a GLRF regatta page and an All Oars Network group. Unfortunately, there has been no response. That lack of response should not be necessarily taken to mean gay and lesbian rowers are not welcome. It could be that, as is the case with many local regattas, the committee has not had a chance to respond or is just very busy with other matters. Canadians have traditionally been very supportive of gay and lesbian sports affiliations.
Unless there is a positive response, GLRF will not be creating a GLRF Regatta page or a group on the All Oars Network for the regatta but any GLRF member is welcome to create their own group on All Oars Groups if they plan to compete at the Cascadia Regatta and want to encourage others to participate.
For GLRF members who do plan to attend the North American Outgames in either a sports or a social capacity, tickets can be purchased here. It is important to understand that even if you register as an athlete, you will still need to buy an event ticket(s). Athletes get a discount on the event tickets which are really tiered passes. Spectators buy the same passes but just pay a higher fee.
The Outgames website is a little confusing because there are two links for tickets on the registration page of the 2011 Outgames website: the first under the heading of North America Outgames Event Tickets, and then another below that section, at the bottom of the page that is called the Spectator Link. Either link will secure you passes. The second link asks for a lot more information since it is intended to ‘encourage’ you to book your hotel lodging reservations through a centralized tourism source. Then your information is passed seamlessly to the same Ticket Card web page that we listed previously where you can purchase the event passes. Confused? Post a topic on the Canada All Oars forum and we’ll do our best to answer it.
Although rowers are not the only ones who are mobile hands-full challenged, the environment that surrounds the rowing community can make owning and using a fancy smart phone just that much more treacherous. In the GLRF booth, we have seen first hand the effects of 3 hours of afternoon sun on our credit card reader, our Nikon CoolPix camera, and our mobile phone. The screens go dark and the electronics become sketchy. Now throw in some Royal Canadian Henley rain and wind blowing everything off the table, some Marina Del Rey beach launch sand, a few minutes calling the coach while your mobile is (securely?) held in a shoulder/head cradle while unloading a boat from the trailer at Oak Ridge, the requisite nudge and fall from the resting position on an erg, or a slide off the dash of the launch boat because Coach Nick’s Miami Beach Rowing Club phone is on ring and vibrate, and and you’ll soon agree that rowers and mobile phones are not meant for a lasting same sex marriage.
So it was by chance that we came upon the perfect rower smart phone. As we prepare to launch a mobile app for the GLRF website, we’re spending a lot of time online looking at mobile phone forums and tech sheets. One banner ad in a forum we visited caught our eye, the Casio GzOne Commando. We clicked the ad and were amazed to read the ‘toughness‘ capabilities of this phone: withstanding 30 minutes submerged under 1 m. of water, operating in a 4″ of rain per hour deluge in Washington DC, 1 hour of vibration riding in the back of Tom Gallagher’s flat bed truck, 24 hours of continuous salt water spray, … well you get the idea.
It’s like the mobile phone engineers rowed for 10 years. Aside from the toughness factor and the hyper masculine look (for those on the DL), here’s a pretty objective review for those who just have to have every Android app out there.
Amazon Wireless, using Verizon, is offering the phone in “CDMA” mode for North America but some of us aren’t at the highest salary levels and it was great to discover the phone can be ‘adapted’ to MetroPCS. What about the rest of the world? We googled the phone under GSM and couldn’t find any reliable links but we’re sure that if enough rowers contact Casio, they will bring out a GSM version.
We’re in the process of designing a new GLRF t-shirt which involves some french words. We came across this site, Aviron DameDeNage, that is entirely in French but offers the most cool desktop images that are updated monthly. Find it here.
What’s even better is the system senses your desktop settings and guides you to select the file that is most suitable for downloading.
The September image is spectacular and for those of you who don’t speak french, the photo credit reads:
“This month, it’s the Swiss who have the honor, shown with André Vonarburg et Florian Stofer who compete for the Swiss national team in the double. The location is Sarnen which is the location for the Swiss national training center.”
Merci Félix Dieu pour la photo
For those who are Firefox browser fans, check out the new ‘personas’ which allow you to personalize your browser tool bar with color and themes.
If you search for the term ‘rowing,’ you’ll find several of these themes. We searched under rowing, rower, sculling, and crew. Found several under rowing and one under crew.
These personas add a little rowing flavour to your web browsing experience. Yeah, sure there are other personas, like male models, gay, and lesbian but we focused on the rowing themes.
GLRF was one of five vendors at the inaugural launch of the USRowing Collegiate Championship Regatta 22 – 23 May 2010 on Lake Mercer in West Windsor, New Jersey. The location, just 7 miles from Princeton University, is the site of the US National Team training headquarters. The 2500 acre Mercer County Park surrounds the lake and makes for a beautiful setting for the races. The seven-lane buoyed 2000m. course has hand held starts and a dedicated Finish Tower.
The event allowed open entry, without affiliation, from any college or university for men and women, in regular and lightweight classes, and for 31 events in 7 boat classes: 1x, 2x, 2-, 4-, 4x, 4+, and 8+. As a result, there were unaffiliated entries from various small schools, as well as entries from larger rowing programmes like the University of Tulsa, University of Massachusetts, Villanova University, Loyola University, Duke University, Fordham University, Lehigh University, Colgate University, and Craftsbury Sculling Center, all told 89 entries from 18 clubs. One rower who rowed for Hamilton College will be competing at the Under23’s for Angola, where his parents live and where he learned to scull.
The weather was sunny and East Coast humid/hot on Saturday but then turned overcast and chilly on Sunday. Ex-Olympic gold medalist Pete Cipillone acted as the announcer for the final races on Sunday morning and his insightful and humorous commentary combined with the new live video feed provided by USRowing gave many of the spectators a great feel for the race.
With an investment of $15,000 in video equipment, USRowing has launched live race feeds for all of its events and the races can be viewed on the US Olympic Committee website which hosts the video feeds. The quality of the video is first rate with a camera crew in one of the chase boats as well as a camera at the finish line.
Gusty winds on Sunday morning made the video technicians nervous about setting up the 46” HD television monitor to showcase the race feeds but a perfect solution appeared when GLRF volunteered the hatchback of our rental car as the display case, parked inside an open tent. Naturally, all the spectators had to congregate right next to the adjoining GLRF booth to watch the feeds …
Medals were awarded in what some call the ‘British style,’ meaning that the boats came alongside the dock after finishing the race and the medals were draped around the necks of the rowers still in their seats. USRowing officials explained that the awarding of medals had to be run in this manner to accommodate the large number of rowers competing two and three times during the day. Race times were bigger than usual due to a sizable head wind blowing down the course.
USRowing has said they are committed to supporting the race event going forward, even with the light number of entries in this first year. Many of the collegiate programs said they just did not have the budget dollars to allocate to an additional event in the current year but they do plan to enter their crews in the next year.
The GLRF membership began its final march towards the millennia mark with the 900th membership registration by a Toronto, Canada rower yesterday. New member sign ups have seen a definite surge since the beginning of the year, averaging 12 – 15 new members a month. If the current registration rate continues, GLRF will see its membership expanding into the triple digits around October or November of 2010.
The top three countries by membership are now the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. The biggest draw in the membership expansion has been the existence of regional groups on Network Now!, the internal social network that serves to connect the GLRF membership.
With the upcoming launch of the GLRF online image gallery, Gotcha! Gallery, members should find even more reasons for logging in and interacting since the gallery features include shoutboxes, comment sections, and FavBoxes for saving favorite images into personal albums.
To better serve the GLRF membership, the All Oars forum has been upgraded with new features including multiple member blogs, a chat board, and more robust highlights of comments and interactions.
We missed the mention in the April issue of Rowing News and a quick look at the USRowing website doesn't give any indication of the event but the 2010 USRowing Collegiate Championship Regatta is the most important new regatta event to emerge in a long time.
2010 will be the first year for this regatta but USRowing is committed to supporting this event moving forward.
The 2,000 metre event will be held at Mercer Lake near Princeton 22 - 23 May 2010. What makes this event so important is the wide variety of boat classes that are available for competition, and the open entry classification. We had to use the old index finger word counting out loud trick to make sure we got it all: 11 men's events and 10 women's events. Yes, there are events for singles, doubles, coxless fours (NICE!), pairs, quads, lightweights of all manner, and yeah, eights... Beyond the attraction of the huge number of boat classes is the fact that any university rower with any program, varsity, club, or even unaffiliated, can compete. That's unprecedented, and it also, finally, puts the United States on the same competitive field with Europe.
Now a set of twins studying at Occidental College in Pasadena and rowing out of Marina Del Rey can compete at a University Championship and then go on to compete in Europe. It means a 12-year old US sculler can continue his focus through high school and at university, and then be competitive with the powerful Slovakians at the World Championships and the Olympics. It means Europeans studying in the United States have a chance at continuing their training in boat classes that are otherwise ignored at most if not all US collegiate rowing programs before they return to their native countries to prepare for elite training.
We're looking at hosting a booth at the event for the simple reason that the regatta will attract rowers from so many rowing programs, and because we like the underlying meaning of the regatta: it's inclusive. That and USRowing sent us an email and said we'd like you to be there!
The Florida Rowing Center sent out an email reminding those of us on the mailing list that they still have some sculling sessions available through 02 May 2010. Once the season ends, you can pick up a great shell at incredible prices as the Rowing Center jettison’s their season demo boats.
Find the list of boats for sale here.
The Center is located in West Palm Beach on a lake that has no other boat traffic. Take a look at the GLRF visit to the Florida Rowing Center in 2006:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aworldwidecommunity/sets/72157594322713235/
For the seventh year running, GLRF hosted a vendors booth at the San Diego Crew Classic, 27 – 28 March 2010 on Mission Bay in San Diego. The eights-only event draws collegiate crews, masters teams, juniors, and open entries from Mexico, the United States, and Canada. This year’s event featured 338 entries from 120 clubs.
Without a hint of the usual San Diego fog or the rainy Southern California spring, the sunny weekend weather created a spectacular backdrop for the races. Last year had seen some high wind conditions on the race course which resulted in two boats ejecting rowers who caught crabs. High afternoon winds typically favor the inside lane but this year the calm conditions meant all the races were evenly matched.
Powerhouse Stanford which had dominated the race medals in the past several years gave way to some of the usual competitive standards, University of California at Berkeley, UCLA Women, Marin Rowing Association, Long Beach Rowing Association, Palm Beach Rowing Club and Kent Mitchell Rowing Club. Some of the surprise winners included: Trinity College, University of Virginia, Temple University and Washington State University. Crews compete for a variety of race perpetual cups and trophies, 32 in all.
The GLRF booth was one of 24 vendors at the event this year. It was great to see fellow vendor alums and GLRF friends Erin and Amy from Pocock Racing Shells, Tom Gallagher from Sykes North America, Loralynn from Sew Sporty , GLRF member @susan143 from Resolute Racing Boats, and sexy sultry chick Margaret Christopher from Whirling Girl Jewelry. Our booth neighbors were the super nice guys from Sports Graphics on one side and the Sharp Cushman Wellness Center on the other. Sharpe was offering free bodyfat measurements so a lot of the guys were ‘getting measured’ right next door (somehow they thought it helped if they were stripped to the waist) and then compared their numbers with their friends. Let’s face it, guys like to compare themselves with each other…and it usually involves numbers!
Stopping by the booth to say hello were GLRF members from San Diego, Boston, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Austin, and Seattle. A big shout out to GLRF Member @sandiegosue3554 for her willingness to spell those of us dying from drinking too much water … As usual, a lot of the collegiate women stopped in to check things out and several men looked over with multiple glances or ventured inside the booth in the company of a group. We had two unusual booth visitors, first among them was a group of rowers from the Delfines de la Bahia Rowing Club, San Felipe, Baja California, Mexico. They were glad to have some of the GLRF ‘Love2Row’ stickers and they came back several times to see the display of t-shirts. The second visitor of note was the Episcopal Bishop of Ohio, Right Rev. Mark Hollingsworth, Jr., who was impressed to see our booth at an event like the Crew Classic. He congratulated us on our presence and wished us well.
The event also was the first time many rowers had a chance to see the new GLRF Come Out and Row Henley shirt up close. The soft feel and the blue on grey colors made the shirt an instant favorite among booth visitors.
