by COC sculling camp coach Patrick Guelakis

Some of the GRP rowers line up amongst the crowd for a local Wednesday night race.

Rowing can be an insular sport. Many of us learned to row by rowing, improved by rowing more, and when something felt off, the solution was typically more time in the boat or on the erg.

There’s value in this approach. Repetition matters. But rowing is also a complex and subtle movement that depends on timing, coordination, and feel. It doesn’t always respond well to fatigue. When the body gets tired, the stroke often degrades, subtly at first, then more noticeably. The challenge is that those degradations don’t just happen in the moment; they become practice and eventually habit. Rowing tired doesn’t just feel worse; it is inefficient. Inefficient rowing is a slog and can compromise the purpose of any session.

This creates a circular problem. It takes a certain level of fitness to row well, especially in the single, but trying to build that fitness entirely through rowing can compromise the very movement you’re trying to improve. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. You need fitness to support good technique, but too much low-quality rowing can make that technique harder to find and, in turn, make rowing harder than it needs to be.

Over time, I started to think about this differently. Rather than treating rowing as something that had to stand on its own, it became one part of a broader endurance system. Running, cycling, skiing, and other forms of training were not ways to take a break from rowing; they were ways to support it. In a place like Craftsbury, that broader system is already built in. Rowing sits alongside running, skiing, and riding. This variety is a training advantage.

Building aerobic fitness through other activities allows you to increase overall volume without compromising your stroke. Instead of asking rowing to do everything, you can use it more selectively. You can focus on higher-quality work, technical precision, and specific efforts where the movement matters most.

I am not arguing that more fitness automatically leads to better rowing. In some cases, it can give you more capacity to apply force poorly. That makes an even stronger case to protect the quality of your rowing while you build that fitness. Offloading some of that base work to other activities keeps your rowing sessions focused on connection, rhythm, and timing, rather than accumulating volume at the expense of movement.

I have seen this play out in the past year. A rower I train with, a former collegiate athlete and long-time masters competitor, significantly reduced his time on the erg while increasing his overall training volume through running and cycling. He stayed healthier, trained more consistently, and still improved his rowing performance, setting personal bests on the erg. The fitness carried over, but just as importantly, the quality of his rowing sessions remained high.

There is also a longer-term benefit. Repeating the same movement over and over can reinforce patterns, sometimes good, sometimes not, and over time that familiarity can turn into rigidity. Mixing in other forms of training helps keep those patterns adaptable. It offers different ways to experience rhythm, balance, and pressure, while also returning you to a learning mindset. You are paying attention again, experimenting, and making small adjustments. That mindset carries back into rowing, making it easier to recognize when something is off and to revisit a stroke that may have become too fixed.

Finally, this broader approach can extend beyond training and into racing. Rowing does not always offer frequent opportunities to compete. Regattas can be logistically complex and infrequent, making them high stakes. As a result, many rowers do not get many chances to practice the art of racing itself.

Racing is a skill. It involves preparation, pacing, managing discomfort, and making decisions under pressure. Those skills are not unique to rowing. Local running races, bike events, or ski races offer low-stakes, repeatable opportunities to develop them. You may not be rowing, but you are still learning how to race.

None of this replaces time in the boat. Rowing is still where the skill is expressed and refined. But it does not have to carry the entire load of building fitness, maintaining technique, or developing race instincts.

Seen as part of a larger system, rowing can become not just more effective, but more sustainable, and for many, more enjoyable.

Tech Tip: Expanding the System - Training Beyond the Boat