The Paradox of Superior Fitness
Fitness is the fly in the ointment: it gives hardworking athletes the profound illusion of mastery.
There are a lot of things we tell beginning scullers and rowers to keep the sport simple that later become millstones around their necks.
“Never let go of your oar handles.”
“These boats are really tippy.”
“This sport is 90% fitness.”
“These boats are tippy” is simply false — they’re not tippy boats; we’re tippy people (until we’re not anymore). “Never let go of your oar handles” is well-intentioned — its aim is to keep inexperienced scullers dry — but it plants a seed of anxiety that something terrible will inevitably happen if you do let go, which also isn’t true, and which some athletes carry around long after they’re competent enough to know better.
But “this sport is 90% fitness” is the most subtle of the three, because it seems obvious. Race results appear to confirm it. The fittest crews tend to be fast. The crews that aren’t fit tend to be slow. The mental math writes itself: if the sport is 90% fitness, then I should devote 90% of my attention to getting fitter. Technical mastery — the remaining 10% — will develop gradually and take care of itself.
That logic has another, even more insidious flaw: fitness largely does take care of itself.
If you row enough miles at a range of intensities, you will get fitter whether you mean to or not. The body adapts. It always has. You can’t log consistent volume without improving your aerobic capacity and tolerance for discomfort.
Technique does not behave that way.
If you row a lot of miles inattentively, you don’t drift toward mastery. You establish neurological habits. You reinforce patterns. You become what you repeatedly do. “Garbage miles” are not neutral — they are formative — and once technical habits harden, they are stubborn and expensive to undo.
So even if we grant the premise — that rowing is 90% fitness — the conclusion should be the opposite of what most people draw from it. Fitness develops naturally if you do the work. Technical mastery does not. If anything deserves 90% of your attention, it’s the piece that will not improve without it.
I heard a version of this confused thinking in my novice year: “Technique makes up seats; horsepower makes up lengths.” It sounds clever until you ask whether you’d like to lose by a seat. In reality, technique and horsepower both make up lengths. There are older, technically slick scullers racing with far less horsepower than they had twenty years ago who routinely defeat substantially fitter athletes stuck in hammer mode.
Winning inefficiently is still winning, and because it happens often enough, the culture continues to worship at the altar of grit to the detriment of what actually wins races. Careful, now — no one’s saying grit isn’t one of the foundations of racing. No one needs to worry that better sculling will make them soft. That’s ridiculous.
Rowing is one of the few endurance sports where inefficiency is quietly tolerated — and sometimes even admired. In swimming or Nordic skiing, poor technique punishes you immediately. Anyone who has ever shared a lane with an aged-out Olympian knows the feeling: you’re fit, you’re working hard, and you’re getting lapped by a fifty-something with a soft midsection who hasn’t raced in decades. You know it’s streamlining and relaxation and feel for the water — but knowing that doesn’t help you, no matter how high your VO2 max is, if you never built those neurological and biomechanical habits.
Yes, the boat provides a great deal of built-in streamlining. The shell itself is always sleek. Poor alignment slows a swimmer down more dramatically than it slows a sculler. But that’s not an excuse. It’s an argument for greater attentiveness. Because a sculler with superior fitness can survive for quite a while on horsepower alone — until he finds himself bowball to bowball with someone equally fit and more efficient.
The excitement of the first thousand meters won’t make up for the sinking feeling when you get rowed through in the third 500 and left behind by open water when the horn sounds.
At the championship level, it’s athletes like Mirka Knapkova and Katrin Rutschow-Stomporowski who usually prevail — not because they’re fitter than everyone else, but because more of their fitness contributes to the speed of the boat.
Fitness is the price of entry. It establishes the floor of your performance.
Technical mastery and a finely tuned nervous system determine how high above that floor you can operate.
Row quality miles. Lots of them. The fitness will come naturally, and whatever toughness you possess will still be there.
Give mastery your full attention. Scull the way swimmers swim and Nordic skiers ski. The reward is longer in coming, but also more permanent.
