Learning to Row: A Morning on Oyster Creek

The July Project: Day 25

Oars on water

Today was my first full, on‑the‑water rowing class. As I mentioned a few days ago, a friend (Mark) and I are taking a Learn to Row class offered by a club in Sugar Land, Texas. I was feeling apprehensive in the last few days because my first attempt at taking a few strokes tethered to the dock on Thursday night felt clumsy and awkward. We’d spent some time on machines and listening to the instructor in the classroom, but there was a part of the mechanics that I couldn’t make any sense of …[MORE]

Beginner and Master

The July Project: Day 22

Tomorrow morning I’m teaching a workshop to about a dozen participants. The topic is using new online resources to grow an audience and communicate effectively with it. I know the subject matter reasonably well, and I’m confident that my expertise is at least a little greater than that of my students, so they’ll learn something of value. Even though a lot of the specific details are tools and techniques I’ve only learned recently myself, I know that I can teach with authority because of years of experience with design, communications, marketing, personal computers, and so on.

Sculling

Contrast that self-confident attitude to how I spent my evening: the second Learn to Row class at the Greater Houston Rowing Club. Tonight I climbed on an Ergo rowing machine and worked on stroke technique until my arms were ready to fall off, and then we started playing around with actual boats. We stepped through picking up the “shells” and carrying them from the boathouse to the dock, swinging them down from shoulders to waist to water …[MORE]