With the rowing season well and truly underway and rowers across the UK battling through the worst of winter, it seems wise to address the (erg) in the room. Erg tests, while a numbers game, are, more often than not, a mind game too. Some of us are supernaturally unfazed, most of us a mixture of nerves and adrenaline, and for some of us, the dread becomes all-consuming. So what happens when the “erg fear” takes over? What is it, and how can we face it?
What is it?
It’s that feeling you get as soon as you know an erg test is around the corner. Sweaty palms, a feeling of dread in the stomach, feeling slightly ill and shaky as the day goes on. It’s nerves on steroids, hijacking the body and sending us into a freak-out. In the end, we somehow push through, or we crash-out. Either way, maybe it seems out of our control.
If you started rowing in high school, you’re probably already familiar with the narrative of 2k erg test fear. It begins when the coach announces a surprise 2k on a Thursday afternoon. The general drift is that if there’s no time to think about it, then there’s less of a risk of a communal meltdown. The overwhelming immediate response to this announcement (“it’s not an erg test, just think of it as a 2000m piece”) is met with wails of distress from a group of teenagers now winding each other up. With a lot of protest, everyone is eventually set up at the catch, staring down the 2-0-0-0m on the screen in front of them, which magically blocks out every other thought you’ve ever had except for one; life will be better once this screen says 0m.
As a junior, I would watch with equal parts awe and fear as the older girls would start their wave first, pulling splits I couldn’t yet hold for even 500m. The coach’s warning: “once you start, no one is allowed to stop”, hanging in the air. I wasn’t able to place what separated the ones who quietly got on with it versus the ones who blew up halfway, heads hung in defeat.
As I got older and these tests became crucial selection tools for trials, I was never able to approach them in the same way as being on the water. Feeling slightly ill and lightheaded, all day I would try to think about anything but that 4pm start time, having to pause every couple of hours to take deep breaths and remind myself that I was not actually in any danger.
As a club rower however, I saw something different: those same athletes who could manage to joke around and had a “what will be, will be” attitude were (maybe not coincidentally) the same ones at the top of the leaderboard when the handles went down. The older athletes in the squad became role-models as I saw how they were able to balance a ruthless competitiveness with a genuine enjoyment of the grind.
Why is it relevant?
Alright, so the scene has been set, you might be able to relate to the experiences above, but what does it have to do with racing? (After all that is the main event for most of us).
Obviously, crew selection and training. If the erg fear gets the better of you, you fall down the rankings and can’t push yourself during a session.
But, more importantly, you subconsciously lose trust in your own ability to follow through, and this affects your confidence, within and outside of the sport. Mentally, your head needs to be in the game (shoutout Troy Bolton).
All the 20km steady-state rows, practice race-starts and deadlifts can get you to a point where you’re as physically-fit as anyone else in a race. But if your mental fitness can’t keep up, it’ll be over before it’s even started.
How do you get over the erg fear?
Proactive not passive. Repeat again: proactive not passive. Just like we train our bodies for 2000m at race rate, we have to train our minds for an activity that we will find hard. That last part is crucial: it will be hard. As a junior, I would make the mistake of trying to calm myself down by telling my brain that it actually wouldn’t be as hard as I was imagining. Did this help me when it did turn out to be hard? Crucially, there’s a second half to this statement: It will be hard and I can do hard things.
Rowing is physically hard. When we’re learning it’s mostly hard because we’re trying not to crab. As we learn what to do, it slowly becomes mostly hard mentally. We practise the physical over and over again, but how often do we deliberately practise the mental?
I have often referred back to this brilliant article by Will Ruth, which outlines some mental skills in sports psychology. It is just as relevant now as it was a decade ago, because these skills become the foundation to build on as you learn.
This covers cognitive reframing, goal-setting, visualisation and imagery, routines, and positive self-talk. I would strongly recommend using these as a starting point for building up a base of mental skills.
For me personally, my go-to erg phrases have become:
1. I get to do this.
2. The erg is my friend, not my enemy. It is there to keep me honest and is a tool that will help me get faster. How good is that?!
So with those inspirational messages out of the way, I’ll leave you with one more: remember to enjoy the process. There is fun to be had even on the erg.
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