Lightweight Eats

If you follow me on Goodreads (which you should! send me recommendations!) you'll see that I've been reading a lot. Consider The Shallows a book about why you should read a lot, too. More than that, it's a book about technology and your brain. It asks you to question the technologies we've welcomed into our lives and gives you the tools and knowledge to do just that.

And on top of all that, it's an incredibly well-written book. I'm not sure I can recommend it more highly.

The book ties into a recent theme in my training, as well: sports psychology. Over the summer, we met with a psychologist as a group which I found very helpful. Since then, I've begun to take my brain a bit more seriously.

In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr argues that the internet has decreased our ability to focus for long periods of time. And while it has given us other abilities, like parsing large volumes of information for specific keywords, mental endurance is a key component for rowing. A productive row can require intense mental focus for upwards of two hours. And while not every row requires that kind of focus, more focus means faster improvement, especially on technical issues.

This Runner's World article talks about building mental endurance for PR's in marathons. We row a marathon most weekends, and half marathons almost every day. Shouldn't the same apply?

I don't want to underestimate the value of rapid data processing. During a race, I have to be able to interpret a variety of inputs: heart rate, stroke rate, wind conditions, 500m splits, other boats locations, time elapsed, distance remaining, audio and visual cues from my teammates, audio and visual cues from referees and more. Certainly tools like Twitter and link-heavy online articles help me process those with minimal brain power (important during a race).

But if 95% of the work happens before you arrive at the starting line, I suspect that closer to 95% of my mental training should be focused on improving my mental endurance. And, as Carr argues, the best place to do that is between the covers of a book.