Tactics for Racing - Heats and Time Trials

In this video, Ken runs through some of the more uncommon scenarios that can occur at rowing regattas. He describes how different crew and weather conditions should influence how you approach both heats and time trial races in preparation for the final.

Video Transcript

​​I'd just like to talk about a few odd aspects that sometimes happen at regattas some are more common and some less so but they're all important to understand before you get to a regatta if you're a regatta that has a heats repercharges semifinals finals and the like then often you'll find that you end up with a race where there's too few entries to run the full set so they only have one heat essentially what that is it's a heat where you row and you're racing for lanes and so the best lanes generally uh go to the fastest athletes so if you're in a race for lanes then it's a lot of decisions to be made first one is check with your rules to make sure if you have to do it or not sometimes you don't have to do it and if you don't do it then you get relegated to last in the rotation so if you know that the weather's going to be really fair for the course and there's no wind uh no chance of a bad lane then sometimes that's not a bad option because you can save your energy for the race sometimes if you're rowing in a new crew composite crew you haven't rowed in before it's good to go for a row in that heat just in order to get a good hit out so you get to row better together also you need to be aware that whether you go well in that race or go fast in that race depends quite a lot on whether the conditions are going to be difficult later on as i say if they're not difficult just do it as a gentle row and work on your technique etc or work on your race pace whatever it is that you think you need to base attention in if the weather's likely to be bad when the final is then i'd suggest you want to really be careful about that heat and make sure that in that race for lanes you end up with a good lane for the for the final so just a couple of things on on where you have a race for lane situation the other thing that sometimes happens at regattas and it's even happened to world cups in the past is that the weather's so bad that they do a time trial now this is really tricky for people who don't understand how it works so do a time trial in order to select the boats that are going to the semi-final so all it is is they row the crew would row down the course one at a time one after the other with a a minute or so in between and depending on how they want to run that and and then the people with the fastest time for the course uh get ranked accordingly and then get placed into the semi-finals and then they go through the normal semi-final process so you've got to be particularly careful about this because you're not racing next to anyone and you don't know if the person in front or behind you is actually much faster or slower so you really have to try hard to make it work the other thing that gets in the way of this process is that when you do the start they normally do them as a running start so they don't hold you in the blocks and then start they ask you to do a running start so they might say at 100 meter mark they'll do a running start and then they'll do a time trial essentially over the 1.9 kilometers if it's a 2k race normally and then they'll choose the semi-finalists from that process so it's important before you get to a regatta practice the running start it might happen and you won't know until uh very shortly before the actual race whether it's going to be a time trial it's not done often but when it is done it's critical to get a good performance and so i suggest practice a running start which is where you get yourself up to race pace so the time you cross the 100 meter mark in the example i just gave that you're going at your maximum race pace or whatever race pace you choose but then they're going to time you from there on so you don't want to be slow into that part otherwise you might find you get penalised simply because you didn't get the running start right so i'd suggest practicing when you start really important so they're just a couple of things that tend to happen at regattas that sometimes people aren't quite sure how to deal with them and so make sure you're aware of it and prepared for it so when it does happen you know what you should do