Competing Indoors

Competing in Indoor Rowing is very unlike competing in on-the-water Rowing. 

First, your competitors are largely irrelevant. You are competing mainly with yourself. And you are supremely aware of your own physical state at every second of your race. If your preparation has been thorough, your finishing time is more or less predetermined - if only you can hang on to that split time at which you have been doing your interval training!

Nor does it seem necessary to enter many competitions because you compete with yourself in training anyway and the peak contest is just a convenient device to incentivise and organise your training.  So you can be a  competitive trainer without entering a single contest. Indoor Rowing races are  more an annual benchmark than a Sport.

However, contests can still bring out extraordinary performance simply by being a spectacle. It is not so much the competitors nor even the audience but just the general atmosphere. 

For example, at BRIC (the British Rowing Indoor Championship), competitors are assembled in cohorts at the bowels of the Colosseum-like London Velodrome or at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham and released in stages like gladiators onto a central arena in which at any one time there are literally hundreds of people competing. Music blares loudly, National Team members are paraded, and, although there is an electronic board with sporadic results, no one competitor is actually being observed. 

A very different alternative is the remote competition from your own home which became instituted during the COVID epidemic. Here,  you are observed individually in digital form, perhaps all over the world, but there is no noise or crowd.  And the only external stress is the fear your technology will fail to record the most painful and courageous effort of your whole life.

But there is something more appealing to me in the smaller competitions such as at the Pan Pacific Masters Games or in regional competitions where a dozen or two competitors in one age group line up together with their supporters only several meters away, and friends can meet up in peace and quiet to share tales of how well or badly they have managed to forestall the deterioration of old age.