The Rowing Podcast
The Rowing Podcast
Justin Moore - "Trust, Respect, Team"
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
I chat with Justin Moore.
https://hydrow.com/athletes/
At Yale, he led the freshman eight to the 1996 Eastern Sprints Championship and, later that summer, a victory in the Temple Challenge Cup at the Henley Royal Regatta. He then went on to Williams College, where as Head Women’s Coach, he guided the team to six NCAA Division III national championships. With an incredible streak from 2006 to 2010, Williams became the first Division III school to win five consecutive NCAA titles. After that, he took over as the Head Women’s Coach at Syracuse. Under his leadership, the orange earned seven top-three conference championship finishes and three trips to the NCAA Championship.
He was also an active international coach, working with the US Women’s Junior National Team on 2009 and 2010 and the US Under 23 Women’s Team in 2012. His crews collected 4 World Championship medals.
Today he is co-founder and Chief Coach at Hydrow, the company that is revolutionizing the indoor rowing experience, bringing the river home with live workouts on stunning waterways from around the world.
My guest today has an incredible twenty-seven years of coaching experience. At Yale, he led the freshman eight to the 1996 Eastern Sprints Championship, and later that summer, a victory in the Temple Challenge Cup at the Henley Royal Regatta. He then went on to Williams College, where as head women's coach, he guided the team to six NCAA Division III National Championships. With an incredible streak from 2006 to 2010, Williams became the first Division III school to win five consecutive NCAA titles. After that, he took over as the head women's coach at Syracuse. Under his leadership, the Orange earned seven top three conference championship finishes and three trips to the NCAA championship. He was also an active international coach, working with the U.S. women's junior national team during the 2009 and 2010 seasons, and the U.S. under-23 women's team in 2012. His crews collected four World Championship medals during that time period. Today, he is co-founder and chief coach at Hydro, the company that is revolutionizing the indoor rowing experience, bringing the river home with live workouts on stunning waterways from around the world. I'm happy to have as my guest today, Justin Moore. Justin, great to have you on. How are you?
SPEAKER_01We're good. Uh despite the stay-at-home order being in its eighth week now, we're we're holding up pretty well, I think.
SPEAKER_00How are you enjoying the transition to hydro and and what you're doing there? Obviously, you're still in rowing very much. So, you know, it's it's a big shift.
SPEAKER_01I uh when I was debating whether or not to step away from college rowing, I was really having this big internal debate about the risk associated with jumping into a startup and and being 50 years old and having done nothing but coach rowing. And all the nerves about the what I didn't know have have proven to be true, um, but in an incredibly exciting way. You know, a lot of academic institutions are large and really, really bureaucratic. We started, I was the 16th employee at Hydro. We have been going at breakneck pace in terms of development and pivoting and working to fail fast. So I feel like at 50, 51 years old, I've had to acquire a whole new skill set. And every everybody loves learning, or especially I love learning. Um, so it's been really exciting. I'm surrounded by a group of professionals who are unbelievable, uh, whether it's in the technology sector or the marketing sector or the business sector. It's something that I can't recommend strongly enough to coaches to go out in other professional worlds and see how other people are doing things, because we often kind of have a little bit of groupthink in that we all come from rowing programs. We hire people from rowing programs, and it's kind of you know passed on versus uh, you know, somebody who really understands how to run a sales pipeline and generate 1,500 purchases in a particular month. I mean, that that kind of skill set relative to recruiting alone is is just astounding.
SPEAKER_00Oh, I know. If I were to go back, I'd almost hire non-rowing people. Like you're saying, somebody who's who has a deep history in sales or marketing or um even mathematics and statistics, I'd I'd be thinking all about that. Right, right. A very different approach to it.
SPEAKER_01The right and and uh staffs are large enough. The issue has been that coaches have always had to be outstanding generalists, like they've had to do everything. We it wasn't long ago when every rowing program was staffed with two people. Um and and now we're starting to see proper staffing, ops people coming in, um, recruiting specialists who don't have coaching roles and things like that, where you could uh leverage some of the experience from the business world in a really, really productive way.
SPEAKER_00What do you spend your day-to-day on?
SPEAKER_01So um, one of the things that I do is uh I'm I'm the primary recruiter. I work in um on the content side, which is everything that comes through the screen. So looking for people who would be phenomenal on film athletes. Um, we're also branching out. We have yoga, Pilates, strength and conditioning and mobility, um, those kind of things. And then in addition to that, we're bringing on some people who are outstanding on the camera, but um certainly need some work, uh, like Nick Karwaski, who is Alex Karwaski's brother. They both rode in high school, but then their paths diverged. Uh, Alex continued to row, went to Cornell, and uh and then rode on the Olympic team. And uh Nick uh was a really, really talented runner and went off and became a pro tri athlete. And so when he came back to Hydro, he's an outstanding athlete and outstanding uh coach, but his rowing needed to catch up to where all his other talents were. So I do that. And then I write all of uh right now I'm writing the training programs that go into hydro, which is unbelievably cool because Bruce has supported research into some of the latest cutting-edge training philosophies that are being used in track and field and swimming, which are way more research than rowing. And they're doing some things that are very, very different from what we're doing in our sport. And that's been incredibly fun. And then, you know, yesterday I went and I drove a trailer and rescued our boats because we broke an axle when we transitioned from Florida back to Massachusetts. So it's very much like coaching. You do whatever you need to do in order to be successful on any given day. And sometimes that's a marketing activity, sometimes that's a rowing activity, sometimes that's a software activity. It's uh it's been really, really cool.
SPEAKER_00Have you also been traveling to different locations for some of the filming or any of those pieces as well? I mean, are you actually on site when you guys are building the content?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So I mean, part one of one of the beliefs that Hydro has is if you look at the current group of connected fitness, like Peloton's the biggest example, they have outstanding music, outstanding instructors, outstanding energy. Everything that they do comes from a studio. And one of the things we believe about the sport of rowing is that it impacts you because it's so beautiful. Being on the water at a when the sun rises, being on the water when the sun sets, um, you just get to see this incredible beauty. So we want to take people places as much as we can through the experience of the machine. So yeah, we um we're regularly filming out of Boston, Cambridge, and uh Miami Beach. But we've been to Texas, we've been to California, we've been to England. Um, you know, we got permission to film in front of the London Eye, which is there's uh there's only been two rowing events that have taken place in front of the London Eye and uh road on Loch Ness, and our goal is to continue to take people to really cool and really beautiful places so that they can enjoy that aspect of rowing as well as the physical benefits.
SPEAKER_00I've got my uh what was kind of my brother's and mine old C2 from like the 90s, the Model C gray, and I put a retrofitting uh monitor on it, and I I've got it in my den and you know, just been doing some some mild training on it during quarantine. But it's a funny thing because you know, as I've been rowing on it more, I'm like, God, you know what? I kind of get the idea. I kind of get why you would want to go somewhere when you can't go somewhere. Um, and I really think I'm like, God, you know, a ri I think a hydro would make a lot of sense right now. Because I I definitely understand that feeling of, you know, you're it's it's just it's good for training, no doubt about it. It's good for numbers. But when it comes to the experience, I would I will I wouldn't really call C2 an experience. I would call it training.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I mean, the the DryZackers have done an incredible job of building an incredibly dependable, bulletproof. I mean, if you go look at see how long those machines are in people's boat, you'll you'll find all kinds of 20-year-old ergs. Um, but it really is designed for people who don't need any company or motivation or anything else through the experience. I'm here to train to get faster. I have my team already. And Hydro is really getting into that area where the people who no longer have their teams or no longer have their tribe, or uh, we're finding that parents are unbelievably time pressed. So whether baby's down for a nap, I don't have time to get out of the house, I can't leave the house, but I can get a workout in. And so we're looking at going someplace, but the leaderboard, um, I find that sometimes I have to turn the leaderboard off because it is a huge influencer in my workouts. When somebody's 17 meters in front of me or 17 meters behind me, and there's five minutes to go in the workout, that changes the nature of what I do. I can tell you for sure. Um and then again, um, we hope to kind of build a lot of team challenges and get that sense of like, hey, people are depending on me to come to this workout. Like it matters whether or not I show up, which is part of that great aspect of being on a team, versus like, I know I should work out, I know it's good for me, um, versus like, hey, there's a group of people that uh need me and it matters. Uh so we're trying to capture all of those things. Um, and we hope, we think early feedback has been fantastic, and we hope it just continues in that direction.
SPEAKER_00You know, you mentioned something about new methodologies, new training, um, maybe new training theses from different sports. And I totally agree with you about the fear that, you know, when you get it within a certain sport for a long time, you're around the same type of people for a long time, and even within coaching, like you get a sense of groupthink. Um, I think it's just normal of uh, frankly, of anything. I wouldn't say it's normal of rowing. Um and I'm curious, any you know, sound bites, interesting takeaways in terms of some of the new things that you guys have discovered in terms of training programs? Like this is something you know we're thinking about doing that we never would have done in rowing beforehand. Right.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00Well, any ideas?
SPEAKER_01Well, the biggest shift is um, I mean, our training programs, when you look at a periodized volume to speed training program, um, which has really been popularized in our sport, um, that is something that was being heavily used by swimming in the 90s. Um, Maglishko's T30 was was really, really popular in the 90s. And the biggest shift is the weaponization of lactate and the fact that the majority of these teams, these sports, are what they know is that the hardest thing is going really, really fast. And so they utilize speed and power, uh, emphasize speed and power a tremendous amount. And they are always close to their speed. So there is never a point when they're just doing volume. They are always helping the athletes understand what it means to go fast. And in our sport, we have kind of approached it from, you know, the typical pyramid model. You build your base wide enough and that allows your peak to be incredibly high. But the truth is, volume only helps people that really, really already know how to go fast. So if you don't have that component, if you don't have that skill set, if you don't have that neurological training, then just doing lots of long, slow distance, there's a reason why people who run the mile don't train like marathoners. Yet rowers train like marathoners. It's it's just been extremely interesting. And um probably a whole other podcast uh for people to dig into. But it has been incredibly fun to work with some of the thought leaders in both swimming and track and field as we've kind of been researching how we want to train people on hydro.
SPEAKER_00Well, that's interesting because I mean, uh, you know, we'll we will have to probably come back and do that one as a standalone. But um, you know, it's something I always wondered about was there's kind of two sides to this coin. Part of me would think, okay, doing longer slow distance allows you to um really tune the movements because a rowing stroke is pretty complicated. It's actually not that simple, which I always thought made it difficult to make it a popularized sport in a gym, not an ergometer, or a hydro or what have you, is that is the movement. I mean, most people can get on a bike and pedal. Most people can get a pair of sneakers and go out and go for a run. But rowing really does take at least a little bit of fine-tuning in terms of your instruction and how your body moves. Um, and so part of me always thought, well, it would make sense if we're doing many miles. You're basically tuning a neurological, a very deeply embedded movement um into your nervous system that becomes almost automatic, that isn't normal at all. Um your body doesn't want to move in those ways. But at the same time, there was kind of um juxtaposed with this feeling that, you know, the problem with doing that though is then you're also teaching your body to go slow. You're you're getting your body accustomed to these loads and this length and this rhythm that's actually not accurate at all. And it's a funny thing. The reason that came came into my mind was I I've I've experienced a few, and not necessarily my crews that I've coached, maybe a couple, if I could, if I really thought about it, but I know that I've been around like a very a J V crew, for example, a 2v crew that uh is awful at steady state and just gets stomped on by the 1v when it comes to like doing long, slow cruising. But when it comes to speed, like actually top speed, uh the varsity is like struggling to keep them away from them. And you know, you're like, wait a minute, hang on a second. Like that doesn't make any sense. Why why is that the case?
SPEAKER_01It makes it makes all the sense in the world because you know, the piece that you're talking about, you are absolutely correct. It is an incredibly complicated motion. And then um the way I liken it is you the more variables you add, meaning the more human beings you add to a crew, it's not kind of like wow, two people are now twice as hard as one person in terms of getting the rhythm right. I it it's kind of uh exponential. And and then by the time you're into the eight, the capacity to really determine where the rhythm breakdown is is incredibly hard. Um but but when you're talking about uh neurological and learning things, uh, the interesting thing about neurolog neurological learning is that it is it is speed and stress specific. So you whatever speed you learn something, a skill at, you are going to be good at that skill at any speed that's slower than that. But if the speed is faster, that it doesn't guarantee that you are going to be able to, your body's going to be able to handle the speed of that neurological activity. Um and I'm trying to think of another kind of common example of a skill that you could learn that if you sped it up, it could become much more, much more difficult. Um, and it is really difficult to figure out. But I would say dancing is probably, you know, a great example with somebody. You know, a really slow rhythm, you have enough time to think about the movements and you can learn the steps and go through all of those things. But if it starts flying, it's so easy to get lost. And that's where if you do miles and miles of steady state and you're rowing 20 strokes a minute, 18 strokes a minute, 16 strokes a minute, wherever, wherever you are, that doesn't necessarily translate to 36 strokes a minute because the stresses on the body, the speed at the turnaround, the momentum in and out of the front is also different. And so in these sports, what they're doing now is they're training people at speed as much as they physically can without having them break down because there's no point, and and again, in track and field and swimming, there is no point in learning and swimming. They can be as exact as listen, if you're if we're doing 50s and you're hitting the wall and you're three tenths of a second slow into the wall. I know that you're learning the wrong thing. And so they then give longer rest or they shorten the interval so that you can go the speed that you know so that that becomes the thing that your body knows and understands and becomes outstanding at. And it is, you can teach the complexity of the motion at speed and under duress. And you'll notice most coaches, when they do steady state, they're doing it full press. So they're trying to put the intensity where it belongs. Um, but but um but they don't necessarily have the speed and velocity and coordination at any uh yeah, at uh cadence there.
SPEAKER_00You know, I uh uh now that we're kind of into this, I have a question for you. How you feel about this, and you may have a very different perspective now, given what you've just been speaking about. And what we were talking about in terms of what you had mentioned, in terms of learning the appropriate mechanism by which you turn around the front end, the how you uh rebound the momentum of the boat, your own body weight, at a high cadence, you know, 38, 40, 42 or higher. Right. Um basically rate cadence, right? I mean, it's a very different motion. Uh frankly, it's a very different rhythm. I mean, there's there's no doubt. And yet, like you said, uh we spend a lot of time training outside of that rhythm and not getting very accustomed to training in that rhythm and out of that different type of stress. Um and I've noticed in other sports, and I'm not sure if there's necessarily a connection if I'm making a good if I'm equating this appropriately, but it's definitely food for thought. Cycling, for example, is the evolution of the gearing ratios. Where uh in older in old school cycling, quote, air quotes, you know, if you didn't show up with a big cog, you were kind of laughed off of the out of the race course. You know, you wanted to be big, not big, but strong, be able to mash the pedals down, have a big torquey pull. And my understanding is these days that it's entirely the opposite, where it's about having a plethora of little teeny tiny gears where you can basically just keep the spinning going. And it's a lot less about torque and driving your legs like crazy. It's more like spin, move it, move it, move it, turn over, turn over, turn over, because that's just much more efficient. Even though it's taxing aerobically, you know, you're really probably putting that part of your system under more stress. It's actually better. It's actually faster, it's more efficient. And it's somewhat pulled from, actually, in a lot of ways, um uh a page out of Armstrong's book where he wasn't necessarily the strongest rider like Ulrich, but he was very, very, very able to just turn over the cadence and could simply outlast people on the pain pain part of it. And I've wondered, and I'm again, this is what I'm my question, I guess, for you is I've often wondered what it would look like to have a crew that train the same way where you'd never train below 30. Like you and not necessarily full power, not necessarily full length, but you're always turning it over, turning it over, turning it over, getting used to a loose, reboundy rhythm so that when you actually go to speed, you're like, yeah, we can actually stay at 42 strokes a minute base without much difficulty. We don't lose our turnaround speed, we don't learn lose the pickup at the front end because we're constantly training in the pickup at the front end. And that's not the hard part for us. The only thing that we're changing when we go to full speed is the length of our drive, actually, and the amount of torque that's in the water. But by and large, you know, the turnover is always the same. And I always wondered what that would look like in rowing if we went radically different. Screw it. Let's just take a season and do like something completely off the wall like that. And what would be the response with the boat? What could it do? You know, what are your feelings on something like that?
SPEAKER_01Oh, uh oh, you're you're you're well, how many hours do you have? Uh you have um just opened a huge can of worms. So let's again look at the technology of our sport and what you explained. When cyclists are going one speed, they're geared one way. When they're going another speed, they're geared another way for optimization. What does rowing do? One oar length, one rig, because it's a pain in the ass to change, set the athletes and go. Whether you're rowing at 18 at 65% pressure, or you're rowing at 36 at full press, or you're rowing at 40 at over speed, any of that stuff, the gearing never changes. So that's just an interesting thing to think about in terms of what's the best way to train athletes. And then your idea of yeah, so you started talking about how can we train, uh, how can we do lots of repetitions at a speed or at a velocity and a cadence that is much closer to a racing cadence, so that we can develop speed-specific skill that, and and what's really interesting is, you know, after you're done rowing 20 strokes a minute, really what speeds the boats up a lot is the people who are doing the right things from finish to catch, not necessarily catch to finish. Handling the speed well, handling the momentum well, handling the change of directions well. And and not losing, not pressing out the speed, not damaging the speed of the boat from finish to catch. And um, so the idea of just training everything at 30. Andy Card, a buddy of mine, did a very interesting experiment where he put a heart rate monitor on a guy on a static ergometer and he had him do basically a 2K as they would in the boat without the handle. So just shadow rowing, as Enquist and uh uh and Lewis would call it. The heart rate monitor read 165 beats a minute by the end of the 2K without an oar, without any resistance, without any added work. They were already doing a significant amount of work just to move. In the way they needed to move, actually already steady state level work. So it's kind of interesting to think about would you ever have people on a ergometer just shadow rowing at the speed they need to row as you're talking about the complex movements? And do they have to have the or do they have to always have resistance? So there's many, many areas where people are looking at it. And the new style of training as well is also really designed to create a physical, a physical and psychological comfort at the speed you need to go, confidence, swagger, whatever you want to call it. I know I can do this, I know I'm good at it. Because when you think about doing tons and tons of miles at 18, 20, 20 strokes a minute, and then you say, okay, guys, um, we've done a whole bunch of volume and tomorrow we're gonna have a 2K. What typically, what's the emotional reaction you get from people when they've done a massive amount of steady state and you say, okay, we're gonna do a 2K?
SPEAKER_00It always struck me like, well, I've never gone beyond a 20. That that did occur to me as an athlete. I'm like, uh, I guess I'm really fit and I'm happy about that, and I feel good about the fact that I'm fit, but I've never seen these splits. And I kind of feel like I'm riding a lightning bolt if I've never done that before. And there's definitely a level of like, uh, I'm confident in my fitness. I'm not confident that I'm not gonna come off the rails.
SPEAKER_01You're you're you you just described it. I don't know if I can do this specific thing that you just asked me to do. I know that I'm incredibly fit. I know that I'm incredibly strong. I know that I have a great fundamental rowing motion, but this thing that you asked me to do takes a certain amount of confidence as well. And you know when athletes are confidence, they approach the line completely differently than when they're hoping. So, so a lot of the new technology is the new training technology is geared toward the brain every bit as much. Um, because when you're at 2K racing pace, there are fire alarms going off in your brain. Don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. Your body doesn't want to have 14 milliliters of lactic acid cycling within the system. They know that's dangerous. They don't want to have uh carbohydrates being chewed up at the rate they're being chewed up. They know that that's dangerous. They don't want the core temperature rising at the at the speed that that it's rising. That's dangerous. So then a lot of fatigue, Dr. Tim Nokes, who's this um South African physiologist who wrote the lure of running, you know, a lot of that fatigue is this is this argument between the stop, stop, stop and the go, go, go part of the brain. Versus that that area where once somebody's gone a particular speed and they're absolutely confident that they can do it, there is a mental quietness that allows them to really focus on some of the other aspects of racing. So, so yeah, I mean, you can peel that onion so many different ways. And but the idea is, well, why don't we train at 30 all the time? That's actually been tried. And the problem is, is, is um most as most athletes burn out um the neurological system, they're not designed for sprinting at that level all the time. So figuring out different ways to get the skills that you need to row at speed, whether it's weaponization of lactate within the system, um, psychological comfort under these severe states of duress, uh, understanding of rhythm in your crew as however many pounds your crew has turns it around at 36 strokes a minute. Like all of those things relate to what the boat's going to be able to do over 2,000 meters. And it's it is my approach has definitely changed since joining Hydro and spending time in the world of track and field and swimming.
SPEAKER_00For the folks who don't really know too much about you, and even for the folks that do, hopefully they'll get a chance to learn more about you today. So let's start at the beginning. Justin, where were you born? Where's home?
SPEAKER_01Uh so I was born in uh Lin Lin, the city of Sindh, but that's because the town that I grew up in was so small. We had no high school and um no hospital. Um so I grew up in this tiny town called Nahant, which is a peninsula that sticks out off of uh off of the coast north of Boston. It's connected by essentially a one-mile sandbar with a road over it. And um, it's a neat place to grow up, and it's a neat place to kind of develop your perspective because there are a lot of wealthy, you know, the waterfront property, uh the exterior border of Nahant was a lot of wealthy people who had had very successful careers in banking and medicine and all those other places. And and yet it it was at its heart a fishing village. Um, and because there were only 5,000 people there, everybody knew one another and everybody got along. It was, it was as I reflect on it, I didn't appreciate it as much while I was there. But now as I reflect on it, it was a really cool place to grow up.
SPEAKER_00Was your family andor were your parents involved with the fishing industry there? What did they do for work?
SPEAKER_01So my my father uh was uh an addicted sailor. So he always lived near the ocean. He he that that was uh something that was critical. Every move that he's ever made in his life was always near. But my father was an architect in Boston, and uh my mother was an artist, and neither were athletes at all.
SPEAKER_00What about siblings? Do you have any brothers or sisters?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I had an older sister. Uh her name is Allison, and uh she's now out in California, and um she is in the world of writing and marketing. She is uh actually one of the really fun things is she's a ghostwriter, which I highly recommend because um the stories she tells as she learns about these people whose story she's helping write is hilarious, fun, fascinating. Um, it's really neat to talk to her about that aspect of her life.
SPEAKER_00Any non-rowing hobbies in particular that uh take up some of your time?
SPEAKER_01Well, the I mean the sport, um, right now I I don't find myself rowing too much because I was I inherited my father's spinal arthritis. Um, so I've got these degenerative disdegenerative conditions in my back. And uh so I I I love rowing. I love when I do it. I just have to be careful about my dosing. And then as uh most people know, um, after rowing, I transitioned to long distance running and then did a lot of triathlon where I met my wife and Iron Man triathlon. And one of the things I'm I'm definitely addicted to fishing as an activity, being out on the water. And it's it's very different from rowing, but I find it uh incredibly enjoyable and do it every opportunity I can. And then in the winter, when I can't be out fishing, I like I like woodworking. So a lot of stuff, I guess. Um brain and hands are always active in some way. My my wife is the best athlete in the family. Lisa Carey was a lightweight rower. She she found rowing in college, uh like I did, uh, but she found it at a Canadian university, uh, which allowed her to get into the single. And two years after starting her rowing career, she was the lightweight single in the United States at the World Championships. And I actually met her. She was training for the 96 Olympics and was bit by a tick and got Lyme's disease that was just misdiagnosed as overtraining. So she got completely wiped out. And she was making her comeback, and one of the things she was doing to gain fitness was triathlon. And I met her in that world and and we hit it off. And then we pivoted and we started doing more and more triathlon together because it was just something we could do together and was so fun. And um, now we've been married, it'll be 20 years this summer, and we've got two kids and a couple of dogs, and uh yeah.
SPEAKER_00Gotcha. How old how old are your kids? Those those kids are are on the recruiting radar, I would imagine. For sure.
SPEAKER_01You know what people both of them were were pretty. My son's a volleyball player now, uh, another sport that I enjoy very much. My daughter swam, but didn't love it enough. She didn't love training enough to to really want to continue to do it in college. So um I don't think either of my kids are gonna be looking for really, really serious um college sporting teams. Quincy is uh 16 now and Mackenzie's 18 and just just graduated. She's actually looking forward to a gap year if uh COVID allows it, uh, where she'll go to Australia, New Zealand, and Fiji and work with indigenous cultures um and kind of get a perspective on American consumerism. And Quincy's got two more years, and he was just devastated that their volleyball season got canceled because they were gonna be, they were gonna be really good.
SPEAKER_00You know, everybody's got their first exposure to rowing. What was yours?
SPEAKER_01Well, very young. Um, so while my family wasn't athletic, um our next door neighbors were incredibly athletic. And one of them, Craig Boyan, rode at uh Harvard when I was growing up. He's about six, seven years older than us. And we would go in regularly and see him race. And I just remember picnicking at the head of the Charles and looking out there and just thinking it was an incredibly cool sport and wanting to do it so badly. But at that time, my public high school had nothing. And CRI didn't even exist. Like nothing like that existed, no opportunities. So I ended up picking a college that had a very small rowing team that I was confident I could make. And after watching people row and wanting to row for a long time, I uh I finally made it to college. And first thing I did was find my way to the boathouse and say, I want to row.
SPEAKER_00What was the bug that bit you? What was that experience for you?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, well, uh, you know, as I grew up on the water and I had so I I was rowing around in trams and rowboats, and I just so I think part of it is being on the water just was incredibly attractive to me. Like that whole idea of wait, I get to go exercise out on the water in these beautiful places. I think the beauty of it was something that really attracted me. And then the other thing is I'm a very social person. I really like to be connected to people. And the idea of being with a group of people pursuing a goal together was was really, really appealing. I wasn't going to make my basketball team like I I was uh I was one of those classic rowing, like really hard workers, but not incredibly not incredible hand-eye coordination, not incredible power, just a lot of discipline, will, and want that you you often find those people transitioning to rowing at some point in their lives. This is kind of a 10,000-foot view about what I've learned about the sport and why, you know, uh uh after when T got, yes, I mean 27 years of coaching, 28 years now. So more than 30 years involved in the sport, what still draws me to it? It really is this idea of you cannot be more connected to people. There's that interdependence of being part of a team. What really drove that home to me was my experience immediately after school. So, as I said, I went to a small, small college with an upstart rowing team. In fact, the rowing team almost disappeared, were it not for two guys who rode, uh, Ken Scott and John Ross, who rode at Rollins College in the 70s. They had a coach after that, right before I got to Rollins, who did some bad things and put the program at incredible risk. Uh, in fact, the the president was like, I don't even know if we need a rowing team. And these two guys said, Oh, you you have to you have to keep it. There's way too much tradition in the program, and the sport is way too valuable to just throw out because one person did something wrong. So these guys came in and took over the program, and it was really in its like almost a rebuilding rebirth state when when I got there. So having watched the sport and I just enjoyed it rowing on the water in Florida all throughout the year. I mean, we got to row. We did erg some, but nothing compared to what the cruise up north were where it eventually went to when, you know, even at the University of Washington, you really started to see them emerge as the national power that they are when they started committing to the fitness on the ergometer and really being fit enough to let all that water time and the great coaching transition to speed. It was interesting. About halfway through my career, I started getting frustrated because we weren't as good or our team wasn't as committed as I wanted us to be. I knew we could be faster. I knew we were wasting some of our talent. And at the end, I ended up so frustrated. At the end of my senior year, uh senior year did not go. Things unfolded. Some other people made some choices that really impacted our crews. And when I graduated, I made the decision that I was gonna do some individual sports because I didn't want to depend on somebody else to be as good as I can be because some trust had been broken. Some bad things had happened. And so I said, okay, I'm uh I'm gonna run. And then I found out that I, while I was a decent runner, I wasn't really, really good. I was what you would call a great rep, I was a good recreational runner. Like, you know, I could I could go low 250s in a marathon, but the guys who were going really fast were going sub-230, sub-220. And then I just said, well, you just have to find the sport that is um appropriate to your speed. And that kept getting longer and longer and longer. So it was triathlon and then half ironmans and then full ironmans. My wife and I ended up racing a lot on the US Age Group team. We had a great time, and triathlon was a great sport, and the strength and conditioning had developed a rowing transition to the bike and the run and all of those things incredibly well. But something was really missing. What I've come to discover was the thing that hurt me so badly when a teammate decided that that uh he had other more important things to do, and our boat disbanded before the championship races in my senior year. I was so devastated by that because it was so meaningful for me. I was so looking forward to doing something with a group of people and pursuing this thing together. And when you become an individual athlete, yeah, you can train and you can function with all this discipline and you can go out in groups, but you end up you really are alone. You're alone on the race course. You don't have to fully vest your trust in somebody else. I don't I consider it a little bit like falling in love. You you've got to be willing to say, this is incredibly important to me, and I'm gonna depend on you to help me achieve it. And on the flip side, I love being the kind of person that other people can put their trust in. I think that those experiences kind of led me to my style of leadership when I transitioned to coaching and um where trust and respect were kind of at the root of every one of my actions. When I went to Williams College or when I went to Yale, you know, I had rode at Rollins and I had done a little bit of coaching. But if you looked at my resume on paper, I had absolutely no business being an assistant coach at Yale. But Dave Vogel saw something in me and gave me a chance to prove myself. I knew that I wasn't going to have the respect that Mike Tady had because I hadn't been on the national team for years like Mike. I wasn't holding world championship medals like Mike. I had rode at a team that was slower than our freshmen at uh at Yale at that point. What were the ways that the guys were going to respect me? And my fellow coaches were going to respect me and the people in the athletic department. And I think being really competent, being really industrious, hardworking, dependable, non-complaining. Um, and so part of the competency for me is I had to go out and get my education differently. Mike gets his education on the water and in the boats. And uh, as he said, he doesn't read a lot of books. Well, I had to catch up because I didn't have that opportunity, I didn't have that skill, I didn't have that capacity to get the education that he got. So I had to do it another way and ended up getting a master's degree. Uh, also ended up spending an incredible year uh with Rowan Canada thanks to Al Moro, where I got to spend a year with Al Moro, Mike Sprackland, and Ben Jensen, three world coach of the years, and and literally just study with them every day and spend time with them. And so when I look at what people respect, I look at competency, um, excellence, dependability, discipline, resilience. I try and move forward that way. I also know that generally people respect people who offer respect to them. Um, if you respect others, the chances of them respecting you are higher. So I always try and respect everybody there. And then the second part is uh trust. You know, anybody who's gonna follow you or or anybody who's gonna really row with you and give themselves completely in the third 500, they have to just trust that you're gonna be doing the same. And that was something that I didn't experience in college. Like I did not experience having that complete trust. It wasn't until much later in in some other crews that um I really felt like I better give everything that I have right now because every other man in this boat is doing that right now. And if I don't, I will be the weak link, and I'll be damned if I'm gonna be the weak link. So those two things I think are something that I carry with me today in every job that I go into. Really, trust and respect are at the root of everything that I do. And it was interesting. So I fell in love with the sport because I love the people, I love my team. Then I transitioned away from the sport. Then I came back as a coach. And again, my team, the teams that I that I coached, the people who I who allowed me to lead them, and that's the way I put it. You allow me to lead you by being a follower. Nobody's a leader if they don't have any followers, no matter what their title is. Those people that allowed me to lead them, they just worked so hard and I had so much respect for them. I had to give everything I had every day in the job. So I think that that really is kind of my my 10,000-foot story uh in terms of I know that right now in America, one of the like we favor in America this this idea of independence and um self-reliance. And yet what I find most satisfying is being in a situation where I have to rely on other people and they have to rely on me. And I think that's something that is incredible in our sport, and you feel it. You know, LeBron can carry a basketball team, but no single rower can can carry the eight. That's cliche, but I think it's really true in our sport.
SPEAKER_00Well, that's great. I love it. Especially the uh the different approach to coaching, because um, you know, it's even the same way with uh if you step outside of coaching for a moment and rowing, it's very much the same thing even within uh a business setting where somebody who may have been very, very good at a certain type of skill, for example, there's still a transition period from being essentially um what's a good way to put it, like the builder versus the uh architect. You know what I mean? And so you may have been a phenomenal builder, unbelievably good, but when it's time to take the step up and say, now I'm going to direct a team of builders to bring together this, you know, to create this vision that I've got, that's a very different skill set. And it's not to say that really good builders can't be great architects, they absolutely can, and we see it all the time, is great athletes become great coaches. But there's still a very big transition. And I think it also lends itself to the fact that I think that reality lends itself to the fact that some people who necessarily weren't in the sport for a long time or don't view themselves as being part of a like a super high-level team or what have you, those people can become fantastic, excellent coaches. But because of that difference of you, I think you do have to be something of a student of the sport, and you have to understand that that leaderships can be pretty critical. Pocock at one point was quoted as saying you know, the the knowledge of a coach is actually less important than the idea of leadership. It's very interesting. Like your ability to impress young people and and to be a guide for them is actually probably the more important thing versus your knowledge. And that's not to say your knowledge shouldn't occur over time, but realize that the critical thing here is learning how to be a leader.
SPEAKER_01I couldn't agree with that. I mean, uh there are so many people who are rowing different ways and training different ways that are making the boats go fast. What is the common element that they all have? Well, they all do it together. They're all fully committed to that thing that they're doing. And um, my favorite definition of leadership is James McGregor Burns's, where he says uh, you know, transformational leadership is getting people to set aside their individual agendas in favor of becoming agents of collective achievement. And I love that idea of like, yes, you know, we're all going to have our personal wants and needs. But it's when we I don't like using the word sacrifice either. I much prefer to invest when we invest in the collective, I find that the most rewarding. When we invest in that collective achievement, collective experience, it is it is to me one of the most rewarding things because I mean, humans are meant to be in tribes, and uh, we're not meant to be walking the world by ourselves and and trying to find food alone. That's that's not how. We were wired. That's not how we were built. So yeah, I I feel exactly the same way that you do about that. And I love your analogy between Carpenter, which is skilled and able to do and can do all the things, and an architect or project manager who can, you know, lead a whole group toward the end construction or the end goal.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I hope this discussion, there's if there are you know coaches out there or people considering coaching who maybe think, oh, you know, I wasn't on a national team or I didn't necessarily win any big medals or what have you, I can't be a coach. Like I don't I don't really think that's accurate. I I think actually if you dig into some of the careers of some of the most accomplished coaches in rowing, you'd be very surprised to find out that some of the people who've had the biggest success were not necessarily the best athletes. I think you go, wait a minute, oh, maybe maybe I can do this. Maybe I shouldn't give up on this on this dream of mine. I really hope that a lot of people don't, because I think that you can accomplish a lot coming from humble beginnings.
SPEAKER_01So and uh, you know, Bill Belichick, right, played at Wesleyan. That that's um that's no football powerhouse there. But uh boy, talk about a student of the game and and somebody who absolutely loves the sport. I mean, when you you can find examples of if you go back and dig into the background of so many of the greatest coaches, many of them were marginal, marginal athletes. And I think that helps make great coaches because you just don't have this natural talent and you don't begin, you have to, you just have to think about how to make marginal gains over and over. How can I how can I make a gain here in order to win? How can I make a gain here? How can I make a gain here? And that that's what coaching is trying to put together a whole bunch of marginal gains into something that's meaningful.
SPEAKER_00If your closest friends could only describe you using three words, meaning three distinct adjectives, which words do you hope that they would use for you?
SPEAKER_01The three the three adjectives that I came up with were industrious. The first one, I I really like that. I just stole that from Wooden. I've since I read Wooden's pyramid of success, it is one of the cornerstones of his pyramid. They enthusiasm's on one side, and industriousness is on the other side. To Wooden's point, you can work without being industrious, but you cannot be industrious without working. And he really wanted to listen, the work that you do needs to take you someplace and it needs to advance things. I really hope to be someone who's who's known as a person who's industrious that when he sets to work, things get done and you can trust him with tasks, and um, he has the competence to lead things through. The second one, um, I'd like to be known as genuine. I really value people who are willing to share their faults. Right now, I just feel like there's so many instances of kind of uh perfection or aspirational images of ourselves up there that we're losing a little bit of uh, yeah, this is what I Instagram is not what everybody always looks like. I really enjoy people who are genuine and and people who are humble. Um, so I I hope to be known as someone who is genuine as well. And then the third, the final one is is caring. I I want to be known as somebody who cares about other people and their experiences.
SPEAKER_00And um What you'll see out about every morning, what drives you, what motivates you?
SPEAKER_01The the first is being someone who can make a difference in the world or somebody's lives. Like I want to matter when I wake up. I want to I want to get up and and know that I can have an impact in some way. And that's one of the really cool things about Hydro. Like, we are introducing so many people to the sport of rowing. And the question is, can you call them rowers? Right. Like, like so many of these people, 91% of the people who buy this machine are never evers, meaning they've never been in a boat, they've never taken a rowing class, but but they just something about the machine appeals to them. Um and and we're arguing, like, can we can we call them rowers? And I'm I'm like, well, if somebody knows what stroke rating is, if somebody knows the basic motion of rowing and somebody knows what a crab is, are they a rower? Like, where I don't know where you where you draw that distinction, like I'm a rower and I'm not. Um, and maybe indoor rower is the appropriate thing, but um, it's really neat to get some of these messages from people who are like, oh, I've already lost 25 pounds, or oh my gosh, like I I'm just loving this experience. I haven't liked exercising this much ever, um, because I really do feel like I'm on a team and I really do feel like my participation matters. And then the second piece is I am really, really drawn to the natural beauty of the world. Like I um, and and that lately when I've been fishing, I've been going offshore and we've been lucky enough to um be sitting out there when humpback whales come by and they'll come, you know, sometimes 20 feet from the boat. And it is just awe-inspiring uh to be out there and and see those things um and see a sunset, um, see a beautiful painting, see, see mountains uh out in out in um the western United States. There's something about it that changes the way I feel. And if I'm ever going on an outdoor adventure, I am just so excited. Um, and I think that's why. I think it's just inspiring for me to be out there in nature.
SPEAKER_00Well, on the flip side, what turns you off?
SPEAKER_01One, uh, people who don't listen. Um and I think that goes back to sharing and connecting, I and care, you know, about caring about other people. Like you have to listen to somebody to really understand them. And I feel like there's so much emphasis on broadcasting about yourself now that maybe not enough people are listening. Um, I hope, I hope that's not the case, but I do worry about it. The second ties into natural beauty, pollution drives me crazy. Like I um, whether it's somebody chucking a cigarette butt out the window of their vehicle or or the water in Miami being just completely disturbed by you know oils and and things like that, uh, it's just a bummer because the world is so beautiful. And if man comes along and messes it up, that makes me feel awful. And then the final and third one is that uh that the word compromise has been somehow corrupted to mean weakness in modern politics, because I do think that everything that I admire about men has been accomplished together. And when I say men, I mean man and women together, like humankind. Um, everything that really is inspiring to me is related on people coming together and finding a way to get something done. And I just disturbs me when the word compromised is somehow equated to, well, then you won't stand up for what you believe in. And uh I don't I don't think that's the case because I think everybody's unique. So if we all just stood by ourselves, we'd get a lot less done.
SPEAKER_00Who is someone that you admire in Ryan?
SPEAKER_01Uh two. Again, I got two. Um, one, I wanted to put all the coaches in those little clubs that nobody's ever heard of who are sharing the sport because they love it, you know, just doing all the crap, you know, boat maintenance and and pulling the docks in the middle of winter, or, you know, all the little things that those coaches do to get 13, 14, 15-year-old people on the water or 60-year-olds who want to come out there and do it. I just like I admire those people and I'm so grateful that they're there. And then the other person that I really thought of was I just love the fact uh Erin Cafaro was always inspiring to me because she is so non-prototypical of the sport. And I love the fact that, you know, this five foot eight girl uh who who really struggled to row the stroke length of some of these taller women, you know, Tom really wants height in that boat. And yet she had these other characteristics that made it impossible for him to keep her out of the boat. So I've always enjoyed her as a rower. Um, and and uh and she she's inspiring to me because it's just proof that you don't have to be a certain built a certain way to be outstanding. There are other characteristics that matter.
SPEAKER_00What's your favorite boat class?
SPEAKER_01Straight four, hands down. Um I I love the straight four. I just uh it's got it's really close to the speed of the eight. It's got the challenge. I think sweeping is harder than sculling. I really like the fact that sculling is balanced and sweep is unbalanced. I think it's harder to be a phenomenal sweep athlete because it's just not equal on either side. And so you have to allow somebody to be the right foot if you're the left foot or vice versa. Um, and the straight four is so fast and it's a collective of people. Um, I always loved, we trained in them quite a bit at Syracuse, and I would love, you know, we'd finish a piece, and instead of me coaching, I would just stop, and the four women would just turn toward one another and start problem solving. How do we make this boat go faster? What do we need to do? The conversations that took place in that boat. Um, and then I had the good fortune of being able to um be the first coach to take a uh a met a non-cox boat to the junior world championships. And um, we we got a silver medal in the straight four, and it was such a fun race. I mean, New Zealand beat us by 0.9, we beat Australia by 0.7, and the Germans by 1.2. I mean, that kind of racing was just awesome. We had so much fun. Um, and so hands down, straight four. Wish we wish we raced it in college as well. Wish it was part of the NCAA program.
SPEAKER_00What's your favorite racing distance?
SPEAKER_01So this goes back to our earlier discussion about um what's going on in track and field and swimming. You know, here's a very interesting question. If if conditioning is so important to what we do in our sport, why aren't coaches selecting on it? Why isn't coaches saying, listen, we're gonna do four by 20 minutes, and whoever performs the best is gonna be in the eight? If it's all about being able to do the volume and conditioning is the number one thing. Um so my distance is I I'm really into the 500 and 1,000 meter kind of levels. I'm really interested in seeing who has the capacity to make the boat go very, very fast. I also think you know 500 meter drag races are pretty exciting um when you put them side by side. And and sometimes long, long races uh are in our sport are really not that exciting because it's like watching a car engine run for for a long period of time if the crew's really tight. Right.
SPEAKER_00Do you have a pre-competition pre-race mantra that you like to use to prepare yourself?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, this was this one really, I was I was super glad you asked this question because um I think they they really are something that evolved over a long period of time. So as an athlete, know that I have to really work hard to stay present. And that was something that was extremely challenging in in Iron Man, right? Like you're you're racing um 10 hours. And to concentrate for 10 hours, as anybody knows, is is is incredibly difficult. Um, but when you concentrate and you pay attention to what you're doing and the task at hand, you tend to perform better. Um, and as a coach, it's it's really um it's not about you. And I think that in America, another thing in America is we we really put a premium on um our professional success. And it oftentimes, you know, when you meet people for the first time, one of the questions that a lot of people ask is, Oh, uh, you know, what do you do for a living? And and that's kind of a loaded question. Um and it and it puts a lot of pressure on people. I when I meet people now, my question that I like to ask is, hey, what do you really like to do in your free time? Like if you when you get to choose what you're doing, what is it that you you want to choose? And it's fun to see people light up versus the what do you do for a living and the people don't feel great about their jobs? Um, you get a completely different emotional reaction. And for me, I know that when I was at Syracuse, um I was at my worst as a coach when I somehow felt like our results were reflecting on me as a human being within the athletic department. Um, there was when I got there, the team was really performing poorly at the beginning. And we were, we had, you know, our our men's and women's basketball team made the final four. Um our men's soccer team was there, uh, was in the in the college cup. Um cross country just won its first national championship, uh, first team east of the Mississippi to win a championship in 50 years. Uh there were so many really talented people. And I somehow got wrapped up that that what we did as a team was uh really reflecting on me as a person and a human being. And it it brought me to a really awful place, um a place I don't want to coach from, and I didn't feel like I was a good coach from. So um, so again, as an athlete, stay present and as a coach, remember it's not about you.
SPEAKER_00Interesting. Got it. Um Do you have a favorite race course or a favorite regatta? And why?
SPEAKER_01Uh well, here's so I believe the hype. I have never been to my favorite race course, if uh if that's a friend, I um, but I believe the hype about Lucerne. Um, I have just I've talked to enough people who I admire and respect, and every single one of them has said if God built a race course, it would be there. So I cannot wait until I get there. I will make a pilgrimage to Luzerne. Um, and uh, I'm looking forward to it. I hope I haven't uh created such a level of expectation in my mind that it's a disappointment when I get there, but I don't think it will be. And then I don't have, I thought really hard about this question. I don't have a favorite regatta because I feel like so many different regattas have so many redeeming features. Like uh, I mean, the worlds are obviously the pinnacle of our sport, and you're seeing the best of the best and what's humanly possible. Um, and and yet they wouldn't exist if in a small town you weren't getting a whole bunch of 15-year-olds together to go crash singles together on a race course. Like, um I I I just can't put my finger on one and say this is absolutely my favorite.
SPEAKER_00What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um, well, I don't I don't know, like, so I could never do hydro myself. Like, I couldn't. Um, Bruce is the one who is comfortable with the sums of money that are necessary to create a company like this. Um, and I don't have that level of comfort or level of expertise around the fundraising and uh venture rounds and all of those things. But um when I decided to step away from coaching, part of the reason was is I really felt that I would regret not getting involved in this group of people that were trying to create something that has never existed before and trying to expand our sport in a really meaningful way. Like if we can pull this off, we can double the number of people who call themselves rowers and care about our sport in a very short period of time. Um, and I think that'll be good for the sport long term. Um, and and and may in some ways help the sport uh survive in this era of television necessity or tell, you know, the necessity of your sport needing to be outstandingly televised. Um, we're working on a lot of ways to to make it interesting to get inside a rowing boat and and um and make it interesting for people who've never rode before. Because I think when you when you look at rowing races on TV, it's hard to really get those meaningful moments across to people. Um so I'm super excited to be doing what we're doing right now. And as I said, uh everything that I'm learning and having to be agile, it's it's uh it's been unbelievably cool. Other than that, I think I would like to build houses.
SPEAKER_00Gosh, very cool. Um what profession would you not like to do?
SPEAKER_01Boy, uh, I don't I would not want to be president of the United States. Uh looking looking at what the last few presidents have been through, I I don't know how anybody wants that job. Um it looks almost like a no-win situation. Um so that that is definitely the one that I would be very, very happy never being president of the United States.
SPEAKER_00To this day, why are you still hooked on rowing? And has this changed from what hooked you originally?
SPEAKER_01Um no. Well, I you know, I thought, but uh my role within it, but it really goes back to the people. It um, you know, uh I was getting so much from people and and in the sport early on. And and now I find that as I get older, my main goal is to give um to people as much as I possibly can. Uh I guess maybe I should say I was giving maximal effort early. Like I love one of the definitions that young people in the workplaces they don't have a lot of experience, but they have a lot of enthusiasm and vigor. And older people don't have the same enthusiasm or vigor, but they have a tremendous amount of experience. And um I just I really again love getting back to that idea of this interdependence within our sport and this ability that you have to take to trust fall if you're really going to be part of an incredible crew.
SPEAKER_00If you could give one piece of advice to each of the following people, what would you say to a rower, a coxswain, and to a coach?
SPEAKER_01Um, so to the rower, I would say learning how to properly concentrate and focus is one of the most overlooked qualities of world-class athletes. We so much time is spent on technique and so much time is spent on physiology. Um, I still think that the sports psychology element and being able, the athletes that I have encountered who have made it to the world championships and meddled at the world championships have one of the most astounding abilities to concentrate I have ever seen. And I think that right now there is a lot of mental noise out there in the world and a lot of stimulation that is grabbing our attention. So I think learning how to deeply focus is incredibly important. To the coxswain, I say earning the trust and respect of your crew and teammates is essential to your ability to lead. And almost every program disregards the importance of teaching coxswains the skills that they need. So you, if you want to be phenomenal at this, you have to take a tremendously active role in your own education. It's not just, it's not enough. A coxswain will never be phenomenal if they just show up to practice and do what they're told. Like they have to go to the next level and really aspire to be educated and and and and to go above and beyond and and and know what makes it work for them.
SPEAKER_00And then what to a coach?
SPEAKER_01Maintaining the right perspective, I think, is absolutely essential. And realizing that um I think self-awareness uh in terms of strengths and weaknesses, and then and then creating an environment where your strengths are emphasized and your weaknesses are compensated for is really, really important. And frequently coaches get very uncomfortable when people there are other people around them who are, well, insecure people get uncomfortable when there are people who are really good at things that they're not really good at. But if you're going to build an outstanding program and you're going to create a complete staff to which serve the program, I think that you have to be really, really aware of where your gaps are and you have to do a phenomenal job of filling them.
SPEAKER_00Justin, any final thoughts or anything that you didn't get to say?
SPEAKER_01Uh actually, no, this is wonderful. I'm really, I'm really glad you're doing this. And um it's gonna be very, very interesting to just pull in and get so many different perspectives. Uh, I hope you get Kafaro in there. Um, I'm sure she's got some great stories. And I really appreciate you inviting me on. Um, really glad that you're doing this, and and I just wanted to say thanks for including me. And if anybody out there founds this useful, great. That's that's wonderful. I'm really happy that uh was able to provide something.