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Friday May 7th saw the inaugural Cambridge University Sprint Relay challenge. The race format was a little bit different than usual, with teams of eight taking part in an 4,000m team race with each person having to race 500m, with all changes having to take place between 470m and 530m.

The biggest race of the day was in the Men's Open between Goldie, the University second crew, and a MAD Team composed solely of indoor rowers. From the start, the MAD Team was a notch more powerful than the students, and they won in 10:57.0, nearly half a minute ahead of Goldie, who recorded 11:24.8.

The overall winner's of each category were:

Full results are now available on-line as well as photographs of the event.

The recent passing of Norris McWhirter means it's far more difficult to get a straight answer if you want to know who was the oldest ever cat and which tree has the most leaves. Fortunately, however, three-times Olympic rowing coach Terry O'Neill has volunteered to step into the breach. Unfortunately, he can only step into the "rowing and training related" and the "losing systems at roulette" breaches. Still, if you've got a question on either of those areas, send it to tels-tales@concept2.co.uk.

Nigel Gildersleve: "Just a quick question - it occurred to me to train the back and arms by rowing using straight legs to develop power/strength and endurance in the back and arms "What sort of 500m split should one be able to do using straight legs if one is aiming at a fast 5,000m time as his personal goal - fast for him being about 17 minutes."

Terry O'Neill: 17 minutes is a pretty respectable time for 5k.

Although you say it is a quick question the answer is not so simple. The reason is there are actually two issues in your question.

Rowing using only the arms and trunk will build strength and endurance in this area. If, however, you wanted to row a timed 5k using only the upper body, you would need to modify your technique.

Whereas the stroke length can be divided 50-50 between the leg drive and the upper body, the distribution of the power is 70-30 in favour of the legs. This is because the legs are used at the beginning of the stroke when the flywheel is moving at its slowest and a greater force can be applied. As the stroke develops and the flywheel picks up speed, so the amount of force that can be applied to it decreases. It is over this later stage of the stroke that the arms and body come into play.

By not using the legs, the upper body will take on a greater load than rowing normally, so it will feel very different and so will need some time to adapt. In the normal sequence of the rowing stroke it would be legs » body » arms; without legs this would become body » arms. The muscles in the back used to swing the trunk are mainly used as stabilisers and, as such, the muscle fibres are predominantly slow twitch. The muscles in the quads, which start the drive of the stroke, are predominantly fast twitch. The difference is that fast twitch muscles provide power whereas slow twitch have a high level of endurance. This means that the back muscles are not suitable to take the beginning of the stroke and snatching with the arms would be better.

Using a much longer layback could make up for the loss of length. This would put a lot more loading on the abdominals and would increase the cost of effort considerably, as the abdominals would be used on the recovery and therefore not have any effect on your score.

You can see that if you want an absolute best time not using the legs it is a little more complicated, because you would need to reconsider the conventional rowing technique. If you did modify technique as I have laid out, and trained using the exaggerated lay back and taking the catch with the arms, you would be surprised how close to your normal time you could get. I would think you could get under two-minute splits per 500m.

What the Indoor Rowing News knows about rugby could be potato-printed on a postage stamp; from what we could tell from our university days, it seemed to involve a lot of cross-dressing and vomiting in the college bar. Anyway; things have apparently changed a lot since then and professional rugby players are now some of the fittest sportsmen around. Not unsurprisingly then, the rowing machine is used extensively for cross-training, and was introduced to the English national side by Roger Uttley. This is a recent test workout for pro rugby players taken from www.fitness4rugby.com:

1. 1,000m row, 3 minutes rest
2. 750m row, 2:30 minutes rest
3. 500m row, 2 minutes rest
4. 250m row, 2 minutes rest
5. 750m row.

Another test for rugby players has come our way from Dave Reddin, the National Fitness Coach for English Rugby. He uses this test to monitor the England players who are limited in the amount of running around they can do.

1. 1500m row, 5 minutes rest
2. 500m row, 3 minutes rest
3. 250m row

A good aggregate time for the players is taken to be 6:55. Again, if you have a crack at this there's a thread at http://www.concept2.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5016 to discuss your experiences.

Also: interesting indoor rowing/rugby trivia: while there have been a number of top rugby players who have gone on to star in the indoor rowing world, most notably Roger Uttley and Andy Ripley, there was nearly traffic the other way, as the world's fastest ever indoor rower, Matthias Siejkowski, once had a trial/training with Leicester Tigers a couple of years ago. Cool, huh?

Entry forms are now available for the second Concept 2 British Rowathlon series, which this year has been expanded to four races. Rowathlons are similar to a triathlon except that the first 'swimming leg' is replaced by a stint on the Indoor Rower and they're therefore obviously loads better. The series is made up of the following races:

The male and female winners in each of the four senior age categories will all win a trip to this year's Concept 2 European Open in Amsterdam, with two nights accommodation and £100 towards travel expenses.

More on the Rowathlon: http://www.concept2.co.uk/rowathlon/
2004 Entry Form: http://www.concept2.co.uk/rowathlon/entry.php
2003 Series Report: http://www.concept2.co.uk/rowathlon/reports.php

Like painting the Forth Bridge, the Training Guide is in a state of continual revision. Although for the metaphor to be totally accurate, the bridge would have to only see a lick of new paint whenever somebody managed to lock Terry O'Neill in a room long enough for him to actually do some work. Anyway; the next two chapters that will be added to the Guide are on "Training For Children and Adolescents" and one on the new PM3 Monitor. What we want is for any PM3 users to drop us a line with anything they think should be in there; if there's something that took you a while to work out how to do, or if there's any questions you think need answering, or if there's something clever you've worked out how to do with it and you want the world to know, just send an email to editor@concept2.co.uk marked "PM3 FAQ".