Learning to race

Rowing is a sport where the opportunity to race only comes around 4 or 5 times a year.
Therefore learning to race is an important skill to learn. Go off to hard at the start and the race can seem to last for hours. Let the competition get too far ahead, and unless you trust yourself, and really know what you are capable of then you are at risk of not having the mental strength to come back.

Trusting your own ability and staying in control

Being ahead is always satisfying but when your not it can be a bit demoralizing if you don't trust yourself to come. One of the best things you can learn is to stay calm and trust yourself while your competition is ahead. So many crews panic and let all the hours of hard training go out the window. When you freak out and give in to panic you are in effect helping the opposition.

Remember that everyone around you is in just as much pain. This is something that is quickly forgotten as soon as the pain sets in. Everyone is human. Everyone feels pain. It comes down to a battle of wills where either one crew gives up and cracks and the other crew moves through them or they stay battling the whole way to the line. A great example of such a battle would be the 2003 boat race where the crews were neck and neck for over 6800 meters. With the winners only determined in the last stroke. Many people fail to remember is that a race is not over till you cross the line.

Another reason I think people start freaking out and loosing control of themselves during a race is because they become to concerned with winning. Winning is only a by product of you doing your best and your best being better than the others on the day of competition. Doing your best is 100 times more important than winning. But when I say doing your best I don't mean doing the best you have done before. In many races you will need to be pushing the boundaries of what you have done before. (Unless your like the Canadian 8+ who once said, we're training so we can win the Olympics on our worst day, and don't have to rely on our us being at our best. Which is a good way to train.) So on race day you have to be ready and waiting to give a performance that is 110%.

The problem can be when people focus on winning (when they aren't capable of winning) instead of doing their best then they get distracted when they aren't winning and loose their heads instead of trying to row to the best of their ability and hunting down the person/ crew closest to them.

Learn from your race mistakes

If you screwed up a race. Learn from it. See what went wrong and make sure it doesn't happen again. If you happened to go off to hard or didn't sprint at the finish until it was to late then you'll know for next time. Often the worst mistakes are the ones you learn the most from. If you didn't train hard enough during the year, then getting beaten might just give you enough of an incentive to train harder and make it.