Lately I've been stressed about crew, I've been working out a lot here but not erging and I'm afraid that when I get back to school I will be really far behind everyone. I tried doing the team workout today and I failed miserably, it's just so hard to push through a hard workout while you're by yourself instead of with the entire team. Erging seems tedious and long and I'm so unmotivated. So I emailed Noel and asked for his advice on training by yourself, what kept him going when he had to train solo etc. He wrote me back the nicest email! He designed a practice plan for me for the rest of the time I'm away, telling me what to do on each day so that I wouldn't get too bored. He gave me advice on how to have competitions with myself to stay motivated, and told me not to worry too much about erging. He broke his arm his senior year of college and wasn't able to row for the first 2 months of winter training so he was on a bike instead of with the team, and 3 weeks after the cast came off he set a 2k PR. He also was really encouraging and told me to remember that I was a leader on the team and that the novice looked up to me, that our boat was going to be "fast fast fast" in the spring if we put in the effort now.
So now I have lots of training to do in the next 19 days. Starting with an 80 minutes steady state tomorrow and lifting. Better start hydrating and get to sleep.