I ended up the stroke seat today.
(Check this handy guide for non-rowers. The stroke seat is 8.)
Our stroke man strained his back end retired to the sharp end where he could take it easy.
I think I’m happiest back at 6, stealing watts off the stroke man, so he can focus on the rhythm & rating, but it felt good to hop in again.
Just the view over the cox’s head was good to see for once, and to spot the landmarks that were boring me to tears by the time I stopped racing as a senior in 2002.
Stroke seat’s kind of the glory boy’s seat, but amongst real rowers, everyone knows that without a good middle 4, even a good stroke is going nowhere.
Where you sit in a boat says a lot about you. In business I’ve always been the MD, the guy making profit out of the “vision” of the CEO. The one that the real ones know is as essential to the machinery as oil and fuel.
Wealth Dynamics is one of the few personality tests that I haven’t done, but my guess is I’d be somewhere around the mechanic.
The CEO is more like the cox. Setting the pace, creating cohesion.
I’m not sure what the stroke man is. Probably the CMO, deciding what the crwe will look like to the outside world.
I’m probably stretching the analogy a bit far now.
