Barbell Shrugged - Rowing for Fitness, Strength, and Sport w/ Shane Farmer, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash #791

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

Shane Farmer is the founder of Dark Horse Rowing. He’s a rower, a 4X CrossFit Games athlete, former gym owner, Concept2 Master Instructor and has made his career de-mystifying rowing for non-rowers. He’s married with two kids and has 13 chickens and an orchard. He loves soil regeneration, permaculture, and testing himself regularly at new and interesting forms of fitness. Work With Us: Arétē by RAPID Health Optimization Links: Dark Horse Rowing Shane Farmer on Youtube Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram  

shrug family this week on barbell shrug shane farmer you may know him from dark horse rowing he has one of the biggest if not the biggest rowing channel on the internet all of it specifically youtube shane's a good buddy of mine from back in the day of san diego we used to compete against each other in crossfit and became friends and trained together and talked business together and all the fun things in life that come along with fitness. Shane's an awesome dude, knows a ton about the rowing space and overall in the fitness space just because he's been in this thing for a good 12, 15 years now. As always, friends, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That's where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis that everybody inside Rapid Health Optimization will receive.

And you can access that over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mess, Shane Farmer, all the way from Southern California. Dude, I totally, when I saw your name come through, wanted to talk about how you beat me by one spot. It's like we've moved on beyond that. We've had that conversation.

I know. It's literally the first thing I think about every time I see your name. I'm like, that guy got me. Always and forever. He's still plotting his revenge, for the record, when you're not around. Could you imagine working out like that right now? Not me. Dude, when I left San Diego, you were actually, I think you interviewed me. I know you interviewed me, but you were trying to kind of, uh, expand your like offerings, expand kind of like your reach into coaching coaches. And then I think right after that, you hit like 50,000 subscribers on your channel.

Yeah. And since then, I go and check you out like, I would say like once a month. I like to go see what's going on. That thing has exploded. Yeah, we're, I think within a month, looks like within a month, if I'm looking at my stats right now, we'll hit 300K.

So that'll be cool. That's enormous. Yeah. Congratulations, man. I'm amazed there are that many people that care about what i talk about me too because you're literally rowing you're not even moving no you're sitting in place in motion yeah it's boring it is boring to watch but this is exactly what i ask how do you keep it fresh and new? And cause I remember you were going and like carrying a row rower, the C2 up mountains. Yeah.

Um, but now you've got a fresh setup in your garage and, uh, yeah, I'd love to understand just kind of like mentally, like how do you keep the vibe fresh and, um, all of it,

all of it exciting for people when you really are just rowing. You take like a two year unannounced hiatus, uh, when, cause you just get totally burned out on making two videos a week, every single week on your own and like dragging your editors through the mud with you. Uh, and then you just burn out and then you kind of like recollect yourself and go, all right, well, I do enjoy making videos i just don't enjoy having to make videos and so i should i guess i should get back to making videos that i enjoy making which is kind of what the last nine months has really been about last year i've made videos that just seemed fun to make and yeah you know i put out my first workout again

a month ago just for fun. I had my own work. So I'm back to actually rowing this year, which is cool. It's been like my big comeback to the sport of rowing, competing on the water again. You're back on the water? Yeah, yeah, five-time national champion this year. So it's been, we went and swept nationals in fours and eights.

There wasn't a race that we didn't win. So I don't know if you can see all the medals on the board. Yeah, look at that. That's awesome. Those are all from 24, so that's pretty cool. Yeah. So I just had a training workout. I was like, I should just turn the camera on.

I'm already going to be on the machine. Recorded it. People liked it. So I don't know. I'm trying to just take it a little less seriously when i when i make the video and then i take it seriously when it's time to post the video so you know i make sure all the nuts and bolts are right getting the right thumbnail getting the right title making sure that the like the editor's outline for how to edit is really firm

so that we know what we're trying to accomplish with it. That way I know it'll land for the YouTube audience, like what, how they like to consume things. And that that's been a big change. Like a lot of my videos have gone, if you know YouTube from our end, like the owner's end of it, when I publish a video, I see how it's performing relative to my last 10 videos. So I see if it's a 1 out of 10 or a 10 out of 10 if it's a flop um and we've had most of our videos go like one out one through three of 10 which is great you can't ask for much better than that so um what is uh kind of like the the latest in the rowing uh community that is cool and exciting like when i look at i have a an erg right in front of me next to an airdyne and i feel like there's like 15 versions of an airdyne yeah but still there's only the c2 like they just made the best thing and nobody's ever

challenged it well rogue's trying right now uh you know they came out with echo rower um my opinion that was a real real shady approach to launching a machine uh because they like concept two was their best has been their best partner they concept two is like the best partner you can imagine on rogue yeah and they were really they let Rogue be the sole distributor domestically. Nobody else could sell Concept2. It was just Rogue and Concept2 direct to manufacturer. And without any warning, Rogue basically tried to rip them off by making a Chinese-made knockoff,

reverse-engineered the monitor to say that it's equivalent. They took copy straight from concept 2's site and used it on their product listing and then said oh hey we have a rower and didn't tell concept 2 they just launched it and i feel like you're getting called into a website or you're getting called into a court battle here as a witness i mean i i want you know i just watched you know you've worked with them both for a long time yeah because like i'm not in concept too i'm but i'm very close on the periphery and so i saw this and i was like oh man that this is not a good look like the way they went about doing it is not a good look and you know in typical fashion like trying to kind of put the

like us say made stamp on it but all it's not it's not they're they're using the fact that a lot of their steel work is done in the u.s but this machine is not whereas concept two they say our parts are not made well not all of our parts are made in the u.s but it's all assembled here in vermont at our tiny little factory like it's just it didn't come out right so that was a big drama yeah that's not the first time they've done that but you know yeah the thing about working with a big company like that it's the risk you run i'm assuming that partnership is over now yeah they backed out of that deal yeah they you know what's so weird right after it happened too is rogue still had to use concept

2 at the rogue invitational even though they had just announced the rogue echo rower so they announced it and then they had concept 2 at the rogue invitational concept 2 machines on the field uh so yeah so messed up so like again i'm not in concept 2 i'm not an employee i'm not paid by them to do that stuff i do a lot of partner work with them but as far as i know they at least opened the door to new distributors uh as a result so they i think they brought in like four or five new distributors i mean at this point rogue has like expanded well beyond the crossfit space but that's certainly where they started but when when we met we were still very much in the crossfit space. To what extent do 300,000 people on a YouTube channel, are those CrossFitters or are those actual rowing,

just solely rolling the sport of rowing and they don't do any other sport like CrossFit or any other weightlifting, etc.? When I started the channel, I made the conscious decision not to lean onto the CrossFit bit too hard. Not because I didn't want to be talking about CrossFit, but because I recognized that there are people who...

Rowing is a high enough hurdle for people to decide to go search for information about it anyways. And so if, and you, then it's a high kinesthetic requirement. So it takes a lot of energy to continue to think about it in order to improve. It's, it's a big skill movement, just like Olympic weightlifting, right? There's a lot of focus. You have to pay attention and you got to want to work on it. That's a high enough hurdle. So I already had that barrier. If I also was tagging the CrossFit name onto it, which just presented yet another barrier to people with like the, the, just the subconscious thought of like, Oh, that's too intense for me. That's not what I'm after. But at the same time, recognizing that I had been

teaching or I taught the CrossFit rowing seminar pretty much for the entirety of its existence. Like I didn't want to push the CrossFit crowd away, but I also didn't want to just glom onto CrossFit and make that my only subset of an audience. So at this point, I would say it's loosely tied to some of the CrossFit audience. Maybe, I don't know, 100,000 of the 300,000 still have attachments to CrossFit or in a CrossFit gym or a gym of functional fitness proportions. And the other 200,000 are probably just people who own a rowing machine and use it as either their primary or their sole form of fitness at home. It sits in their spare bedroom, their garage, their living room, and they're not comfortable enough. Or they either have a full home gym setup, or they've just chosen one because like a barbell is too intimidating for them. You know, so they might have some dumbbells, they might have a kettlebell or two,

you know, things like that. Dr. Andy Galpin here. As a listener of the show, you've probably heard us talking about the RTA program, which we're all incredibly proud of. It's a culmination of everything Dan Garner and I have learned over more than two decades of working with some of the world's most elite performers, award-winning athletes, billionaires, musicians, executives, and frankly, anyone who just wanted to be at their absolute best. RTA is not a normal coaching program. It's not just macros and a workout plan. It's not physique transformation and pre and post pictures. RTA is something completely different. RTA is incredibly comprehensive and designed to uncover your unique molecular signature, find your performance anchors and solve them permanently. You'll be working with not one person, but rather a full team of

elite professionals, each with their own special expertise to maximize precision, accuracy, and effectiveness of your analysis and optimization plan. Arate isn't about treating symptoms or quick fixes. It's about unlocking your full potential and looking, feeling, and performing at your absolute best physically and mentally when the stakes are the highest. To learn more, visit aretelab.com. That's A-R-E-T-E lab.com. Now, back to the show. I want to dig in. You're actually on the water doing the sport. What does your training actually look like? Call it like week to week. How many days a week are you on the water on the earth strength training like how do you put all that together okay so i think we all know this like with kids life gets very like you really got to prioritize the road so easy 1 500 all out

yeah uh you know i was just talking about that this morning because so i'm in my studio right now which is like a wait how many do you have now how many what kids oh two there you go two is all i need so the studio the studio now is like a block yeah all set um i'm a block and a half from invictus and so i just kind of like walk by it on my way to my office most days. And I was talking to Nunu, if you guys remember Nunu Costa. He's still there? For sure. He's still there, still doing his thing.

Still fit. He's still the number one in the world of whatever age he is. Yeah, I know. He's amazing. The guy's an incredible athlete. So anyways, we were talking and he was asking the same question.

I think in a week, I would estimate I'm putting in probably 80 to a hundred thousand meters a week right now. Um, between the erg and the water. Uh, so I have two water practices a week, sometimes a third, if I can convince my wife to let me have Saturdays, but most, most weeks, I only commit to training Monday through Friday. And then I commit the weekend to the family, whether I have to do home projects or take the kids to sports or whatever. So in a typical week, I will have three or four high aerobic workouts, mostly zone two stuff. Tons of zone two has been what I would say is the secret sauce for my last, uh, the success that I've had this year. And cause I've never really approached just a boatload of zone two. Um, so I'll spend anywhere from 60 minutes to 90 minutes on the

machine, uh, on my non water days. And then on the water days we'll have one or two one day might be a steady state row and then the other day is going to be some kind of intensity interval so um last week was uh three by eight minutes so basically three by 2k on the water uh saturday was multiple 750s so four sets of two by 750 with one minute rest in between we're practicing sprinting because we're getting into race season is about to start so we're getting ready for 2k season so um yeah that's what it's like i actually uh raced the san diego indoor classic and all-time pr'd my 2k a month ago faster than college at 39 which is pretty wild that's super cool that's wild yeah it blows my what's your 2k time now it's a 621 what a boy have you guys ever if you watch the movie boys in a boat of course

that's that movie that movie made me fall in love with rowing. I'm so glad I watched that, and then I'm talking to you. Before, I'd be like, rowing a boat, good. That movie gives so much respect for what you do. Is that true? Yeah, it's a true story. Those dudes just made the Olympics just because they tried to feed themselves. Yeah, pretty much. They were coming out of the depression there

and riding into a pretty tumultuous time. And they were, you know, feeding. They were struggling at the time. So you had a lot of like farm boys who just happened to be tall and strong that were, you know, in need of a place where they could be housed and fed and continue to go to school. And at that time you would use the feeder program for the olympics was much more of like you would take an entire

collegiate team right transplant them to the olympics um there were not real opportunities for like developing a national team at that time so yeah pretty cool story yeah it was it was super cool and i and like doug and i've been, me and Doug Anders, we've been to Jamaica. I got a chance to work with the sprinters from Jamaica. And, like, one thing I noticed is, like, because you always ask yourself, how does a little country like Jamaica, it's, like, the size of, like, I don't know, a suburb of Chicago, but yet it dominates in the world of sprinting. But when you give athletes no other opportunity, it's like you make this happen or else you're

in big trouble. The motivation is quite different than what we experienced in America. And dealing with athletes there is completely different than dealing with athletes here. But that was interesting getting to see it like even from an american point of view that when you give athletes no other choice they seem to like make things happen other than too many choices yeah well because i mean if if you if you put people into a pressure cooker situation, you're going to get the best that come out at the top. Those that decide that,

you know, they, they have to, right? Like it's a, it's a at all costs. Like, this is my,

this is what I have to do. And I will do whatever it takes to, to get there kind of thing. When, like you said, like when people have too many choices, when you're like, ah,

I could take it or leave it. You're not going to get good athletes you're just not i know i know you can get fit athletes but you're not going to get athletes that want it right you know because they don't have to do it yeah right yeah you get the like uh i could take it or leave it oh i won no i didn't win like okay i know it's quite frustrating sometimes as an american coach dealing with athletes because of that very reason they're like yeah you know i'm good my parents are gonna leave me 10 million so i'm fine and so but to make her like with me as an athlete i didn't have other choices it's like i had to make shit happen or else and so but yeah it's why i don't i prefer not working with elite level athletes honestly yeah i you know most of my audience they're all

absolute beginners because they're they're hungry they want you know if you come to me searching for like how do i start rowing and you're 45 years old like you've decided to make a choice that you're you got to figure you want to be straight out you know you're not like you're not coming in with like well i'm trying to you know shave off tenths of a percent here yeah where maybe you're my thing maybe you're not i don't know if i trust you i got a higher level coach that i trust more and like uh well i got this world cup that i gotta get to so like i'll i'm gonna put you on the back burner and i'll contemplate listening to someday in my point this is my point yeah to that age group have you noticed a big bump kind of in the in the rowing world as like bo2 max and Zone 2 and longevity kind of training has become popularized color over the last two years?

You know, rowing feels definitely like it's a little bit stuck in the past. Now, that being said, I would argue that a lot of rowers already trended. Trended? That doesn't sound right as i'm saying it but trended towards a lot of low intensity volume anyways so i don't know that it feels like it's been a big surge uh on our side of things because you kind of had this like high volume audience from like you know if they were rowing in the 70s or 80s they it was kind of baked into them anyways to jog but on the rower. So I don't know that we've had a ton, like a big surge of zone two talk.

Things that I'm surprised haven't been picked up in rowing is like, why haven't we converted over to using FTP zones as one way of tracking performance on the machines um people are still a little bit hesitant even to like jump onto heart rate training which is odd to me uh you know for zone two they're just kind of like i just sit on the machine and do 20 000 meters yeah you know i just do 10 000 meters like with like absolutely zero objectives like you don't use any metrics for success there it's just kind of sweating you know yeah when you're talking about your training a

second ago like you know at some level i totally expect you to come in here and talk about doing some long slow distance um you know zone two type stuff and then a bunch of intervals of varying um you know sets and durations and all that but uh i really am not familiar with with rowing as a sport only really rowing relative to kind of the crossFit community. How much do you guys play with with changing the resistance on the rower for various intervals and whatnot? Do you find like your optimum optimum resistance setting and then stick with it with whatever kind of produces the most meters for the output? Or do you do you actually play with the resistance for any particular reason? Or do you keep resistance all in the kind of more of the

strength training world? We don't mess with resistance a ton. You know, sometimes, if you're in an elite program, you might have a coach that gives you a few workouts here and there messing with resistance. Now, if we were, I guess if I'm looking at this as a coach, and I'm coaching on the water, and I have full control of a program, I would probably program some workouts where I'm messing with resistance for my team. Because if you think about it in a given practice on the water for us, we're in Mission Bay, which has connection to the ocean, which means we have a tide that comes in and out. And so sometimes we are going against the tide. Sometimes we are with the tide. Sometimes you're into a headwind. Sometimes you have a tailwind, crosswind. All these things change the resistance feeling of the water, which is essentially what adjusting your damper setting does. It changes the resistance

feeling of water. It doesn't adjust your intensity you determine your intensity and so i would play with various damper settings in order to just be able to practice on the machine what we would experience on the water but largely in part on the machine we just pick a damper setting that works for us personally and we typically just stick with that i use a drag factor of 117 and that's pretty much uniform what i use for all of my training sessions whether i'm pulling a 2k whether i'm doing 5 by 20 minutes whether i'm sitting down and just doing a 20k steady state uh i'm going to use the same resistance setting for pretty much everything that i do so for the average person that has no idea where to to put

that setting what's like an easy just catch all for for anyone that is just just starting out stop it stop it go to 10 uh just kill yourself right if you have a new ish machine if it's clean you don't see a bunch of dust on the flywheel, between a three and a four is a good place to start on the damper setting. That's like, hey, you don't even want to bother understanding what drag factor is. Just take the little lever, put it between three and four. If the machine looks pretty dirty, there's dust all over the place, clearly hasn't been cleaned in a long time, I would take it up between four and five. And if it's exceptionally dirty, there's rust on the cage, tons of dust coating the thing, take it up between a five and a six.

All because dust simply adjusts the feeling of resistance because it's limiting air supply in the flywheel housing. And so the same feeling at a three, four on a nice clean machine, there's lots of air moving in and out. But if you have a ton of dust on that thing, it's limiting the air supply. So a three, four on a clean clean machine, there's lots of air moving in and out. But if you have a ton of dust on that thing, it's limiting the air supply. So a three, four on a clean machine versus a really dirty machine, they're not going to feel the same. They're going to actually be different resistances, even though your little lever says, you know, three, four versus five, six, that's not a unit of measurement. The unit of measurement is how much it's really what it's measuring is the deceleration

of the flywheel. So the more air that's in there, the faster the flywheel decelerates, the less air supply, the slower it decelerates, which is why you get when you're down at a one, it feels really fast is because there's, uh, it's pinched off the air supply. So the flywheel just keeps spinning. And so in order to catch up with it, you have to be faster twitch at the catch in order to meet or match the speed of the flywheel. Whereas when you take it up to a 10, you open up all that air supply

on the side of the flywheel housing. Now it gets really heavy because there's a ton of air. So now that flywheel slows down really quickly because you've increased air supply. And so now it has greater resistance. And so it slows down faster. But it's also why damper setting drag factor is not what determines your intensity on the machine. It just changes the feel.

Right? I hope that made sense. Yeah, right on. I mean, despite having been around rowing at least a little bit, I didn't know that level of detail. Do you do any other supplemental cardio, given you're already on the rower as much as you are? Do you go for a jog? Do you do Metcons? Do you do any other anything?

Or is it just rowing and strength training? Or do you just row, especially pre-competition? I like to go through seasons uh this year though i've really just put my head down to rowing but again it's the first last year was the first solid year of training that i've given to rowing since college because you know i went to crossfit and competed in crossfit from yeah uh 10 through 13 10 11 12 30 yeah um so went to the games 10 11 12 13 so and then after that i just kind of like continued to dabble so long ago it was so long ago you're just counting that on your fingers like it was high school you're like uh oh jesus 15 years um so uh you know and then

i just continued to dabble in like strength training. And but it prior to last year, a typical season for me would be like, OK, December through March, I might row. I would typically row one race a year. And then every June. Sorry. Every June I run. If you ever heard of the Dipsy is the oldest trail race in the country. It's up in Marin County county up in northern california um so i run the dipsy every year this will be my fifth year doing it my goal is 30 straight years uh i have two other buddies that i run it with and it's like

our goal is to hit 30 it's pretty cool it's a beautiful race you start on the bay side of san francisco and you finish on the ocean uh you literally like how long is it uh it's like 8.2 miles and like 2400 feet of elevation gain and it's single track so you're like passing people constantly there's like you're swim moving by people on single track and it's ages from like i think the youngest winner of the race is like eight years old oh because of the because of the way that they seat it it's super cool so it's like five-year-olds to 95 year olds running this thing and they do like a reverse seating so the 95 year olds and the five-year-olds start the race together

and then they they basically go down from there and like v of age until you get to your scratch age which i think is like 30 maybe or like 30 to 32 34 and so it's your the 34 year olds are like trying to catch the 95 year olds and the five year olds that are on the trail so it's and it's it's true first finisher wins which is awesome so it's like a genuine first person to cross the line it's a really cool i didn't even know that existed that's awesome yeah and like entry is super fun because it's very limited you have to like get a spot into their two categories there's invite and open you have to start in the open which sucks because the entire invite category 5 and 95 and down to scratch, go first and then open goes. So if you're in the open,

you're having to like pass a thousand extra people just to get close to the invite group. And in order to get entry, they encourage like bribery. They encourage sob stories. It's like built into the application form, like write your sob story on the back. Feel free to include donations, They encourage sob stories. It's built into the application form. Write your sob story on the back.

Feel free to include donations to the entry committee. So it's really fun. It's a cool race. Super historic, and it's really fun. Wait, in order to do 30 of them, do you have to get lucky? Or does your last year weigh into getting it this year? Yeah, so once you earn your way into the invite... You get a seat.. So once you earn your way into the invite, yeah,

once you earn your way into the invite, then your, your goal is to maintain your invite status. And you have to do that by staying, uh, by finishing in the top. I forget what the percentage is. You have to stay in the top percent to continue to earn invite back. Uh,

otherwise you can get rolled out and then you'd have to reapply to get into open um thankfully i've maintained my insight with that level of that's like a two-hour race with that level of elevation and it the fastest times are like 50 minutes i think yeah it's insane what eight miles and with like a big climb it's crazy the initial climb is just everybody yeah yeah you start the race you like sprint through the downtown of mill valley if you've ever been in marin it's a beautiful little town you sprint through the the town and then you hit stairs and you just climb a thousand feet of stairs immediately that's how the race starts and it's it's like two lanes of traffic.

There's a walking lane and there's the running lane. And you're just getting elbowed. And people are like trying to make progress on these stairs, which is dumb because you're not going to really, you know, win it on the first set. And you can, you know, screw yourself over. And then it's just this massive thousand foot descent immediately after the stairs.

You bottom out at the bottom of a valley. And then you just have another like 1200 foot climb through through trail that is just endless it feels like it never ends and then you peak that and then it's just this long descent to the ocean where you're like running through the redwoods and the fog it's so what is the best what would be the best like uh strategy is like survive the steps make the descent and then on the climb or where's the best place to make your move uh fast descents if you you know anybody that knows trail running like fast descents can make up a ton of time if you're willing to just kind of throw caution yeah right yeah um you can make up a ton of time on descents if you're a good descender

and yeah the second climb is where you can really make up a lot of meat in the race uh because it's so long and you and people get really bogged down so the tough part is if you don't surge early you get stuck in the the glom of of kind of the middle pack of people. And so you really want to try and get ahead of them because that group tends to really slow you down when you get pinch pointed at, you know, long climbs where you've got roots on all sides of you and there's really not much passing that you can do. So the descent, it seems like that descent, you need to separate yourself and then like from the, all right.

Yeah. I'm so into this. Like, I never thought I'd be into all this, like endurance sports, but like, it's so fascinating for me being, you know,

more into like weightlifting and like a one second sport. I love the endurance strategy. Dude. If you get mashed when you, when you realize like how many cool things like adventure wise are in that like domain of fitness it's really cool like yeah we had we had a client that did the the race across america they're doing 100 miles a day on a bike or more like some crazy numbers uh for two weeks straight or i can't remember all the specifics of it um like doing the the rim to rim

rim to rim to rim oh yeah uh the grand canyon you there's so many cool things that you can do i haven't done many of them but um they're all they're all what's the one with the the everest challenge that they do in colorado oh's called Everesting. Everesting. They hike up and then they take the chairlift down and then they hike up and take the chairlift down until they've done whatever the equivalent is of summiting Everest. It's 29,000 feet or whatever it is.

That sounds awful. You guys have heard about the Barkley? Oh yeah, where and run in the circle every four miles every hour but uh no this is the one that's in like uh i think it's in maybe tennessee somewhere in appalachia i think where it's it's five laps and every lap you reverse course and you have to it's like they're like one or two finishers every year uh and one or two people survive is that what you're saying pretty much yeah they've only been like in its history it's

been going since like the 80s i think there have only been like 15 or 20 finishers yeah finish there's one that i saw that's your race match no yeah. There's one that I saw that's like, it's like four miles or five miles an hour forever until there's one man standing. Yes, yes. That one sounds so gnarly. It's like the Agoge or something similar. Oh my God. That one sounds so gnarly.

Just knowing that every hour you're on four miles. I mean, you're running 10 minute miles forever for infinity until you quit and there's i mean even if you did them in 12 minutes like that's you're looking at like a day yeah okay so here i got this this is the barkley marathon barkley marathon it's an ultra marathon trail race held each year in frozen head state park in morgan county tennessee uh and it's just this there's a documentary about it definitely worth watching if you want to see something interesting and it's like entry is a license plate from your state or country plus the item of clothing that the organizer wants for that year so like everybody will like

i want pants and like everybody has to bring his size pants plus their license plate. And like, that's it. That'd be awesome. You would never run out of jeans. Yeah. Like he just said, so like one year he wants underwear. Everybody has to bring him money. Like gives you a size.

You have to bring him underwear. It's nuts. That's funny. Yeah. I don't need to do the endless races, but I mentioned this on the show before that. And I, I might, I might get this wrong, but it along the lines of vacationraces.com, I want to say.

Sorry, I got a long one on here. I think it's vacationraces.com. You basically just go to all the national parks. You go to Glacier. You go to Yosemite. You go to Arches. You just do cool races in the most beautiful places in America. That's something I could totally get behind i love national parks and like to do it and and have a race um tacked onto it sounds like an enormous amount of fun way more fun than an

endless race that only one person has ever finished in the existence of the race dear god yeah yeah yo i want to hear uh kind of the story back into the water and getting back into the sport of rowing. How long did that take? What was the gap between your, I guess your, maybe it was college or the last time you were like rowing as a sport versus training or CrossFit? So I mean, my last competitive season of rowing was my last year of college. Um, so 2009 and, uh, after that, you know, I continued to dabble. I was always fit

enough. And so I would get a call like every December, like, Hey, we're putting a boat together for the San Diego crew classic, which is the big season opener. And it's, it's here in San Diego. So it was an easy, yes. I could always just fill a spot for one race and I'd be like, sure. I'll show up for a couple of practices. I'm fit enough. I can handle a 2k and you know, not make the boat suck. And, uh, and then I had this, this coxswain that I've known forever. She moved back to San Diego. Um, her husband was, was a pilot in the Navy. And so they moved back. She pinged me and was like, hey, it'd be really fun if we put an actual fast boat together this year. Do you think you'd be on board? I was like, I haven't been hot. I was like, I don't know. I haven't been in an

organized program for a while. And she just kept needling me. She's like, come on, we'd love to have you. Like we start now i think we can make a really fast boat and honestly it was just her like not not giving up on me and last just november december i officially joined san diego rowing club and we started training together and it it was wild we went in one San Diego crew classic. We went to regionals, swept every race that we were in, other than one where I flipped the boat right out of the start. Oh boy.

Yeah, that was, it was, they put me in a, in a double. First timer, first timer. So there, if you don't know this, there are two types. What is this rowing thing we're doing today? There are two types of rowing. There's sweeping and sculling. So sweep rowing is where you have one giant oar. So you have one big oar.

Each athlete is just responsible for one oar, and you rotate out around a pin. So your movement is actually rotating, not straightforward like on a rowing machine. So you rotate out. That's the type of rowing that i do sweeping think like a broom you know you only sweep with one broom at a time and uh and your oars huge sculling you have two blades you have a blade in each hand so that's called sculling

i don't scull i've never sculled i've never been in a single i don't get in sculling boats it's just it's not the type of rowing i've ever practiced or done and uh and they just threw me into a double which is me and one other guy in a sculling boat and if you if you're not used to it it's like riding a unicycle rowing is you know it's it's rowing is very skill heavy you're in a you know a long shell that's a v-shaped hull it doesn't balance itself and you're coordinating two moving objects in your hands which only have a singular fixed point but you're in control of what the oars are doing yeah and we went to start the race first stroke and it was me and the students that retired navy seal was my

partner he's sitting behind me and he had slightly more experience and he's like we're gonna be fine it'll be great started the race first stroke we just rolled straight into the water oh god it was embarrassing other than that we swept regionals went to nationals swept nationals went to the head of the charles uh in the champ for, which is the best colleges in the country. So yeah, Harvard, Yale, Princeton,

Dartmouth, Washington, you name it. Best, best colleges in the country. And it was us against all the best colleges in the country in a four. Uh, we started in 14th place,

finished in 11th out of 18. And there were three national teams there. So the U S had a team in the boat in that race, the Italians, and then the Swississ and the irish put a four together and we took 11th we beat three other teams moved up from 14th to 11th it was awesome help me help me understand technique because you know earlier you could you um you related rowinging to like limited weightlifting which is that's what i what i coach help me understand all the like uh you know i could easily explain to you kind of like the what what the technique of weightlifting is help me understand the technique of rowing so you know

we like to try and borrow from what we understand when it comes to teaching something, as you know, like it makes it easier to apply knowledge for people that don't understand it. So, you know, if we're looking at rowing, for example, we can talk about bits and pieces of other sports that make sense into what we're doing. Essentially, the rowing stroke is you're coming up to a fixed point that is a loaded spring. That's the catch. That's the essentially the taking a bar off the floor moment, right? You got to have good setup on a barbell. If you're going to take it off the floor, you got to make sure that your body is braced in good position and that you're

hitting all of the key points in that position, right? The better you get, the more comfortable you get hitting your setup right out of the gates without having to sit there and fidget and find it and have a coach behind you, lifting your ass and dropping your shoulders and making sure your lats are engaged and so on and so forth right that's our catch right set up right as you drive you are trying to essentially move against a fixed point so just like taking a barbell off the ground you have to make sure that your trunk is braced so that that doesn't become a slippage point and become an energy leak because you need that that core to be able to transfer the power you're driving from your leak because you need that that core to be able to transfer the power you're driving from your legs into the machine that transfers up to the handle

just like yeah just like moving it's the same concept you're applying force through the legs that has to transfer through the body and be applied to an external force which is the handle in our instance right as you finish you're not really reaching triple extension in our sport you're you're hitting the point at basically like a one o'clock hip opening roughly um it actually ends up being a little bit you want to aim for slightly less uh but you end up getting to one o'clock with like momentum carrying you open and that's just that finished position so it starts with that leg push transferring into a hip swing and then just snapping with the arms as opposed to like getting a shrug and getting elbows high and outside. You're just thinking about that handle

coming right into the base of the sternum. Then the difference is that you do have to be consciously thinking about what you're doing on the recovery. That's the move forward. And at that point, it's just a reverse image of what you just did. So you got to make sure that the hands move away first because you're trying to reload the system every time got it so it kind of like if you were to take you know barbell cycling and i know it's like a bastardization of of you know let's take a snatch for example but like if you take a snatch and you barbell cycle a snatch you have to make sure that as that comes down as that barbell is coming down you're transferring into that elbow down so that that barbell can slot against your body and make sure that the bar tracks into the right position so that you're in a good setup position same concept on the recovery hands get away then your hips close yeah then the knees bend to bring you back and that way you get

to the catch position and you're fully loaded ready to go again for the next stroke ah it's beautiful okay that's awesome man i mean like you know everybody i know it sounds beautiful like you know when i see rowing i'm sure same thing that when someone just watches someone do like a snatch they just think oh no big deal but like that looks so easy it looks so easy and then i'm like try it and see what happens you know like yeah think about trying to rub your head and pat your belly while you're riding a unicycle like that's what we're doing that was a beautiful explanation thank you yeah and it's i always say like rowing on a rowing machine is like riding a four-wheeler where you learn how to you learn how the system works you're sitting on a seat you have wheels you have pedals you have handlebars like you get how the system works. You're sitting on a seat, you have wheels, you have pedals, you have handlebars. Like you get how the pedaled system works and makes sense.

Then learning to roll in the water is like taking what you learned on a four wheeler and learning to ride a unicycle. The same systems apply, but it becomes infinitely more complex. That's what taking it to the water ends up doing. I always wondered, like you see those little boats. I'm always wondering,

I'm like, man, it looked like they would tip easily. But like know when you watch the movie they just get right in it and start you know paddling down the down the river or whatever but like it's a lot harder than it looks obviously of course it is but like yeah dude just take the family out for like a little day at the park and try and hop and. Drown them all. Strap your feet into shoes that are connected to the boat and then flip a boat into the water

while everybody's feet are still attached to the system. Oh, God, you just freak me out. I'm never going to do that. I feel like you have to have some stories about that happening. What do you do? Are there times where people can't get their feet unclipped or out of the slots it's

happened uh so your shoes are actually fixed to the boat so you just come in with socks and then you put your your shoot your feet into the shoes that are already there but now i'm sure this is as a result of things horrible things that have happened in the past um most shoes are velcro and then there's a a single strap that connects to both of the velcro pieces so all you have to do is grab a single strap pull and both feet are okay your feet can come out like for example when i flipped at regionals for it's just instinctive you reach for the strap pull it and both your feet just instantly come out okay all right yeah yeah i know i've always

wondered like where i see i've seen kayakers flip over and they have there's like a technique where they can you know write themselves but it's like their their their whole legs are like in the kayak not the exact same thing is growing but it's just like as a non-kayaker i look at that and go i want no part of that believe it or not i'm pretty good at kayaking i love are you i'm good at canoeing kayaking i used to teach both yeah so no kidding yeah yeah i know i don't look like it but you you'd be just fine in a boat other than just having to learn how to set the boat that's the hardest part for most people is learning how to let the boat set itself while not impacting it much because in like a single for example those boats might be a foot and a half wide like not even as wide as you are and it's

a v-shaped hull like if you if there was nobody in it and you just put that boat on the water it wouldn't set itself it would just tip to the side and it would rest on the rigor with one rigor on the water like a training wheel it looks like the most beautiful sport in the world though it looks like you're getting out there on the water it's just like it's great just gliding yeah quiet mornings on glassy water or like a little bit of fog it's what and you rose you're watching the sunrise like that's as beautiful as it gets there are a ton of mornings where you're like this is why this is why i do this and then you sit on the earth you're like why do i do this is there a reason i feel like i feel like rowers like it's like a part of the culture to like wake up super early to do rowing is there like an actual reason for that or

or is that just a part of the culture you know for some unknown reason um number one that's when you have the calmest water because there's no boat traffic out yet most people because our boats are so tippy and they only sit you know maybe a foot to a foot and a half out of the water wake can really just like it'll roll over the gunnel of your boat and fill the boat with water and you get into like hazard situations like that so i'd be so pissed if somebody comes oh yeah we hate water skiers i hate water skiers and wakeboarders i'd have a pellet gun yeah right yeah uh so that's reason number one is because we don't row in open water we row on calm water so that's when you get your calm water nobody else is out on boats yet the second is at least when it comes to team rowing that's the easiest that's the easiest time

to get 16 adults to show up at one place at the same time without scheduling conflicts before we've all started our job for the day because like on tuesdays and thursdays when i have practice i'm waking at 4 20 in the morning to get to the water by 10 to 5 and practice we're starting at 5 we are on the water by 5 15 and then we're off the water by 7 no questions like that's awesome by 7 30 making breakfast people got a shower and get to work. Like we do not, it does not extend beyond seven o'clock. You know, like, I mean, and like, there's something about, I used to canoe early like that too. And like, it would be so peaceful. You're on the river and it's just like,

it's just no place I'd rather be, you know? My best friend KJ and I used to wait, when it would flood, we would kayak the river. And it was, I look back and think about how dumb that was. We would go and we would kayak some monster, like, whitewater. In places you shouldn't be kayaking. Like, it was so – The things we do as kids.

The things we do. Just you saying rowing on Mission Beach, I used to love waking up and going walking in the morning on around mission bay and seeing you guys out there and i'd be like dude that is a sport like that is the best by yourself it's like you're doing your surfing though you know saying beautiful yeah water sports the best i don't know i don't know it's the only place you can just like really go and it's like actually disconnected yeah there's nothing you can do out there you're you're focused on the thing that's it that's all you've got yeah how do you get into that sport though like you know it's so like uh you know it's like weightlifting used to be weightlifting if you didn't live in like one of seven places in America, you didn't, didn't wait, you know, but like, that's the way it is for rowing now.

Like, where do you go? Like, if you're not like in like Massachusetts or one of the, or Washington or some of these places who love rowing, like it's hard to get into, I would love for my kids to get in that sport. It's yeah. It's location wise. It's tough because you, a, you need access to just a body of water. Plenty of people do have their own shells. They'll take a single and they'll go row on a lake nearby, even if there's no rowing club, as long as there's a put in location.

There you go. You know, they'll go and row on their own. Admittedly, though, like clubs, this is the part of rowing that i fight against and kind of the whole thing that i've built my business on is like as as a community and uh we as rowers suck we're the worst we're we're we come off to everybody as snobby we make it hard to approach we we're always wearing spandex like nobody understands that it's not it's not like an easy like weightlifting to the same man yeah yeah for you to like walk into a rowing club and be like hi i don't know what i'm doing is intimidating as shit and it's and they're not going to make

it easy on you they're never going to answer an email at a boathouse they're never going to answer the phone yeah you have to walk in and everybody's standing there in spandex soaking wet staring at you and you're like can i just talk to anyone like is there an office running this place you know sure like think about here some of the gyms that i've owned i bet the first time coming in had to be the hardest thing ever because it's like the middle of nowhere it's just a bunch of just monsters lifting crazy weights and like with their shirts off and spandex on and like you know their pants are ripped where the the bar is meeting their thighs it's like huh i never even thought about all this but yeah like so i don't know as far as finding rowing it's

my objective is to try and make rowing more approachable for people. And, and a lot of that starts on the rowing machine. If you can gain a level of confidence on the rowing machine that you, you would love it on the machine, you might be willing to suffer the initial discomfort of having that first conversation at a boathouse or like calling a boathouse until somebody answers the phone to make your way to the water eventually. It's a little easier for kids because juniors programs are a little bit more welcoming. But, you know, getting your kids into rowing is fantastic. So it's because there are so many scholarships in rowing and so few athletes that it's a great avenue for getting scholarships

for kids into college and entrance into like big name schools with scholarships because there so many scholarships in rowing and so few athletes that it's a great avenue for getting scholarships for kids into college and entrance into like big name schools with scholarships because there are a whole lot of juniors athletes out there um so yeah shane where can the people find you man what's that where can people find you oh that was all one one one word i thought you were just indiscriminately shouting at me. You'll do it. Maybe. DarkHorseRowing.com, but primarily I would say YouTube.com slash DarkHorseRowing is probably

the best place to find us. If you head to DarkHorseRowing.com, you'll find all of our resources there. We're improving our website at the moment, but that's where you can find and connect with us and find everything that we have to offer. Otherwise, the YouTube channel is a good place to find what we have new coming up. When are you starting your permaculture uh youtube channel dude i so badly want to do that i have a really good friend we'll do this on another show we'll talk about farming

and another show i actually met with a client yesterday and he goes did you really buy a farm and i was like oh how long you got we could turn this into a two hour long meeting would you like to dude i got i have a buddy who has one of the largest gardening youtube channels in the world here in san diego um this channel's epic gardening and every time i see him i'm like how do i do i i'd love to do this i'd love to start a new channel i should start from zero with all the knowledge you have. Coach Travis Mast. Mastlead.com. And soon we've got a new website coming out, but I also have this article dropping for Gym Aware.

It's all about how to get faster sprinting in the gym. It is a monster. I'm working on that. It's going to be a sick article. Can we do a show so I don't have to read? I would love that. Yeah, I'll tell you all about it. Thanks, man. I've got all about it. Thanks, man.

I got to dip out. Thanks, Shane. This is an awesome show. Thanks for having me. You bet. Yo, Shane, stoked to have you back on the show, man. Been a couple of years here, but I haven't actually checked out your YouTube channel in quite some time, so I didn't realize it was crushing to the extent that it is.

So stoked to go check it out, but I appreciate you coming on, man. I always enjoy it. Thanks for having me. Appreciate you guys. Find me on Instagram, Douglas E. Larson. Dude, when you reached out the other day, because I didn't reach out when I was supposed to, I was so stoked. It was like one of those dad moments. I think probably

all dads have them. Everybody. I was in the car and the kids jumped out and you texted me and I was like, oh, mom's just going to have to handle the kids for the next 20 minutes. I'm talking about, I'm talking chickens, I'm talking cattle, like we got things to do now.

But I just sat there and was like texting, I was like, I'm not dadding right now at all. I'm talking about farming. I'm so envious of the cattle, the ability to have actual livestock beyond chickens. Like that's i i wish i could have that kind of space or even that kind of forethought to be able to handle that but not where we are certainly not in la mesa yeah you know you need uh it's wild uh my my main takeaway from owning cows now is that um they're kind of like remember when you had your

first kid you just like it wasn't doing anything but you could just like stare at it and you're like this is wildly fun like now i have a cow and i can stare at it i'm like you're just eating you're literally it's just eating it just it does nothing but eat and i just 20 minutes will go by 30 minutes and i was like where where are you like oh we're just watching the cow horns yeah i'm just staring at a cow what's the objective like what's your goal is it meat is it grazing is it like soil soil rehab what's the i'll tell you the the whole thing this is great for the intro people actually making this long in the show um uh my my end goal by the end of this year is to be like 90% self-sustaining and not have to go to a grocery store except for I joke, ice cream and bread.

That's about it. Um, so I bought two cows, one, the mom and then the baby. So that mom's going to be making it sometime to around like July, August, and then she's got to go to slaughter. Uh, and then I'm splitting it with my neighbor um we have now we've counted 110 trees fruit trees in the orchard so that's an enormous amount of fruit obviously vegetable gardens um and then between my neighbor and i we're like we're like a meat team um we can take down like three deer in our backyard we'll have each 500 plus pounds of meat for the year um 110 fruit trees to 10 000 plus fruits and then the vegetables and all those things so i don't really have much else after that that i

consume so i shouldn't like the goal is to like not have to go to a grocery store for a year are you are you planning on supplementing like grain in with like doing like large large-scale grain purchase like large, large rice purchases, or are you just, you guys not doing grains? Um, I'm sure that that will show up just because a year is a long time and like, probably going to want some right white rice at some point, but for the most part, like, like it's, it's 90%. Like I'm really trying not to have to go to a grocery store. I like that. So that's enough farming. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. And we are Barbell Shrugged. Barbell underscore shrugged.

And you can head over to rtalab.com. That is where you can learn about all the lab lifestyle and performance analysis, testing, and coaching that we will be doing for you inside Rapid Health Optimization. It's rtalab.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.