Here’s a dreary insight from my recent trip to a single sculling camp: you can be in good aerobic shape and still have a hard time doing a new activity. Like rowing, if you’re basically a biker. You have this neat aerobic base from all the biking. That’s great. But the "delivery system" – as I was told by a Ph.D. in Exercise Physiology ( that may be the wrong name for it) – may not be in good enough shape to get the stuff to the parts that are doing the work. My fitness, he said, is mostly in the business of getting blood to and from the legs. For rowing, you have to get the juice to the "core" and the upper body as well. So you can be in great shape and still be doomed at your new activity. And be a dope, like me, in rowing camp.

Sorry about that but there you go. Answer: all your life, do some cross training, to use most of the major muscle groups with at least some regularityThis crap is hard, man. Very very hard. Any experience out there? Especially anything that makes it easier to cross train? I am about to buy a rowing machine, and I dread it. Hate the suckers. Is there another way?