Recovering from an injury is never fun, and it’s rarely ever easy.
Just like that, all your training momentum is gone, and beyond the literal pain, sometimes the thing that hurts more is losing a sense of identity and belonging. After I had shoulder surgery a few months before graduating college, I still showed up to practice because I loved my team, but it felt different. There was no excitement over a new drill because I wasn’t in the boat to try it. I wasn’t pushing myself to win seat races because there was nothing to win. My seat—or lack thereof—was secure. I didn’t have one.
My teammates were battling to get into top boats or racing lineups, while my days consisted of long, solitary BikeErg sessions on the dock. I did what I could to make it interesting: I painstakingly curated an extensive workout playlist, I did a lot of early morning people- and bird-watching from my post on the dock, and I challenged myself by completing the same program over and over (4×20:00/3:00r was a particular favorite). But overall, being injured gave me a lot of time to think. Sometimes too much time.
We’ve all had our minds wander during steady state pieces, like the moment where you stop thinking about splits and start fantasizing about what you can scavenge for a post-practice snack. Concept2 even cheekily noted that scrolling Instagram while on the BikeErg was “out” for 2026, a habit I’m sure we’ve all indulged in once or twice. I’ll admit, quite a few of my own dock biking hours were spent mentally constructing my CrewLAB entries for whenever I finished the workout. But I’m talking about real thinking—the kind of soul searching that only hits with the knowledge that your recovery timeline is measured in months, not days or weeks. This was the toughest aspect for me to adjust to while I was injured. More than the change in physical ability, the most jarring part of my injury and recovery process was mental.
I knew what I was signing up for when I agreed to have my labrum and rotator cuff repaired. It’s not exactly something you can walk off and return to the boat the next day—I knew I was sacrificing my remaining college racing opportunities for daily comfort and the chance of returning to the sport throughout my lifetime. But that still didn’t prepare me for the shock of losing my sense of direction and progress, and the challenge of relearning milestones and accomplishments on my own, as opposed to sharing them with my boat or my team. Instead of having well-defined direction and a clear goal for what I wanted out of my training, I was suddenly listless and adrift.
CrewLAB served as a powerful accountability factor for me. There were plenty of moments where I felt discouraged or unmotivated to continue putting in work because I couldn’t compare my progress to my teammates or felt that my work didn’t matter. I felt like in some ways I was coaching myself—not that my coaches stopped caring about me once I couldn’t go out on the water, but that I was responsible for setting my own benchmarks, adjusting when needed, and holding myself accountable once no one else was doing it for me. The process required a lot of introspection. Am I pushing myself to my full potential? What could I do to improve my training, and thus my results? Am I giving myself grace to recover, without slacking and falling behind? Through keeping detailed notes on my workouts, recovery and rehab, I was able to recognize trends, make changes and fine tune my own training independently.
Learning to train on my own forced me to recalibrate my goals and choose what was important to me instead of being told what was important. Since my aim was no longer “get into the top boat” or “help the team win” I had to pick new marks to aspire to. Often, the goal was something simple. I’d target heart rate marks or split ranges and felt the competitive spark return—except now my only competitor was myself. It still meant a lot to me to be able to support my team (and feel like a member of it) but I was also able to achieve goals just for me, little things that kept me motivated like receiving my Million Meter Club t-shirt from Concept 2 or noticeable, marked improvement in my fitness.
Using CrewLAB made it so that the work I was doing didn’t happen in a void. I was able to reflect on where I was improving—and where I was struggling. Having a catalogue of past thoughts, insights, accomplishments and setbacks made it so that I had concrete evidence of the work I was doing, and I was accountable not only to myself but to my coaches as well—even when they couldn’t see me in a boat every day. They could see that not only was I still engaging physically however I could, but I was also if anything, more mentally focused and thinking more deeply than when I was healthy. Even when I wasn’t in the boat or tagging along on the launch, I wanted to make sure that my commitment to my own improvement and to the team was still at the forefront. CrewLAB also made it so that progress was easily understood, even when I had different measurement metrics from the rest of the team: bike vs erg/water rowing, injured vs healthy, team boat vs solo workouts.
More than anything, using CrewLAB helped me to still feel connected to my team, even when I was training separately. Having one place to communicate, share wins and comment on teammates’ work made me feel like I was still an equal—I might have been doing my workouts alone on the dock, but at the end of the day all of us were still working towards the same thing, and went to the same place to talk about it.
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