Rowing? Yes, There Is An App For That!

Patrick Schnöll's rowing app

This past Saturday, 14 January, Patrick Schnöll of Germany released an application for rowing, “iRowCoach”. The app is for Apple’s iPhones and it helps coaches and athletes to track stroke rates, times, and speed like any other of the ‘stroke watches’ that are out there – at a fraction of their price! “iRowCoach” tracks your speed, that is the device’s speed, whether you take your phone in the boat, “which is not clever” (Patrick writes in an e-mail to HTBS), or if the coach has it with them on his/her bicycle or motor launch, of course then going at the same speed as the athlete’s racing shell.

The app is compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation), and iPad.Requires iOS 5.0 or later. Its available in the USA iTunes Store: here for $1.99 (size: 0.1 MB), in English and German.

So, HTBS spent the money and downloaded Patrick’s app to try it out during the weekend. The weather was not really suitable for an outing on the river (very close to ice), so we had to try it out with some ‘moving land training’. For that, it worked perfectly fine, we just had to imagine following a rowing boat on the river. It made my think about my time as a young coach, being only a couple of years older than the crew. Of course, in those days we just called the ‘app’ a stopwatch...

See also this!