Indoor rowing floats his boat
Crosby rides wave of fitness craze
The late Tom Crosby, who lived to be 98, often said the secret to his good health was that he took his exercise sitting down. Crosby, often called the "dean of the Charles," raced in the Head of the Charles Regatta every year from its start in 1965 until 1990, a month before his 90th birthday.
Yesterday, the Crosby family was represented on the Charles once again - this time by Crosby's grandson, 33-year-old Josh Crosby, who competed in the club eight event and finished third with a crew that included other former national team members.
If rowing is the quintessential New England sport, then the Crosbys of Manchester-by-the-Sea are the quintessential New England oarsmen. Tom Crosby, who died in 1999, took up intramural rowing as a student at Harvard in the 1920s. He became a stockbroker and an avid recreational rower, participating in the first Head of the Charles with his son David, also a Harvard graduate. David Crosby, in turn, threw his son Josh in a boat on the Charles at the age of 5 or 6. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the three generations of Crosbys would often row the Charles together, launching their shells from the historic Union Boat Club.
Tom Crosby, who skipped his nightly martini only before racing in the Head of the Charles every year, "was not the easiest guy to be around," said David. "He could be kind of an ornery guy, but Josh and he had a wonderful bond through the rowing."
The youngest Crosby is the one who took the family tradition into the competitive realm. He rowed for St. Paul's, an elite boarding school in Concord, N.H., later for Brown University, and for the junior and senior national teams.
Today, Crosby continues to bring the family name to rowing, but not on the Charles River. Or even on the water.
Now based in Los Angeles, Crosby bills himself as the creator of a new fitness craze he calls "Indo-Row." Inspired by the success of group spinning classes, Crosby hopes to become the face of indoor rowing classes in health clubs around the country.
"I don't know if you want to call me the Richard Simmons of Indo-Row," he says with a laugh, "but I just see myself as someone who loves what he's doing."
Model concept
Three years ago, Crosby took his Indo-Row concept to the Sports Club/LA's main gym in Los Angeles and was turned down. Pat Soley, the gym's group exercise manager, recalls her boss saying, "That's insane. We don't have room for a bunch of ergs," referring to the Concept2 rowing machine that's universally called "the erg" - short for ergometer, which measures the user's power and speed.
So Crosby built his program at a small health club in Santa Monica, Calif., called Revolution Fitness, where he knew the owner. He purchased five ergs and began refining his teaching style, a combination of coaching advice and motivational speaking. He typically starts with a program he calls "ready for rowing," which covers technique and form and helps the class synchronize into a rowing rhythm. Set to a high-energy playlist from Crosby's iPod, most of the 50-minute class consists of interval work. He then divides the class into teams, and they race each other to the "finish line" with Crosby fist-pumping, clapping, and shouting encouragement in all corners of the room.
Crosby is used to having all eyes on him, from gym members to fashion photographers. One day in August 1998, when he was training on the Charles to make the national sculling team, producers from J.Crew came to the Union Boat Club. They offered locals $350 to be extras in a catalogue photo shoot on the water. Soon, he was doing local television commercials and has since found a niche in modeling for sports companies such as
Emboldened by his success, he began taking acting lessons and, at 28, moved to Los Angeles. At first, he says, "Indo-Row was a way of creating some income to stay in the game of acting." But after two years of grueling auditions, he had only added a few bit parts to his résumé.
He now satisfies his acting bug by dashing from erg to erg, shouting his lines at middle-aged gym-goers. "Let's go, ladies! Hard as you can for 100 meters," he cheered at a recent class in Santa Monica. "Go, Alice! Crush it! Leg power, leg power! That's it, Bob. Empty the tanks. Love it!"
After a year of refining his fitness program, Crosby returned to the Sports Club/LA to pitch his idea again. In March 2006, Sports Club/LA launched Indo-Row in its main club, and within months, its Orange County, Beverly Hills, and New York City locations followed suit. The company has purchased about 80 ergs, which start at $850 each, and has transformed a racquetball court at the Orange County facility into an Indo-Row boathouse.
"It's huge for us to make a commitment like that," says Soley.
Challenged to succeed
The irony of Crosby's newfound calling is that many competitive rowers hate indoor rowing machines. The erg, says Frederick Schoch, executive director of the Head of the Charles, is often called "the black dragon of winter training" because rowers can't hide their level of fitness. "For swimmers in the pool, it's the stopwatch that doesn't lie," he says. "For us, it's the erg that doesn't lie."
When Crosby told his old rowing buddies about Indo-Row, he says, "The initial response from them was, 'Why would anyone pay to sit on those machines?' "
Porter Collins, who competed on two US Olympic teams and rowed with Crosby at Brown, says, "I thought he was nuts. We'd spent so many hours on the rowing machine training for the Olympics. I had memories of pain, not of fun. There were other people trying to make your boat. There were people dry-heaving. It's not the most pleasant experience."
Josh Crosby himself loathed indoor rowing.
"The bane of his existence was that damned erg," recalls his father, David. He remembers his son calling home to complain when the national team coaches tested him on the machine.
Today, the younger Crosby says he has "a healthy relationship" with the erg, and Collins leads some of Crosby's classes at Sports Club/LA in New York. Crosby's father, who does his own winter training on an erg, says, "Josh is trying to take something that's considered masochistic to something that's fun."
His former coaches say they are not surprised Crosby can make indoor rowing enjoyable. He rowed the stroke position in an eight-man boat, which required him to execute the commands of the coxswain, set the tempo of the strokes, and push the crew to move faster.
"Whether it's Josh Crosby or Tom Brady, there are people who can bring other people to a higher level, and Josh is one of those guys," says Steve Gladstone, a top collegiate coach who recruited Crosby to Brown.
The 5-foot-11-inch Crosby says he had to be motivated to overcome the challenges of his size.
"The standard profile of a rower is 6-7, 220 pounds of lean, perfect muscle," he says. "I was always the opposite of that. I'm a smaller guy."
In Crosby's junior year at St. Paul's, his coach, Chip Morgan, had to convince the junior national team coaches to give him a chance. "I remember spending a lot of time on the phone saying, 'Yes, he only weighs 145 pounds wringing wet, and his erg scores may not be phenomenal because he's so little, but his boats always win,' " says Morgan. "Finally, they believed me."
When Crosby arrived at the team's summer training camp, he found six coxswains, the smaller boys who steer the boats, sitting on a couch in the boathouse. Seeing Crosby, one of them said, "Aw, that makes seven of us."
An offended Crosby corrected the boy and became even more determined to beat out the bigger boys for a rowing seat. By the end of the summer, he had made the team, won the gold medal at the 1992 junior world championships in Montreal, and made a name for himself.
Market competition
Josh Crosby is not the first to try to sell America on indoor rowing classes. Others have tried, including the Vermont manufacturer of the Concept2 indoor rower. The first erg model was introduced in 1981, and most prep schools, colleges, and Olympic training camps began to line up the machines in their boathouses for testing and winter training. Indoor rowing evolved into a sport, and Concept2 now dominates that marketplace.
Health club owners began investing in ergs as well, but Concept2 owner Dick Dreissigacker says club owners would often complain their machines sat unused in the corner. In the mid-1990s, as spinning classes became popular, Concept2 pushed health club owners to promote indoor rowing classes, offering incentives such as instructor training and class regimens.
"It sort of flopped," says Dreissigacker. "It caught on in some clubs and not others. I'm not sure whether we did it wrong. I think it was more that you needed a real champion out there. The clubs where it took off, they had someone leading it who had the personality. But it really takes a champion in the club."
Josh Crosby may well be that champion, but others are racing to the same goal. Los Angeles-based Victoria Draper, a former collegiate rower, is the creator of Rowbics, a program similar to Indo-Row that she runs at three LA health clubs and will launch in Boston at Revolution Fitness by the end of the year. The business competition brings out "that old sportsmanship," says Draper. "It's all fair game. We're both trying to get our program in as many clubs as possible."
Draper says she is currently working on a deal with Gold's Gym to introduce Rowbics nationally. For now, Concept2 is staying above the fray, claiming to support the efforts of all the wannabe stars of indoor rowing.
Crosby has assembled an experienced team, including fitness star Jay Blahnik and talent agent Julie LaFond More, to beat out the competition. LaFond More, who co-produced more than 20 Jane Fonda Workout videos, concedes that growing Crosby into a brand will take time.
"Josh is not an Academy Award-winning actor," she says. "But when it comes to rowing, he's the real deal."
As Crosby strives to bring Indo-Row to the masses, Concept2 is seeing its erg sales to health clubs take off, citing a 30 percent increase in gym sales in the last year. And Dreissigacker says he has seen the most interest in group rowing classes coming from the California gyms. Crosby's team is trying to ride this wave of popularity, but it has also set its sights on the home exercise and fitness video markets.
Crosby may be trying to achieve stardom through fitness instruction, but his passion for rowing - and family tradition - is undeniable. Just before the end of each class, Crosby channels those mornings when three generations of Crosbys launched their shells on the Charles River. He asks his rowers to close their eyes and take 10 strokes for a loved one or for someone they'd like to "send good vibes to." Red-faced and sweaty, they do as he says.
"I started doing that after my grandfather passed," he explains. "I always finish with 10 strokes rowed as perfectly as I can. It's a nod to Grandpa." 