Time for action — timing a stroke
The best way to figure out how long an action takes is to do it and time it. Now you'll do a rowing stroke to see how long the animation should be:
Sit where you can lean forward.
Hold your arms out and hold your stopwatch in one hand.
Start the stopwatch and immediately lean backwards, as though you are pulling oars against the water. This is called the drive phase of the stroke.
At the end of the stroke, move your hands down to lift the oars out of the water and lean forward. These are known as the extraction and recovery phases.
Then move your hands back up to the starting point to dip the oars back into the water. This is the catch phase.
Do this three times and then stop the stopwatch. Write down the time it took.
Repeat the timing two more times. Hopefully, all three readings are about the same. Take the average of these three readings and then divide that time by three to get the length of time a single stroke cycle takes.
Now, start the stopwatch and just...
