Rowing Crew

Pearl Lake - May 2021

​A rowing regatta - I’d never been to one before. I was here to watch my cousin Michael’s team, and I was in full-blown teenage awe. Tall, muscular college-aged women and men rowing long narrow boats across the water. Well-trained bodies sliding easily forward and back on track-mounted seats, the powerful pull of their oars precisely coordinated. I don’t remember if Mike’s team won, but I do remember the strength and grace of the sport and the athletes competing - it was mesmerizing.

Fast-forward a few years to my first week at UC Santa Barbara. I happened to see a flier for a meeting about rowing for the crew team and my intrigue was rekindled. That night I sat listening to Doug, the men’s coach, talking to the large audience about how this sport was not for the faint of heart. This was for the person who wasn’t satisfied running behind someone - this was for the person who’d bust a gut to pass anyone in front of them. This was for the person who would give it everything they had to get to the finish line. I was hooked.

There was a lot to learn. For one thing, jump squats hurt. The more we did, the more they hurt. Weight training - squats, deadlifts, lifting to failure -  was a new thing for me. I became familiar with the oar itself, and the set up of the eight-person shell, or boat: rowers, numbered one to eight bow to stern, sit with their backs to the bow, syncing their oar stroke partly off the eight seat (also called stroke) and partly off the small-bodied coxswain (cox) perched in the stern, the only person in the boat facing in the direction the boat moves. The cox was both coach and human metronome, and a key presence inside the boat. Although I rowed two seat, almost as far away from the cox as you could get, I could hear the cox loud and clear via the speaker system along the gunnels or the mini bull-horn they’d sometimes use.  

Afternoons were our dryland training: runs, ergs (timed 2000-meter workouts on an ergometer or rowing machine to measure progress), circuits, and various sadistic workouts our coaches concocted. 

Our mornings were devoted to rowing. Lake Cachuma, a large reservoir nestled in the Santa Ynez Valley in the mountains above Santa Barbara, was a lovely place to start our day. 6:00 am sharp at the boat house, a mere 45-minute carpool-ride from our dorm parking lot. How five of us crammed our long legs into the tiny Honda our teammate Jessica drove I will never know. 

Following practice our Amazonian tribe of women rowers would race back down to campus and hit the dining hall, all of us proudly sporting our old sweats with rings of black oil on the rear-end from the greased seat track. We’d take over a table like it was a medieval dining hall, plates piled high with eggs, pancakes, fruit and yogurt. We were not shy about our appearance or loud conversation or eating our fill. 

Part of racing means reaching for something more. Standard races are 2000 meters - just eight minutes of rowing. But sustaining the required intensity to be first across the finish makes those eight minutes hellish. The coxswains, the good ones, could pull something out of me I didn’t know I had. It was the coxes who were right next to us, straining and sweating and swearing during dryland training, who I wanted coaching me in the heart-bursting intensity of the race. The coxes who slid through training because they “weren’t rowers” were ones I didn’t want to pull an oar for. The coxes who experienced the mental and physical demands of training could use that understanding when lungs, legs, core and arms were screaming for mercy, to stop, or at least for your head to blow up so you wouldn’t register the pain. I’d be ready to pass out and the coxswain’s voice would come through, helping me tap into something a bit deeper inside, and somehow, I’d give it that much more. 

There were other learnings I picked up on my own. In our very first stadium workout, we lined up at the bottom, Coach Deb blew the whistle, and we ran up the first section of stadium seats. The goal was to turn around at the section top and make it back to the bottom starting point with a few seconds to breathe before she blew the whistle again. I simply paced myself and still had breathing time before the next round. I was cruising. 

Then I looked over at Margaret, one of the women in my eight. She was a burly athlete, but not the fleetest of runners. The whistle was going off well before Margaret made it to the bottom. There was no rest for Margaret. She did not give up, she did not complain, she was all in and pushing herself hard, lap after lap. I decided that I needed to up my game. If I was not pushing myself as hard as Margaret, I had no business being in the same stadium as her. Margaret taught me something valuable that day about how pushing yourself looks different for each person. She taught me about humility and respect.  

One morning practice at the end of the season, I was lucky enough to be in an eight with Teresa, a varsity coxswain I hadn’t rowed with before. More than skilled, she was gifted and could elicit great performances from her rowers. There was a fog hanging over the surface of Cachuma and each boat was assigned a specific area of the lake in order to avoid collision. It felt like we were the only humans on the planet out there. As one of our final workout segments, Teresa led us into a demanding sprint, and we were moving strong and fast. And then suddenly, I felt the entire shell lift up out of the water for a couple dozen strokes. We were still rowing hard, but it was effortless. It felt like we were flying. 

​This rare magic is called swing - the result of being well-trained, in sync, working hard as a team, and a little something more that I can’t quite put my finger on.