After a 12 year hiatus, I started rowing in eights again on the Charles at Community Rowing. Because of my past experience, the organizer suggested I start with the level 2 crew where I'd been before. A lot of rust builds up in 12 years, so when I signed up it was with sweaty palms. The motivation to do well gets magnified with seven other rowers depending on your totally synchronized execution of each stroke. That's part of the attraction of rowing: the demand for pure attention while going all out physically; and the beauty of the result: the speed, the grace known as "swing", and the driving beyond yourself when it finally works.
At the first session, though, the coach sent a few of us who'd never been coxwains to the level 1 group to get that experience. (Coxwains are hard to come by, so rowers are rotating to that position, which demands its own training -- yes, they do a lot more than yell "stroke", and they hardly ever do that.) Some prideful part of me was crestfallen to go back a level, another part relieved. The people in level 1 are nice to be around, and the atmosphere is casual: very different from the almost-military rigor I remembered before, especially on the occasions when I was bumped into the competitive crew's boat to fill an empty seat.
So after one nice light rowing session, I did my stint as coxwain. It was miserable. As a coxwain, you need to exude confidence and authority, focusing eight wayward heads on you to bring this 32-limbed creature into sync. As a beginning coxwain, you have to utterly fake it and just bark loudly, especially when bringing the boat in and out of the water. I'm not good at faking it, but I somehow got through it without damaging anything.
Having paid these minimal coxing dues, I now thought I deserved the jump back to level 2. This chest-thumping beasty within trampled over the small voice that tried to remind me of a decade of encrustation. The next session, I talked my way back into level 2, feeling a little remorse at leaving the group of good people I'd just met. But because it was a fully attended day, there were more people than seats in the boat, so the coach had me sit in the launch with him for the first half of the workout as we buzzed alongside and watched the crew gradually build to full pace through a series of warmup drills. Halfway through the workout, he switched me into the shell, bringing out another rower. Oar handles finally in hand, I began the process of ripping off those chunks of rust and small shreds of palm skin.
Jumping smack into a fully warmed up boat of rowers and going full pace after years of inexperience, and on the opposite side of the boat from my habit (which threw off even the tiny remaining bits of muscle memory) was, let's say, humbling. "Three seat, are you having a problem? Do you want to persevere?", the seasoned coxwain intoned in his Scottish brogue after I'd caught a crab for the third time (a move feared by all rowers where the oar catches jarringly in the water), and we'd stopped. "Yes, if you can bear with me. It's been awhile." was all I could manage. "I can bear with you, but I don't want to go swimming." The goose-crap littered dock, when we finally approached it later, shown in the setting sun like sweet home.
All the next day, though I reminded myself of the obstacles I'd faced, there was continuosly a little part of my mind rehearsing to do better, and pretty nervous about the session to come.
Next time I was given the benefit of a full session in the boat. It was a big improvement starting at the beginning and warming up, and I avoided catching crabs. Just the same, I was clouded over by a lingering fear of bringing the boat to a halt again. But there were heartening moments of smoothness and swing. The coach's commendation at the end of the day, as we put away the oars, was this: "when you're good, you're very good, but when you're bad, you suck."
What I really want to get out of this is the conscious experience of being a beginner. That means a part of me needs to be just watching: watching the faults, the embarrassment, the pride getting in the way, the physical progress. And ready to be there when that swing happens again, even more than it was 12 years ago.
June 07, 2002 10:16 PM