by Ginny Gilder
Everything hurt, including my butt. My hands sported new blisters, my lungs felt like they had been rubbed with sandpaper, and I wondered if I would be able to stand up when we docked. The race officials posted the results hours later, and we found our crew’s time in the middle of the pack, a nothing-special outcome. I had never felt happier.
So much had changed in the year since my first encounter with rowing on the banks of the Charles. I jumped shore into a new adventure, found my own boat, and was learning its ropes. I could see the future beckoning, where I could speak like a rower and maneuver my oar like an experienced hand. My body was starting to slim down and thicken up, as my extra cushion of chubbiness melted away and new muscles emerged. My hands were already toughened; my first set of blisters had thickened into calluses that covered my palms and spiraled up the insides of my fingers. They looked like warts, but they were mine and I was secretly proud of them.
As autumn yielded to the inevitability of winter, chill winds blew over New England’s open spaces. Rivers froze from Princeton to Hanover. There would be no more rowing outdoors until spring.
The start of indoor training coincided with the end of fall semester. By now, wending my way around campus, I often recognized and greeted various members of the group of twenty-five-plus regulars with whom I’d rowed through the lagoon’s murk. There were several freshmen to get to know, among them tall, lanky, brownish-blonde-haired Elaine Mathies, sporting a faintly Svenska look, thanks to her shoulder-length braids, whose 6´1″ frame must have caused Nat to salivate; stocky Sally Fisher, another shrimp, albeit a tad taller at 5´6″ than Chris Ernst; strong-looking, medium-tall (i.e., above my pathetic 5´7″ but not cracking the dreamy 6´ mark) Margaret Mathews, with an abundance of wiry auburn hair whose growing up in Europe and Turkey intrigued me; and another super-tall goddess in training, Cathy Pew, a pre-med smartie who projected an air of self-assurance I could only hope to fake. Besides the team’s Olympic aspirants—our captain Chris, whose natural charisma and quick wit got me liking her immediately, and Anne, whose obvious sense of disdainful superiority got me wanting to keep my distance—there were sophomores Jennie Kiesling and Lynn Baker, aka Bakehead. Both these upperclasswomen seemed more at ease than I felt, not just around the boats and all the associated accoutrements, which made sense, but with themselves. I hoped that in another year I would feel more comfortable in my own skin, like Bakehead, as she swaggered around, looking a bit like the bulldog of our team, with powerful shoulders; proud of her bulk and the power it gave her, she claimed it shamelessly. I found myself gawking with amazement at Jennie K, first because of her utter fascination with and deep knowledge of military history, and then because of her habit of counting every single stroke she took, whether in a practice or a race. Now there was a woman who could not be distracted!
I also knew my roommates by now—Maria and Gwen—and I had figured out we weren’t going to be best friends, although I liked them well enough. I knew the names of the girls in the suite across the hall and recognized most of the students on the lower three floors of Lawrance Hall, my dorm. I spent most of my free time in the early weeks of college with several of them, but my involvement with crew gave me an easy pass on forging lasting friendships, allowing me to step out of the social swirl without looking like the loner I was.
Aside from the press of my dorm’s social scene, I liked my new home, which reminded me of my hometown. I felt comfortable in New Haven, despite its well-earned reputation as dangerous, given its record of student muggings off campus. Although the city shared a grittiness with New York, the university’s private campus police force and focus on security kept fears of crime to a minimum. The campus was located squarely within the city and stretched several blocks in many directions, so the university’s attempt to maintain a separate identity was difficult. The dozen residential colleges that lay outside the Old Campus, with their ornate architecture, locked gates, and quads with lush green grass and low stone walls, served as oases of green peace from the city’s concrete and less savory elements.
Lawrance Hall, affectionately nicknamed “Lousy Lawrance” in my father’s era, was sandwiched between two other dorms, Farnum on one side and Phelps on the other. The row of brick buildings nestled shoulder to shoulder, like Manhattan brownstones, with their stairways leading up from the public sidewalk to the front doors of private homes. A slew of these buildings, including Wright, Durfee, Battell Chapel, Welch, Bingham, Vanderbilt, Street Hall, Linsly-Chittenden, and Dwight Hall, served as the boundaries of the quadrangle known as the Old Campus. Broken by four major sets of wrought-iron gates and another three or four smaller gates, they comprised the bulk of the freshmen’s living quarters, along with some buildings serving as office and classroom space.
Lawrance’s entry doors opened onto the Old Campus, whose graceful elm trees scattered among its sprawling open space and walking paths crisscrossed the green lawn. The dorm’s back windows looked out onto College Street and the New Haven Green. I lived on the fourth, and top, floor of my entryway. Another suite housing three more students was directly across the hall from my suite. A dank, cramped bathroom with a moldy shower and a single toilet stall opened into the hallway opposite the stairwell, shared by everyone on the floor. Nothing fancy, but certainly serviceable, with a hint of history in view everywhere, starting with Connecticut Hall, at the interior of the quadrangle, which was erected in 1752 and was the oldest building on campus.
I had entered a skewed new world, in which having officially been co-ed for the last 5 percent of its 275-year history, Yale’s men occupied way more than their share of every classroom’s seats, but this aspect of the surrounding culture neither informed nor deterred me. Self-absorbed in my own private transition, I didn’t think one way or another about the implications inherent in the situation. In fact, I was much more comfortable with my classes since discovering rowing: my fellow students weren’t all geniuses; my professors weren’t supercilious tyrants gunning for my failure. And the 24/7 presence of boys brought some advantages: I plunged into the dating scene, had some fun without getting entangled in the drama of romance, and slept with a couple of guys in my dorm. Even though the sex was just fine, I discovered that the physical intimacy I shared with them couldn’t compete with the thrill of stepping into a shell.
The upperclasswomen fretted about the onslaught of winter training—something about difficulty and intensity—but I nodded happily at their grumbles about weightlifting, running, ergometer pieces, stairs, circuits. I didn’t know what they were talking about, but by now the unfamiliar was no deterrent. I would be there, come hell or high water.
Ignorance was bliss.
Winter training stripped away the best of rowing and exposed its worst, magnifying the drudgery, monotony, and pain. There was no scenery to distract, weather to enjoy, boat to feel, or rhythm to seek. Instead, I spent every day in the dank basement of the cavernous gym attempting whatever marching orders Nat scrawled on that day’s torn piece of notebook paper pinned to the bulletin board. The experienced rowers translated the mysterious phrases for the novices, all synonyms for torture: stairs, 1–9b, 5–9b × 5; tanks, 3 × 15 min. @ full pressure/5 min. off; Edwards Street run; Nautilus, free weights, body circuit × 5; 6 minute ergometer; wind sprints.
As newly fit as I felt in November, by December I discovered I was an out-of-shape blob. I lacked strength and fitness, as well as the knowledge of how to build either. As for mental toughness, I’d never heard of it, so surely I needed to develop it.
Regardless of the methodology, the goal of weightlifting for rowers is to build muscle, whether it is a bicep, hamstring, tricep, glute, lat, quad, or ab. These muscles have to be strong, and their strength has to last at least as long as a two-thousand-meter race—which takes somewhere between six and seven minutes in an eight-oared rowing shell, depending on weather conditions and a crew’s competence. Assuming an average crew rows about thirty-five strokes per minute, factoring in the starting twenty
to forty strokes at the beginning and end of the race, when the rating can exceed forty, the average race requires nearly two hundred fifty strokes. If either a rower’s muscles or pulmonary system fail to deliver, the result is the same: her power production diminishes, her ability to maintain the cadence and synchronicity with her teammates decreases, and the boat slows down. A crew is truly only as fast as its weakest link.
I learned how to lift free weights: cleans, squats, dead lifts, bench presses, clean-and-jerk. I used nautilus machines: leg extensions, hamstring pulls, lateral pull-downs, and leg presses. The bench pull was a homemade torture device designed especially for the rowers: a bench raised four feet above the ground with a slot for a weight bar notched at hanging-arm length below it on one end. It resembled a sturdy ironing board made of wood, with a rectangular surface long enough to hold a person’s body. The exercise consisted of lying face down on the bench, chin hanging over the edge, and raising the weight bar—anywhere from forty to seventy pounds—to the underside of the bench, then lowering it to full arm extension. Repeat thirty times per minute for up to six minutes.
During a stroke, a strong rower can shove her legs from a compressed position to straight legged in well under a second; accept without hesitation the transition in load from the legs to the lower back, supported by the abdominals; link to the arms via the latissimus dorsi (the muscles under your arms that wrap around your back); and finish the stroke with a crisp pull of the biceps. Many of our weightlifting exercises mimicked a single element of the rowing stroke to isolate and strengthen those particular muscles: that way, leg strength could be built without being limited by wimpy arms, and individual rowers could focus on strengthening their own particular weakest links. Leg presses recreated the leg drive; dead lifts engaged the lower back to open up at the end of the stroke; bench pulls evoked the finish, where it was all up to the arms.
To build muscular strength, we lifted the heaviest weights we could muster. To build muscular endurance, we slogged through weight circuits, which lasted anywhere from fifteen to thirty minutes, depending on Nat’s mood, and never included a second of rest. Sometimes the goal was to perform a set number of repetitions of different exercises; other times, to complete as many repetitions as possible in a set amount of time. A circuit consisted of ten repetitions at each of several stations, which could include dead lifts, cleans, sit-ups, burpees, push-ups, bent-over rowing, arm overhead splits, squat raises. Nat manufactured homemade weight bars out of heavy plumbing pipes with cement-filled coffee containers glued to the ends: they ranged from thirty-five to forty-eight pounds.
Circuits, stairs, rowing, and running combined to tax and stretch the rowers’ cardiovascular systems in supremely vicious ways. Mere minutes into any of these endeavors, lungs begin to lag in producing oxygen to meet the muscles’ needs, and the muscles express their displeasure, immediately and emphatically. Without sufficient oxygen, a muscle will fail to deliver: and to a muscle, failure to perform as instructed by the brain spells disaster. So when muscles work hard enough to outstrip the available supply of oxygen in the bloodstream, they resort to backup mechanisms that are less efficient, but stave off disaster for a little bit.
In these moments, the muscle will manufacture its own oxygen anaerobically, which literally means “without air”—within the muscle itself. This shortsighted solution comes at a painful price: the production of lactic acid as a chemical by-product of the muscle’s desperate fix. The acid creates a burning sensation in the overworking muscles. Within two to three minutes of continued anaerobic oxygen production, the lactic acid level increases to the point that it diminishes the muscle’s effectiveness. The acid’s burn can progress into severe cramping, triggering a decrease in output and athletic performance. At this point, the muscles have no choice: they slow their production to match the oxygen aerobically available through the pulmonary system—through good old-fashioned breathing.
Developing cardiovascular fitness requires pursuit of a two-pronged goal: increase the amount of oxygen the pulmonary system can distribute to the muscles, and increase the muscles’ ability to work at maximal output in the presence of lactic acid. Athletes need lungs that can provide more oxygen and efficient muscles that can tolerate acidic discomfort. Nat proved a merciless expert in developing both kinds of fitness.
I forced myself to run outdoors in cold, slick weather, torrential rain, and wind-whipped sleet; to race sprints around the indoor track; and to leap endless repetitions of interminably long flights of stairs. I felt my breath quicken and shorten, my lungs ache with constant overdrive exertion, and my leg muscles seize as I pushed them beyond their capacity to sprint one more step, lift one more weight, row one more stroke, jump one more circuit, or run one more stair. I heard my body protest the workload, beg for a break, whine with the pain, and refuse to continue. And I learned to listen to the voices that communicated without words below the complaining: hope and desire.
I intended to survive this endless test. I wanted to get back outside into a rowing shell. I didn’t want to lose my chance to glide across pristine waters in the company of my teammates, our bodies arcing through the drive into the recovery, safe and controlled, predictable, an endless circle of magical motion. All that mattered was to live to fight another day, to get out in a boat one more time and feel the sun on my face, the water splash on my back, the pressure of the oar in my hand, the success of one more stroke.
Rowing had trapped me with its promise of beauty in motion. Winter training delivered nothing but ugly. Stinking sweat, heaving lungs, breathless exertion, endless effort, and exhaustion. Nothing of beauty to love, just the chance to toughen and test myself. That was enough.
I had never suffered from an all-over deep body ache before, with every major muscle throbbing. I had never been so tired that reading could put me to sleep in the middle of the morning. I had never struggled to get out of bed, hold a pencil, walk up stairs, or carry a loaded food tray.
Evenings after supper I lay on my bed, muscles stiff and sore to the touch, my body so coated with Ben-Gay that the pungent smell drove all visitors away. It hurt to sit up, to turn over, to cross my legs or raise my arms. Propping a book against my chest demanded more energy than I could muster. Staying awake past 9 p.m. proved impossible, regardless of my need to study.
Yet, somehow I successfully completed my first semester. I passed my exams and finished my papers, avoided academic embarrassment, and headed home for the Christmas holidays. I took my running shoes and sweats with me; I wanted to be ready to resume winter workouts in early January.
4
Second semester began. Although I had been a reliable regular on the team since early September, it took both time and circumstance for me to claim full membership on the women’s crew. To qualify as a team member, I only had to show up and do the work, without sharing stories or secrets about myself. I liked that what I did mattered, not who I was.
As drawn to rowing as I was, past experience taught me to be wary of relationships: trusting people felt riskier than relying on a skinny sliver of wood to hold my weight. But no novice could survive winter training alone. Chris Ernst’s tough-minded, slightly impatient encouragement that buoyed me enough to approach impossible challenges with a shrug, Anne Warner’s not so subtle putdowns that somehow galvanized me to push through excruciating pain, Jennie K’s casual mentions of military history tidbits that lightened my mood, and my fellow freshmen’s various states of disbelief, determination, and exhaustion from the tortuous nature of our daily workouts, which made me feel like I was part of something bigger than myself, all combined to keep my head above water.
We came from such different backgrounds—Sally Fisher from a conservative small town in Connecticut; Elaine Mathies from the puddles of Portland, Oregon; Cathy Pew from a fabled Philadelphia oil family, whose wealth she did her best to ignore; me from urbane and sophisticated New York, where the doorman shoveled the sidewalk when it snowed (Lynn “Bakehead” Baker, hailing f
rom the snowy Midwest and a family on a tight budget, never let me live down my request to shovel the boathouse dock one day after a snowstorm, a novel challenge for me)—yet when it came to practice, we were united in our sense of purpose and refusal to be bested by the daily posted instructions or by each other. The companionship and competitiveness of fellow rowers are as fundamental to success as oars to boat speed: there is nothing like the edge created by training companions who are slogging through the same workouts and trying their hardest to score the best running times, erg scores, stair-climbing speeds, circuit repetitions, and lifting maximums.
In the bowels of Paine Whitney, I learned my first rudimentary lessons about counting on those who kept showing up when the fun faded and the going got tough. Inevitably, our Olympic wannabes set the bar high for the nearly thirty girls who showed up daily and ticked off the required elements of every workout. As Anne and Chris trained for the spring collegiate racing season and the summer Olympics, I did the same exercises and drills they did—granted, they had better technique, did less huffing and puffing, and showed more speed. I could run with them (well, usually behind them), lift weights with them (okay, substantially fewer pounds than they did), and race up stairs with them (staggering several flights behind them). I watched them with awe, listened to them taunt and goad each other, and admired all of it. I fancied myself in their seats, slipping my feet into their foot-stretchers one day.
There were no secrets at the gym or on the water. The number of seats in a rowing shell was a fact: only eight people would row in the varsity. Competition among teammates was necessary, normal, and openly recognized.
For me, it was also deeply uncomfortable. I hailed from a different world, where jostling for position among my siblings was routine but unspoken, and yet somehow unsavory and wrong. I didn’t understand why I had to fight so hard for a bit of space, why there was never enough room for me to be myself and loved as I was. I had dedicated years to securing a place for myself beyond my older, stronger, funnier, smarter, and more likable sister’s shadow. I had alighted on a goody-goody strategy—good grades and good behavior to please my parents. But aiming to please came at a high price: in the shuffle of figuring out what they wanted, I lost track of what I needed and pleased no one. My mother was impossible to satisfy because she had dropped out of full-time parenting and spent much of her time abroad; who knew what she expected or wanted? My father proved tough not because he had high standards—although he did—but because he wanted everything to go his way. Even Peggy complicated matters: whenever I beat her, inevitably in the domain of grades, her irritation ruined any satisfaction I gleaned from gaining my parents’ attention. Win or lose, in my family I often felt as if I lost.