by Ginny Gilder
My trance broken, I sat in my shell, oars finally at rest with their blades flat on the water, breathing ragged, trailing my hands in the water as I waited for the results of the photo finish to flash on the scoreboard. A cheer went up. I took another deep breath in, as I drew courage to look at the posted results. I glanced up quickly. My name was in third.
No guts, no glory. I shut down the naysayer in myself, if only for a few seconds and a few hundred meters, and in those moments someone else emerged. I went head to head with my doubt and fear. Some part of me shoved away the doubting for an instant and gave me breathing room to remember what I was supposed to do: just row. And in that instant, my love for all of it came pouring out and changed the course of everything.
Love conquered all; love, showing my heart instead of protecting or hiding it, that’s what won the day. I had never known that yielding to the truth would make such a difference.
By the end of 1983, I was the top female sculler in the United States. My summer racing season started with a matched pair of National Championship gold medals and flowed from there. In late August, I returned home from the World Championships with a bronze medal swinging from my neck, raced in the pre-Olympic regatta at Lake Casitas in Southern California in early September, and won the Head of the Charles regatta again in late October.
During my year of working intermittently with Harry, I had started to change. I had spent years proving people wrong, and now Harry gave me the luxury of proving them right. With his quiet words and imperturbable calm, he coaxed a nascent self-confidence in me, grounded not in the nightmare of my past, but in a dream of my future. From there, without knowing what was going on underneath my surface, I’d ventured out and tried something new: racing for the joy of it, not to escape or ward off disaster.
My sense of possibility and awareness that I was capable flowed naturally from the results of that hidden shift. I was now able to rely on hard evidence: competitors I bested, medals I won, records I established. This new part of me found its voice and showed its strength during the Worlds. I began to believe.
14
Intuition. Trusted and left to its own devices to hover in the unseen, to pick up signals, to interpret meaning from subtle shifts in the environment, and to transmit its conclusions to an open mind, it can be a powerful ally, despite the difficulty of tracing its process or justifying its judgments. This type of knowledge comes from deep within and, as such, contributes to the strengthening of one’s self-confidence. When its wisdom is borne out, the self gets credit for success, and confidence grows.
I didn’t believe in myself enough to respect my vague apprehensions that something was off. Instead I trotted down a path of pretense with Josh, convincing myself I was attracted to him and wanted him in my life going forward. When he announced his decision to move to Boston while I trained for 1984, I told myself I was thrilled. When he proposed to me the week before Thanksgiving, I accepted with alacrity, ignoring my internal jangling and the uneasiness that settled in my gut. I didn’t want to say no, because I didn’t want to think about what that answer might mean.
We set the date for a year later, after the Olympics, and began the usual preparations for the usual sort of wedding. Josh asked whether an engagement ring was necessary. He was poor, and I put on a pragmatic face. I told him that of course I didn’t want one. I didn’t need an ostentatious show of love. Why make the guy feel bad? I couldn’t wear a ring anyway; it would convert the callous at the base of my ring finger into a blister overnight.
I was secretly sorry that Josh took me at my word and disappointed that he never questioned whether I was lying. Strayer would have ferreted out the truth and would have insisted on knowing the real story. And I would have told her. She and I had created a safe haven where we could show ourselves to each other.
But I traded that safe haven for a different kind of refuge, where my real identity could hide from the light of day and I could escape exposure. In that place, getting what I wanted would not be possible, for being fully known was out of the question.
I happily anticipated the next cycle of National Team selection and all that it would bring: one final bout of winter training with my competitor friends to prepare for the Olympic Games; rowing on the river I loved through one more round of late winter, early spring, and incipient summer; plotting my training regimen under Harry’s tutelage; endlessly discussing the finer points of my technical flaws with Lisa; the constant back-and-forth of pushing harder, demanding more, hearing my weaker self’s plea for mercy and glorying in my increasing capacity to ignore its call. I looked forward to testing, testing, testing. I relished every opportunity to flash my untouchable brilliance when I lined up for a practice with Carlie Geer, Anne Marden, Strayer, Judy Geer, whomever—it didn’t matter: I was going to make sure they all knew they didn’t have a chance, a hope, or a prayer to beat me. Period.
On January 1, 1984, I leaped at the chance to go for a row on the magically open waters of the Charles. The first day of the Olympic year! No ice on the water, a miracle given the season. Clouds skimming across the gray backdrop, the temperature below forty degrees, but not freezing. No one else was out in the blustery weather. I seized my chance to gain an edge, however slim—an extra water workout while the others consigned themselves to the drear of an indoor practice or allowed themselves the luxury of a day off in honor of the New Year.
I gloried in having the entire river to myself. I rowed the four miles down to the Museum of Science, digging into the strong head wind that buffeted my oars as I reached back for each stroke. Bring it on; I welcomed the chance to develop more of the toughness required to row into a blustery head wind.
I turned around to head upstream back to the boathouse. The now-strong tail wind caught my oars. I had forgotten the corollary to a strong head wind—the destabilizing effect of a tail wind. Whitecaps broke over my hull as I struggled to maintain my balance. If I flipped, my odds of self-rescue in these hypothermic conditions were slimmer than my single.
I was in trouble.
My arms started to quiver and then shake uncontrollably. I looked around. I was rowing near the Cambridge side of the river, where a thirty-foot-high stone wall ran for over half a mile from my current position through the two bridges that lay ahead of me—Longfellow with its salt-and-pepper-shaker buttresses and the plain Massachusetts Avenue span. No shore met the water until past the MIT boathouse, beyond the second bridge. I had a long way to go before I would reach the safety net of nearby dry land.
Just shut up and row. It’ll be okay.
I had rowed into a potential disaster, ignoring the weather and obvious signs of danger. I had overlooked the warnings. Now I had to put my oars into the water carefully and pull steadily, but not gingerly, to return to safety.
I made my mind go blank, refusing to entertain the hovering what-if questions, and concentrated on the job at hand. Every time a wave caught one of my blades, I relaxed my grip on the oar to prevent its motion from disturbing the boat’s balance: tension would stiffen the blade and reduce the oar’s give, setting me up for a flip. I wanted to hang on for dear life, to clutch those oars like they were my babies, but I fought to keep my hands loose.
The seconds passed like minutes. Wave after wave crashed into my hull; I could neither regain nor maintain my balance. I wondered for a second if I’d switched sports; the boat behaved more like a surfboard or sailboat, despite its unsuitable design for either.
Finally I reached the MIT boathouse and cut close to the shore, where the water was shallow and slightly sheltered from the wind. I could stagger to dry land if I flipped along that stretch. As my adrenaline ebbed, the tension in my arms released. I felt as if I had rowed a grueling race, against the weather and against myself.
That was the beginning of a long winter of injuries and illness. Strep throat and asthma kicked up like winter storms, shredding my meticulously designed workout plans. Myriad minor but irritating muscle pulls also blew me off course. I
fought against these head winds to maintain my position, taking downtime to rest and recover, staving off the despair I felt beginning to build.
The cycle of nagging injuries, persistent exhaustion, and illness suggested that something was off, yet I missed the shift in my internal weather pattern. Focused on external yardsticks, I tracked my progress with conventional metrics: my stadium-running times improved, my bench-pull reps increased, and my coaches’ comments regarding my technique turned more positive. Despite my periodic setbacks, I grew physically stronger and my rowing improved.
Yet my confidence dwindled.
“I’m tired of rest. I need to train,” I ranted again at Harry. It was late March, and we were squeezed into his cramped office at Newell, at the top of the stairs on the second floor, wedged among chairs with wool vests, sweaters, hats, gloves, and rain gear stacked everywhere. Harry’s desk was drowning in piles of paper, weighted down by stroke watches. He was dressed for the water, wrapped in foul-weather gear from the waist down, his jacket off, while he tried to console me.
“You have to remember the goal. If you take care of yourself now and are healthy by the trials, you’ll be fine.” Harry repeated the sermon he’d been preaching for over a month.
I nodded, as if to agree. “But Harry, if I’m not strong enough or fit enough, who cares if I’m healthy by then? It won’t matter anymore.”
“You can maintain your fitness doing other activities, you know that. There’s no point to risk additional damage by rowing. Does your chest still hurt?”
“Yes, a little.” I had pulled several intercostal muscles located in the center of my chest. “But we’re getting so close to the trials.”
“Stay off the water until you’re better. You can get race-ready quickly as long as you’re healthy.” His serious expression matched his tone. He would brook no debate about training through injury.
“Okay, okay.” I sighed deeply. As I left, Harry smiled at me, gave me a giant hug, and ruffled my hair. “You’ll be all right.” I wondered if he knew I was going crazy inside.
I tried to be good. I went out on the water, but rowed lightly for one, maybe two practices. Even so, I felt waves of pain cascade from my chest. I knew I shouldn’t be rowing at all. Even normal breathing hurt after I got off the water.
In early April, I interrupted my recovery and flew to Los Angeles to accept an “Up and Coming Athlete” award from the Women’s Sports Foundation. I participated in a pair of workouts run by the women’s Olympic sculling coach, John Van Blom: he would be selecting the women’s quad following the singles trials, not that I cared about that, given my laser focus on winning the single trials and going for gold alone. But I welcomed a chance to gauge the speed of the Long Beach scullers, a group of competitive and confident women who included the queen of women’s sculling, Joan Lind, of 1976 Olympic fame. However, jet-lagged and distracted, rowing in a borrowed boat, I did not comport myself well. In fact, I rowed horribly against that passel of women. It was one more reason to feel disheartened and afraid.
I returned to spring: calm waters and sunshine. It was hard enough to stay off the water in crummy weather, but nearly impossible in dead-flat conditions. I was short on patience and long on worry: time was running out. My flight to the Olympic trials in Long Beach, California, would depart on May 7, and the first round of elimination heats was scheduled for May 10.
Ten days before my departure, I caved. I was gradually increasing the intensity of my workouts, and my intercostals were slowly recovering. The tide of pain was slowly receding. I took a chance and went out for a row, just to be on the water. I barely rowed, just easy paddling strokes, babying my waning injury. Partway through the workout, I felt some muscles jam under my right armpit, a knot of spasms settle between my ribs and a localized swirl of pain. A new problem at a new location. Damn.
I showed up at my physical therapist’s office early the next morning and got four trigger-point injections directly into the spasm, two of Novocain to relax the contorted muscles and two of cortisone to decrease the swelling and speed recovery. Along with reducing inflammation and promoting healing, cortisone masks pain and weakens scar tissue—problematic side effects for someone who can’t listen, who ignores her body’s warning signals, and who won’t follow directions.
“No rowing today. Give the injections a chance to do their work. You can do a light work out tomorrow,” my therapist said.
“Yup, no problem. I can do that.” One day off and I’ll be all better. Surely I could restrain myself that long. I’d dodged a bullet; a single day off in exchange for a full recovery was a bargain. I drove out to my Waltham office and spent the day working, tending to customers’ software problems, happy to distract myself.
Yet, somehow, five o’clock found me waltzing down the Weld Boathouse dock with my single balanced on my head, oars on the dock ready for duty. Sunshine reflected off every shiny surface. The river mirrored the sky’s perfect blue with an extra dash of diamond sparkle. The brilliant late spring weather had lured me down to the river and onto the water, but I sternly promised myself no hard work, as if my words carried any more weight than the air they floated on.
It was twelve days before my first Olympic heat.
I launched, headed upstream, and warmed up to the top of the Head of the Charles course. The pain was gone. I felt loose. My skin heated up in the sunshine. Perspiration trickled down my arms and the back of my legs, and my tank top darkened as the sweat soaked in.
Lulled by the ease of my warm-up and the lazy afternoon sunshine, I didn’t devise a workout plan. I followed my desperate, misguided intuition. First I rowed a pair of three-minute pieces at a moderate thirty beats per minute. Maintaining the rating was difficult, but I concentrated and stuck with it. I had to power through the discomfort with the rating to refamiliarize myself with higher cadences. Then I rowed a pair of pyramids: sequential sets of ten, twenty, thirty, forty, thirty, twenty, and ten hard strokes, with even rest between each. Then I pushed the rating back up to my normal race cadence, low mid-thirties.
And kept pushing. If I could just regain that familiar feeling of certainty that I could move a boat on a whim, that I was unbeatable, I’d be ready. I could tell I was close. I was approaching that sense of supremacy, reaching, ready to pluck it like a ripe, juicy apple hanging off a high branch. I could almost taste my returning speed. I was eager to reenter the flow of joy and reclaim the satisfaction that I could count on myself to deliver once again.
As I headed downstream back to Weld, passing under Anderson Bridge in the middle of my final power twenty, I felt a pop under my right arm, like a tiny balloon bursting. A hot stab of pain followed.
What the hell? I stopped rowing immediately, sat breathing hard for a minute, waited for the throbbing to abate, and then started again.
I lasted one stroke. The pain sliced so hard and deep that I couldn’t make myself pull.
Oh, fuck, what have I done?
Wait a minute, try again. Maybe something got temporarily tweaked or twisted up. Deep breath. Pause. Another stroke, more gingerly attempted.
Same result. Shit!
I tried to make myself take another stroke. Linking up at the catch and putting pressure on my port oar felt as if I were thrusting a dagger into my side.
Come on, one more power ten. I girded for the pain. But advance knowledge didn’t help; my will collapsed at the first jolt of pain as intense as an electric shock. It felt lethal. “Do what I say” lost its power: I couldn’t make myself row.
If ever a person could rewind time, this would have been a fine time to locate the reverse button. I longed to return to the moment when I had conned myself into thinking a brief row would be okay and inject an instant of good judgment. Give me one last chance to go back and remind myself to withstand the pressure of shortsighted desperation, to stop my fear from dictating the terms of my game just for once.
But I knew I had just killed my dream.
I finally made it back t
o the dock, wincing with every stroke, flinching as my arm muscles accepted the load of pulling. My eyes stung with angry, bitter tears. This injury was not going to be shot away with cortisone or coaxed to a manageable level by pills. All the training in the world was no contest when it came to the kind of damage I sensed in my body. Beguiled by my own sirens, I had pushed myself beyond my physical capacity. Lifting my boat out of the water, I felt my pulse throbbing under my arm right where the bubble had exploded.
I couldn’t listen to myself anymore, but the words wouldn’t stop. They poured through my head and heart in a rush of hopeless anguish. You blew it, it’s over, you fucking idiot, how could you have done this, whatever you just did, this injury—whatever is wrong—is not going away overnight. It’s all over.
But I tried to keep going. I struggled through the next few days, trying to row my workouts in spite of the pain. Impossible. I couldn’t take a single stroke without crying. The dagger in my side twisted deeper with every pull of the oar. Poison seeped into my thoughts. I was a goner and had no one to thank but myself.
I floundered even deeper. I reverted to old habits. I didn’t return to my physical therapist. A diagnosis would do no good. I avoided Harry as long as I could. Dealing with my situation alone was unbearable, but at least I could stave off the demise of our relationship.
But I couldn’t avoid him forever. After all, he was accustomed to my regular, impromptu visits. On the afternoon of May 1, I finally showed up at Newell and confessed.
“Why are you doing this to yourself?” Harry asked, sounding more incredulous than angry.
I had let him down, the guy who stood up for me when I couldn’t stand up for myself, who taught me self-confidence by modeling confidence in me first, who loved me not out of obligation but because he couldn’t help himself. I flouted his instructions, discarding his irrefutable logic. I flung myself beyond the reach of his training and experience, and landed in a desolate sinkhole.