Course Correction

by Ginny Gilder

  After perusing the entries for the women’s quad, I indulged myself with a peek at the entries for the women’s single. Carlie Geer was one of a field of sixteen. There would be heats, repechages, and semifinals to determine the top six scullers who would compete for the medals. Carlie would race at least three times. The East German and Soviet women who had finished ahead of me and taken gold and silver the previous year at Duisburg were no-shows, victims of the boycott. Carlie had a great shot at gold. My gold.

  It still stung.

  I liked and respected my boatmates. Racing with them was much easier psychologically than going to the line alone. The presence of a competent coxswain also reduced the pressure. I didn’t have to steer or manage the race plan, nor problem solve alone if the ratio felt off or the cadence was wrong. I simply had to follow directions and execute our race plan with authority and confidence.

  But I had learned to manage my pre-race jitters on my own, to back into a stake boat by myself, to call my own race strategy, and to impel my top performance at my own behest. Every time I raced in my single, I proved again my resilience to my toughest critic—myself. And I loved rowing alone, feeling my shell glide through the water under my own power.

  Rowing in the quad didn’t bring the same level of challenge or satisfaction. I didn’t say those words out loud, but I knew. Of course I was thrilled to have made the Olympic team, to have landed in the stroke seat, and to compete. The fact remained: I was not rowing in the premier sculling event. I had no one to blame but myself, but that didn’t change a thing. I was jealous.

  Several of my family flew out for the Games. My mother chose the Olympics as her first race to attend, Peggy represented my siblings, and my father came without BG to divert his attention, accompanied instead by a film crew to commemorate the event. He’d engaged the crew earlier in the summer to film the trials in Long Beach, capturing that travesty on tape, so the guys knew me well by now. Josh was there, too, along with his parents, who were celebrating their daughter’s success.

  Races were held early in Ojai to beat the late-morning winds that ruffled the pristine reservoir waters of Lake Casitas. Thirty-six hours after opening ceremonies, we launched to race in the qualifying round. Our Monday morning heat ended in a nail-biter with a photo finish: after our crew crossed the line pretty much simultaneously with the Danes, long moments ticked by before the results flashed on the screen. The finish-line photo showed that our bow ball (the rubber attachment affixed to the pointy front end of every rowing shell to prevent injury in the event of a crash) had crossed the line a whopping one one-hundredth of a second ahead. We qualified for the finals without needing a trip to the reps.

  After the first race, my mother erupted in uncharacteristic joy. I accompanied her to a restaurant that afternoon for lunch. Televisions were positioned in the room’s corners, all sporting ABC’s Olympic coverage. Our heat from hours earlier came on the screen, and my mother started shouting, “That’s my daughter!” I shrank in my seat as other diners turned to look. Several people stopped by and offered their congratulations, all of which my mother accepted with pride. She had never held an oar, but now she acted like she’d been in the boat the entire race.

  On Saturday morning, finals day, the sun rose into a cloudless desert sky. I woke to the usual race-day anxiety gnawing at my confidence. The forty-minute drive from the Olympic Village to the course in the quiet company of my teammates gave me time to force down some bites of banana and drink some water. We arrived early enough to allow my PRTs to work their way through my system and cleanse me of any extra baggage. Then I took a jog along the lakeshore to shake out some of my nerves.

  The pressure of the upcoming moment made me nearly numb. The inevitable, unanswerable questions started. Would I pull hard off the line? Would I give up after twenty strokes? What if I let my team-mates down?

  Our crew had raced together only a handful of times, but we had established a pre-race protocol that accommodated our individual proclivities. We stretched in silence and brought our oars down to the dock. We had done all the needed talking the night before when we met with John, reviewed our race plan, and discussed any last-minute concerns. There was only one thing left to do: execute.

  It happened so fast. Our start left us damn close to last off the line, in fifth place, nothing new there. West Germany jumped out fast and far. We were in lane six next to the Danes, however, and the Westies were across the field in lane one, so they didn’t distract us too much. There’s nothing like racing from behind to kick you into survival mode. Not that my adrenal glands needed any more motivation to ramp up production; I was already in the race of my life.

  I’m not sure we ever really settled from our high strokes off the line: maybe for about twenty strokes. And a quad races one thousand meters a good thirty seconds faster than a single. No wonder the race flew by.

  After we passed the five-hundred-meter mark, we started catching up to crews, but we couldn’t ditch the Danes. They stayed with us, like pesky little sisters, the entire race, reminiscent of the heat. Maybe they thought they could beat us this time, given how close our heat times were, but we knew differently.

  The West Germans began to flag; they had gone out way too fast, the classic faux pas of “fly and die.” By 750 meters gone, the Romanians claimed the lead.

  Our coxswain, Kelly Rickon, egged us on: “We’re in third, you guys. We’re in the medals! Let’s go for silver. Come on, get me even with the Germans. I’ve got their stern. Give me their coxswain!”

  Every cell in my body burned. Kelly called our sprint, and I brought the rating up over a forty. We shortened our strokes and pulled for home. The crowd roared as we approached the grandstand, a mighty swell that reminded me I was not rowing for myself alone. All the people who had supported my dream rose up: the strangers who scrawled good-luck messages at the kiosk outside the Olympic Village during the week; my cadre of work cohorts who sent me reams of printer paper with “GO FOR IT” typed down the pages, inscribed with dozens of personal well-wishes; Harry, who believed in me without reason and gave me reason to believe in myself; my father, who challenged my dream every step of the way and yet emerged as one of my most valiant supporters; the rest of my family, who did not understand much about my sport, but came anyway because they loved me; the many other friends who had seen me through the years’ rough spots and high notes. Their energy alchemized inside me and poured out through my oars.

  Kelly urged us on. Only a few strokes left in the race of our lives. She looked across the field. “I’ve got their coxswain! Get me that silver!”

  We passed the West Germans with less than fifty meters to the finish line.

  Standing on the podium with a silver medal swaying from my neck, listening to the Romanian national anthem—wishing we were hearing “The Star Spangled Banner” instead—a resigned satisfaction crept over me. It was over. No going back. My pursuit of an impossible goal, nearly a decade long, had transformed into an instant of accomplishment and was now morphing into a memory.

  Later that afternoon, after the barbecue celebration with the entire crew, coaches, families, and friends, my father offered to drive me down to the main Olympic Village at UCLA where the bulk of the athletes were staying. Done with competing, all the rowers were moving there to attend the second week of the Games as spectators and then participate in the closing ceremonies.

  He lowered himself into the driver’s seat, slammed the car door, and grinned at me. “Well, kiddo, you’re a has-been now.”

  I sat silently for a minute, digesting the compliment masquerading as a barb. “Better a has-been than a never-was, Dad,” I responded.

  He laughed.

  For the longest time all I had left of that day was my medal and a photograph tucked in a cardboard box in a basement closet. For the longest time, the memories were gone. Why, I’m not sure. Yet when I look at that photograph, I see a hint. Four muscular women stand side by side with their beanpole-thin coxswain, hands claspe
d, arms raised straight above our heads like paper-doll cutouts. All identically dressed in snug navy blue rowing shorts and white tank tops with the USA Rowing emblem. All barefoot. Our medals hang from our necks, beribboned in green, pink, and yellow.

  Look at me in that photograph, with my head down. The other four are looking straight ahead, faces brimming with smiles. A study in contrasts. It’s easy to surmise what those four are feeling: happy, proud, satisfied. But not me. I’m not looking up, soaking in the moment with my compatriots, part of the happily-ever-after story going down in history right then.

  The hole deep inside me that I kept hidden so long is right there for all the world to see. In that moment, I should have embraced the fleeting, happy present, savoring its texture and flavor. I should have gloried in all I accomplished, all I overcame. I should have appreciated all that happened and how it unfolded. But I was already turning elsewhere, toward the next approaching danger, pondering the risks in the territory ahead.

  It took a long time, more long stretches of my life’s stream, before I started to hear those take-charge voices of doom clearly. It took even longer before I recognized the havoc they wreaked, and longer still before I stripped them of their authority and started making decisions based on love and joy.

  PART III

  Release

  16

  There comes a moment in every stroke when it’s time to stop pulling. That moment when your oar wants to come out of the water, that’s the release. Let it go. After exerting all that effort to propel the boat forward, you arrive at the end of the stroke. Nothing is left. Depleted of oxygen, out of water, you need time to breathe. Your oar needs to find new water.

  The stroke is over, but not the practice or the race. Many more will follow, more chances to perfect your technique, concentrate on power, improve your timing, and meet the struggle and joy that constitute every pull of the oar. Without this finish, there are no more beginnings.

  Progress is impossible until you know when to yield. Loosen your grip. Free the oar to exit the water. Breathe. Move on.

  My Olympic medal, elusive for eons, was mine to savor permanently. My decade-long journey to Lake Casitas had presented so much to confront and conquer. Surely I was well armed for life beyond the water. After all, I was resilient, persistent, never-say-die tough. I had pushed myself to tackle challenges most wouldn’t contemplate, much less attempt. Surely I had learned all the lessons needed for a happily-ever-after life.

  But I had never allowed myself to ponder what constituted happy. Doesn’t success? Satisfying your family? I never dreamed the road ahead could offer obstacles steep enough to challenge an Olympian.

  I’d been away from my job for over three months. My company had retained me on the payroll for the entire duration of my leave; I had to get back to work. I skipped the Olympic medalists’ tour around the country and trip to the White House, eschewing for the second time an opportunity to meet a US president and accept his congratulations.

  I went home.

  Of course, I couldn’t stop my affair with rowing dead in the water. I raced in the Head of the Charles again and won the women’s single for the third year in a row. But other than that fling, I tried to focus on real life, my job, my fiancé, and my upcoming November wedding, and to shove away nascent dreams of the 1988 Games.

  But concentrating on the near future was tough. Another secret gnawed at me: I wasn’t sure I wanted to marry Josh anymore. Gentle, unassuming, a genuinely good guy: I knew all that. But I also knew that he was no match for me. While I set my sights on reaching the stars, he kept his feet solidly planted on the ground. He happily cheered me on from the sidelines, safely sequestered from the competitive fray. Maybe I had enough fire in my belly for two, but could I thrive with a partner whose approach to life ran completely counter to mine? And, of course, I wouldn’t allow myself to contemplate the most obvious mismatch, the one I hid from the world.

  I secretly longed for Josh to break up with me; I knew I’d survive. But I couldn’t bring myself to break up with him; I couldn’t bear to hurt him that way. Crushing Strayer was bad enough. Over a year after our breakup, I couldn’t look her in the eye anymore. I had devastated her as my father did my mother. I couldn’t risk doing that to Josh, too, and shouldering the blame for having derailed one more person’s life.

  And I couldn’t afford to blow my cover.

  So instead I married the wrong person. I ignored my internal warning and catered to the preferences of the outside world. I submerged my private self to keep my public self above reproach. I fell back on habits learned in high school, when my father coached me in the first months after I moved in with him: pretend you don’t have asthma and breathe normally. Act like everything is fine.

  Swallow hard.

  I didn’t think about the consequences I was unleashing on Josh. I didn’t know about pay now versus pay later with interest, that the price for lying would mount with every passing day. We would both pay for my deception. The truth would out. But I didn’t know that at the time.

  We married. We moved to Seattle, where Josh had lived before and I was glad to go, hopeful that if I left the type A East Coast, I would leave the type A, never-satisfied part of my personality behind, too. Josh didn’t believe in a material life, and I hastened to agree with him that money couldn’t buy happiness—me with my boarding school and Ivy League education and Upper East Side background, deeply immersed in one of the more equipment-intensive and expensive sports around. I didn’t let myself think about the implications or difficulties of buying into Josh’s Birkenstocks-and-jeans, minimalist view of life. I had no idea our list of differences would include money, career, lifestyle, success.

  Maybe I could delude myself in my marriage, but I couldn’t trick myself when it came to rowing. For the first time in my ten years on the water, although I’d already set my sights on Seoul in 1988, the prospect of training made me grimace. An infinite loop of work, work, and—oh yeah—more work. A grind. I couldn’t put my finger on what was missing—maybe because I’d turned my back on my need for it elsewhere—but it should have been obvious: joy.

  Nothing felt good or right. Waking up early felt like a chore; watching the sunrise glitter on the water lost its appeal. My workouts felt sluggish and uninspired; I couldn’t dredge up any motivation to go the extra mile. The prospect of notching new personal bests in practices lost its allure. I told myself I still cared about training, but I felt like a fake.

  I didn’t allow myself to think about why I was struggling. Instead, I signed up to compete in the US singles trials for the 1985 Worlds. Who cared if things didn’t feel quite right? Surely I could force myself into shining when the time came to put myself on the line.

  But it didn’t work out that way. My performance proved unremarkable, underlining my newly lost connection to my on-water purpose. I didn’t even come in second! I felt like a fraud. How could I ever have been an Olympian? I was dead-ass slow. Once again, I was a mere wannabe who couldn’t measure up. It was tough to hold my head up and look anyone in the eye.

  After the trials, I loaded my boat and packed up my oars, saying good-bye to the competitors who walked by. I overheard one of them, Beth Holacek, of Olympics trial fame, who had accused me of deliberately flipping two years earlier, mutter derisively, “Oh, just go get pregnant and have a baby.” It was bad enough I had performed so poorly, but did that mean I was now only fit for motherhood? And was motherhood a lowly pursuit compared to the highfalutin’ aspirations of top-level athletes, something that, because it was pretty much accessible to all females, was simply nothing special? Since when did motherhood and peak athletic performance represent mutually exclusive endeavors, positioned at opposite ends of the opportunity spectrum?

  Nonetheless, the comment bolstered some of my own private thinking, although quitting didn’t fit into my calculations. I wanted a family; Josh wanted kids. If I timed things right, I could take one year off. I would have a built-in reason for taking a
break. The time off would rekindle my love for rowing and rejuvenate my competitive drive. I could return to competition the year before the Olympics, fitter, stronger, and hungry for a medal, with a more balanced life and a refreshed approach to racing. Perfect!

  I’d dumped my girlfriend out of shame and guilt. I’d married my boyfriend out of fear. Maybe a baby would solve everything.

  By the Head of the Charles in October, I was ten weeks pregnant and already railing against the restrictions of my state. Slotted to start first in the women’s elite single event, which I had won the past three years running, I was suddenly struggling with my asthma again, courtesy of the trip from Seattle and the temperature discrepancy between the two coastal cities. Insisting on not sharing the pregnancy for a few more weeks and not wanting to tip off my competitors, I swore Josh to secrecy, asked his doctor father for an asthma inhaler prescription without warning him of my new condition, and raced despite my chest cold and wheezing lungs.

  The outcome was horrible; Judy Geer passed me in the first half-mile of the race, and matters deteriorated from there. My official finish was a decidedly mediocre ninth. When I landed at the dock to greet my father and Josh’s parents, I could only muster one explanation: “Not bad for a pregnant woman.” They were mostly thrilled, but Josh’s father lectured me about allowing him to prescribe without knowing the full details of my condition.