Over the last two weeks, I’ve had a small breakdown, decided to take a break from rowing competitively for a while, made some decisions regarding my career & business, acquired a minion, and pulled myself back from being such a friggin’ girl.

sometimes you just need someone to remind you not to be a chick.

In the course of my situational rollercoaster, I had about a week where I thought I should say yes to a possibility that was a bad idea. Then a Frenchwoman was kind enough to metaphorically smack me upside the head & remind me that just because certain situational issues had changed didn’t mean that certain personality differences had altered, so at the end of the day, I had the choice of whether I wanted to have a friend or an inevitable ex-boyfriend – given the way I presented that information, you can probably guess which I chose.

the stuff that oars contribute to.

I’m not quitting rowing. Let’s just make that clear. But I need some time, and some distance, and just… a break. I need to not care about rowing so much, and work on other aspects of my life before I think even about backing up to a stake boat again.

source

Initially, I chose to take a week off from exercise completely. What did I do with that extra time?

I slept.

Oh yah. I slept. And slept. And then, when I was done with that, I slept some friggin’ more. At one point, Jenny from Forrest Gump called & was like, “Damn girl, you got skills.”

But sleep doesn’t last forever. Much to Zoey’s disappointment, eventually you have to wake up, roll your sleep-groggy arse out of bed and see to the rest of your life.

Getting my land legs back.

I took a week off exercising completely, and then only did some light cardio last week – 45 minutes on an arc machine at heart rate is a full workout for alot of people, but for a rower that’s just enough to justify sitting (okay laying) in the dry sauna followed up by a nice long shower.

The first workout back after I’ve taken time off is usually kind of… rank. And I mean that in the odoriferous sense. Exercise really is how my body detoxes – I sweat on a ridonkculous level, and if I go more than three days without exercising in some fashion, the sweat that I throw off in that return workout really is just… well it’s noxious. After a whole week off… ugh, I don’t even want to suggest to you what those clothes smelled like when I pulled them out of my gym bag. ’twasn’t pretty, people. just. not. pretty.

It was kind of weird, not having that… routine of working out as part of my daily life. You notice odd things — this weekend I realized this was literally the first time in years that all of my workout clothes were clean & in the appropriate drawer at the same time.

I think the dogs were a little startled to have me around that much. Ernie was thrilled, but Zoey kept looking at me like, “What’s the catch?”

However, we all know that Sedentary!Claris only lasts so long, so thanks to a story involving a pair of pants that I’ll share at another time, I decided to do the San Francisco Half Marathon at the end of July — partly because I’ve lived in LA for a decade & never been to San Fran, but also because the finish line for the 1st half marathon is only about two miles from Lovely Poet & Missi’s apartment, so I won’t have far to go before I can fall over afterwards.

hustlin’ with help.

Along with smacking some sense into me so I didn’t was less likely to make stupid decisions in my romantic life, the aforementioned frenchwoman also said, “You have this competitive drive that you pour into sport, but in the long run it doesn’t gain you much for the rest of your life. I don’t understand why you don’t take that same attitude and apply it to business? Wouldn’t the results of that solve alot of other problems in your life?”

That was very hard for me to hear. Not due to an unwillingness to recognize the inherent truth therein, but because it forced me to concede the one thing none of us ever want to admit — the French were right.

So for me, this summer is also about finally getting my arse in gear & doing what I should have been doing way before now — treating my business like a career instead of a job. That means going through & redoing my contracts, finishing up the revamp of my portfolio, doing some sites for strategic purposes, & launching one of my own projects.

Truth told, it’s gonna be a whack of work.

Which is why it kinda works out that one day in a boathouse locker room whilst shooting the sh*t with a teenager while I was getting dressed, I ended up finding a minion.
If you’re a rower, that sentence is completely legal & actually did make sense. Just trust me & roll with it.

So Veni is going to come help me out this summer, and we’ll see if, between the two of us we can’t take over the world – within project scope, of course. Shouldn’t be too hard, I finally signed up for Basecamp, so once I get done with the tutorial webinar on Monday, we can totally map things out, and before you know it, domination shall be mine. Just you wait & see.

Music: Florence + the Machine (MTV Unplugged)

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Well… sort of.

Where other places have snow & cold, we have wind & rain — from the middle of January until about the end of March, there’s about a 75% chance that things will look like Winnie the Pooh’s Blustery day fell off the wagon & went on a drunken rampage until April comes along to smack the atmosphere out of its drippy bender.

For rowing, this is both good and bad.

Good, because you have the possibility of being able to train on the water — I’m sure East Coast rowers reading this are like, “Yeah, I’ve been off the water since November, so I feel really bad for you right now.” And then they play a quick riff on the Tiniest Violin in the World before going back to their winter erg dungeons while they wait for the ice to get thin enough for a coach’s launch to break a pathway for them to row.

Bad, because we have hope. A shining, beautiful aspiration to great winter training conditions which the weather then proceeds to smash to smithereens with things like 20 mph winds.

Exhibit A: The Pairs Matrix.

Z has a very straightforward method for determining the varsity 8+ – he takes a week & systematically seat-races the girls in pairs. The Dreaded Pairs Matrix.

I have been around for, oh, maybe five or six years of them, & I think only … two(?) have been finished first try during the week he tries to do it.

Completely normal for them to get cancelled due to wind. In fact this year I took a small snippet of video on that Wed to demonstrate the 15kt winds tossing around the sailboats at Bear!Boathouse that week.

… his reply was silence, which in Z’s world is what he says when he knows he shouldn’t say what he wants to say.

It’s actually gotten to the point where I said to him last week, “Look, I say from now on, you pick the date of when you want it, then go, ‘okay, that’s not going to work’ and push it forward two weeks.”

“Actually,” he admitted ruefully, “this year it got delayed a whole month.”
And then maybe we chuckled.

All I can say is that it seemed okay at the time.

A few weeks beforehand, I’d said, “Sure, I’ll do Spring Regatta — I’ve never done a 2k in a single before, I’ll just go bang around & see what happens.”

Note to Everyone I Will Ever Know Ever: Please do whatever you can to stop me from saying the words, “I’ll just see what happens” — because it turns out that’s a really bad idea.

We looked at the weather & went, “We can row that.”

The weekend of March 17th however, we all were in a bit of dread. There were two regattas at Beach!Boathouse that weekend – juniors on Saturday, masters on Sunday.

They’d predicted rain, which rowers can ignore.

And wind, which we cannot.

Saturday was overcast & yicky and windy. I went down to Beach!Boathouse for two reasons:

1. I needed to move the new shoes I’d put in last weekend down one notch on my footplates & better to do that the day before the race than realize you’d forgotten to do that once you’d lauched for your warm-up 40′ before the race.
   If you’re asking whether that would actually happen, you’re a new reader of this blog, so to you I say, Hello! Welcome.
2. the mens’ team at Bear!University was racing UCSB, so Bear!Boathouse was going to be a madhouse. It was actually safer to drive 45′ to Beach!Boathouse & avoid that crazy-headed-ness.

Recently Beach!Boathouse actually acquired some spin bikes, so I decided to risk the odds and bring my clips down with me to see if my knee had fully recovered from this winter’s mishegas.

Flyweight & a couple others were there, also improv-ing an indoor workout for the day, so I was able to get on a bike & for the first time in at least six months, there was no pain when I cycle. At first I was dubious, but 45 minutes later I was willing to stamp victory on the exercise. Sweet!

By this time, they’d gone from trying to figure out if they could run the junior races in the wind to throwing a couple boats out on the course as an experiment. After all, it’s just teenagers — they’re mostly made of rubber, right?

I made my way over to the other side of the stadium to see what there was to see, but mostly because I had come to the rather late-in-the-game realization that I only had navy short spandex for the following day, and if I went with those, I was gonna freeze.

So while I did plan on stopping in to say hey to Z‘s Rolling Road Show Extravaganza & Callaghan‘s… actually, Callaghan hasn’t really made a showy name for his team, so I shall simply call it… his team. Yes, that works.

Anyway, I was going to go visit, but more than that, I was really hoping that the JL tent would be there so I could get myself some navy capri spandex and not freeze my arse off attempting to be in uniform the next day.

At least, that was my intention.

However.

In the time it took me to park & walk the 500m from my car to where the JL tent would normally be, the skies opened, and I was soaked to the bone.

…and if you noticed my use of the term “where the JL tent would normally be”, you can guess that JL had the good sense to stay home, putting them one up on the rest of us.

At that moment, a couple of Salter’s novices walked by going, “Hey! It’s you!” — because this was actually the first time they’d seen me a) outside of Bear!Boathouse b) wearing something other than spandex.

They told me all about how their race had involved the fact that they’d never rowed that lineup before and that, for some reason, the rudder wouldn’t go left so they’d only sort of been in their lane, until I finally went, “Okay guys, this is great, but the JL tent isn’t here and I’m already drenched, so I’m going to ditch you all & go home where it is dry.”

Being rowers, they understood that philosophy & we all said words in the hope that the weather will be better for my race the next day.

…and then the gods laughed.

I woke up on Sunday morning ridiculously early – not only because I’d made myself go to bed at like, 8 the night before, but also because in a couple hours the LA Marathon was going to be going right past my door, so if I didn’t get outta Dodge at 4:30am, it wasn’t gonna happen.

…which is how I ended up pulling up to Beach!Boathouse at 5:15am on a Sunday morning — turns out when there’s no one on the road, it’s WAY faster to get places. Who knew.

At that point, it was already windy, and there was light rain. My race was (theoretically) at 7:05am, and at 6 I looked at the boathouse president & went, “…is this a good idea?”

And Boathouse!President, who of course wasn’t rowing that day, went, “Oh, sure! It’s fine!”

Lemme tell ya – it was not fine.

Around 6:20, Flyweight & I were on the dock. Due to having registered as a Masters’ rower for the first time, I was in the event directly after the Open rowers. Add in that they’d combined some races to save time, I was rowing at the same time as 17-year-old Flyweight (the only open lightweight) and a 58-year-old woman from LGBC who was, as far as I could see, rowing a MAAS.

Okay. Sure.

Flyweight & I were launching, and the wind, it was a-whippin’ back & forth enough to shame Willow Smith.

Here’s the trick – the day before, when the juniors had raced, it was a tailwind — it went towards the finish line, which has the amusing side effect of making a couple of those novice boats get the idea they were suddenly helluh fast. As Z said later, “yeah, they’ll be disappointed for the future. I mean, we’re good, but we’re not that good.”

But for our races, it was a head wind — which goes away from the finish line.

To give an idea of the wind at that point: when we were launching, I didn’t push off — I just let go, and the wind took my single cleanly away from the dock so efficiently that I had to hold on starboard so that I didn’t crash into the motorboats in the slips 500ft across the channel.

Upshot: in order to finish the course, you would literally be pushing against physically palpable forces of the earth itself.

Earlier in the week, I’d asked Z for a warm-up plan under the idea that hey, even if this was just a bang-down-the-course practice run, I should still get into the habit of what a pre-race routine would be, etc. He gave me a nice little routine, with pick drill, and varying steady state, and a couple power tens, running through starts — all the usuals.

Frack if I got any of that done.

This was not racing — this was survival rowing. In the chop, going with the wind, it took me about six minutes to go 1000 meters. Because yeah. It was like that.
for non-rowers: yes. that’s bad.

The majority of my warm up time was spent negotiating the length of the stadium against the wind & then rowing the 2000m back up to the start line, at which point I found most of the others had taken up the same philosophy as me — stay near the start line & row to get to the finish.

and away we go! …well, sort of.

First out the (metaphorical) gate was the Open 1x event. Normally, this is the one that I’d have registered for, since at the ripe old age of 32 I qualify for an age handicap, but I’m not old enough yet for it to be of any, you know… help. Plus, there’s a part of me that prefers to win or lose based on what I actually did rather than some jiggery-piggery math done afterwards.

In this case however, I went for the Masters’ category for two reasons:

1. I was just rowing to get the experience of rowing, so I didn’t care what the ranking outcome was — the goal had been to just row straight and complete.
2. Everybody in the Open Category was at Beach!Boathouse for their winter training before they tried out for the National team. In an Olympic year.

When Coach Ian had remarked on my choice, I cited those two reasons & added, “If there’s anything you all should have learned about me by now, it’s that while I may sometimes appear crazy, underneath it all I sure as sh*t ain’t stupid.”

In all honesty, I also figured that since they’re a bunch of rowers Training for An Actual Thing, I felt like I should have the respect for them to… well to basically not get in their way. So I registered Masters & wished them well.

Now, the course at Beach!Boathouse is a full 2000m course. It was actually the course used for the 1984 Olympics, but it’s no longer eligible for international use due to the bridge that now spans it.

That’s right — we’re doing a 2k in wind and chop through bridge openings.
Yay! :thumbs up:

Also? Due to the wind, there were no buoys or lane markers. Why? Because it’s more fun that way, that’s why.

The Open event lined up & (sort of) got whatever point could be attained in those conditions, & off they went. Due to conditions, both safety boats went with that group, delaying the start to our race.

As Flyweight & I sat there, paddling a light steady state to keep our boats in place, I was watching the trough of the wave go deep enough so the crest cleared my hull about midway up the length of the stern, and looked over at Flyweight, whose complexion was giving my Flilippi white a run for its money.

Here’s the thing – the morning, I weighed 165.4 lbs. (non-rowers: of course I weighed in – it’s a race day.) My erg scores are built on having the spent my pre-crew years doing squats as a kickboxer, and due to having learned to row behind a 6’4 guy, lower rates are kinda my jam. As such, while I knew the row would suck, I knew I had the skill and, to be indelicately unfeminine, the sheer body weight to get it done.

The 17 year old, 114lb kid in the lightweight Stämpfli next to me? Not so much.

At that point, I pulled a card that I very rarely use. I became The Adult in this Situation.

“Are you okay to row?”

Flyweight looked at me, startled — this is not a question normally asked in rowing. In rowing, you tough it out. You suck it up, you do what the coach tells you & you don’t question.

“I, I think so,” she told me. However, since her round-as-saucers eyes were in conflict with the words coming out of her mouth, I tried again.

“Hey,” I said sharper than I normally talk to the kids, “If you are not okay, we will go in, and if anyone has a problem with that they can take it up with me & I will tell them I made that decision for you. So I’m gonna ask you again – are you seriously okay to row?”

“Yes,” Flyweight nodded. “I, I wanna try.”

Okay then. So while we were waiting for the safety boat to come back, I sat there & talked her though what she was supposed to be doing technique-wise – cut the layback so you don’t get stuck, pay super attention to bladework since the littlest bit of under or over rotation would catch a crab, and only go as high a rate as could be safely managed. We agreed that we’d row the piece together at least through the bridge & see what happened from the 1000m pole through the finish.

Finally, finally they lined us up.

If, that is, you define “lined up” as that the Club president who said it’d be “fine” stood on a dock & kinda sorta called the bow balls & then Attention-ROW!‘d really quick.

May the odds be ever in your favor… you poor bastards.

We took off.

Okay… we tried to take off, and eventually started going in a direction away from the start line.

This was the complete opposite of the 1k I did this summer — that was just frenzied and crazy and what-the-hell-just-happened.

You know how they’ll take video of people doing a 2k and s-l-o-w it doooooooown so that you can see the technique?

This was like that. Except in real time.

According to weather.com, the wind at the 7am hour was “7-8 mph, with 12 mile gusts”.

To which I say, Yes. That. Except what they don’t say is that if the main wind was going along the route of the course, the gusts were going across it, which meant that every so often, through no effort on your part, you would just find yourself swept about 20m to starboard. Just… fwwoooop! probably the closest I’ve come to my very own Transporter, except the whole thing is way less funny without Simon Pegg to ask if anyone has a towel.

Thankfully, I made it through the center opening in the bridge at the 750m, only to have another one of those gusts sweep me over into the next “lane” around 900m. The safety boat, which was behind Flyweight & the lady from LGBC, actually shouted at me, “Claris, port! Port please!”

At this point, I was a good 250m ahead of the LGBC rower — we’d gotten through the bridge & since I could see that the other safety boat had Flyweight in their sights, I’d started to pull ahead in the spirit of just getting this over as quickly as possible. When I was about 400m ahead of everyone & the safety boat once again started going, “Claris, go port…” I finally made use of my lungs & yelled back, “I’m trying!” which seemed to startle them enough to leave me alone for the rest of the course.

Now, for the non-rowers reading this, a 2k is normally done at a 28-32 stroke rating, & since this was supposed to be just me screwing around down the course, I’d been looking to go somewhere in the 2:04-2:06 area for my splits. Nothing crazy, just a nice, crisp pace down the course.

2:45, 2:32, 3:01 — those were the kind of splits I saw going down the course at my whopping 24, 25 stroke rate. I mentioned to @Steeesh that going past the 1000m pole I’m pretty sure I saw a 3:05, and she was like, “At that point, I’d have stopped looking altogether.”

Pretty much, yah.

It was actually worse in the last 1000m.

Normally, that stretch of water looks like this:

But on that day, with no buildings close enough to block the wind, it was just a straight out meteorological free for all — once I’d seen that Flyweight was covered, I’d started actually putting my muscle behind the stroke, and all that got me was that in throwing myself into it for the last half of the race, I went at almost exactly the same pace as I had when I was sandbagging to keep level with a flyweight rower for the first 750m. Awesome.

Technical advice: survive.

I actually had a couple of new-ish / unused to such conditions rowers ask me later how they cold prepare for their turn down the wind tunnel.

The thing is, in that situation, there’s really not much you can do to make yourself go any faster down the course other than to stay upright & pull like Clydesdale.

Personally, my strategy was a nice, sharp almost-flip-catch, give a blink extra time at the front to make sure my blades where in nice & stable, and then treat every stroke like the first of a sprint start — instead of hitting it hard, prrrrrrrrryyyyy off the front for the first 1/8-1/4 to ensure that you have the best blade placement possible, & then really engage legs & add force on through the rest of the drive, because in those sort of conditions, you can’t afford to miss your blade placement if you want to stay out of the drink.

oh for the love of god – are we there yet?

The last 350m, my rower instincts clicked on, & I reflexively thought, “Okay, even if this is the crappiest race ever, I’m gonna kick it up for the last 250m — I can at least do a 28 rating, dangit!”

…and the wind laughed & said, “No, no you really can’t.”

As such, I managed to clear the finish line at an impressive 24 stroke rating. Looking up, I could see Flyweight a good 850 away from the finish, pulling with all she was worth, and the older lady from LGBC had somehow gone from being on my starboard side (left) at the start line to drifting aaaaaaaaallll the way over to the beach side which was a good 250, 300m across from me on port (right).

Normally, I would just say “Bless her for comin’ out” and move on, but I honestly just have no idea how she managed that one considering that the wind was pushing us all in the opposite direction — if nothing else, I’m kind of in awe of the left side of her body for pulling that hard, so hats off to her, man.

Any landing you walk away from.

I waited for Flyweight to finish her piece (I’m not even going to dignify this experience by calling it a “race”) and as we were rowing back towards the dock, I chose to decline her previous invitation to row a quad later that afternoon when the predicted winds were around 21mph. Having just finished a twelve minute 2k, she totally understood where that was coming from.

A bit later, once the semantics of racking my boat had been taken care of, I sent the following text to Z to let him know how things went:

Awesome right? I know.

Official score: what the frack.

The small comfort I have is that for the Open event, whose Nat’l team-hopeful participants would consider a 7:30 time a slow day, the results ranged from a 9:39 to a 10:16. Because it really was like that.

Personally, I think that the best (and most laughable) part is that, after all that, I really did lose the race. Remember that age handicap thing?

Why did this happen? Because we’re rowers & we’re crazy.

Other than cancelling the 1ks in singles later in the day, they really did keep going & run all the races. Not with me in any of them, but yes, they happened.

As for me, I still have no idea what my time is running a 2k on the water — at some point maybe I’ll catch a timing in the creek if Z has a single going to Nationals this year. We’ll see. I’m not all that worried. As JvB said, “The good news is that after this, anything you race is a PR.”

Who knows — maybe next time I’ll get up to a 25 and a half stroke rate. What? It could happen!

Music: Slow Pony Home – The Weepies (Say I Am You)

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Yup. That’s the bottom of a boat. A boat that I normally row.

so… how was your Sunday?

For the record, it really wasn’t my fault.

Sunday, I was going up the marina at a good clip, about 80% pressure so a 2.04, 2.05 at a 27,28, doing what I should be doing.

All of a sudden, one minute I was at the catch, the next I was rolling sideways into the water.
(which despite what people think about California, is no small amount of cold in February)

No, I did not hit a buoy, thank you very much.

It seems that a coach from Neighbor!JuniorTeam was bowing a 2x with a high school rower, decided it was time to go in, turned around to go horizontally across the traffic pattern to head back up to their boathouse, & somehow completely missed the sight of me alone in the middle of a deserted marina going full tilt up along the approved traffic pattern.

As such, N!JT Coach started to paddle across. The result? A great moment in boat repair history wherein I came straight up and, due to my momentum, over their bow hull.

I said to Salter afterwards, “Thank god I was at the catch when it happened & my bow ball was out of the water — if I’d been at the finish, I’d have hit straight on & we’d probably be talking about replacing the back end of the boat.”

In terms of my day, I was on the 6th of 10 intervals, so I was literally smack dab in the middle of my workout when I got thrown into the water mid-stroke.

To her credit, N!JT Coach totally took responsibility for what happened, which was nice. Unfortunately, that still left me bobbing up & down in the middle of the marina with a single that might or might not be leaking, which was… not nice.

This was the point where my workout became a biathalon.

Second event: swimming.

I can get back in a MAAS or Peinert like most people breathe — I teach Sculling I, for me it’s not a big. However, the Fillipi is a far narrower shell. Add in that there was still a part of my brain looking around like a toddler woken up from a nap asking, “What… what happened? How did we get here?” I pretty much knew I wasn’t going to be able to manage a demonstration of my normally mad-ass flip test skills at that moment in time.

Thankfully, this all happened across from Lions!Boathouse – as another rowing boathouse, their dock is low enough for me to be able get in & out of my single, which the general marina boat slips are not.

So, I grabbed a rigger in one hand and started to awkwardly breaststroke my way over, tugging the single behind me. Thankfully, N!JT Coach realized that hey, this could be done better & offered to tow the boat over for me, which brings me to some very important lessons:

Things to know:
1. Bungee workouts do come in handy
2. Laziness can pay off.

Due to the fact that I travel between two boathouses and am too absent-minded to remember to bring things with me, I will often just buy duplicates & leave them in the appropriate places.
(For instance, I have three yoga mats. We can go over that another time.)

That day, my saving grace appeared in the form of the bungee that I’d left looped around the speedcoach crossbar. We were able to use that to attach my shell to their 2x and N!JT Coach & her rower towed the single over while I aquatically booked it over to the Lions!Boathouse dock, valiantly attempting to avoid swallowing marina water along the way.

Thankfully there was no one at Lions!Boathouse for me to have to explain why I was shivering my arse off on their dock as N!JT Coach brought the single most of the way, and some helpful guys in a motorboat nudged it level with the dock. Once that mischief was managed, I was able to get back in and row the 1000m or so across the marina & back to Bear!Boathouse, where Salter was unloading one of her 8+s. It would seem one crew was awesome enough to have broken a backstay and thus had earned a land workout while Salter finished on water with the lineup that hadn’t screwed their hardware.

Well okay then – I guess it was just that kind of a Sunday.

I fished out my sopping wet longsleeve (which thankfully had been under the back of my footplates & thus hadn’t floated away), threw it on the dock with a rather definitive splat!, looked at the 10 junior rowers watching me and asked, “Well ladies, on a morning like this, there’s only one thing left to decide — which one of us is going to tell Z that he has two broken boats?”

yeah…

don’t let anyone fool you kids — being a grown-up sucks.

Z came in with his varsity boats about 15 minutes later — just enough time for us to get all the boats up and out of everyone’s way & for me to strip off my sodden clothes & jump into sweats.

For the record, the habit we rowers have of buying sweatpants so they ride really low on our hips over spandex is all well fine & good until the day that you are so cold & wet that you can’t even keep your underwear — try rockin’ that look commando in a public boathouse, & you’ll be cinching the drawstring a little tighter, lemme tell ya.

And so, still cold & hoping that my pants would stay up until I could get into the shower, I went to talk to Z. Poor bastard had just barely stepped out of his launch before I said, “Hiiiiii….”

After six years, Z knows that tone of voice from me means to move forward with caution. “Hi…”

Claris: So…how was your row?

Z: Good, actually. Really good.

Claris: Okay, ’cause we broke two boats.

Z: That’s not funny.

Claris: I know, which is why I asked about the row — I figured that way we should at least start from a happy place.

:insert Z glaring at me here:

In all honesty, I was every bit as annoyed about the situation as Z, but as I told him an hour later, “I had to joke about it on the dock because if I’d expressed my actual opinion with kids around, the profanity-laden diatribe probably would have resulted in you getting some parent phone calls.”

At which point he considered that & nodded in agreement at my chosen course of action.
You’re welcome.

In thinking about it again, this is probably why they reminded us to have redundancies.

The Bear!Boathouse single will be fixed — if nothing else, the head coach of the Neighbor!JuniorTeam is actually the rigger at Bear!Boathouse.
(see: rowing & social incestuousness)

Training-wise, it means I’ll be erging mornings at least this week because I don’t have the extra two hour commute time planned to go to Beach!Boathouse & row my own single until Saturday morning.

The downside being that this Sunday is a Bay Series (i.e. scrimmage head race) and I’m going to do that. It would be the first race since Head of the American this fall – between my arm & my knee, I hadn’t done any of the previous races in the series, and it would have been nice to be able to practice higher rates on the water before the actual, ya know… piece.
I would call it a race, but I’m still at the point where I’m doing a piece rather than rowing a race, so let’s just be straight up & call a spade a spade.

Physiologically, I have learned that when you get forcibly tossed out of a boat and into cold water in the middle of a workout, you’re fine for the first couple hours. Then you get home, sleep an afternoon away and spend the next few days pretty damn sore. As you might guess, I’m totally looking forward to doing 1500m at 2k pace in a few hours this afternoon. Good times.

But the most important lesson to come out of this?

Swag will totally save your sh*t.

Truth told, I flip about once a year – every so often, the numbers don’t fall in your favor & sh*t just happens. Spend enough time out on the water alone, you just accept the realities of life and work around it.

As such, my Nalgene has long included a carabiner around the loop so that I can clip it onto the Filippi’s speedcoach crossbar, a habit that I’ve had several rowers over the years remark on the strangeness of.

Rowers are big on swag – they’ll race for shirts, you get a uni for rowing for a team… rowers love their kits. It’s a whole thing, and it’s customary to swag people when they help you out.

I am swag-less.
I didn’t row in high school or college, my first boathouse doesn’t exist, the team I ran wasn’t around long enough to have our own shiznit, and I never got kitted out when I was coaching. Basically, I have my uniform tank for Beach!Boathouse & that’s it.

However, the last time I was down at SD, Hoff reached in a box in the office & went, “Hey, look – we have stuff now! You should have one!”
This may sound odd, but before Callaghan got there, SD was not a team that had extra stuff, so having things they can afford to give away really is a step up thanks to his work.

At the time, I laughed and thanked her for my first piece of free crew crap.

But as much as I might joke about how rowers love their shiznit, ya know why my stuff wasn’t at the bottom of the marina when I got back to the dock on Sunday?

…because of my one piece of rowing swag.

Good thinking there, Hoff. Good thinking indeed.

Music: Matt Wertz – Yesterday Morning (Somedays)

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So yes – as mentioned in my last entry, I 2k’d again last weekend. It went better than I expected – I pulled the exact same split, but at no point in the before, during or after process did I throw up, so in my world that’s the actual victory.

However, my avoidance of neurosis-induced vomit is not what today is about.

Instead, I would like to take a moment and make a plea on behalf of some of the girls that I’ve competed with over the last two weekends.

Please stop making new adult rowers do their first 2k at erg competitions.

Ya know, doing it to kids is bad enough – as much as we naysay, the truth is that every coach gets a little amusement out of making the children suffer athletically* – I’m not a coach anymore, so I’m just gonna go ahead & admit that.
*within ethical boundaries, of course.

The thing is, new adults are different.

In this case, there really is a difference between “to-may-to” & “to-mah-to”

I think the fact that indoor rowing classes are gaining popularity is good – it brings a higher awareness to rowing, increases the mass market exposure of an otherwise niche sport. These are all great things.

On the other hand, I’m cool with being the snob in the room by making the statement that erging in a group exercise class and training as a rower are two completely different things. For those of you that may be new to my ongoing adventures, I say this with the experience of someone who didn’t row in high school or college – I stepped in a boat at the age of 26 & have been working on sucking a little less every day since.

But before I ever considered the life choice that I might be bisweptual, I taught spin & kickboxing and worked doing sales & operations at a gym, interacting with the very demographic of new clients that indoor rowing classes are trying to attract.

So just as I would not send one of the girls that took one of the cardio kickboxing class to step into a ring with some of the guys I learned to fight with, I would like to state that it is not fair to send inexperienced people to race against rowers for their very first 2k without preparing them for what’s going to happen beforehand.

Yet, for the last two weekends, that is what I’ve seen on the erg to the right of me.

Two Saturdays in a row, some poor girl who’s probably working on a BMI shift will sit down, looking nervous as all hell, hit the first 500m really hard, and then proceed to fly & die.

Two Saturdays in a row, I have finished my piece, cheered her through the finish of her last 500, & said, “It’s okay, just breathe. Is this your first race?”

Both of those girls managed to sort of nod their heads as they tried to regain some semblance of what their life was before they’d been smacked face-first into a wall of pain while 30 people screamed and yelled for them to go faster.

Each time, I patted the poor thing on the back, told her she did a good job, & encouraged her to just try to keep breathing as I got up & walked away. I had to walk away so that I wouldn’t stop & ask the coxswains what the hell they were thinking throwing a new athlete to the sharks like that.

Let me be clear – I am not saying that erg athletes and/or novice rowers shouldn’t do competitions.

But for the love of god, let the poor bastards go through the indignity of their first 2k in the relative privacy of their own home!!

While on the outside, an erg race looks deceptively relaxing, for the person doing it, it’s a special kind of hell on earth. And an athlete can’t know what that experience will be, or how to deal with such things until they’ve done it at least once.

True Life: Pudge on my wudge

Ya know what? I used to weigh 60 pounds more than I do now. You ever want to see me bitter, try to get me to talk about my hatred of Presidential Fitness tests in high school – I was the kid who had trouble running a mile.

So while there admittedly is still pudge that could be worked off my wudge, there also used to be a lot more of me to lurve, and lemme tell ya – at that stage, having to do an athletic feat of any kind is personally challenging enough. Adding in the experience of being thrown out there & left to flounder is horrible.

A good amount of coaches and instructors are people who’ve been athletic for most of their lives, so I’m working from the assumption that there were the best of intentions, and an understandable lack of personal experience regarding what it’s like to approach sport at such a mental disadvantage when I say the following:

Putting someone in that sort of situation is inconsiderate. And while probably inadvertent, it’s also kind of mean.

Give them time. Give them at least one practice run. Let them be mentally prepared for some semblance of an idea of how much it’s going to suck. One junior novice coach that I know preps her novvies by having them do their first 2k test at the beginning of January, & in the interim erg pieces, adding a little more pressure each time – ridiculously loud music, and after I pointed out what the Beach!sprints are like, having people that are on land that day yell at them from in front of the erg.

Even with that effort on that novice coach’s part, I’ve still been knocked over in the lobby of Beach!Boathouse by a novice that tackle-hugged me crying, “Oh my god, that was the most horrible thing ever!”

If nothing else, a practice 2k is the best way to create a personal goal to work towards so that if they don’t get a shiny medal, the newb still has a sense of personal accomplishment for the day. It also sets the precedent of individual markers for achievement, which is what’s going to keep them training even if they’re not winning.

Hard Currency: Even if you don’t really care about people’s feelings, being an asshole is bad for business.

If nothing else, let’s look at this on an economic level:
If you scare the crap out of your clients/club members, they won’t come back.

By not preparing your newbies for the race & failing to help them determine a realistic split, you’re setting them up to feel defeated.

End result is that if they start to associate negative connotations with the activity, after a while they’re not going to want to do your class or row for your team.

Logic would then dictate that since the long-term economic health of any business or rowing club is dependent upon having a solid base of repeat clients, this course of behavior is not good for your bottom line.

Mass market means changing the way things are done.

One of the things that I’ll talk about for ad nauseum is that with the introduction of indoor rowing as a group exercise activity, the rowing world is going to encounter people who aren’t like normal rowers.

As a sport, rowing is a niche area with very specific environmental & equipment requirements. Because of this, most boathouses are used to being the only opportunity in the local area for time on the water, and there are a lot of rowers who can, will, & have put up with a lot of crap because of that.
(Rowers: see, you totally just nodded & thought of an example, didn’t you? I’m just sayin’.)

Indoor rowing clients are different.

These are not people who are crazy for the sport, it’s something they’re trying for fitness. They can come to you, they can go to spin class, they can Zumba.

The upshot being that because you are not working within the smaller pond rowing world, but competing instead in the much larger ocean of the fitness industry, you are not this new market’s only option. If they don’t like the way you treat them, they can walk away.

This new contingency can’t always be treated like athletes – they need to be cultivated as clients.
They have to feel safe, they have to feel secure, they have to have a sense that you care. If you can create that sense of comfort & trust, they’ll be happy to pay. If you don’t, they’ll go somewhere else.

It really is just that simple. Things are no longer about the sport. Now, it’s just plain business.

Conclusion: Have a heart, people. Life works better that way. #trufax!

So from now on, please extend some semblance of humanity to your newbs, lest they end up walking away from an erg competition looking like Zoey did when she realized that the Saturday which involved a 2k for mommy was followed up a bath for her:

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Music: Hey Mama – Mat Kearney [Young Love]

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Marina is just that – it’s an open marina that you row in a counter-clockwise loop, and depending on your course it can be about 6000m, not counting inlets. You’re out there with everyone else – rowers from other boathouses, recreational motorboats, sailboats, a couple of commercial tourist fishing expedition boats, and the occasional Catalina-bound ferry. As you might guess, sometimes that makes for an adventure wrapped in chaos punctuated by many an utterance of “What the fuck?”

Creek is different. It’s an outlet of the LA river which has about 2400m of protected water between two bridges that’s two, maybe three boat lanes wide. Thanks to our location, Bear!Boathouse has a dock that lowers down directly to the water. Everyone else has to actually row out of the marina, go out around the breakwater & surf about five or six hundred meters of ocean waves to get access. As such, the course doesn’t get much play beyond some of the local Masters who know how to manage that sort of hazard and college crews who have a coach launch as safety escort.

I like rowing in the creek. Not just because the water is flat – after six years in our marina, shit water is just part of the game. No, I like creek because it helps me let go.

Truth told, I really needed that this week.

Laziest. 2k. Ever.

I did a 2k piece last weekend. I went to SD & did their Indoor Classic, and while everybody else in my heat was busting their ass racing, I just went ahead and… did a piece.

One of the Juniors described it later as “the most casual 2k ever”, and it’s true – I pretty much did the anti-2k.

I sat down, I did a nice steady state piece. I adjusted the volume on my ipod twice, I deliberately didn’t go faster than the girl who was winning the lightweight division (open & open ltwt went together) & and I really only put pressure on for the last 400m when I looked the screen & saw that Hoff (who came in 2nd in the lightweight division) was +10m up on me, which the junior rowers described as, “it literally looked like you said, ‘ehhh, screw it, I’m gonna go ahead & beat Hoff‘.”
That was actually a very accurate assessment, except that longtime readers will not be surprised to know that in my mental version of that statement, I dropped the f-bomb.

After I was done, I put my handle in place, reached back for my phone, took a picture of my screen, then cheered on the girl next to me for her last 500m & waited for everyone else to finish.

Rowers reading this story are either laughing or horrified right now. Or, as JRo said to me at work on Tuesday when she heard, “Wow. You seriously did that & still won your race? You’re kind of an asshole.”

Salter:	hahaha…what a good example you lead for the high school kids
Claris:	what? i cheered the girl next to me on – that’s totally sportsmanship!

Why did I do a piece instead of a race?

Because the problem isn’t my body, it’s my head.

For me, last weekend wasn’t about winning or busting my shit out, it was about composure. It was about rowing a piece without freaking out. Last Saturday, I pulled a 1.53.7 average split – pretty much the same time I pulled last year. The difference is that this year, it wasn’t a fight. I wasn’t hyperventilating. There were no panic attacks. Honestly, if I was anything last week, I would describe that piece as oddly detached.

I wasn’t rowing for time. I was rowing for flow.

One of the things that I’ve come to realize over the last few months is how much I’ve lost my flow.

High School Locker People: where you the shover or the shovee?

On the water, athletically, I love rowing.

Off the water… well let’s be honest, folks – the rowing community has a lot of crap.

Rowing is a small group of people to begin with, and each individual boathouse is a bit isolated from others, so oftentimes you end up in what I can only describe as high school, only nobody is ever forced to graduate, so they just sit at that maturity level. Forever.

The result? You see a lot of dumbass crap.

For people like me, who didn’t participate in high school when I was in high school, being different can make you a target. Add in that I’ve never been one to duck a punch, and you learn real fast what it means to stand alone.

But having to deal with that sort of thing, to keep taking care of yourself over & over… after a time, expending that energy takes its toll. And in the course of that, I’d lost much of what made me love my sport.

So I retreated. I purposely backed away from people & just concentrated on the rowing. Z changed the metrics of my training plan so that I couldn’t measure things the way I usually would. And while the detailed entirety of the tale will no doubt be a different blog entry at another time, for the last four months, I have simply dialed things back & worked the problem.

All of which is why, last weekend, I rowed a piece for flow. I rowed it like I was in the creek.

While the water conditions are mostly flat, unless you have very specific conditions, the split you pull in the creek isn’t really an indicator of your actual speed – since we tend to row early in the morning & later in the evening, the tide is almost always either coming in or out, so one direction your split will be really great, and the other… not so much.

If I really wanted to, I could I find those perfect conditions – as Z happily pulled out his phone on Sunday to demonstrate, there’s totally an app for that.

Do I bother? Nah.

Right now I just need to row to row. After Saturday’s 2k, I came home, went to sleep, headed over to Bear!Boathouse on Sunday and hit the creek for a 4×20′ under 155 HR where I literally spent and hour & twenty minutes just playing around with the technicality of my stroke.

The truth is that right now, I am a selfish rower.

Christmas Day, I rowed a 2x with Stesha Carle.
@Steeesh & I had known each other for a bit, but really only started talking over the last year or so, & have never actually rowed together, so when there was nobody around & neither of us had a training plan for Christmas, we decided to meander out & see what there is to see.

…and I was reminded that damn. I row selfish.

Overall, it was decent for never having rowed together. Balance was good, & as someone who normally rows a single, I was perfectly happy to let the little control freak bow so I didn’t have to steer.

There was some slight mismatch – due to yoga having allowed me to develop the ability to scrunch my body into as tiny a ball as one could be when 5’10″, I have a fair compression at the catch so my front angle is deeper, but Stesha comes off the footplates & turns around into the drive much quicker & harder than I do — which is probably why she’s got the silver medal for team USA from this year’s Worlds in Bled and I’m just mucking about in a creek on my own.

…but the thing that struck me the most about that row was the difference in how we balance.

As we would go up the slide, I could feel Stesha behind me – there were wiggles and twitches and movement from her calves and toes as she counterbalanced me.

For me, balance comes from relaxing – I tend to deliberately loosen my upper body as I go up the slide, push my shoulders away from my ears, finesse the oar handles, and allow the boat to roll around me.

Now, to be clear, neither approach is wrong. It just illustrated to me a difference in mindset.

Competitively, Stesha rows a quad, so she’s used to counterbalancing and working with other people in the boat. As much as she concentrates on her own performance, there’s always a part of her brain that also constantly adjusts what she’s doing to better mesh with her teammates.

For the most part, I row a single – because I don’t have to worry about what anyone else might do to offset my motion, my instinct is to just keep my body in line, allow the shell to go where it’s gotta go, & re-engage as I approach the front in order to allow for as little disturbance as possible.

While neither of us knew it at the time, looking back, I know now that really needed that row. For me, that row, and the lesson that I learned from it – athletically, it was a kind of blessing.

When you learn to row, you’re taught to row with others – the most common boat is the 8+. You work as a team, you compete against others for your seat. So much of what & how you do things involves other people.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I love an 8+. Rowing-wise, I was born & raised to be an engine room, and after the practice row for last year’s Crew Classic, I was the one going, “Sweeeeeeep – wait, why are we stopping? Let’s go again!”

But, much like the fact that my parents raised me in a Catholic Republican environment only to have their daughter send them a copy of Farenheit 9/11 right before the 2004 presidential election, how I was raised is not who I turned out to be.

What that row with Stesha taught me is that right now, I’m a single rower. And there’s nothing wrong with that other than that I hadn’t accepted that because what I row has changed, how I approach how I row has to change. I have to be selfish. More importantly, I have to be okay with being selfish, and doing what I need to do for me, no matter how that stacks up to what other people think or expect.

I’m just now getting to the point where I can start to put my head back in the game. Last weekend was the first time in three years where I rowed 2000 meters on something other than the paddle and didn’t feel like my heart was going to explode from neurosis.

Was I at full pressure? Hell no.
Athletically can I do better than that? Yah, I totally can.

But mentally, that was the best 2k I’ve rowed in four years.
There was no psychologically abusive coach telling me I’m not “a real athlete” because I hadn’t hit a certain split, no lung-stealing panic, no feeling that the walls were gonna close in on me. I stopped thinking about anything other than what I needed to do for me, & I did a piece. I did okay. I didn’t freak out. I was okay.
I am okay.

This weekend? Round 2.

There’s another erg sprint at Beach!Boathouse, so I’m going to build on what I did last Saturday & try it again. Based on the heat sheets, I know there’s at least one other girl who’ll probably beat me in the event, and honestly… I don’t care. All I want to do this week is to be able to go a little faster than last week & still have the same composure. To push out of my comfort zone a bit more & still be okay.

This isn’t my endgame. This is a step. This is part of my process. To get to there, I have to get through here. So if I lose on Saturday, that’s fine. Right now, I’m finding my flow.

I’m not racing to win. I’m not there yet. Today, I’m just rowing for me.

Music: Falling – Staind (Chapter V)

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Why, you might ask?

One word, people: Crosstraining. Cross. Training.
Okay, yes. I think it may be two words. shush.

Here’s the thing – when you’re a rower, you can’t just row. If you do, two things happen:

1. you get hurt because you’re overworking those muscles.
2. your brain gets bored & you burn out.

Thus, cross training. Swim, bike, run, whatever – you do something that’s not rowing.

Last May, I joined up at YAS.

YAS is exactly what its name stands for – Yoga And Spin. That’s it. That’s all they do. No upsell, no attempt to get you to do personal training or their diet program. Yoga & Spin, in one form or another. Very cut & dry.

Thus for me, as someone who used to teach spin & is already inclined to yoga, that’s pretty much perfect. And I loved it there. Loved it.

At least, it was until my right knee decided to get all… wonky-like.

Lemme ‘splain.

If you’re going to spin regularly, it’s highly advisable to get shoes & clips. This gives you a better footing on the pedal than using your regular sneakers with a basket on the pedal.

Now, when I was teaching, spin was still fairly new, and I was poor & in college, so I didn’t get clips. This time around, however, I decided to take care of business, & caught a good sale on some Sidi shoes.

At the time I didn’t know anything about spin shoes & just went with the philosophy that I wanted the lightest hardshell shoes I could find, because to me that seemed the logical choice. I later learned that I’d lucked out not only in price but also in brand since, as YAS instructors Diane & Gina said when they saw my new shines, “You got the rockstar shoes! Nice!”

However, you also have to get clips to go on the shoes before you can use them.

So, that in mind, one Saturday I stopped by MDR bike on Lincoln in Marina Del Rey & said, “Hey, I got these shoes, I need to get clips, can you help me?” And the guy in the shop said, “Sure, here you go”, installed clips & off I went.

No problem, right?

Wrong.

I have a bad feeling about this… No, seriously. There’s actual pain. It feels bad.

As time went by, I began to notice that

a) the right shoe always seemed to be loose
b) my right knee was beginning to be sore

Well… crap.

At first, we thought it was just that the bikes needed to be tightened.
(because yes, I’m a princess & pea about my equipment, so Gina & I started testing the bikes)

After the regularly scheduled maintenance at YAS came & went and I was still having problems, I was willing to admit that yes, it was somehow my shoe, & this time I headed over to Helen’s Cycle in Marina Del Rey & explained that I didn’t know what was wrong, but something was just not right.

Their shop guy was really great, and sat down to look at my shoe – took a look at the shoe, at my foot, opened everything up. In the course of this, he discovered two things:

1. the clip had been placed way too far up on my foot – basically, every time I was out of the seat, I was on my toes instead of the ball of my foot.
2. the washer on the right shoe… yeah, one of them was in backward.

Possibly the words “this is just not even an amateur screw-up” may have been used in the course of that conversation as they asked who set my shoes up originally. I’m just sayin’.

Sadly, even with the shoe fixed, my knee remained sore. Damage was done, man – every time I went to spin, my knee hurt like a bitch the next day. The incident which led to our Holiday Zombie Abandonment Poll? At the time I thought it had been from my erg, but looking back, totally because I’d been on a bike the day before.

So I took three weeks off at the end of the year, thinking I’d just give my knee time to recuperate, and the first week of January, off I went back to YAS.

…where I didn’t even make it through the warm up song.

Instead, I did something I’ve never done before in a spin class – I got off the bike, packed up, & had to leave. Waved to Gina, pointed to my knee, she was cool about it, but yah. No spin for me for a bit.

Instead, I get to work on diversifying my cross training, which isn’t really a change you want to have to figure out in your training during a month which ends in two consecutive weekends of 2k races.

The moral of the story:

When it comes to your equipment, when things don’t feel right, never be afraid to be steal a little something from the Princess & the Pea. As the freelancer without health insurance who was happy to be able to run a slow 5k last week for the first time in three months, I guarantee you – it’s worth it.

Music: Baby You’re Gonna Have to Pay – Victoria (Alcazar)

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Three months later, I know it was about me.

Back in the day (aka mid-July) while Pomatto & I were sitting up at Lake Mercer about to inadvertently fluster our way to winning Southwest Regionals, she mentioned to me she’d heard the varsity 8+ of the lady Trojan Navy would be racing Head of the American in singles this year.

Oh, crap.

The USC women have a high yield of European recruits. This means that, unlike a lot of American collegiate rowers, USC girls know how to scull. And in the case of one Trojan, I know she knows how to scull, because I was learning to coach & lent her my speedcoach while she learned to row a 1x.
(I’m sorry American schools, but let’s be honest — emphasis isn’t put on smaller boats to get recruited to college. Flyweight, who has been sculling (and winning) in a 1x & 2x for the past two years, actually had college coaches reject her for recruitment when they found out she wasn’t primarily sweep rowing. I’m not saying it’s better or worse, that’s just the way the two systems are, and the result is that the majority of American collegiate rowers are not scullers.)

As a single sculler under the age of 35, rowing in the Masters’ category is kind of pointless — no matter what my raw time is, the age handicap adjustment would kill me.
Right now my age is only useful for a Masters’ A boat’s ability to bring in new collegiate grads to the boat & still make the 27 minimum age average — a fact which my original coach G was happy to realize for Crew Classic this year considering that when I started five years ago I was one of the young’ins he had to compensate for.

So if I row the Masters’ category, I could win in raw time & lose to a 67year old by age handicap, but if I row Open, there’s a very good chance I’ll have to compete against the freakin’ Trojan navy, two of whom placed in the top 10 at this year’s U23 World Championships.

And people wonder why I laugh when they say rowing looks so relaxing.

My decision?

Frack it. I’d rather take the chance of getting beaten in raw time than lose because of math.
Damn you, math*! ::shakey fist::
*not to be confused with Math, who is an actual person I quite enjoy talking with & simply has an ironic misspelling on his birth certificate, poor bastard.

Upcoming challenge in mind, I emailed what would should have been my primary source of training info & said, “Okay, I’m not going to Canadian Henley, but it looks like I’m gonna have to race the Trojan Navy at the end of October, so how do I alter my workouts to use the end of the summer to prep for that?”

In return I got…nothin’. Crickets started to chirp, & then stopped to apologize for being loud.

As someone that used to coach & run a team, I recognize that for the group at large there were other priorities at that point, and I’m realistic enough to understand that a lone Masters’ rower whose schedule didn’t match the competition plan for the rest of the team… not high on the list.

However, since this wasn’t the first time I’d asked a training question and gotten the cricket response, and I’ve never been one to sit around & wait, I went to Z & said, “Hi. I need help. …please. I totally meant to say please.”
Z, being a bit more used to me than most people, said, “What’s up?”
“Based on scuttlebutt, it would appear I’m going to be rowing singles against the Trojan Navy.”
“Crap.”
“Exaaaaactly.”

Note: that Trojan who used to borrow my speedcoach? Guess who was her coach as a junior rower. If you guessed the guy that I was talking to, good call.

So we sat & talked a little.

While Z & I have known each other since I started rowing & his then-girlfriend Mo was using her experience as a former U23 rower to systematically kick my novice ass every seat race, he’s never actually had any direct interaction with my training other than the general stuff you talk about when you’re in the same rowing community for five years.

When I was looking for a coach after First!Boathouse, I’d actually asked Z first, but he was taking pre-reqs to get into grad school & didn’t have time, so I ended up working with Webster instead. Three years later, Z‘s decided against grad school for the moment, I wasn’t working with Webster anymore, & here we were again. Circle of life, man.
: obligatory Lion King joke here :

In talking, we went over my heart rate settings, which caused Z to have a coronary of his own and declare me freakish & odd, something that I have long accepted isn’t a descriptive solely isolated solely to my pulse rate, but more a continual state of being for my overall existence.

“In short,” I explained, “I have the heart rate of a hamster. A hamster that’s got a 5-hour Energy addiction. And does crack. A lot.”

So we did a step test, which for non-rowers means that I did a step test, & Z stood behind the erg & wrote numbers down, then went away & did a bunch of math. (Considering the options, I’m glad I was on the erg.)

The result was a two-faceted change to my training.

Physically, I had a new set of intervals for my morning workouts on two-a-days, and then I’d continue doing a recovery workout of stacking a spin class followed by yoga that night.

In terms of mental perspective, Z changed the metrics by which I measured my workouts. Where in the past I’d been ruled by meters on the water & splits on the erg, Z took into account the fact that four years of trying to change my heart rate workouts to what everyone kept telling me they should be and failing had only resulted in the the annoyance of this making my HR go faster because my competitor brain would look at the slower split & think about the split time instead of the heart rate, which is the actual focus of the workout.

To combat the fact that I’m overly competitive and more than a little OCD about tracking numbers to the nth degree, my new parameters were that I would do my pieces on the water for time instead of distance and that any work on the erg would be done using watts instead of watching split time. This way, the goal became to stay within my heart rate ranges for that time, and whatever distance/split I got, I got. We’d take a look every so often at split/meters total to see if those improved as I went, but otherwise that wasn’t something to be taken seriously — kinda like the rowing version of Joey Fatone on Dancing with the Stars.

Thus I was sent off to go try this out for two weeks so that we could make any changes needed before Z went on vacation – aka The Time of the Year When He Runs Like Hell for a Week or Two & Pretends the Boathouse Doesn’t Exist & There Aren’t Over 120 Teenagers to Plan for in September & Really Who Can Blame Him for Doing So.

What I discovered was… I felt better.

Longer, looser… way less stress.

Don’t get me wrong. I love rowing, and I’ve learned something from every coach I’ve ever worked with. But so often in doing workouts, I would walk away feeling defeated instead of accomplished. Not by the actual rowing, mind you – otherwise why on earth would I still be doing this, ya know? But for me, as someone that walked into rowing a minimum four years behind most of my teammates, & then in running a team and working as a single sculler — I have always had this feeling that I didn’t know enough, and that the reason I felt like I couldn’t keep up was because everyone else was just better at rowing or knew something that I didn’t, or I wasn’t working hard enough, or I just wasn’t… enough.

As such, I had spent four years since G was my coach thinking I was lacking. There’s something wrong with me, I needed to figure out how to do better so I fit into what everyone else was doing.

Even with my heart rate – I’d had my last two coaches both tell me at different points that the reason I was out of their range was because I was out of shape.

On the other hand, Z’s reaction had been, “Has anyone ever tested you?” and I went, “There’s a test?”
somewhere in northern California, Jessica just read that & mumbled, “How do I do a sprint start?” Yes, Jessica it was just like that. Shut it.

But in changing the approach to the pieces (and also their structure), I found that I would finish & feel… accomplished instead of defeated.

Here’s the thing – a lot of coaches (but not all) will be very pound-pound-pound-pound and work to get you to push your body to the limit all the time. And for many people, that totally works – for a fine example of this, see the Canadian Mens’ 8+. They’re not just hot enough to populate Kalmoe’s List, they also supposedly have a Spartan-worthy coaching philosophy to beat the band. And for them, it totally works, because hey, hello with the winning.

For me, as a(n almost) 32 year old competitive Masters’ rower who has a full time job & limitations on when my nearest boathouse and its equipment is available… the pound-pound-pound approach… turns out that just isn’t me.

It’s not only an age thing — a goodly number of National team rowers are actually in my age range, and I know that Kline, a 42 year old lightweight down at Beach!Boathouse, can kick my ass on the water.

For me, the improvement was mental.

Z‘s methodology is a lot more… chill. When I was talking to him about it, I described it as that things felt longer, looser, like there was a lot more flow to the workouts rather than bang-bang-bang all the time.

Part of that comes from who Z is as a person, which of course is a huge influence on how he runs things. I learned to coach by riding launch with Z for a summer. In the course of that time, Z described his college rowing experience as, “For the first year, I was the guy that everybody was hoping would quit.”
We also learned during our time in the launch that we’d existed in the LA rowing community for the previous 3 years ignorant that the other was also a humongous pop culture nerd. Delightful for us, dangerous for everyone else.

Z‘s approach is fairly low-pressure — the girls are pushed, but for a rowing team, it’s a very relaxed environment. However, if you take a look at who’s been jockeying first & second place for the womens’ 4+ at Nationals and Head of the Charles for the last three or four years, clearly it’s an approach that doesn’t entirely suck.

When that philosophy was applied to my training program, I was able to appreciate as an athlete what I’d learned in the launch as a coach — that for some athletes, when constant push and pressure is taken away, things just work better.

For me, the result was that I began to feel better not only in terms of the workouts, but also on a physical level. I found that I had more energy – in addition, I altered the heart rate ranges I was working with in spin, and once I wasn’t constantly beating myself into the ground, I could do things like… stay awake at my desk around 2pm during a work day at Museum!Co, which is probably helpful for being able to continue to fund rowing my life.

Z also worked within the construct of what my stroke actually is, as opposed to trying to make it what it theoretically should be. Down at Beach!Boathouse, I was working out with lightweight rowers — mind you, these are damn fast pre-elite caliber lightweights, but still — lightweight rowing is a different technique & approach. It’s quick(er), short(er), fast, high rate.

It is, in essence, everything I suck at.

When I was a novice, as part of G‘s campaign to simply shove technique into my erg score, I spent most of the summer rowing behind PK. PK was about 6’3″, 6’4″, and a collegiate coach who’d been rowing competitively for about, oh, 20 years by the time I started rowing. I was literally told, “Go learn to match PK’s slide control.”

Incidentally, while he would never actually admit it to any of us, one of PK‘s ideas of a good time was to understroke everyone, something Mo found out one day when she bowed a 2x with him & said to me afterwards, “Okay, seriously? He rowed a 12.”

“Yes, yes he does,” I told her. “Welcome to my friggin’ world.”

Take that beginning & add in the fact that my next coach was Webster, a 6’7″ former National team rower for the pair, and the result is that, as I joked with Z, “Basically, I row kinda like a guy. An openweight guy. That’s done a lot of yoga. And prefers to understroke. That’s me.”

To which he laughed (because he knows both PK & Webster) and said, “So the assumption that this October you’d be head racing at a 28-30 rate…”

“Yah…not what exactly what I’d call ‘realistic’.”

As such, we built things around the fact that, at this point, I’m not going to be rowing at as high a stroke rate as most people, & thus need to work on incrementally getting used to being able to hold higher rates for longer periods of time.

Which, for me, has been a total bitch.

Oh, and did I mention I’ve been injured? Because yah. That happened.

For those of you just tuning in, before rowing there was kickboxing. While I was developed as an ambidextrous boxer and can maintain a fair southpaw, I am instinctively right handed. Also the three years of violin lessons, which used my right arm for bowing, and the years of painting/art school, and the fact that I work as a freelance web nerd & sit at a desk for hours on end using my right hand for the mouse…

Right. It’s really not surprising that there was a slow creeping of twinge-ey pain growing in my right elbow. Honestly, in terms of repetitive use strain, it’s kind of a miracle that it’s taken 30 years to show up.

But still…. ugh.

So I went through my life, and nailed down that the root cause was the desk arrangement with my new (to me) cube at Museum!Co. Heights were adjusted, things fixed, and while the cause of the problem was remedied, I now had to get through the part where things (aka my right arm) heal up & go back to normal.

Which is why, at one point in the process, Z got an email whose first line was, “J’ai besoin d’un nouveau coude.” Which is French for “I need a new elbow”, a phrase I mastered in speaking with Cecile, a lovely Parisian lady who rows out of our boathouse & likes the fact that my time in New England included six years of French classes.
After all, an injury’s not an injury until you can bitch about it in the European language which turned out to be completely useless because you moved to LA, right? Right. Totally.

All this in mind, I confab’d with Z and was like, “look, let’s just be realistic — I’ve been training more off the water than on, and we don’t actually know if my elbow will hold up for a full 5k, so me ‘racing’ this… maybe not the best idea.”

The verdict was that since we don’t actually know what my steady state speed would be if I completely disregard heart rate & just row at a comfortable pace, we might as well use Head of the American to find out. Natoma is a simple course, flat water, no obstacles in the way — Bear!Boathouse Marina has ocean chop & a 180 turnaround halfway through their 6k, Beach!Boathouse course has three bridges & an expanse of open water whose crosswinds have caused some of the junior rowers refer to that stretch as The Devil’s Triangle — so if I couldn’t race it full up, Natoma was a good route to use as a control experiment.

Double the questions, double the fun, none of the winning.

Based on everything over the last three months, the goal became twofold:
1. Hope that my elbow would hold for 5k.
2. See what, rowing comfortably, I could hold for an avg split around a 24/26 rating.

In short, I was going to deliberately tank the race, and after that we’d figure out where to go next.

Good times.

Race day – early intestinal upsets, late starts.

On Saturday morning, I made a rather disconcerting discovery — even when I mentally know the race aspect doesn’t matter, my body still treats any race day like a race day, which is why I had the awesome experience of driving the porcelain bus not once but three times before I walked down to get breakfast that morning. Thank you neurosis, thank you so very much.
on a bright note, after brushing that many times I probably had the cleanest teeth at the starting line, so I like to think I at least got the periodontal win.

The other crappy thing about that race is that our event wasn’t until 2:45 in the afternoon.

:sigh:

While theoretically I understand the semantic reasoning behind this, which is to get the big boats for juniors/collegiate events out of the way and make it easier for those teams to start to de-rig & load trailer… I still hate racing later in the day. As my intestinal upset might indicate, I would much rather race early in the day get things over with so I can spend the rest of the day watching everyone else race and Wandering Crew Crap*.
*shopping the vendors who come to regattas with products that say “crew”. Actually, that’s a limited description — some of the stuff also says “rowing”.

In some ways, this event was a little reunion — I was rowing with Cheng and Austin. Cheng I’d seen at SW Regionals, but Austin I hadn’t seen in about 4 years, back when she was rowing in college & her coach was… PK, the guy that liked to row a 12.

I launched with the Lil’ McGs, who were in the lightweight events at the same time, and upon getting up to the start line, found Cheng in her 1x in tears — it seems the borrowed boat she was rowing had a wing rigger & she couldn’t move the feet, a problem she didn’t realize until she was out on the water. Because of the way the Van Dusen was set up, she couldn’t adjust her shoes without taking the entire rigger off — yet another reason I really don’t like wing riggers in a single.

Thankfully, the start line launch was willing to help Cheng out, so we all chillax’d while they were taking care of that, & I got to say hey to Austin, who was back from Pocock with a shiny new fiancé and an open dubiousness to my assertion that, “No, seriously, I’m not actually racing this today, you’re totally going to pass me by.”

Once they got Cheng at least a little more adjusted in her settings, the starting line informed us that Cheng would be going last, so with the staggering of starts used for head races, the first person to launch would be… me.

Dude. Really? So both of my competitors will get to pass me on the course?

Thanks.

I took off and did what I was supposed to — I settled into what was a comfortable stroke with a concentration on swing and form, probably about eh, 65, 70% pressure, stroke rate around 24.

Around 1000m, Austin caught up with me & I called, “In or out, dude – lemme know.” She glanced over her shoulder, saw that I was seriously there, and I don’t think it was until that moment that she realized I hadn’t been bullsh*tting about the fact that I wasn’t racing the course. I pulled port so she could have the buoy line, and about 1000m later did the same for Cheng, who also looked at me like, “You were serious?” as she went by.

Honestly, it was actually kind of a nice row. Weather was decent, the course is pretty flat, I was rowing with the sun at my back, and I was allowed to completely disregard any and all numbers on my speedcoach. When I have to row my steady state in heart rate range, I’m usually around 2.45, 2.50 avg split, so it turns out when I just chillax & actually have a comfy go at it, I’m about 30, 35 seconds faster. I just rolled into my stroke and really worked on finding swing and getting length out of each stroke, and around 3500 meters, my abs actually started to get tired, which hasn’t happened in a bit.

I hit the last 1000m of the course, which is when the spectators & other teams can see you, & you’ll hear, “Go faster! You can do it!” … and I was thinking, “thanks, but I’m not supposed to go faster…”

Behind me, I heard the horns for when Austin & Cheng hit the end of their runs, and was like, “Cool, next one is me, just listen for the horn…”

…except it wasn’t, because it seems that HoA uses a double-horn at their finish, so the horn I thought was mine was actually the double for Cheng, and I stopped 250m short of the finish. #GoTeamMe! #HowToActLikeANovice #WayToRowDumbass

I laughed at myself & hurried across the finish line, hitting the timer on my speedcoach.

Afterwards, when things were de-rigged & put away, I went over to say hey to Austin off the water and when we were talking about the race, Austin made a joke about the fact that she used to rag on PK for understroking his races, and I confessed, “I’m not gonna lie, I totally rowed that bad boy PK-style.”
…and then we moved on to the fact that she doesn’t take the riggers off her shell for travel, which omfg would make me so nervous, and a little worried that by now, saltwater has fused that metal to the fiberglass on her boat.
Just the thought of it made me wash my boat really well when I brought it back to Beach!Boathouse Monday morning. :shudder:

Overall, I did aww’ite.

In terms of the theoretical benchmarks that Z & I had talked about, official time puts my average split within striking distance of what we’d been hoping to see. Sadly, since my rating was a 24 instead of a 26, actual goal achievement is a bit 50/50.

In terms of the race itself, I came in dead last.

One of the things that the guys taught me in fight training was knifework — close quarter maneuvering with handheld knives. (rubber blades were used for practice) The guys I was up against were all minimum six feet, most with brown belts or higher in more than one discipline. So to win, I learned early on to make sacrifices – turn my shoulder into it, allow the graze over my hip, use my forearm to block the blow — all things designed to draw my opponent in and make them feel comfortable enough for me to get close & make a single strike count enough to finish the fight.

After one of those bouts, the guy that I was up against asked, “What are you doing? You’re all cut up by the end.”

To which I replied, “Yeah, but I’m only bleeding. You’re dead.”
For some reason, guys seem to find it disconcerting when a girl says things like that. :shrug:

Earlier this fall, Math & I were discussing some stuff for his own training after he’d missed an erg benchmark. Since it was at the same time as the Worlds in Bled, I sent him the quote that Kitch got from Kalmoe after the 4x won silver – “I hate to say it, because you always want to win, but sometimes you need to lose to figure out how to win.”

In the last few days, a couple people have looked startled when I’ve laughed about finishing last behind two (nearly) lightweights. The thing is that for me, I know this isn’t the endgame. I’ve got an idea of what that is, and this was just a step in the process. I’ve got a baseline. I can plan the what comes after this because now I know where I’m comfortable.

Now it’s time to get uncomfortable. It’s time to get re-accustomed to pain.

It’s time to start what comes next.

Womens Open 1x

Music: What the Water Gave me – Florence + the Machine (Ceremonials)

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- Me in conversation with a junior coach, inadvertently providing an abject example of why rowing really is just something you have to experience to understand

…just lie back & it’ll all be over soon – isn’t that what they used to say?

One of the project managers at Civic!Co emailed me yesterday — I’d talked to him late last week (talking=ongoing email chain with the same subj line as a project we finished 3 mos ago) and said, “At this point, I’m kind of overloaded and I’m not taking on any new work until after Nov 5th.” and J, who I’ve worked with since I started subcontracting there two & a half years ago, said sure, no problem.

…and then today I got an email regarding a migration starting November 7th.

On the one hand, it’s nice to be needed.

On the other, I could use a break.

I’d set the Nov 5th date for new work because I made the decision not to row NARF this year. I’m going to do Head of the American this Saturday and then take a week off for myself, both athletically and personally.

I just… I need the time, honestly.

There’s no way around it — I can tell just by looking at my online bank statement & seeing how many times there’s a charge from Whole Foods West Hollywood between the hours of 9:45-10:30pm, which is particularly ridiculous considering that my fridge is completely stocked with things that are perfectly healthy for me if I would just take an hour or two to set everything up so they’re ready to go.

Have I done this? of course not.

And really, it’s not just food – I have at least three client projects to finish up, a personal site that I need to put live Friday night, and a whack of administrative paperwork/recordkeeping crap for my business that’s just… in dire need of seeing to, lest I get to the end of the year & be utterly screwed. Thus, I’m going to take a week off the water (other than finishing teaching Sculling I) which will give me at least two to three hours a day back to myself & should make The Accomplishment of Things easier to… accomplish.
Yeah, my English kinda failed me there. not gonna lie.

Hopefully I’ll be able to hit the ripe old age of 32 having knocked the majority of Things On my List off said list. While they say that people can age like fine wines, I going to guess that’s not supposed to include dust on your to-do list.

Plus by then, the dogs will probably need another bath – and really, who isn’t looking forward to that?

Music: bang bang bang – Christina Perri (Lovestrong, deluxe edition)

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I dunno about you guys, but I have been tired. There was a snafu with a client’s job that had me working from 5pm on Sun afternoon until about 6:30am last Monday morning, and I spent last week been trying to play catch up ever since. I’m having one of those stretches where I’ve got a case of The Don’wannas – I don’t wanna work, and I don’t feel like doing pieces at race pace even though there’s a head race next weekend, and I didn’t want to drive three hours round trip that night to pick up a roof rack so I can transport my single on Monday…

…et cetera and so forth. It was Head of the Charles this weekend, and while half the rowers I know were either in Boston or on watching the Cambridge web cam to see how many people would use a boat crash to mark their visit to The Land of Dunkin’ Donuts (mmm…. delicious blueberry cake munchkins that it turns out I’m totally allergic to…) I wanted nothing more than to just crawl into bed for The Best Nap Ever.

Which would explain why, on Friday afternoon, I fell asleep for about, oh… 14 hours. oops.

Also, because it’s a stretch where I am slightly whiny and oogy (as if this post hadn’t already given that away) I am also having that time where I just want a Nap Boyfriend.
I don’t need sex (although wouldn’t that be nifty), I don’t need an actual relationship right now, but it would be nice to curl up with a nice, solid male-gender type in my attempt at Best Nap Ever.

Alas, most likely it will be as things normally are — I’ll tell Ernie to go sleep on his bed, he’ll jump over his bed (often because Zoey’s already in it since she’s left all of her toys on her bed) and he’ll hang out on the couch until I’ve fallen asleep, at which point both dogs will take advantage of my unconscious state to climb onto my bed and drape themselves on top of or wedge next to my body so that I wake up hot as hell and pinned down to my own mattress like a mental patient that’s been strapped in for safety.

This is my life, people. Welcome to the whirlygig.

…because clearly a single woman over the age of 30 must be in want of a sailor.

Okay, you know what Google? Meet me at Camera 3.

Do I even want to know what on earth in my internet workings caused your algorithm to present me with this ad?

Really, Google? Really?

When I said I wanted a Nap Boyfriend, it didn’t mean I was going to be trolling the docks to provide any port in a storm, thankyouverymuch.

and now for a #TwitterFail of Olympic proportions

… you ever have that day where you make a joke on twitter about your neighbor being a pothead right as your friend on the National team twitters & cc’s the world championship 8+ to thank you for the baked goods you sent them?

… yeah. Me neither. :cough:

um, hi guys. < /awkward>

Honestly, what I really like about this is the educational opportunity that @thisismagda created:

You ever have that moment where you just look at your world & think, “our lives aren’t like other people.”

… yeah. me neither.

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Looking back, I suspect he gave it to me so that I left him alone before he threw it at my head — just because I insisted I could feel that the oars weren’t set evenly & it turns out they were off by .3 does not mean I’m crazy. It means I’m precise, so there’s no reason to ask if I’m the Princess & the Pea like it might be a bad thing, it means that I now know how to change out handles & set even lengths on oars, and I think that’s a good thing.

…right? Right. Totally!

Note: For the record, I gave Z his book back, because I’d gone to Amazon & ordered my own in case I wanted to be able to take notes.

The point being that rigging a boat & doing wiring — normally these things & I are, if not Great Friends, then at the very least, Fairly Amicable Acquaintances.

Sadly for me, the following story is not normal.

Saturday. The day I thought I had it figured out.

So for those of you that actually read my blog entries that have #rowing in the header:
first off – thanks for putting up with me
second, you probably know that with my new boat, there’s been a slight… struggle with setting up my wiring.
(“struggle” : trans. MTV called from the 90’s, they’d like to know if I would participate in Claris vs Boat wiring as a Celebrity Death Match.)

Thus far this process has involved discovering that my wiring set didn’t have a magnet on the seat (my fault for not checking & assuming it’d be there), switching out the original wiring that came with the boat for a new set, trying three different magnets before I found one strong enough (really NK? What’s up with a weak magnet in my NEW wiring set? A couple of rowers at Beach!boathouse say they had that problem too, you might wanna check your supplier.)

The point being, two wiring sets & three seat magnets later, I finally had a rate.

Unfortunately, it appeared to be the horribly wrong rate, unless I’ve suddenly developed the heretofore unknown to me superpower of thinking I was paddling and in fact rowing a 46. (for non-rowers, you paddle at like, a 16. Slight difference, that.) G-mo borrowed my 1x for his heat at SW Regionals* & it told him he raced his 1k at a 108 stroke rating, a skill of which we were all appropriately in awe.
*because of my vertical proportions, I discovered my best hardware fit was a mens’ F-15 with a 165 weight cap. As such, my boat is the envy of every lightweight male on our team.

Since everything appeared to be installed correctly, we declared that I’d gotten a crap wiring set, & I ordered another from NK. Got it, put it in… same. damn. problem. Stroke rate: approx a bajillion.

Em. of. effffffff.

Attempt at Silver Lining:
Well, I have been working on improving my ability to hold a higher rate.

At this point, I gave up, admitted that I’d hit the edge of my troubleshooting capability, & asked DaddyMcG to take a look. So after team practice on Sat morning, we took my boat down, & by the time I’d gotten my speedcoach & came back, he said, “I can see the problem right here.”

The magnet was too far back.

JTG, whom I’d bought the boat from, already had wiring in there, so when I put the new sets in, I used his old spots thinking, “Okay, he’s already proven this is the right place. As they say in Beauty & the Beast, if it’s ain’t Baroque, don’t fix it.”
@Steeesh: B&B reference is totally your fault. I’ve had that song in my head on & off ever since you said “Hey gurl!”

Realize you’ve put the seat on backwards.

Sit 100m away from the dock & go, “Son of a b*tch!”

Paddle back to the dock. Get out of boat. Pull oars in. Take seat off tracks.
Turn seat around.
Put seat back on tracks.
Grumble.
Run oars out. Get back in boat. Push off dock.

Five strokes… no stroke rate again.

I just… I don’t, I can’t… it’s not fair.

Okay. Stop. Breathe. Engage yoga breath. Apply brain. You had a stroke rate last time, then you put the seat on correctly.

…if the magnet was at the front when the seat was on backwards, putting the seat on properly moved it to the back again.

When I stopped to talk to the other rower & explain that I didn’t come back in because Something Dire Had Occurred, I must’ve not been paying attention & put the magnet right back where I’d just taken it off from.

Go. Team. Me.

Paddle-back-to-the- dock. Get-out-of-boat. Pull-oars-in. Take-seat-off-tracks.
Put the damn magnet in the right damn spot.
Make sure seat is facing right freakin’ way.
Put seat back on tracks.
Grumble.
Run-oars-out. Get-back-in-boat. Push-off-dock.

Obligatory five strokes.
Achieve stroke rate.
:fist of triumph!:

Start to paddle away… realize that there’s a click & slight bump when approaching the catch.

What. What now? What the freakin’ bloody hell now???

With the added weight of… well let’s just be honest – my ass, the seat now bends in just enough that the two magnets don’t pass by one another, they hit each other.

Really? Really? It’s not enough that I’m having this morning of mornings, but now you gotta make a sister feel fat, too?

WHY DOES THE UNIVERSE LIKE TO TORTURE ME?

Seriously, people – I’d put up with a lot from the Cosmic Muffin that day, but the fat joke — oh, that put me right over the edge. I just started mumbling stuff like, “You wanna go, b*tch? Really? You wanna go? Fine. Effin’ bring it, and we will em’ effin’ go. And you will lose, because right now I’m in the mood. I am from New York. My mom works at Wal-Mart. My parents live in a trailer. I was the first to get a freakin’ degree. You know what that means? Underneath all this nice, civilized, well-spoken, meditation-practicing, educated-up guise, I am a Long Island girl with a bad temper whose parents are technically trailer trash and if need requires, do not doubt for a moment that b*tch, I will cut you. ”

Backtodock. Outofboat. Pulloarsin. Seatofftracks.

Let’s look at what we’ve got here.

Okay. Seat – magnet cannot get any higher, it’s on the frame for the seat wheels. No give there.
Boat. We’ve got the deck, the tracks, the porthole cover.

Dude, wtf, I lost ten pounds & shifted BMI this summer because I’m freakin’ allergic to mother-lovin’ wheat. What is wrong with the world when I have to give up bread and my own damn boat is still telling me my ass is too big? Why you gotta be like that, Baby? Didn’t I get you new wiring? I’m gonna order the new shoes soon! Momma loves to row you, why you gotta be so mean?

Okay. No. Stop that. Focus, brain. Focus. Let go of the leftover childhood insecurity borne of being taught an unrealistic body image and focus on the now.

Porthole cover. That’s inset, so it’s lower than the deck. Unless I flip the boat :pause to knock on internet wood: I’ll pretty much never take that cover off, so it really won’t move.
I can try putting the magnet on that, and it should be low enough so that the magnets will clear each other under the apparent weight of my ginormous ass.

Hey hey! Focus, remember? Focus. Before we descended into allowing Bridget Jones’ neurosis to control thought process, there was an actual good applicable solution there. Let’s focus on that.

As you might guess by… most of the entries in this blog, my life often falls into the category of… special, and as such I’ve learned to contingency plan, which is why, when I’d first come down to the dock, I’d brought a roll of electrical tape & a small pair of scissors which I keep in my toolbag just in case.

This, it turned out, was just such a case.

I gently pried the hull-magnet (attached by double-sided tape) off the deck, scooted enough slack in the wiring to stretch to the porthole over, and pressed the hull magnet onto the cover, using my handy-dandy electrical tape to tack things down for testing purposes.

Run the oars out. deep calming breath.
Get back in boat. it’s gonna work. it’s totally, totally all going to work.
Push off dock. Things will be fiiiiiine…

Obligatory five strokes.
Achieve stroke rate. yay!
Five more strokes, listening carefully….
No clicking noise.

No way.

I’m almost afraid to say this, but I think it works.

YES!
It’s possible I almost started to do a victory dance before I remembered I was in a slightly tippy conveyance out in the middle of a body of water and thus needed to hold on to the oars in order to stay upright.

Finally.

I paddled out clear of the dock & the stadium which was no longer open to rowers & thus meant I couldn’t calibrate that morning, & started up the channel towards the yacht club. Held water, took a minute to check things before I started my workout an hour & fifteen minutes after I first put my boat in the water (Not that I’m bitter. Not at all.) Looked up as I was putting my sunglasses on, & saw…

… the rest of my team rowing by from the bridge to the dock as they finished their practice.

Hey guys… :sad little wave:

At that point, it was about 8:30am, the sun was up & in the sky at full shiny brightness, the rest of my team was headed home, & I’d accomplished jack-all for a workout that morning.

There was really only one thing to do.

…and so, 3×30 minutes of steady state later, I was done.

What? Of course I did the workout after all that — even my boat is saying my ass needs to train!

Music: Henry Nearly Killed Me [It’s a Shame] – Ray LaMontagne

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