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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#nerdproblems

That moment where you don’t know if the reason things are uploading slowly is because the coffeeshop’s wi-fi is overloaded, or because your laptop is slowly dying, which is why you’re really, really kinda hoping the new one you ordered is early & shows up today instead of tomorrow as the shipping manifest predicted.

Moving on…

Before I share the tale of how I went to Joshua Tree for a weekend so I could alternately sleep, meditate, and allowed two guys to beat the crap out of me for my own endocrinal good, I thought we’d hit on a happy note & I’d share some of the things brightening my world right now.

Problem: I can never find my iPhone because everything I own is black.

…and to try to solve that, a bright orange case seemed a good solution. However, I soon discovered that for some reason, the headphone jack & charger openings weren’t large enough to allow me to use my original charge wires — damn you Apple & your ability to make things smaller & nicer over time! :shaky fist:

Solution?
In a rare display of glitter in my life, I got an iphone case that looks like Dorothy slippers.

Because it’s awesome. And the sequins mean it sparkles so I don’t root around in my bag mumbling under my breath about personal tendencies to apply goth color spectrums in my electronic accessorization.

psst – they also have green, gold & pink. I’m almost tempted to start a collection just because seeing me take out a sparkly red iPhone seems to startle people. #KeepEmOnTheirToes

I found tea that smells like cake. No. Joke.

In December, I picked up a couple of the holiday teas that were out at the store, & may possibly have opened a box, started to walk away, then doubled back like Toucan Sam following Froot Loops as I took a deep breath and said, “Oh my god, that tea smells like cake. It then proceeded to become my go-to cuppa until January when I ran out & may have had a small panic.

Then I remembered that I had the internet and things became okay again.

If that’s not your (tea)bag, I’d suggest that Sugar Cookie Sleigh Ride is also pretty damn awesome.. I’m gonna go ahead & assume y’all can figure out on your own what that smells like.

Having a day? Just sit back & let the sound of British make you feel better.

I bring you Matthew Mcfayden reading the first proposal scene of Pride & Predjudice. Why? Because it’s lovely – there’s something about the way he reads that, no matter what’s going on, just makes your day feel a little better. Go on, put your headphones on & have a nice little auditory break.

I mean, the visuals are kinda shmatlzy, but otherwise…see? Wasn’t that nice?
If you just want the audio, word is it can be found here.

Lovely. Let’s go have some tea.

Oh, Tumblr – you do make so many things better.

In a time where Texts from Hillary made us all consider the re-emergence of large dark sunglasses, we also got Texts from my dog, which completely reinforces my fear of Zoey figuring out technology.

…and they’re British. Because the Britishisms just automatically make it all so much better.

Did anyone else see this preview & go, “That’s freakin’ awesome…”

I don’t give a crap that it’s probably a formulaic “Author hunts serial killer copying his books” plotline — somebody thought to cast John Cusack as Edgar Allen Poe. Screw the rest of the plot, that decision alone is just fantastic.

To that casting director: Those of us who grew up in the late 80′s early 90′s salute you!

You’re like Dumbo. Except without his feather.

in case you’re like the Geico guys who live under the rock, I’m posting The Many Faces of Jenny Lawson. Because it’s awesome. And you should go pre-order your book now.

So go hit up the pre-order love, read it, steal yourself a Bible to compare, and then and we can all Pretend This Never Happened..

Music: This is the Thing – Fink

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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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Shut it, I totally did. I had a bunch of freelance work in my queue, and I said to myself, “Self, we are going to be sane about this. We are going to sit, and work out timelines & process, and include that in estimates and establish a system for how we’re going to tackle off of this that will allow us to have sanity and get some sleep. Indeed Self, that is what we shall do.”

And, in a rare occasion of personal awesome, that’s what I did.

I know! I was so proud of me too!

…and then it all got shot to hell.

Then on a Thursday morning, I got a call from what I shall call Finance!Client

Finance!Client:	Hey, you know that two month timeline we had?
Claris:	….yes…
Finance!Client:	Well we know our old site sucks, and we’re going to a conference, so we wanted to see if we could move that up a little so we’d have the site ready for it.
Claris:	Okay… when is the conference, gentlemen?
Finance!Client:	Monday.
Claris:	I knew you were going to say that!

And yes, I actually did say that out loud. Freelancers everywhere: you’re welcome.

However, considering that the final tally for the contract will be slightly under what I make in two months worked at Museum!Co (which is no mean amount in itself, thanks be to art museums) I really couldn’t turn that one down, so away we went, and everything got thrown up in the air as I scrambled to finish the site for Finance!Client before all the other projects fell back down to hit the ground.

Which is why, as of last Wednesday, I have completed enough work that I am now caught up to… last Sunday evening. (except for Civic!Co. There I’m just kinda eff’d & will have to spend the next week & a half doing… pretty much nothing else.)

However, in the interim I had a couple thoughts that I figured I’d share with you, so here they are.

Things I would want you to know if they’d happened to me.

But they didn’t, so obviously this is all entirely hypothetical.

- you’ll get way further in your research if you wait until the end of the phrase to hit enter.
For instance, “Google table” gives completely different results than “Google tablet“, which was probably the information I was looking for anyway.
psst – suck it, Apple! I told you if you’d made the iPad Mini I’d buy it but nooo… you couldn’t give me a half-page-sized fully functioning tablet. Well Google can, so what’s up with you?

- pay attention when ordering oar handles.
Why? Because it turns out that “1″ isn’t one set, but one single grip, and a bad time to find that out is when you’re opening the envelope for the first time* as Z is taking the old grips off only to hear you go, “Stop stop! Son of a bitch, I’m an idiot!”
*because possibly I might have thought I was being smart by not opening the envelope until we did the switch, thus lessening my chances of losing anything.

Note: This would be especially bad if this was perhaps the second set of oars that I’d bought new grips for and maybe I’d correctly ordered the right quantity the first time around. Because if that had happened, and then I had still mucked up ordering the second set, that would be just… so stupid. If that had happened. Which, of course, it didn’t. But if it had, this entire story would be… less than optimal.

- don’t buy a Kindle while you’re in the middle of a work rush.
Otherwise, it will arrive on Monday, & you will walk past it for a week, still in its packaging because you just know that if you let yourself open up the box & get it sorted & put the darling red leather cover on, no actual work will get done because you’ll just start reading smutty books to decide which would be best to send to Anya* now that, thanks to the Kindle, no one will actually be able to see the content of what you’re reading.
I’m still not entirely sure how this tradition evolved to its present state over the years, but when one friend lives in LA & the other lives in Toronto, sometimes the birthday & Christmas packages become… creative.

Instead, because you know you’d fall into the Tempting Pit of Reading Awesome and are trying to be really, really good, the Kindle will sit in a box on your living room floor which you will cast long, sad looks at as you rush past from bed to boathouse or work. It will squat, sad and alone and feeling unloved as you inhabit your couch while The Daily Show & The Colbert Report marathon from your Hulu queue in an attempt to make oneself feel as though you have some semblance of an idea about what’s going on in the world as your life consists of a backlit screen and the constant clicking of mouse & keyboard until you realize that the TV is distracting, and you go into full-on Sh*t Programmers Say mode.

At this point, it’s possible that you will not only have a despondent, still-wrapped Kindle anthropomorphically emoting annoyance in the way only electronics can, but you’ll also now have two canines balefully staring at you — after all, TV they can watch with their mommy, but once you put the headphones on — well, :sigh:… it’s like you’re pretending they’re not there.

So, ya know… that might have been my life last week if I’d decided to wait until a later date to set up the Kindle. If it had happened. Which of course, it didn’t, so hey — good thing there.

do NOT start watching The Biggest Loser on Hulu.
Because, if say, you work with k-walla, who loves Jillian Michaels, & randomly turn on season 6 for background noise one afternoon while working & setting your world up for the week, you just might become a-freakin’-diccted and end up staying awake with Sachiel until 1:30am the next Sunday night to make sure that Heba & Vicky don’t win because oh my god, they’re such bitches, and Michelle rocks!
You might also already be 2 episodes into season 7, want to give Jerry a teddy bear, hope that Dan gets to stay forever, & think that Tara is the sh*t. Maybe.

Untapped potential: Jillian Michaels as a coxswain. I'm just sayin'.

…and in conclusion:

…that might be my world right about now. So – how’s y’all? What’d I miss?

Music: Simple Song – The Shins (Port of Morrow)

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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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In the process of completing a survey as part of a job bid, I finished the Self-Evaluation of Skills where I numerically rated my skills in various software products, programming languages, & miscellaneous skills. In the comments section, I put the following:

“In the survey above, the word “Writing” is spelled wrong.
(I also do proofreading.)”

I’m just sayin’.

Fear the future.

Someone marked a post on pinterest with the caption: “I want to be an Olsen”.

…I don’t know who you are, but I’m really really scared for you.

My monkey has red pants!

Let me start by saying this: I like kids. I do.

Due to the fact that I spent most of my teenage years working as what is now called an au pair* & thus have already raised someone else’s toddler, I don’t presently feel any driving urge to manufacture additional replicants. However, I do like other people’s children & honestly do enjoy interacting with them.
*back then we just called it “babysitting a lot”.

The result is that I am totally the person that stands behind parents at the grocery store & makes faces at your kids so that they laugh & clap and then when you turn around I pretend to be fully absorbed in my iPhone screen, thus causing you to wonder what on earth is wrong with your offspring that they are having spasms of joy over what appears to be nothing at all.

And then, when you turn around, I start making faces at the kids all over again. :thumbs up:

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That said, even I felt a little bad about this one.

I was in Target, & a very cheerful toddler stood up in the cart & began waving at me. As the housewares department normally doesn’t see that kind of enthusiasm, I happily waved back. She obliged by displaying the odd plastic green rubber… thingy that was in her hands (I have no idea what is the new…toy…thing or whatever) and said, “My toy!”

To which I said, “Your toy is very nice. What color is it?” When her face was clearly stricken at not knowing the answer, I said, “It’s green. Your toy is green.”

Toddler was rather delighted by this, and started looking for something. “Monkey!” she proudly said, thrusting out the tiny plush monkey which had been by her feet. “My monkey is green!”

“No,” I told her gently, “Red. Your monkey has red pants.”

It was at this point that her mother decided it was time to move to the next item on her list & we waved goodbye.

However, as I walked around the corner, I heard a small voice saying, “My monkey has red pants!” “Hi! My monkey has red pants!”

And, from my viewpoint, I could look down the line of aisle openings & see that my tiny new friend was indeed now riding the cart through Target, greeting every single person they passed & letting them know that her monkey has red pants.

To her mother:

I am so sorry.

I know what it’s like when I toddler grabs onto an idea & won’t let go, and I realize there’s the very real possibility that you heard about the monkey’s red pants for at least half an hour straight following our conversation, so yes. My utmost, honestly sincere apologies – I had no idea things were gonna go down like that.

Seriously. My bad.
~ Claris

Music: Howie Day – She Says (Stop All the World Now)

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…and thus entered Ernie into our lives.
Much to Zoey‘s deep chagrin.

Also? Holy crap lookit how skinny he used to be.

As such, despite several attempts by his older sister to sell Ernie to gypsies for a quarter, Ernie survived his first year with us. And since we’d don’t know his actual birthday, it’s been decided to make Valentine’s Day his Adoptaversairy Day, so today, Ernie turns seven.

In fact, Ernie comes into his seventh year having learned many important things.

Things I Have Learned!

by Ernie.

• It’s better to poo outsidethe house. ’cause when you do that, they say, “yay, good boy Ernie!”…and when you don’t, you have to sit in the corner. :sigh:
• it takes some time to learn how, but if you’re quick, you can follow Mom everywhere & not get stepped on.
• if you want attention, it’s better to sit with all four feet on the ground, ’cause Mom says making a dog dance for treats is demeaning.
• if you are quiet & patient & okay with her always being in charge, eventually Zoey will tolerate you, and then you can sleep on the same side of the bed and she’ll let you give her kisses! (I love my big sissy!)
• Quiet Time (when mommy meditates) is the bestest!
• before I pick a fight with a bigger dog, I should check to make sure I am bigger than their head. I don’t understand why that is, by the way – I’m a scrapper from south central, yo — I can totally take them!
• turns out that when I get to eat, I’m a whole different breed of dog. Who knew?
• when Mommy teaches Sculling I & I go in the launch, I am an excellent assistant coach. Mommy showed me that someone put it on their course evaluation, so it must be true!
• we’re not supposed to attack random people, even if I think they’re shifty.Sometimes I forget this one.
• I sleep curled up by Mommy’s tummy. Zoey sleeps behind her knees. Why? because that’s the way we roll.
• Zoey gets the big couch, & I get the little couch. Unless Zoey wants the little couch. Then I go sit on Mommy’s feet.
• My first night, Mommy got me a blue Thomas the Tank Engine blankie because she wanted me to have something soft & she thought that was better than the pink Disney princess blankie. It’s a year later, and I still really like my blankie.
• when Zoey walks over & looks at you, it usually means she wants that spot, so you should move. Some people think she only does that to me, but I’ve actually seen her move humans that way. It’s amazing!
• it’s nice here. I like it.Thanks Auntie Dao.

 



Expectation vs. Reality: the Adoptaversairy Version

 

Expectation.
Now, considering the way our house is, you’d probably hear the word “Adoptaversairy” and think “Oh holy jesus, you like, put the dog in a hat, didn’t you?”

source: Huffington Post

No, indeed I did not.

 

Reality: POO. omg, people. So. Much. Poo.


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Instead, we’ve spent the last two days with a puggle whose tiny tummy was hugely upset, an event that he kicked off my walking up onto my bed and vomiting – luckily, I was awake and thus able to cry out in alarm as I quickly stripped the topsheet off before it could soak in — to be honest, the part that took the longest was convincing Zoey that no, get up for real. Dammit Zoey, this is not a drill, get off the bed!

And such has it been. But only at night.

Two nights in a row Ernie has graced the floors with unintentional cow pies, the likes of which have reminded me of why I prefer hardwood flooring (which we do not have in the bedrooms) and have caused Ernie to hide under my desk out of shame until I coaxed him out to assure the poor baby that I wasn’t mad.

However, some advice from Auntie Anya & two 1/4 tsp doses of Pepto Bismol later, we seem to be on back on the right digestive track, thank $deity.
Thus, with a (arguably) more refined sense of decorum & a markedly more stable intestinal system doth Ernie enter the age of 7. Personally, I’m just hoping that this year involves such valuable things as finally getting The Ernie Noise recorded for you guys, maybe helping Sachiel figure out how to hold a puggle, & the vague notion that Ernie will become blasé enough about his security for the separation anxiety to ease just a bit — at least enough that his sister will no longer exercise the one thing she’s found Ernie to be useful for: Getting him to do shit, as she did one night when I shut them out of my room in the hopes of being able to eat in peace, and instead started the video on my phone because I… heard something.

I know this will seem odd at the beginning, but just… hang out & wait for it. Trust me.


Happy Adoptaversairy, lil’ man. Next year though… I’m totally gonna see if Auntie Mia can find you a tiny party hat.

Music: Twenty-three – Tristan Prettyman










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]]> http://heroineaddict.me/ernies-adoptaversairy-also-expectation-vs-reality/feed/ 3 http://heroineaddict.me/first-2k-trauma-for-the-love-of-god-stop-doing-this-to-people/ http://heroineaddict.me/first-2k-trauma-for-the-love-of-god-stop-doing-this-to-people/#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:29:07 +0000 claris http://heroineaddict.me/?p=2007  

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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]]> http://heroineaddict.me/first-2k-trauma-for-the-love-of-god-stop-doing-this-to-people/feed/ 1 http://heroineaddict.me/rowing-creek-letting-go-finding-flow-being-really-freakin-selfish/ http://heroineaddict.me/rowing-creek-letting-go-finding-flow-being-really-freakin-selfish/#comments Fri, 03 Feb 2012 07:29:11 +0000 claris http://heroineaddict.me/?p=1978 Bear!Boathouse sits on a finger of land that separates two bodies of water – marina & creek.

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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]]> http://heroineaddict.me/rowing-creek-letting-go-finding-flow-being-really-freakin-selfish/feed/ 1 http://heroineaddict.me/sht-we-say-in-la-21-jump-street-storm-troopers-on-the-highway/ http://heroineaddict.me/sht-we-say-in-la-21-jump-street-storm-troopers-on-the-highway/#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:31:24 +0000 claris http://heroineaddict.me/?p=1959 I have actual content, I swear.

But before we get to the fact that Gina Curano is my new girl crush, I thought I’d share a few things with you:

sh*t people say in LA

While I have not snorted coke with Skeet Ulrich, I am verbatim guilty of the parking quotes, and yes, a couple of other things:


21 Jump Street? I am SO THERE.

Much to Sachiel‘s horror in the movie theatre lobby, I fully intend to partake of this, because unlike my erstwhile roommate, I’d already seen the trailer:


I love two things about this movie:
1. They’re not even trying to take any of it seriously.
2. The fact that every time they do promos for this movie, they’ll have to say “Oscar nominee Jonah Hill” really is just made of farcical win.

 

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How to mess with people on the highway:


That’s right, it’s a storm trooper motorcycle suit.
I’m not even gonna comment, you just go ahead & think up your own remark for this because anything associated with this will automatically be awesome.

Other news?

• I got my arse in gear & fixed the couch, thus making the dogs very happy.
• Slowly but surely unpacking things, thus making the cardboard box recycling plant busy.
• Have been sucked in over on pinterest, thus losing hours of my life, but with some good source material.
• Now need to actually do something with said source material
• I am in a waiting mode for a few things, and it’s driving me beserk.

 

More to come:

• At one point last week, I tried to work out but was defeated by my lack of a dollar bill. I really wish I was kidding about that.
• Ya know, for a group so up on relaxation, yoga peoples need to chill the eff out.
• Haywire made my world shiny.
• There actually does come a day when you stop missing wheat. Now, if I could just give up sugar.
• When in doubt about a soup recipe, just throw it in the slow cooker for a day. It really does make everything better.
• … except cheesy cauliflower. (don’t worry, the crock pot is fine. I didn’t even try.)

 
Music: Bach, the Cello Suites – Yo-Yo Ma



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