Finding Her Stroke

Years after hanging up her oars, a once-serious rower forges a new relationship with the sport that used to consume her

(Sean McCormick)

I glared bitterly at the little box marked "beginner" and then checked it.

The truth, like it or not, was that my days as a high-level rower were in my buff past, a distant place decorated with high school and college team medals and marked by fast races up steep hills and times when I was rowing so hard I'd vomit off the side of the boat into the water. This may not seem glamorous, but I'd clung to those memories to the point that, at 34, I felt I had become the classic movie character, the guy with the beer gut who won't stop talking about how he won the high school football championship.

Except I'm a woman. And I don't have a beer gut.

Now as I filled out the paperwork for a two-hour rowing lesson in an unfamiliar light scull made for one person, I couldn't help noting how different this body is from the one I had when I stopped rowing and coaching in 1992. As a young woman, being a rower painted me in my own eyes as disciplined and strong, and the fact that I excelled in this fanatically competitive sport seemed to prove anything was possible. Now, however, I am far softer and weaker, probably 15 pounds lighter than the woman who did pull-ups off a ladder hanging from the boathouse ceiling at the University of Wisconsin. While I'm still a recreational runner, the only physical evidence that I was once a serious rower is the missing top inch of my left ring finger, which I lost when I was 16 during a freak racing accident that tossed me from the boat.

I had never really faced the fact that my days of being a student athlete, with all the camaraderie and youth and promise, were over. I'd accumulated so many intense memories: The team's spring break road trip to a Tennessee training camp while the rest of campus was headed to boozy beach spots -- and we couldn't have been happier crammed into a van driving south through the night. The foot races up steep, steep Topping Hill with our coach driving beside in a car, screaming at us to run faster. The walks early every Saturday morning to the boathouse in crunchy snow along the lakefront path. The medals, the grins.

That is a powerful time, young adulthood, a period when many of us begin to define how we see ourselves: I am "an actor," "a baseball player," "a writer." We have one foot in childhood and one in adulthood, right on the border between fantasy and reality; sure, I can't fly, but perhaps I can make it to the Olympics?

But as my college years went on, my towering, determined Midwestern teammates started beating me -- in "erg" races on the misery machines known as ergometers, in boat sprints on Lake Mendota, in weightlifting competitions. Looking back, I can see I didn't have the tenacity and pure love of the sport to hang tough as the coach moved me from the "first boat" to the second boat, or the third. Discouraged and demoralized, I quit in my junior year.

Now I was ready to accept the choices of my past, ready to forgive myself and start again. I wanted to snatch rowing from my history, drag it into the present and rewrite the ending. So as I prepared for my lesson at a Vermont rowing camp, the passage of time was stark. In the camp's little bathroom, I noted that I was missing all the rower prerequisites: the dorky shorts with the butt padding, the bulging thigh muscles, the hard-earned calluses from rolling the oar handle repeatedly for hours on end, back and forth. I look like a tourist, I thought to myself as I walked with my boyfriend down to the little lake for our lesson.

Before, I'd always competed in the long, sleek vessels made for eight powerful people. Now I was trying to learn how to row in a scull -- a boat made for one person -- a more pragmatic choice for a working adult too busy to join a team. Sculls are far lighter -- about 40 pounds -- and tippier, and have two oars to master rather than one. It was like starting over at something I'd never accepted that I'd stopped.

As we waited for our teacher, six young teenagers were getting beginner lessons next to the dock. I listened as the teacher explained how to lower your body into the ultra-light boat without flipping it. The kids giggled as the instructor talked about the clean "plunk" the blade -- the rectangular part at the end of the oar that goes into the water -- makes when it's put into the water correctly, and the importance of keeping your body level and moving on an even plane.

Taking a deep breath, I got into the scull for my lesson. Then I realized I'd forgotten the globally recognized oar markings that help you put the starboard oar into the oarlock on the left and the port oar into the one on the right. Because rowing equipment is highly sensitive, this would be like trying to run with your sneakers on the wrong feet.

Soon the teacher gave my boat a shove, and I was gliding along on this small, glassy idyllic mountain lake, just me and all the most defining athletic memories of my youth. The boat was so light and tippy that there was no room for cockiness; I needed first to make sure I didn't flip. In rowing that is called keeping the boat "set." You don't want the oar handles to go too high toward your face or too low toward your lap; while you are rowing you want to keep them within a narrow "strike zone" in the midsection of your body.