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

By Michelle Boorstein
Sunday, May 14, 2006

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.

I've often heard sculling coaches tell people there's almost no chance they will flip, but I beg to differ. Not only was I maimed when I flipped out of an eight, but I had tried briefly to learn sculling in the early 1990s in Boston, and can still remember drivers stopping along busy Memorial Drive parallel to the Charles River to see if the woman holding onto the overturned scull was all right. I'm fine, I waved calmly, trying to make it appear that I was involved in some planned safety drill. I soon took a job in waterless Phoenix and abandoned that brief flirtation with sculling.

Now, once my little scull was somewhat set, I started the classic drills many rowers begin a workout with, breaking the stroke into sections and practicing each part separately. Rowing is about moving the boat, so all your work is aimed at getting the blade plunked into the water at the correct angle and depth so you can pull hard. I often think of a rower as looping his or her hands around a track, like a bike chain. When this is done correctly, it's like being in a perfect stride while running, or taking a seamless shot at the golf course; it is blissful. The rower will feel like one with the water and the boat, power channeled perfectly into grace.

That was not what it felt like that day.

The lightness of the scull compared with an eight is like the difference between painting a Faberge egg and drawing in a coloring book with crayons. I tried to relax, but my strokes were wobbly. When my blade was in the water (called "the drive") I felt great, but the half of the stroke when my hands were moving away from my body and the blade was out of the water (called "the recovery") was rocky, because that's when the boat can get easily unset. When you're rowing well, the boat is perfectly balanced -- the blades aren't dragging along the water's surface during the recovery, the oar handles aren't bonking along the sides of the boat. The only sounds are the oar handles turning in the oarlock, and they can sound like windshield wipers going methodically back and forth.

My blades were dragging a bit along the water's surface, making a thump-thump-splash sound, and I was still afraid of flipping. But I was getting some good strokes in and losing myself in some familiar sensations: the sweet smell of gas fumes from the teacher's boat, the smooth oar handles in my hands, the stretch in my back. Even after 12 years, there was something primal kicking in.

Looking out at the water before me, endless memories returned of how rowing defined so much of my young life. Feeling over the moon when my high school coach waded into the water to hug us after winning the New England Championship. Coming to a Big Ten school and finding myself competing with nearly 100 women for a handful of top spots, and getting one. Then watching it slip over the next few years. I remembered my father, a college rower, driving and flying all over the country to watch me race, and my unathletic mother noting that she could spot me at a distance in the boat because I was often the only brunette in a sea of Nordic blondes. I relished the idiosyncratic lifestyle of a rower, the daily trip to my body's outer limits and the closeness of a team moving in one fine unit. I loved that age because everything seemed possible, in sports, in love, in life.

But as I stroked my way across that glassy little Vermont lake, it was screamingly obvious that I am a different rower, a different person. I am now a thirtysomething with a car loan and nice soft hands. I was at the rowing camp with my boyfriend, who was brand-new to the sport, not my father. I'd wanted to learn to scull with my dad, but he told me his knees were bothering him. He said it was getting too hard to lower himself into the boat. It washed over me that trying to re-create something from your past is pointless.

Since that two-hour lesson, I've begun sculling on the Potomac and slowly forging a new relationship with the sport as an adult, and I've found it mostly exhilarating. I am still learning to balance the boat, and one day I got a dirty look from two college-age women in a two-person boat when I didn't navigate into the dock correctly and caused a minor traffic jam. It's a trade-off. I no longer possess chiseled back muscles, but I do have an adult's appreciation of the meditative aspect of rowing, not just its power. I no longer obsess about winning and erg stats. Instead I observe my body and the stroke unfolding in the same way one meanders through a poem. And, occasionally, I get into a stretch where all I can hear is the sound of windshield wiper blades.

Michelle Boorstein is a reporter for The Post's Metro section.