Catch, drive, release; catch, drive, release. Shadows deepen along the shore, and a crimson, mackerel sky glows above. A stern, still heron studies the deep. Oars dip, legs press, backs open. Together we move over the water, in the growing dusk.
I knew at first stroke. Love never seized me that way, but rowing did. When I first dropped my oar into the water in “Learn to Row” and drove the seat back hard with my legs, something elemental took hold. Suddenly, I was a 9-month-old, standing in my mother’s lap, pushing hard with my legs, locking my knees to stand. A primal drive.
I grew up before Title IX when girls didn’t do sports. I played kickball with the neighbor kids, but balls flew at my head and bounced off. I could never judge where a pop fly would land. Or the ball dropped into my glove then bounced right back out. I was good with a bat, but the ball flew straight into some outfielders glove every time.
Sport required a confidence I lacked: the confidence to be out in front, to grab the ball away, to win at somebody else’s expense. Winning at sports seemed equivalent to pushing your way to the head of a line, showing everyone else up. I didn’t understand why the rules I learned in Sunday School – do under others as you would have them do unto you – didn’t apply in sports. Competitive sports seemed brutish and immodest.
In college, I began to develop some confidence in my body. I went to an all-women’s college with a crew team, but crew was for rich kids. I was a farmer’s daughter, so it never occurred to me to row. I did sign up for “Self-defense.” My instructor was a tall, handsome MIT student who believed in stockpiling food & weapons for Armageddon. He tried to recruit us to set up a compound in the California hills, commute into the city for professional work, and wait for the end. In our class, he taught us to punch, how and where to kick, using mixed martial arts. He dressed up in heavy padding and a giant foam helmet and had us beat the crap out of him. It was fun. He said I had a lethal punch. He even trained us on weaponry, and we practiced diving and rolling while pointing a gun at an intruder using a lighted rifle sight. I wonder if the athletics department at Wellesley College knew what he was up to. This training, for all its paranoia, took my confidence up a notch. The man believed in us.
After college I worked in D.C. for a few years. During that time, I began to run along the shady, azalea-line streets of NW Washington. More important, some co-workers at the NIH gathered for volleyball every Wednesday evening. Our games were beer-fueled and abandoned. I learned to serve with precision, dig at the net, deliver the ball up for spike. I was no longer the last pick for a team. The main lesson here was joy in sport. My fear of athletics eased.
In medical school I began swimming to release the nervous tension accrued studying 10 hours a day. I discovered the mood-altering properties of exercise and the need for mood food created a habit that I followed irregularly through my middle decades. Once during medical school, I was running along Scott Avenue in outer University when heard footfall behind me and then a hand between my legs. I stopped, wheeled around and stared, unbelieving, at a smirking ~15-year-old boy. I turned and began running again. Once more I felt his hand between my legs. My self-defense training came to me in that moment. I spun around, drew back my right arm, level with my chest, karate-style and spat, “Keep your god-damned hands off me.” He threw up his hands and backed away. I regret he departed without feeling the sting of my fist up his snotnose. This incident brought home to me that, somewhere along the line, I had become confident of my power.
For many years my preferred sport was running – along the shoulder of a country road, past open hayfields, aging farmhouses, and empty barns. My thoughts moved easily from one topic to another, measured by the slow, regular beat of my feet on the pavement. My brain sifted through the detritus of the day, sorting, filing, organizing, and putting the scattered thoughts ricocheting around inside my skull to rest. Passing my eyes across the landscape, I could feel its beauty open my heart and settle my nerves. Cattle lifted their heads to study me, the sun warmed my shoulder, the fresh air filled me, and I entered a state of perfect relaxation. It’s a ritual I still enjoy, more as I grow older. The reverie is more intoxicating and the glow more liquid and sweeter.
Years ago, a friend suggested rowing to me, because I am tall. I did not try it until my daughter was in high school. I thought rowing might improve her posture, so I signed both of us up for “Learn to Row.” My daughter hated it, but I…I found love. It must be true that, just as there is someone for everyone, there is a sport for everyone. I seemed to have a natural facility for rowing. I loved the fluidity of the stroke. It is a sensory experience. You must position yourself very specifically to meet, then overcome, the resistance of gravity, friction, and inertia. When you succeed, the water submits, the boat responds. Your body is relaxed and energized.
Novices think that rowing is an upper body sport. Not so. It is 80 % backside and legs, particularly for women. Rowers sit with their backs to the bow (front) of the boat and face the stern. The seat is moveable along a track about 3 feet long (called “the slide”.) Your feet are tied into to shoes mounted on the boat frame. You begin the stroke with your knees flexed the seat pulled up close to your backside. In this position, you drop the oar straight into the water “at the catch.” The first movement is straightening the legs. Once your legs are straight, you “open” your back, moving the upper body angle from 11 o’clock to 1 o’clock, pivoting at the hips. Finally, you bend your elbows and pull the oar handle to “the mark,” mid-chest. You then begin the recovery, which flows in precisely the inverse order as the stroke: arms out first, torso forward, knees flex and you are back at the catch. Good strong rowing includes a quick catch, a strong shallow drive, and a controlled recovery up the slide so as not to push the boat backward. The power of the stroke is in the legs.
Like any physical skill, the experts make it look easy. It’s hard. There is so much to the technique, that for the first few years of rowing you feel more confused than anything when humping along in the boat. If you focus on slowing the slide, your hand heights go to hell. If you focus on hand heights, you forget to drive with your legs and when you remember to drive with your legs, you are rocketing up the slide again. Rowing is intensely cognitive and physical at the same time. That is part of the magic. It works the entire body and much of the brain.
As with most skills, it takes 10 years or 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery. I can almost tell you the day that happened to me. Suddenly, when I wanted to work on my hand height, I could put my attention on pulling back lightly and the rest of my body would go through the natural motions of the stroke without thought! I had trained my body to do the right thing (mostly), and I gradually learned to trust it. The key lesson of rowing has been mastery: mastering my body, mastering a technique and a culture, and mastering my own fear.
I found myself in the stroke seat long before I felt ready. The stroke is the lead rower in the boat. It is a key position because you set the length and pace of the stroke for the whole boat. You have to be steady, and you have to row long. The rowers behind me were full of doubts about this relatively “new” rower and I could feel their critiques behind me, especially when we prepared for races.
There are two kinds of races: sprint races and head races. As the name indicates, sprint races are short and fast. They begin with the boats queued up to a “stake boat” or float on the water, so that the sterns are in perfect alignment. Maneuvering into the stake boats is terrifying. The officials issue terse directives. The cox barks orders. There is a flurry of fast, fine blade work to get the boat into position. When all boats are aligned, oars are in the water “at the catch” and all eyes are on the referee. The referee holds a flag up and begins the race with “Attention……”. He drops the flag, saying “Row.” And all boats do a “start” maneuver, a series of fast, short strokes to get the momentum going. This is an intense, technical maneuver, that is bound to get the nerves up. It often feels frantic, and you can see very quickly which boats are strong, as they forge ahead of the others with a vigorous start.
Once the race is underway and fatigue hits at about 500 meters, the terror turns into silent pleading for it to be over. Rowing hard and long is a miserable undertaking. I drool. I cannot spare an ounce of energy to catch the drool sliding down the right side of my chin. The time between 500 m and 750 m is the roughest. You question why you subject yourself to this torture. You think you will die. By 750 you’re getting ready for the sprint. “Sit up for 10. Up two in two (from 30 strokes/minute to 32). Up two in two for the sprint.” Then you are across the line, and you are gasping and sick with fatigue. Within moments you can sit erect again and pull on your oar and the delightful, relaxed row back to the dock is your reward.
The night before my first race at Masters Nationals in stroke seat, we practiced a start and I washed out, meaning my oar was too shallow and it caught more air than water. This gaff derailed what little confidence I had. I talked about scratching the race. A senior rower guffawed, “Syracuse doesn’t scratch.” All night I made trips to the bathroom with diarrhea. My embarrassment was profound. Here I was, a novice rower pretending to lead a race at a national competition. Not only that, but I was also sneaking back and forth from a bed I shared with a woman I hardly knew and trying not to shit too loudly all night long.
I made it through the race, rushed the slide but didn’t die. I continued to feel like a fraud in stroke seat. After a couple of years, I became impatient with myself. It occurred to me one day that “fear” and “fierce” not only share the Latin root for untamed (ferus) , but they are somewhat the same feeling – pounding chest, fast breathing, trembling extremities- a good old adrenaline surge. After that realization, I practiced, “turning” my fear a quarter turn in my mind into “fierce.” It was an intentional act of changing how I felt. I practiced this when stroking the boat and, within a very short time, possibly 3-4 weeks, my feeling about stroking changed from fearful to fierce. Could it be that simple? After that, I began to enjoy stroking. I learned to love setting the pace for the boat, rowing “long and strong,” and made that my signature rowing style.
In the summer of 2021, something extraordinary happened. The club hired a 23-year-old coach for us named Colin. He had rowed competitively in college and tried out for the national team, but then decided to focus on his work and took a job in Syracuse. We have learned from many wonderful coaches over many years. We took different pointers away from each one. However, being a small club, we could barely fill one or two boats for regattas and, as the years went on and we aged, our numbers dwindled. We made a poor showing at races, happy to beat a boat or two.
Then Colin arrived! Preternaturally wise and well-disciplined, he rebooted our rowing technique based on what he learned at the national team. No lay back. Carry oars one inch off the water on the recovery. Put all your power into the top 6 inches of the stroke. All these changes made it easier to row well. Possibly more important, he didn’t molly-coddle us because of our age. When winter training came, he kicked our butts.
The winters are long in central New York. We are off the water from early November until the ice floes vanish from Onondaga Lake in late April. There are 6 months of winter where you can sit around and watch Neflix after work or get on your rowing machine and gut it out for 90 minutes. We knew from the head race season of 2021, that our technique was improving but our stamina was poor. So, during winter training, Colin challenged us to get stronger. The club sponsored practices 3 days a week either in person or via Zoom. While we had gone through winter training programs before, Colin took us several notches up.
The key element was accountability. Once a month, we did a “test piece” of 500 meters four times with a few minutes of rest between. The average “split” of those four pieces became our 1K split. So, if your average split from the 4 x 500 meter pieces was 2 minutes and 16 seconds, your 1K split was 2:16. Each month we tested and he posted our individual results to Google sheets for the whole team to see. Each month we trained against that split. Every practice we sent him screen shots of our results. Every month we tested again and uniformly we lowered our splits. The next month, we paced ourselves against the new, lower split.
There were nights when I rowed so hard, I wanted to vomit. There were nights when I couldn’t take it and signed off. There were nights when I hit my splits and proudly texted my results and others when I was ashamed of my performance. Colin, with his cheerful and encouraging tone, rewarded us for giving it our best. He called us athletes. Athletes. And as a group we got very close and texted throughout the weeks, bemoaning our sore muscles and lousy splits. More importantly, we celebrated each other’s incredibly hard work. By May we were back on the water and feeling confident because of the work. Moreover, we had several new rowers, young women who had rowed in college. Our boats were noticeably more powerful. At our first race, we took a first and a fourth place.
For our second sprint race, Colin mixed younger and older rowers in our 8. There were 4 boats in our race, including our arch competitor club. Our coxswain was a scrappy, copper-haired coach named Hunter. At the start we surged into the lead. Startled, by this, we dug in and put everything we had into the row. Our stroke, Lisa, settled to a strong 30 strokes/ minute. I zeroed in on her tan, muscular left shoulder, trying to match her stroke for relentless stroke. As we gained, Hunter’s voice grew stronger and more excited,
“Legs, long, Legs, long, Legs, long!” Our oars hit the finish together in a “clunk” that sounded to us as powerful as the SU men.
At the 500-meter mark we were two boat lengths ahead. During the second half, we advanced further and further, crossing the finish line 3 boat lengths ahead of the next boat. We smoked ‘em.
Colin met us at the dock smiling. Back in the parking area we were jubilant, tearful, and proud. It seemed we had accomplished the impossible.
We practice to compete and win races. But, for me, the real joy comes in the day-to-day experience, the constant work, the daily effort to move from dread to mastery. I am still a little scared at the beginning of every practice. At the end of most practices, I feel relaxed, dreamy, and free.
Early on Saturday mornings the river is our private paradise. We launch into a quiet mist. Families of mallards and Canada geese slip in and out of the reeds. The sun rises and the mist gathers to the shoreline then vanishes. We push off the dock and begin our warm-up at steady state for 4, 3, 2, 1 minutes. We float up the river together, oars dipping, muscled thighs driving the boat forward. The sun burns our shoulders and sweat trickles between our shoulder blades. Then, the work begins, and we start a 30 minute piece with a technical focus. As we work, Colin stays abreast in the launch and, through the megaphone, cues each of us on technique, “8 seat, concentrate on the top 6 inches.” “4 seat, pull straight back, blade half-buried.” “Starboards, carry your oars one inch off the water on the recovery.” We listen. We change and when we get it just right, we hear, “There it is!” The sound of effort meeting achievement. The ring of work finding reward. At 69 years old I am in the best shape of my life.
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Deborah Young Bradshaw is a physician in upstate New York. Raised on a dairy farm, her memoir work captures the enduring characters and landscapes of her childhood, alternately innocent and brutal. Her narrative medicine pieces offer a glimpse of the inner life of medical professionals. Her work has appeared in Stone Canoe, The Healing Muse, The Annals of Internal Medicine and Neurology. Her memoir piece, “Dry Cows,” was named a 2020 finalist in the Jeffrey E. Smith Editor Prize for the Missouri Review.
Story © 2023, Deborah Young Bradshaw
Image © 2023, Tracey Burke Laszlo
Halfway Down the Stairs 