The Last Race

A friend at The Star asked me to write something about the experience of studying abroad for R.Age a couple of weeks ago. I forgot to give her something last weekend, and then this week procrastinated until last night when I looked at the clock and realized 11pm Thursday on CST is 1pm Friday Malaysian time. Yeek. Cooked this up in half an hour. Also discovered, while looking for old notes, that I wrote a lot of memoirs on the last crew road trip on the way back from Dad Vail freshman year.

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“Drop,” calls Lindsay. Eight oar blades smack the river’s surface. Behind me, Jill cries.

We could have been good. The start was much too slow, we weren’t pushing it, but we picked up the pace and were around third place – we might have made it to semifinals. That is, until Jill’s seat popped off around the thousand-metre mark. I am racked with guilt because I stopped rowing in confusion for several seconds after it happened. This boat has gremlins in it. We’ve had equipment problems all season.

Even after that disaster, we almost caught up with the rest of our race. We could have been so good.

Jill cries. I reach back and pat her arm awkwardly, not knowing what to do.

That was our last boat race during my freshman year, and possibly my last boat race ever, since I didn’t rejoin crew the following fall. After recovering from our misery, we wandered up and down the riverside park, watching the rest of the regatta and cheering for our seniors. It was the kind of bright spring day that makes me feel the North American climate can be bearable.

The year ended with a defeat, but we still felt that it had been a good year. In six or seven months we had gone from being eight freshman girls who couldn’t set up a boat straight to having raced in several regattas and won bronzes once.

Shortly after starting college at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, I committed myself to crew like a lamb to the slaughter. At first it was mostly curiosity, and an ill-though-out curiosity. The feeling I had on first seeing a racing shell is best described as techno-lust, like seeing a fighter jet, or an F1 car, in the flesh – a mobile monument to human ingenuity, sharp as a knife and icy smooth.

The problem was that I was in terrible shape and could hardly run a mile without wilting: fifty-one kilograms of wimp. Rowing is a demanding activity, since you’re pushing a large flat object perpendicularly through water. In racing shells, unlike ordinary boats, the seats slide back and forth so that most of the thrust comes from the rowers’ legs – you hold on to the oar handle and push off with your legs. And all this has to be done in exact coordination with the other rowers and the coxswain’s commands. An analogy for the physical and mental concentration this takes would be like lifting weights and drill marching at the same time.

And yet, when your boat achieves that, there’s the thrill of rushing through the water at incredible speeds, everyone catching and pulling in a perfect rhythm. You see the river in all its phases – still, wind-ruffled, choppy, cloudy, clear. Air and water. It’s an elemental sport.

(Obviously, in any activity that involves uni students, there are also abundant dirty jokes – like my “10 Reasons Why Rowing Is Better Than Sex” T-shirt purchased at a regatta.)

I look back and think I must have been crazy that year. Aside from crew and a full course load, I was also working part-time, sometimes up to twenty hours per week, and dealing with some of the social drama that comes with being a college student. It may have been pride that made me stay, and a reluctance to let down friends by leaving an empty seat in the middle of the season. There was, however, another side. For the first time in my life, I’d been forced past what I thought were my limits and discovered that they in fact weren’t. For the first time, I felt my muscles ache and harden. For the first time, I was participating in a sport by choice, not in P.J. or a compulsory co-curricular activity. For the first time, I was strong.