What good is it having two showers if you can only use one at a time?

Recently somebody implied that I was being a big couch potato because I wrote a few posts about television. Well for the record, yes, a little bit, but only when I’m home.

My last two weeks have been spent mostly either at work or the local rowing club. It’s interesting going to different clubs (this is my third) and comparing them. The one in Vancouver was a well established affair, a social club with a relatively big and fancy club house with employees and everything to boot. Then of course at McGill it was a university club where the focus was on training, coaches putting you through your paces at every turn and not giving any slack.

It’s hard to tell what exactly exists at my current club. The program I’m in is pretty much dominated by kids from the local high school teams. Though I’m told there are senior rowers around, there is certainly nothing regular or organized. I certainly miss the intensity of the university crew. We have had a couple days where we did erging or running and I was thoroughly worn out by the end, but the days we can get on the water—the area is notorious for thick endless fog—are decidedly less intense.

The thing I miss most is having a set crew. You knew as your alarm went off at 5 am that there would be seven other guys down at the water counting on you to be there, not to mention the cox and coach. If one guy didn’t show up, everybody suffered. Train together, win together.

I had just finished my least favourite exercise at the gym tonight when a woman got my attention to say that the exercise wasn’t a good one to be done alone, and was worried I could hurt my back. The reason I dislike this particular exercise ran along those lines already, but I did it because that’s the workout we did when I was doing it as part of winter training with a workout buddy.

Of course, I’m always willing to improve myself and my workout (otherwise I wouldn’t be at the gym in the first place), so I asked this woman what I should do to fix the problem. First she said, “You should try using this machine instead,” pointing to a second piece of the same equipment. Huh? I asked for clarification, and she mentioned some other ways of using the same equipment but work totally different muscle groups. Now this woman had credentials of sorts, so I was inclined to take her advice, but even I know that arms and legs are different muscles.

The conversation was going nowhere fast. I started getting a defensive vibe from her, which made me think I was making her think I didn’t believe her or wasn’t interested. So, we quickly dropped it and went our separate ways. It kept bugging me though. I’m more than happy to switch this exercise for another, but what was she talking about? What exactly had her criticism been? What could I do to avoid the problem? What was going on?

I caught up with her later to ask a few questions and see what advice she might have, trying very hard to seem open to the conversation and willing to fix what she saw as something bad in my routine. I don’t think she took it well. I was trying to strike up a friendly conversation—something I rarely do with strangers!—and even had conversation to make, but she still came off as highly defensive, as if I was attacking her opinion. She was actually a bit of a bitch about it.

I had a philosophy professor who used to say that in order to say something is wrong, you have to be able both to point out what exactly is wrong and how to fix it. I never really agreed that you needed the second part, but it certainly would have been nice in this case. Now I’m left at the mercy of the internet, googling for new exercises to replace what I’ll be too self-conscious to do again, instead of getting… well, advice from a random stranger. I guess I’m no worse off.

How many rowers are in this boat?

The answer is below the fold.

When I’m not listening to CBC during the drive to and from work, it’s a mix CD my mom made. It is her car after all. There are a handful of songs I like, but most I just skip over.

There was one that I was sure was a Madonna song, which I wouldn’t have expected from my mom but she does have varied tastes. For weeks I just skipped it after the first three seconds or so, but then one day I was distracted by something (possibly keeping my eye on the road) and let the song play. After about 10 or 20 seconds, what I was sure was a Madonna song turned into what I know is an ABBA song. I don’t know which ABBA song, but I recognized part of the music from an ABBA mashup techno megamix thing I had once. A melody of glissandos. I’d sing it for you but you can’t type that.

So then I stopped skipping the song. I didn’t want to have anything to do with Madonna, but an ABBA song is fine by me. If it came out today, I thought, it would probably do well. It could easily fit in with the pop charts of the day, as far as I knew. I got into the habit of listening to it on my way to the gym, as it was a good kind of song to get a person pumped up and bouncy.

I figured I should get a copy for myself and maybe add it to my erg playlist—something which requires lots of pumping up. The only problem was that at the very beginning the vocals say, with the beat, “Time goes by… so slowly… time goes by…. so slowly” which is the last thing someone wants to hear at any point during, say, a ninety minute steady state.

Nonetheless I figured I could edit that part out and the rest would be good, so I asked my mom what the name of that ABBA song on her CD was.

“ABBA song? What ABBA song?”

“You know, the one that goes like (me singing melodic glissandos)”

“Oh, that’s by Madonna.”

Damn.

These last few weeks have been hectic ones for me. Not so much because of a lot of different things to be done, but because of the specific things.

Months and months of winter training and far too little time training on the water culminated today with the Queen’s-McGill Boatrace. I wish it could say it turned out to be worth it, but a fantastic loss wasn’t exactly what we were going for. Well, it was an experience worth having and I’m glad I did it. We were a hastily slapped together crew, some of us with as few as two days on the water for training since October. It was disappointing for sure, and if ever I wanted to use the phrase “pooped and demoralised”, this is it.

My final exams aren’t even over but I feel like today’s race, the last of my McGill Rowing experience, has given me my main closure. In two more days my undergraduate career will be finished, and within a week or two after that I’ll be back home for the summer before moving to the big T-Dot for grad school. One adventure over and another one begins.

Two thousand metres in less than seven minutes. A 1:45 split. That’s my goal. Seven minutes.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1, ROW.

Half, half, three-quarters, full. Start with ten strokes strong. It feels like I could keep it at 1:33 for six or seven minutes, no problem, but I know I won’t feel that way 20 strokes from now. Take ten strokes to settle into my rate.

A few hundred metres in, holding 1:44 to 1:45 nicely at 30 strokes per minute. It feels easy but I know that’s temporary.

Coming up on 1200m remaining. The middle of the piece, from 1200 to 700, is the worst. Push through the pain. I can hear my coach behind me telling me to keep it strong, keep pulling.

Focus. Up to the catch. Breathe. Head up, eyes open. Don’t break the back too early. Strong finish. Breathe. Hands away and do it again.

By 1000m I’m pulling around 1:46, which is slower than I want, but only by a second. My average is still 1:43. Halfway through. Just don’t let it come down any more. I’m grunting and groaning in pain but it doesn’t matter.

I can hear my name being shouted, encouraging me, telling me to push, keep the legs strong. Coming up on 700m left. Soon it’s 500 and the end is near.

I know it’s time to start sprinting. My split has slipped to 1:50. Don’t let it get any lower. Push it, hard with the legs. I know it’s time to start sprinting. Push with the legs. The split stays at about 1:50. Shit. My legs are done pushing but I keep putting them through the motions. Keep the rate, wind it up even. Keep the length. Full length can give you two seconds on the split.

Somewhere in my head I know some of the others have stopped, crossed the virtual finish line. I don’t care—I’m not rowing for them, I’m rowing for myself. 200 metres left. Then one hundred. Ten strokes left. My “inner crazy” comes in a few hundred metres late and not as crazy as I needed, but I bring the split down a few seconds in the final push.

Zero meters. Finish. Breathe. Breathe. People are applauding our effort. Breathe. Coaches congratulate. Breathe. Drink. Breathe. It occurs to me to check the result—my average slipped above 1:45 in the last few hundred. Breathe. Two thousand metres in seven minutes and 1.6 seconds. Breathe. Today is not the day I beat seven minutes. Breathe. There are varsity men who will beat that time by twenty seconds, but for me it’s a personal best. My goal is in sight for the next time. Breathe.

Someone remarked a few days ago how funny it was that suddenly everybody’s a rower. Four months ago we were a bunch of hopefuls who had (mostly) never been in a boat and had no idea what any of the catch, drive, and recovery were, sweating our way up stairs and around the basin for who knew what. This week we were standing at an organizational meeting for winter training and the summer season, planning out our lives as if they revolved around the sport.

Today I had a similar moment of realisation. You know that sudden surprise you get when you catch your reflection in a mirror and see that somebody glued a large rainbow clown wig on your head without your noticing? It’s the shock of realising that the picture you have in your head and what you actually look like are completely different. Today, I was walking from the weight room at the gym to the locker rooms, and happened to glance in a reflective window along the way. I wasn’t wearing a clown wig, but I was surprised for a moment that I was wearing baggy shorts. Your average Joe would just call them “shorts”, but to me they were surprisingly baggy because at some level I just expected myself to be wearing spandex. That’s what rowers do. Wear spandex around and forget that it’s weird.

The situation is this: I am writing a paper, at the last minute of course, for my class on existentialism. At the same time, I have been rowing almost every day for seven weeks or so in preparation for a regatta this weekend. As I write the paper, I am conscious of the fact that it’s far past my bedtime, and if I have any hope of being able to get up and go to crew practice at 5 am tomorrow, I need to wrap things up and go to bed. With about half the paper left to write, I’m starting to get desperate for material, so I turn back to the text and start reading:

The empirical image which may best symbolize Heidegger’s intuition is not that of a conflict but rather a crew… It is the mute existence in common of one member of the crew with his fellows, that existence which the rhythm of the oars or the regular movements of the coxswain will render sensible to the rowers and which will be made manifest to them by the common goal to be attained, the boat or yacht to be overtaken, and the entire world (spectators, performance, etc.) which is profiled on the horizon.

I swear, when I read this paragraph from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, I actually thought I was hallucinating.

… is having time to make an awesome breakfast.

These huge temperature changes are really throwing me for a loop. This morning when I got up, it was 3 degrees out. I wore two sweaters and a jacket, wished I had remembered my toque, and was brushing frost off my legs. By this afternoon my single fall jacket was too much for walking around downtown. Granted, when I was outside this morning it was 5am and the sun hadn’t risen yet so you expect it to be a little chilly, but it often seems like a few months goes by every 12 hours. (NB: What am I doing up at this hour writing blog entires if I have to wake up at 5!?)

Being out on the water for a few hours every morning before sunrise has been a good swift kick in the pants kind of motivation to get some decent winter gear for once. Layers upon layers of spandex only get you so far. My quest for gloves that are windproof, waterproof, and still dexterous, has been for naught so far. I was foiled, in part, by a poorly staffed Sports Experts. Despite standing around the counter for a good while looking as helpless as I could, nobody came to my rescue. Indeed there was not even anybody in sight that I could call for help. At least the latter fact made it possible for me to do big awkward reach-arounds to get the good gloves out from behind the display case, but it was still awkward enough that I couldn’t get to all the styles or sizes I needed to try.

My quest for socks turned out much better. I checked many many stores looking for some 100% wool socks. Eventually I had to settle at some reaching for the 70% mark, but they also had “thermal” on the label so I was pretty satisfied. We’ll have to see how they fare tomorrow. And I’m considering cutting a hole in a second pair to fashion myself some pogies. It’d be nice to still have all my digits at the end of the season.