For me the best parts of the winter games are hockey and curling, but neither of those really struck a nerve the way, say, speed skating or nordic skiing did. The gold medal hockey game between Canada and the US was fantastically exciting, but it just made me want to watch more hockey, not play it. Same thing with curling, which is something I’ve always wanted to try (and now I’ve put it in my calendar for the beginning of next season).

But the speed skating. The nordic skiing. Something about them really makes me want to get off my ass and do something. I bet it’s in no small part due to the fact that those guys actually look athletic—you’d have to in those outfits—and the endurance they must have speaks more directly to athleticism than a game like curling or hockey. (That’s not to say that those sports don’t require athleticism, they just don’t show it off the same way.)

Part of my current feeling is also coming from the fact that I’ve been in a bit of fitness limbo lately. I’ve been going to the gym regularly but don’t feel like I’m getting much out of it. I’m certainly not being pushed the way I was on the rowing team in Montreal. I think I’m still looking for that same kind of high. The Olympics have reminded me that it must be out there somewhere. I just need to find it.

The polite reason I give people when they ask is that the coach and I didn’t see eye to eye. But as I reflect on it more and more, and hear what others have to say, the pretense of an answer like that becomes quite obviously lame.

I love rowing. I love pushing myself for the sake of the other guys in the boat. I love being locked into it, knowing that there’s no possibility of stopping for myself without stopping it for everybody and there’s no way I’m going to do that. And I’ve had coaches that would push me to the breaking point until I thought I physically could not go on, then make me do that one piece more, and in feeling like complete shit after I’ve never felt better. I’ve gone as hard as I can go even alone on an erg but knowing those coaches and my crew were behind me watching my split and shouting for me to bring it down. I’ve had that feeling of barely being able to get up, and not being able to do anything but try to recover for hours after and it was in all honesty one of the best feelings I’ve ever had. I want that again.

But I’ve also had a coach that made it very clear that he didn’t believe I was going for that feeling. He made it clear that every move I made wasn’t cutting it. This was not a case of pushing me to improve, but a very clear statement that I needed to be as good as the best in that boat. Not that I needed to strive toward that, to push myself to my limits to reach those goals, but that if I didn’t already match those standards then he didn’t believe I was even trying. There’s a subtle but startling difference between being pushed to the breaking point and just being told that if you haven’t hit it yet then you haven’t tried.

How long do you take that, being told as clear as day that you aren’t good enough—not that this is what you need to do to improve, not that the improvements you are making are worth anything at all, but that no matter how hard you try you will not be good enough—before it’s not worth trying anymore. How many asshole crewmates does it take before it’s not worth putting yourself through that pain anymore?

I want to feel that pain again. I want to cross that finish line “vomiting and bleeding from the eyes” as one of my crew once put it. I want to fall off that erg with a PB on the monitor and spend two hours unable to do anything but try to catch my breath. I know what that feels like. But I want it to be for something. I want it to be worth it. And two months of having my coach break all my ambition, pulling only for myself, and hating every moment of it, is definitely not worth it.

That’s why I didn’t go back.

Peter Paddington is certainly an interesting character. He is full of worries and insecurities that I think a lot of people could relate to. Certainly at that time of life. But then again even now as an adult the new years resolutions I might make are a lot like Peter’s, and that makes him endearing. He is overweight and friendless, and wants nothing more than to be thin and popular. Or at least make a friend. And yet continually he does things that we know aren’t going to get him anywhere.

Full disclosure: As I write this, I’m sitting in bed snacking on Pringles, having skipped going to the gym today to do a group workout with the rowing team. At one point in the novel, Peter says of the athletic boys in his school, “I’m afraid of their touchdowns and last names and loud voices.” I may not be a lonely overweight 13 year old, but if you knew the guys on the rowing team you’d see why I can relate.

Despite all that, I will not say that I loved this book. It does make for an interesting read, but I was not as swept away by it as I might have been. One thing the book feels like it’s lacking is a resolution, or any cilmax, to tie up the story. It’s vaguely unsatisfying in the end, having lived with Peter and all his aspirations, to be left without any kind of happy ending or even significant event in his life.

Well, I shouldn’t say that. There is a good ending there, but I missed it. I was actually caught up in the last few pages, running along with Peter, but stumbled at the end when I missed the significance of one of the last lines. Later, my mom explained it, and I made the connection I was missing, but at the time I was a little lost. Still, it is cute. I still wonder a bit what happened to Peter, how he made it through the next few years of his life and what kind of man he grew up to be. There are, I’m sure, a plethora of coming-of-age-and-out books out there to be read, but I’ve read few to none of them so I can’t say how Fruit ranks in that particular genre, but of the three Canada Reads books I’ve read so far this year, this is (narrowly) the best of an otherwise unimpressive bunch.

Other books in Canada Reads 2009: The Outlander by Gil Adamson

I realised what the problem is. I still have ideas of things I want to write about, but I don’t have the same opportunity to procrastinate that I once did. For various reasons, I decided that I would not blog while at school. Or at least, not using my office computer. Unfortunately, between rowing and school, I’m only actually at home with my own computer for a couple hours a day. And those hours are typically spent eating, watching TV, and generally zoning out—not the kind of activities I need to procrastinate from (i.e., not the kind of hours I’d rather spend blogging). The same as been true even on weekends.

I wonder if that will change when the rowing season ends next week. The big finale actually coincides with two other major deadlines in my academic life as well, so I’m definitely looking forward to the weekend after, when I won’t have all this same sense of impending doom…

… which is of course the other reason why I’m writing this! With four (well, practically only three now that it’s well into the afternoon) working days left before going off to the national championships for five days, and three major projects to work on, I can’t really justify taking Sunday afternoon off. And so I spend it blogging instead!

At this rate, I wonder what the chances of me participating in NaNoWriMo this year are…

My answer is basically… maybe?

On about the second or third day here, the rowing season started. That means that almost without exception, I’ve been on a steady schedule of waking up at 4:30 AM every day, which forces a bedtime around 8 PM. By the time you add in the time I spend at school, pretty much all I can say I’ve seen of Toronto has been the Astrophysics department, the boat club, and a few restaurants we’ve gone to for lunch.

Today and tomorrow are the first real days off I’ve had since that first rowing practice at the beginning of the month. Since I’ve not yet developed a social life in this town, tonight I went to get groceries, and discovered that I actually live in a very happening little neighbourhood. It actually reminded me a lot of St-Laurent, or St-Denis, although more compact. There were lots of people walking around, all the restaurant patios were filled, and even the little ice cream shop next door had a crowd out front. You miss these things when your bedtime is on par with your average 12 year old.

All of this has been just around the corner and I never even knew it! I wonder if it’ll still be there in November.

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.

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.

This comes from one of those classic inspirational or motivational posters, and is found in the lunch room at my current workplace.

First, count the shoulders.

We can see seven, which means this must be an eight. Eight people rowing, each with one oar. One person just got cut off in this photo. That’s fine. But let’s take a closer look at two of these people, numbered three and four above.

I highlighted number three in green and number four in red. Three’s oar can be seen clearly to the right. Four’s oar must be going to the left—you can see his hand on the end of it. But wait a minute….

Who’s holding this oar? It looks like the oar in front of number four is being held by the guy behind him, and the same for all the other pairs in the boat. Either this is a revolutionary new rowing style, or this motivational poster has just taught me that it’s okay to falsify photographs if it gets the job done.

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.

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.