Start Pulling Your Weight, Again
A coach once told me, “you don’t have to commit forever.”
For commitment-phobes his implication was that if you set a goal — an event, a season, an accomplishment — that marker can be your safety exit. You have implicit permission to step aside once realized. Figure out the “later” later. Give it one’s all, now. Don’t be daunted by horizons. What I discovered is it has an emboldening side-application: you can commit as many times as desired.
My coach’s advice was partially applied to bicycle racing in my teens, but I applied it more memorably my junior year of college. After a fortuitous winter encounter with the men’s rowing coach at the school’s sports complex I joined the crew team two weeks later, committing to the spring season of sprint races. I trained hard and gained immensely in a short time.
The memories remain as strong as any from my four years in university. Surprisingly, at least to me, I only rowed once a decade since. It’s now 30 years since that season. Yet this month I picked up an oar and committed temporarily, again.
Rowing is not a sport for the casual. There’s equipment to master. The people who do it well are intimidatingly athletic — like you at your best, but taller, fitter, stronger still. In school and university rowing the focus is on eight-man boats, adding team chemistry to the mix.
The social component can’t be overstated. Rowing requires precise skill in syncopation with those in your boat, a physical and social teaming-up potentially undermined by the tension that you or they may simultaneously vie to become a member of a more elite crew. Needless to say, in university rowing, many athletes have several years experience from prior schools providing another daunting element.
Despite these potential sources of insecurity, mid-junior year I climbed into the pace motorboat to sit with the coach and an alternate rower or two, travelling alongside the sleek, 60' long eights as they went through their paces on a big river. Coach would study the rowers quietly then over a bullhorn admonish improper form or timing.
I expected I’d just be an observer the first weeks so I was taken aback when after a half-hour he called out, “Weigh enough!” to pause the boats on the water. Out from one boat he removed an immediately-dejected rower and directed me to carefully climb into the vacant seat.
I grabbed the oar and for the remainder of the workout tried really hard not to muck it up for the seven other oarsmen and a coxswain I’d never met.
I sweated not just from the exertion, but from presuming they were steaming with frustration at the new guy with improper form and timing.
I suppose it was better not to have had time to over-think it. Whether beginning something new or returning to the fold, not over-thinking it is almost always good strategy.
The season became a surprisingly memorable spray of moments from morning and afternoon hours in practice and from sundry locations of universities against which we’d compete. As with any sport undertaken in one’s youth one ascends quickly — temptingly suggestive of promise.
That promise would remain untested. The general distractions of senior year and classes to complete a degree in Physics conspired to keep me on the shore for that year and the following decades, up until now.
Who are you? This age-old question most confounds when asked of oneself. When you take up something new it’s a defining moment but when you take up something again it’s redefining. Surprisingly, the latter is a tougher challenge. If you take up a pursuit, it’s the same “you” as ever, but now you’re adding a facet. Any pressure to excel is self-applied and probing questions as to why do it are easily displaced by “why not?”.
If however you’ve done anything in earnest previously and set it aside for an extended time, it’s different. There are distracting questions. Why did you it before? Why did you stop? Are you starting again to redress something unfulfilled? These can offer introspection but usually impair; it’s often best to move forward… why not?
A few things made this year different. Harbouring a physical impatience borne of COVID lockdowns was one. I turned 50, for another. The number didn’t mean much to me but as any milestone offered a moment of reassessment of a few components of my life.
One of these is my enjoyment of being athletic. I’d been seeing physiotherapists for different injuries and in frustration decided this was a good year to feel different. Less cycling. A bit of lifting. Reintroduce running. Play some league volleyball. But… what about that sport which in which I participated for such a short stint but triggers such passionate reminiscing all these years later?
There was only one thing to do. I emailed the 136-year-old Wellington Rowing Club.
“To improve the oarsman you must improve the man.” — Steve Fairbairn, rowing pioneer
Fortuitous was that my first visit to the boathouse corresponded to their annual Opening Day. I wasn’t the only return-to-rowing story; I met someone who’d been out nearly 10 years and was inspired by patriotic scenes played out on television from the 2,000m rowing course at Tokyo’s Sea Forest Waterway. Many others hadn’t ventured far from their oars in decades. I joined a mixed-boat friendly race in a four-rower sculling craft and a week later joined a mixed-gender sweep eight for an informal training row out in the bay.
The club has produced Olympic gold but the Masters group — 27 years old and up — is geared towards participation. What this means is more diversity among my peer rowers in their reasons for being there.
One’s peers arrive in a boat as they do from life — from all walks. It’s all the more remarkable we may join those who are essentially strangers for something akin to an athletic dance, moving through the same poses at the same rate, even propelling the very structure on which we all sit. How little we need to have in common to enjoy something so deeply in common.
But this isn’t about rhapsodising rowing or any other shared experience but about how we all arrive at the things we do.
The answer of course is we arrive at our activities for different reasons and return to them for as many or more. To do something forever condemns one to a continuum, but periods of commitment are the savvy workaround to keep enjoying life. You change throughout it and so in revisiting past pleasures they may be taken in anew.
Reentry to a pursuit such as sport, music, or art can become an introspective prism, easily refracting into several more “re’s” — rekindling, redefining, reidentification. These words offer tempting questions but remember, answering them may delay you. Your safest path to reward is not to over-think it.
