When I was in middle school, strangers—repeatedly—stopped me to tell me I was “built like a rower”.
I would later come to find that the comment had less to do with my height as it did my strong legs and long arms, but it opened a door of possibility. What did a rower look like? And if I looked like one, could I become one? Did I want to?
It’s hard to find a sense of identity. Doing so as a middle schooler, it should go without saying, is harder. The stakes seem so much higher at that age. Before you develop the internal fortitude to judge yourself, it matters more to receive a favorable judgment from others—to look cool, be in the “right crowd”, make people like you. So, when someone drops a ready-made identity right in your lap, you might as well take it. I grabbed on to the prospect.
Before I had the chance to explore the sport firsthand, I dove into learning everything I could from afar. My gifted copy of Boys in the Boat became dogeared, the list of meaningful quotes I pulled out of the book grew longer. Other cultural rowing touchstones like “Kelly for Brickwork” positioned rowing as something lofty and historic, something that elevated athletes to a near deity level. The thought of rowing was admittedly romantic to me. The combination of polished, preppy imagery with the grittiness and grind was almost intoxicating.
I could also picture myself in the sport, something that had never happened before. All through my childhood, I had been distinctly uninterested in organized sports. While my sister played soccer, or softball, or rolled around on a judo mat, I was perfectly happy to sit on the sidelines with a book. I wasn’t anti-sports; I’d always just found other activities I’d rather devote my time to. But that was changing, and the glimmer of possibility was exhilarating.
For weeks, I tried to condition as much as I could in advance of tryouts for my local junior team. My recollections of this time include numerous situps on the living room floor and wheezing through “runs,” though that might have been a generous term for it. Still, I was looking forward to what was ahead of me. I was “built like a rower”, I had been told. Surely that, plus my naïve research and desire to learn would carry me through, wouldn’t it?
I didn’t make the team.
I’d known this outcome was a possibility — only a couple roster spots were open during midseason tryouts, and 95% of the team were highschoolers. The odds were stacked against an underconditioned eighth grader with a negligible athletic background. But being cut gave me a choice: either go back to a life on the outside of team sports, or decide that a future in rowing was worth fighting for. It wasn’t the first time I’d faced failure in my life, but it was perhaps the first time that failure had been a motivator to try again and do better. It meant more to me than the things I had failed at before, and I was determined not to fail again. I chose to keep going.
The next time tryouts came around, I made the team. I liked the sport even more than I thought I would—which is saying something based on how high I let my expectations get. I’d routinely arrive more than an hour before practice, supposedly so I could stretch, but really just to soak up the boathouse atmosphere as much as I could. I jumped at the chance to learn how to row on both sides not because I was thinking it would make me invaluable or would better my odds to make lineups, but because I simply wanted to learn as much as possible. Every land workout, the ergs were lined up in speed order, fastest to slowest. I was never the slowest (and that was a point of pride) but I never got fast enough to move up further than two or three ergs from the end. Still, I never bailed out of a workout, and it didn’t matter how slow I went, I was glad just to be there.
As much as I fell in love with the sport itself—equipment and technique and atmosphere and swing and everything else—I fell in love with the feeling of being an athlete more. I liked that it was hard. I liked that people outside of rowing didn’t understand it. I liked doing something that most people couldn’t (even when I didn’t like it). I liked the feeling of accomplishment and discipline and the drive to push myself further than I thought possible.
