(continued from part 1)

At the beginning of my rowing career, some of my crashes were understandable – unfortunate, but not completely unexpected. My learning curve for coxing was pretty steep, but my coaches seemed ready to believe that a novice coxswain could still be learning basics even by the time her new rowers were comfortable.

But some things are not so understandable – like literally overturning a boat in the water.

Perhaps you thought that was physically impossible? Allow me to assure that it is not. It’s especially possible at 5:30 a.m., long before the sun will rise, when the water is brutally cold, the docks are dark, and your rowers are tired. It’s especially possible when your rowers climb into their boat on your cue, take their seats, and all of your starboards neglect to lock their oars in.

A rowing shell works like this: there are 8 seats on sliders down the length of the boat, and 8 oarlocks (4 on starboard side, 4 on port). The oars are locked into the oarlock with a screw. Aside from breathing, locking in the oars is about the only thing rowers do without specific instruction from the coxswain.

That particular morning looked like this: at 5:20, my carpool careened into the parking lot, parked, and we ran into the warehouse that served as our gym. Some rowers were already doing their warm-ups, and pretty soon the coach began listing the activities for practice that day. At 5:30, I hollered out to my boat that it was time to go. They guys walked over to our shell (“The Bob”), and prepared to take it off its racks and carry it down to the dock. As previously mentioned, rowers don’t do anything without hearing a coxswain order them to do it, so the guys stood around until I was ready.

“Hands on,” I called. The boats were hung upside down on racks along the wall of the warehouse. At “hands on,” the guys each grabbed the boat, but did not move it. They literally only put their “hands on” the boat.

“Ready to lift,” I said. The guys braced themselves to lift the shell. “Lift and out.” In two swift movements, they all lifted up and then seamlessly out of the braces. Their arms locked above their heads, holding the 100 kg shell upside down.

“Down to shoulders, and down!” I called. They dropped the boat gently onto their shoulders. The boat was still upside down at this point, the flat edges of the hull sitting against their shoulders.

“Ready to go, and go.” And they started walking down to the docks.
Once on the dock, I watched to see how far along they were. When the bow was at the tip of the dock, I hollered “weigh nuff” and they stopped walking.

“Feet to the edge,” I called. They all took a step to the edge.

“Ready to drop, and in!” They rolled the boat from their shoulders into the water, right side up.

Usually seven rowers carry the boat down, while the eighth man runs ahead, carrying all the oars. He had laid all the oars on the dock by the time we got there. Once the boat was in the water, the men turned to get their oars, and laid them across the boat.

This is the hazy bit – the coxswain doesn’t give any instructions about grabbing oars or locking them in. Maybe she’s supposed to. Maybe I was supposed to. Obviously, there were a few things about coxing that I was still learning. Anyway, after the oars are all laid across the boat, it’s usually safe to let the rowers get in, because the oars help balance the shell. So, once the oars are in, the coxswain yells, “one foot in,” and the rowers put their outside foot in, and then “and in,” and the rowers sit down. At that point, it’s safe for the coxswain to climb in, too. Or it ought to be.

The rowers had one foot in, and I climbed in, and then suddenly all 8 of them, all 8 oars, and all of me were underwater. The shell bobbled upside down against the dock, and an utterly stunned silence permeated even the pre-dawn serenity.

It took at least 20 guys to get the boat lifted and set right-side up – the boats are heavy (around 220 lbs!), and once they’re in the water you have no leverage to use in pulling them up. My coach helped us all out of the water, and we stood dripping wet on the docks. The other boats were sent out for their morning routine.

My coach was livid. I’ll never forget it: the glimpses of dawn barely lighting his furious face; how clearly his wrath carried through his unwavering voice, a soft silky fury at first. And then the verbal lashing began.

I did my best to defend the guys, but the fates were against us. Had one of them been on port-side, or had less than four of them not forgotten to lock in their oars, we might not have overturned. But the sad truth was just that: the weight of the locked-in portside oars was more than the shell’s balance could handle, and with no starboard oars to compensate, we flipped.

I stood there sopping wet, letting the coach rip into the men, me, and everything else he could think of. We were sent back to the warehouse for land training. A brutal, grueling business, and none of us could even look each other in the eye.

I was recruited to join the Texas Crew club rowing team my junior year of college as I was walking across campus.

Anyone who has been to my campus (or perhaps any college campus on the first few days of school) knows the feeling of walking around: pedestrians are besieged by representatives from every imaginable campus club soliciting participation. “Join the Women’s Professional Fraternity!” “Young Conservatives of Texas! Rally Friday!” “Save a life, give blood!” “Petition for two-ply toilet paper all over campus!” (Ha! Seriously!) “Texas Democrats!” “Israel Block Party this weekend!” “Student rates on [pick your commodity]!” “Free Tee-shirts!” (Awesome, thanks!) “Stop Genocide.” “Free copy of the NY Times!” (Awesome, thanks!) “Save Darfur!” “Free Beer!” (Really? Oh, at some party later). “Texas Spirits!” “Free Copies of The Socialist Worker!” (Yeah, right.) “Pledge Chi-O!” “Pledge Pi-Rho!” (Are you for real?) “You’d make a great coxswain!”

It was the last call that stopped me. “You’d make a great coxswain,” a tall, slender guy repeated, holding out a flyer. I reached for it gingerly.

“Thank you.”

“We’re doing sign-ups all week! Think about it.”

“Okay…”

And I shuffled on. I did think about it, though; not seriously, of course, because I am easily the world’s least athletic person. Ever. Walking with two feet at the same time is a feat of coordination I only hope to master. There was no telling what kind of havoc I could wreak in a boat.

But apparently, the slender guy had gotten to a friend of mine, as well. She mentioned it that afternoon, beaming.

“I think I want to join Texas Crew!”

“Oh,” I hesitated. “Yeah, they gave me a flyer today, too. Said I would make a great coxswain.”

And then those fated words, those words that millions of women fall victim to every day: “I’ll do it if you do!”

And so we did.

Practice was at 5:30 a.m. every day. “a.m.” as in, morning. Before lunch. That “a.m.” 5:30 a.m. is a lot earlier than it sounds. Especially when you’re in college. Even the sun shuns 5:30 a.m. But 5:00 came the next Monday, and we dragged ourselves out of bed, into clothes, into the car,  down the highway, and to the river by 5:30. Already I was becoming more coordinated.

After a few weeks, my friend quit, and I found myself alone in the wee pre-dawn hours. And, if you are wondering: yes, I totally wanted to quit, too. I hated being up that early. I hated the dark mornings. And most of all, I was scared to death of coxing. I was scared of the rowers (I think that’s understandable – who wouldn’t be intimidated by eight enormous college guys, surly because they’re so sleep-deprived), I was scared of my coach, but mostly I was scared of failure – of the fact that I was just so bad at being a coxswain. No, really, so, so bad.

But I couldn’t quit. I thought for sure that my friends were waiting for me to quit, waiting for me to complain, waiting for a chance to say “I told you so.” So I stuck with it.

Coxing is mostly a mental exercise. A coxswain is mentally counting, watching the strokes and body positions of eight people, correcting those people, listening to the coach’s instructions, relaying them to the rowers (who, even though they can hear the coach, too, are trained not to do anything until they hear it from the cox), and at the same time exuding confidence. And still counting. It’s the counting that threw me off the most (that and the confidence). I can barely count when I have a calculator in front of me; to do it amidst all the chaos and in my head was unbelievable. I made up a lot of numbers (Coach, if you’re reading this: sorry about that).

By the end of the first few weeks, I might not have won the award for “worst coxswain ever,” but I’m pretty sure my name was on the ballot. I could barely keep the stroke count, I was almost never confident and ferocious, I had no real idea of what was going on… and I crashed into everything: Bridges, sandbars, other boats, docks – if it was there to hit, you could be pretty sure I would hit it.

It’s not like I hit narrow bridges in hard-to-miss areas. No, I hit the massive, motionless, cement bridges along which the highway ran. The bridges that had gaps of at least 50 feet between pillars. Gaps that most coxswains sailed through without ever even considering the bridge. In my more Pollyanna moments, I use the story to praise my aim. Not many people can hit a pillar dead on with the 3-inch-wide bow ball. That’s partly because most people, when they start getting close to a bridge, realize they will hit it and know how to steer to the left or right a little more, know how to adjust their direction so as to avoid the cement pillar and hit the 50-odd feet of wide open space instead.

I still don’t remember what I was thinking the first time it happened; I was probably trying to keep count. All I know is that I was fiddling with the rudder (the practically-microscopic rudder does nothing in these situations, fyi. You’re supposed to get your rowers to help you adjust the direction. Things to have known then). Fiddling, fiddling, counting, fiddling, counting, BUMP. And we all jerked back and forth. It was a gentle tap first, but that only lasted for an instant before the boat (going full speed ahead only moments before) began to turn and then slide against the cement. It was all downhill from there. So to speak.

(to be continued…)