RowingRelated

Photo: Hannah Wagner Photography So, as it turned out, I bought a $4,000 teddy bear for my daughter—the price tag said £25 but all the extra lessons added a bit of markup. We lost on Henley Wednesday, for those just checking in. We drew Cork Boat Club in the first round; based on strong results at the Metropolitan Regatta, Cork Regatta, and individual international achievements they were seeded as one of the top four crews in the Thames Challenge Cup Eight event. The Wyfold Four, on the other hand, went in against Thames Rowing Club 'A' and yet Potomac was the seeded crew. Thames made Saturday; the Potomac four de-rigged on Wednesday as well. The draw is ruthless and to expect otherwise is a mistake. The Stewards' goal is to see the fastest crew win each event, not seed the round of 32 in a proper snake-draft bracket or make sure that the top four make it to Saturday or whatever it is. (Hell, the Princess Elizabeth Cup draw made no bones about giving a Wednes...

Photo: Hannah Wagner The Henley Royal Regatta draw took place Saturday afternoon, in a room with no air conditioning. Fate and the stewards smiled upon some crews, and seemed to laugh at others ( Cornell vs. Syracuse in the Temple Challenge Cup on day one—one assumes that had St. Joe’s or Drexel come this year, they’d have gotten Temple first). Not many things in life are decided by a Commander of the British Empire in a blue blazer with five Olympic gold medals picking your name out of a goblet, but Henley isn’t like a lot of things in life. First off, the Temple. The wording of eligibility used to exclude anyone that made a "blue"—i.e., made one of the top two eights of the Oxford-Cambridge boat race—or the American equivalent. This was typically enforced as no one from an EARC or PAC-12 first varsity eight. That was replaced with "won a U23 medal."* Never say never, but it's now conceivable that any of the top American collegiate crews with j...

It's go time (Photo: Hannah Wagner) Being in the right place at the right time doesn't feel so good when it's only because someone else was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's a circuitous way of saying that your author, the 'super-sub,' is now about to cross the ocean. Not as a spectator, but as a replacement rowing in the big show. The short version is that Spencer blew his back out; Spencer, our five-seat, an Alexandria, Virginia native and TC Williams grad, a former Naval Academy oarsman, one of the first guys to come visit my wife and I after we brought our baby home, isn't going to Henley—and I am. Actually, that's the long version. The short version is that life's not fair sometimes, and I am benefiting from the misfortune of one of my closest friends and one of the best teammates I've ever had. No pressure though. But here's the thing: several weeks ago, during selection, I could have easily murdered Spencer with...

At home with Potomac Boat Club (Photo: PBC/Flickr ) I still have nightmares about the East Park Canoe House. Just past the Strawberry Mansion bridge over the Schuylkill River race course, the Spanish Mission-style building, completed in 1914, is where you typically park and launch from at the smaller Philadelphia regattas, like Saturday's Schuylkill Navy Regatta . The end of its first century was rough. In the early '00s, the bathroom stalls were covered in layers of graffiti so deep they provided a geological record, and broken glass in your bare feet was the best case scenario for traipsing around the surrounding area. It was a Pixar movie hell-scape, so comically vile and so casually menacing that surely delirious lightweights have hallucinated it growing a mouth and red eyes and yelling about the Mummers Parade (probably). The Temple rowing family deserves all the credit they received and more for restoring that place, credit I planned to give them in a speech I...

Crushing the erg with PBC (Photo: Hannah Wagner Photography ) My first time racing after college was a blowout. We got up at the start and just walked away, a reasonably solid four that had been moving well together and didn’t see much in the competition to worry about. After 1,000 meters, it was over. But like, actually over. The race was only 1,000 meters long. The whole "masters" thing is weird. In practice, "masters" often means the above—a course of 1,000m. I have no idea how you could squeeze in 7,000 events at Masters Nationals (personal estimate) if they were the full 2,000m long; a shorter distance means you can run more races. More races means more racers, and more racers means more rowing. Great! We all know there's a self-congratulatory, breathy "rowing is the hardest sport" (see here and here ) mantra lots of folks in the sport love to celebrate—never mind the fact that in the NHL they play over 80 games per year, MLB over 160...

Training with PBC (Photo: Potomac Boat Club/Flickr ) Eight-time Mr. Olympia Ronnie Coleman used to say that tilapia ' thins the skin .' To look truly shredded before a bodybuilding competition, Coleman was saying you need to have a low body-fat percentage and be effectively dehydrated. The low-fat, high-protein, low-water tilapia is a superfood for this purpose. For the same outcome, Mr. Coleman might just try rowing in DC for the summer. We have waffles. Some teams spend the entire season preparing for and attending only one regatta; perhaps a Club Nationals, or a Canadian Henley, or Masters Nationals. Especially in a Henley year, the PBC summer—for better or worse—tries a bit to be everything to everyone; like Hemingway's Paris, it's more of a moveable feast . That's why we kick it off with a brunch. Nay, not just any brunch—the Strawberry Brunch. A joint effort of Potomac's Social Committee and men's team for years now, it's the effect...

Training with PBC at Rivanna Reservoir (Photo: Andrew Neils ) Matt Miller , I think about you sitting in class in business school from time to time. Do your classmates know they're sitting next to a guy that pulled a 5:40 2k? Over 10,000 athletes competed at the Rio games, but that 5:40—that's really rarified air (yes, yes, I know about Joshua Dunkley-Smith ). And that was in the Rio build-up, so that's a window into what an elite athlete with tremendous physiology can do when you filter out all the 'other stuff'—nothing but the goal. But what about when there's a lot of other stuff? While full-time focus on your sport typically helps, it's certainly possible to be near-elite, or even elite-elite, with a full-time job; this year's Boston Marathon was a great example of this. Yuki Kawauchi won the Boston Marathon in 2018. He is a full-time teacher in Japan, and runs marathons—runs them really, really often, actually—regularly under 2:20. The sec...

Potomac Boat Club training on Rivanna Reservoir (Photo: Andrew Neils ) Your erg room used to have a piano in it (probably). You realize that there weren't always ergs there, don't you? And if your erg room used to have a piano in it, then somewhere in your boathouse are old black-and-white photos of formal parties in the building (picture the July 4th Ball from The Shining ). And if this is all true, your boathouse surely has a ballroom (you know, a room for having fancy… galas?) It’s hard to imagine the Social Register crowd ever presenting their daughters to society in the same room where I puked after a PB on "The Cooler," but I'll be damned if it isn't still universally called 'the ballroom.' So few of the fundamentals in rowing—if any—have changed. Catch together, finish together; push with the legs. For the love of God, back the blade in, bow four. But a sport is more than its fundamentals. At some point, the ballroom became the erg r...

Potomac Boat Club training in Virginia (Photo: Andrew Neils ) The Boston Marathon had a long tradition of tolerating "bandits," or runners sneaking into the race, bib-less, without having paid. They had to crack down eventually of course, but I assume it was seen as in keeping with the amateur roots of the event and the local traditions involved—let those lovable rogues have their fun! I don't think there's an analog in the rowing world. It's awfully hard to sneak a single into the Head Of The Charles starting chute, for instance; it's surprisingly difficult to sneak an eight into the Georgetown lightweights vs. Temple lightweights dual (we tried). And American rowing has no shortage of rogues, some lovable, some not; the 'Rude and Smooth Crew,' the "Dirty Dozen" eight, the Riverside Meatwagon. * We have the mischief-makers—so, where's the mischief? Sure, every once in a while, perhaps a college crew gets to race at a World C...

Part 2 of our series with Potomac Boat Club (Photo: Jordan Sandberg) The following is the second installment of our series on American Club Rowing, with Peter Clements of Potomac Boat Club. Here, Clements discusses what makes Henley Royal Regatta such an important experience for a club, or even elite rower. Why Henley Royal Regatta? Racing at Henley is running the Belmont Stakes, Preakness, and Kentucky Derby three days in a row (plus another two races if you're lucky), but in a jacket and tie, using borrowed equipment, and on perhaps the most difficult race course ever devised. Most important to consider is that in this analogy, you're the horse. Old newsreel footage of FDR watching IRAs in a special-built train car, or the gilded age yachts that allow old Bonesmen to follow Harvard-Yale hint at this sort of experience, but the deep, deep history on which Henley is built puts the Regatta in a class all its own. The spectacle and experience of the event makes it ...