CRASH-Bs: Rowing Nowhere

Since the days of the Boston Tea Party, hardy souls may have gathered in February on the banks of the Charles to test themselves in rowing matches, but it wasn't until the invention of the kilometer, unitards, and the Concept2 rowing machine (henceforth, the erg) that things really got rolling.  The CRASH-B world indoor rowing championship is a 2K time trial at which some 2,100 competitors come together at Boston University's Agganis Arena to leave their marks.  Over the course of the grueling 9.9 furlong course, most will cram a year's worth of physical suffering into a tidy 6 to 9 minute package.  You're guided in this struggle by (1) a digital console that shows distance remaining, stroke rate, and current pace (in terms of a 500 meter split time), (2) an analog coxswain that shows people to be inherently sadistic, and (3) a rail that constrains your longitudinal motion.  The first two will mock you and lie to you, while the third... well, that's just tempered steel.

The 2K time trial is notoriously difficult - too long to be a sprint, too short to be an endurance event, and too dynamic for the use of supplemental oxygen.  This event separates the men from the boys, but it doesn't stop there.  It further separates the boys into a complex sub-ranking, ranging from Power Lad to Droopy Toddler.  Figuring the trial would once again spit me out somewhere near the end of that spectrum, I came prepared with a binky and a change of clothes.

When asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, George Mallory famously quipped "Because it's there."  Lacking any sensible response - how could there possibly be one? - I'd give the same reason for my participation in the CRASH-B's.  When reminded that Mallory's dessicated corpse was discovered 75 years later, somewhat short of "there", I'd probably grow hostile and refuse to answer any more of your stupid questions.  But after a few minutes, I'd sheepishly relent, because nobody else ever wants to talk to me.  From a tempestuous start, we'd forge a short-lived life-long friendship.

Let's go over the rules.  The horn goes off (there is no horn).  You row.  You're not allowed to deliberately spit on your competitors, but if  you're not inadvertently showering your neighboring rowers with some combination of bodily fluids (tears are my serum of choice), you're doing it wrong.  There will be a lot of yelling, but you won't know if it's coming from you or someone else.  Despite all evidence to the contrary, after a finite amount of time you will finish.  Finally, you will swear off ever rowing again.  Period.

This was to be my third year at the CRASH-B's.  I had pulled a 6:43.0 in my inaugural effort, improved to 6:31.4 as a sophomore, and was looking to break the 6.5 minute mark in 2015, and to perhaps also break into the top ten of my 40-49 age group.  That was going to take some serious training.  The gods were smiling on me, as a nagging kayak-related injury chased me off the water and onto my basement erg by September.  I still had a few working parts left, and I'd be damned if I wouldn't also grind those down by Christmas.

For the first few months, my focus was on building aerobic endurance through long and leisurely-paced sessions.  I tempered the tedium - while also improving my mind - by streaming endless hours of culturally sophisticated Netflix programming.  Turns out that Gopher's real name was Burl!  By December I was ready to trade in some of my slow rows for something a little more arduous - a couple of interval sessions a week.  Mary Beth decided to start training at this point too, leading to many drunken fisticuffs over who would get the erg that evening.

For the next six weeks or so, I was living the dream.  Maybe not the dream - after all, I wasn't yet best friends with Steve Buscemi and was spending a lot of time gasping for air - but life was pretty good.  My interval times were falling faster than Bill Cosby's ticket sales.  By January I was in better shape than I had been at the 2014 race, with 8 weeks of training still on the table!  I started dropping my CRASH-B goal.  6:28?  6:25?  6:23?!?  Narrative etiquette requires that I conclude this paragraph with a declarative statement of hyperbolic optimism. So...  Nothing could stop me!

At 7:42 on the evening of January 24th, the flywheel of my world came to a shuddering halt.  After nearly two months of steady improvement, I suffered an epic meltdown during an interval session.  It wasn't just that I ran up against a physical wall (that is, a metaphorical wall, physically), but that something snapped mentally (also metaphorically, I hope).  I lost the willpower to continue pushing through discomfort levels I had once laughed at (in a queasily maniacal way, granted).  I nominally completed my session that night, but my relationship with intervals - formerly tempestuous, but built on a foundation of mutual respect - had taken an ugly turn.  What I had hoped was a one-time anomaly repeated on me in the next work-out, and then the one after that.

I became haunted by the specter of looming intervals.  Taking a cue from Homeland Security, I initiated a color-coded "Dread Level" plan.  On days scheduled for easy workouts, I'd perhaps be at Dread Level: Yellow.  On interval days, however, the Red banner of doom would be waving over me from the moment I awoke.  I'd spend the day in nauseating contemplation of the forthcoming suffering and verbal abuse (Mary Beth had started piling on), and was seldom disappointed in my fears.  My interval performance was getting steadily worse.  My confidence was shot.  My cousin Toby kept calling to ask about borrowing more money.  That may have been unrelated.

Despite my struggles - or perhaps because of them - the morning of the CRASH-B's arrived.  I had peaked weeks too early, but nevertheless had a reasonable shot at bettering my 2014 time if I could keep the hounds of doubt at bay.  On the drive down to Boston, I reviewed my race plan with Mary Beth, who would once again be serving as my Sherpa - guiding me to my best possible time via the use of strategically applied insults and surreptitiously delivered "vitamin" shots.  Whereas last year I had developed a detailed stroke plan that made the invasion of Normandy look like a slapdash affair, this year I was keeping it simple: pull at 1:36.5 pace until rigor mortis set in.  Assuming I got to the finish line prior to my expiration date, that would put me at 6:26 flat.

A cox has free rein to apply whatever motivational leverage she feels will pry another tenth of a second out of your carcass.  However, in past trials I've heard a few over-the-shoulder phrases that I believe may have had the opposite effect.  So during our strategy pow-wow, I suggested Mary Beth might want to stay away from the following:

• "You're almost an eighth of the way there!"
• "Is that blood?"
• "Why, no... I'm not doing anything after the race."
• "The custodian says he'd like to clean up now."
• "I never noticed that mole before."
• "Noooo!!!"
• "Remember, your speed increases as the cube root of power exerted!"
• "Why can't you be more like your brother?"
• [Disappointed silence]
• "There's always last year."
• "Stroke!  Stroke!  Ooh, a nickel!!!"
• "You've just aged into a new category."

She said she'd do her best, but wouldn't make any promises.

We arrived at Agganis Arena (its summit barely peaking over the snowy wasteland that was once Boston) just in time to see the junior women's world record being shattered.  The air crackled with excitement - cheers echoing through the hall over the soft thunder of imploding rowers.  During warm-ups we ran into Indomitable Roger Gocking, who earlier in the day had himself toyed with breaking the lightweight men's world record for his age group.  Ultimately, he looked inward and decided that the journey was reward enough, leaving the record for another day.  Also, he erred slightly on his pacing and ran his fuel mixture a little lean.

A brief warm-up later, I discovered myself unexpectedly perched on my erg.  So soon... I had been in the Red all day, but as my last minutes ticked away, my level of apprehension over the coming torment reached unprecedented levels.  I was operating at Dread Level: Bile.  It seemed unimaginable that was a voluntary endeavor.  Looking around with wild eyes at my impeccably toned and spandexed competition, I desperately sought a reasonable excuse to bow out.  Death in the family?  Unfortunately, my relatives were all clinging selfishly to life.  Sudden-onset dysentery?  I didn't want to ruin everyone's day.  Robot uprising?  Even if I could arrange it in the next couple of minutes, our new overlords would probably sentence us to a punishment of endless 2K time trials anyway.  My three best options exhausted, I resigned myself to the inevitable.

In a trice, the start fell roughly upon us.  Sit Ready.  Attention.  Row.

At the beginning of last year's race, I had enthusiastically launched off the back of the sliding seat in an apparent effort to cripple myself.  Determined to avoid repeating this drama, I eased out from the dock as if ferrying a parasoled duchess across the Avon.  Perhaps we'd stop for some scones mid-river.  I was concentrating on not spilling a drop of tea when the salty oaths of my coxswain reminded me that while my cox was indeed a woman, she was no lady.  So much for the scones.  With no legal recourse, I responded to her verbal lashing and upped my pace...

... and entered into a wondrous zone of infinite possibilities.  The first 150 meters of a 2K is a magical utopia, where all is sweetness and rainbows, and friendly woodland critters caper about excitedly.  You're 4 years old again, and you cannot believe how fast you're running across the lawn.  Those scores of intervals that established your performance limits - those were the anomalies, while this is your true natural pace.  Deep within your mind, one last spark of rationality suggests that maybe that's the adrenaline talking, but, not wanting to have his glasses broken yet again, tries to play it off as a joke when stared down by his bullying, short-sighted brainmates. 

One of the advantages of doing a 2K is that  - for a span of a few minutes - you get to abdicate your normal mental responsibilities.  You're there to row, not to solve the Middle Eastern crisis, worry about work, or remember how to breathe.  That's what your coxswain is for (and I look forward to hearing what Mary Beth came up with regarding Israeli-Palestinian relations).  I emptied my mind and let MB take the wheel:  "Stroke.  Breath.  Stroke.  Heartbeat.  Stroke.  Multi-national accord.  Stroke."  It worked.  As the words flowed through me at an almost subconscious level, I eased back and settled at my target pace, although I do now have an inexplicable urge to paint the living room.

Since the erg monitor doesn't show pace to tenths of a second, I made a game of trying to alternate consistently between 1:36 and 1:37 to hit my target.  Four strokes at 1:36 then four strokes at 1:37.  Perhaps not the most exciting game ever, but any distraction from the growing build-up of lactic acid and irreversible lung damage was welcome.  As the meters slowly unrolled, I found that all those 1:36's weren't sitting that well with me.  Too bitter.  I threw in a few more 1:37's to sweeten the mix.  Delicious!  Following the unimpeachable logic of this slippery slope, by the 1000 meter mark I had completely flushed all of those foul 1:36's out of my system and was throwing in the occasional 1:38 for seasoning.

When talking about the halfway point of a race, it's important to distinguish between the halfway point as measured by an external observer and the halfway point as measured by someone traveling within the sliding confines of the erg itself.  For the former, the race is obviously evenly divided into two 1K halves.  For the racer, however, time and distance take on a taffy-like consistency.  Although  the world's preeminent physicists and confectioners have explored this phenomena, none have been able to explain how the halfway point can indefinitely recede as one continues to row.  A young Albert Einstein believed that the dilation of time had something to do with flywheels and reciprocating frames of reference, but ultimately abandoned this conundrum to work on simpler problems.

With the halfway point  just ahead, I muddled through to 1500 meters in the general vicinity of 1:37.  The final 500 meters of a 2K is a shadow realm, where all is sorrow and pain, and vicious woodland fiends tear at your soul.  Approaching this dark kingdom, I quickly triangulated a new course that would allow me to skirt the murky depths.  A heading of, say, 1:45 should do it.  I began my course correction when a malevolent snarl from behind froze my heart.  I had forgotten - this wasn't my vessel to captain.  "May the devil be damned!  We row through the Heart of Darkness!" roared my coxswain.  "Stroke!  Stroke!  Stroke!  Breathe tomorrow, worm!  Stroke!"  The leg irons tearing at my flesh, the deep reverberations of the drums numbing my spirit, the fetid stench of my fellow oarsmen overwhelming my senses... I had no choice but to comply.

We plunged ahead at 1:36, foam spraying from my turbulent mouth.  Time dilation in full force, I was able to truly savor the piquant agony of each hour-long stroke.  With 300 meters to go, my overtaxed muscles mutinied and staged a sit-down strike to demand better working conditions.  Sinew and grit would have to see me through for the remainder.  A hundred meters later, grit tendered its resignation (blind to the irony, apparently).  I was almost halfway home, but could only watch helplessly as the shadowy murk closed around me, sucking all hope from my spleen (modern medicine, bah).  I was destined to wander the darkness for all eternity.  Even my hallucinated beacon of hope, Mr. Flappers, couldn't save me this year.  All was lost.

Or was it?  Yes... all is lost.  But maybe not?  Irretrievably lost.  What if I... Look, I'm telling you.  It's lost.  You're lost.  Give it up.  Yeah, but... I can see that I'm going to have to spell this out for you.  You're exhausted.  Ever fiber of your being is hoarse from screaming in pain.  You don't even care about finishing anymore.  It.  Is.  Lost.  But doesn't the mere existence of this inner dialog indicate that I do indeed care about finishing?  That I have some fight left in me?  OK Descartes, then how do you explain the fact that you stopped rowing 15 seconds ago.  Well I... wait.  What?  That's right, sucker.  While we were arguing you finished!  Or did I?

I did.  Even the longest night comes to an end, and I had weathered through to dawn.  While tucking my tattered lungs back inside my body, I struggled to make sense of the jumble of swirling numbers on the console of my erg.  Only after blood flow had been restored to the non-essential organ in my head was I able to make sense of the display.  6.26.3.  Sweet tears of joy flowed down my cheeks.  Only to be replaced seconds later with bitter tears of frustration once Mary Beth had helpfully reminded me that Joe Glickman once pulled a 6:20.  You can bet that no-account show-off would have a good laugh at my expense that night!  Nevertheless, nobody can take away the fact that I had improved my personal best by 5 seconds.  At least not until the blood test results come in.

Mary Beth's heat was to start in less than twenty minutes, so shoving her aside, I rushed to find a secluded area for my vocal exercises.  It was with unfettered glee that I approached my reciprocal coxswain duties.  After locking down an 8:21.0 last year, Mary Beth was looking to cut that in half for 2015.  That seemed a bit optimistic, so we haggled a while before settling on something in the 8:15 range.  She'd aim to maintain a steady 2:03 pace throughout.

After a few minutes of practice strokes to get me in the drill sergeant frame of mind, Mary Beth settled in for the start.  Although she claimed to be nervous, she acted more like she was at Dread Level: Kitten.  I was still at a red-tinged Orange.  Then it was time.  Sit Ready.  Attention.  Row.  I started out of the gate strong, with Mary Beth at my heels.  After the first few moments of frenziedly barked instructions, I settled into a more sustainable rhythm.  I needed to remain within myself if I was going to make it.

Meanwhile, Mary Beth had wisely decided to stick with her inner coxswain rather than start at 130 strokes per minute as her outer coxswain was advising.  By the time I had calmed down and gotten back to the plan, she was a few hundred meters into the race.  At the halfway point (see above), Mary Beth was right on target at a 2:03 pace, but some cracks were starting to show in both her form and my voice.  Whereas last year she had gone out much too slow and then accelerated through the last 500 meters with the flywheel spewing dense clouds of smoke, this year she had gone out perhaps a shade too fast and was now struggling to maintain her momentum.

It was difficult to watch as Mary Beth waged a no-holds-barred, bare-knuckle fight with herself to maintain pace.  Not because of any empathy, but because I was still feeling a little light-headed and nauseous from my race.  I'm proud to say that Mary Beth and I both powered through adversity, retaining a sub-2:04 pace and my lunch, respectively.  With a time of 8:13.3, she had shaved 7.7 seconds off of her previous best time.

We stuck around to watch the Open class competitors in the final races of the day.  This wasn't a choice, but a necessity - neither of us could remember how our legs worked.  We were rewarded with a spectacular race by Cuban rower Angel Fournier Rodriguez, who staged a come-from-behind victory by dropping his pace to jaw-dropping 1:20 with 800 meters left in the race.  Finishing at 5:45.9, Señor Rodriguez had been generating an average of 550 watts.  I was only putting out 388 watts during my effort.  It's nice to know that there's some room for improvement in 2016.

Here are links for the full championship results, my group results, Mary Beth's group results, an animation of my heat, and an animation of Mary Beth's heat.

CRASH-Bs: Rowing Without a Net

Let's review.  The CRASH-B race is the world indoor rowing championship.  That sounds impressive until you discover that the entrance criteria are limited to your ability to cough up $25 and to figure out what to put for "Affiliation" on the registration form (I went with "Blue Cross/Blue Shield", just in case).  More than 2,000 competitors met at Boston University's Agganis Arena for the event, rowing against themselves and their peers in a day-long set of 2K time trials.  Although these races are completed by most rowers in just 6 to 9 minutes, you tend to approach the event the same way a medieval peasant might view a trip to the dentist/barber.  But, like that irresistible urge to see if you can stand puddin thad eztra-strendth clodesbin on your dongue (yes!), we are slaves to our masochism.



The Concept2 rowing machine (the "erg", short for "aaaaaaergh"), when paired with a 2K trial, is an unrivaled weapon of self-destruction.  An LCD console keeps you appraised of your elapsed distance and time, your stroke rate, your current pace (given as a 500 meter split time), and your average pace.  During a race, experienced rowers can combine these values intuitively to determine how much pain they're probably in.  This is handy since after a certain point, your under-oxygenated brain can't be trusted to reliably decode your body's signals.  Last year, for example, 1700 meters in I distinctly recall hearing a prickly mauve scent.

Since one's natural tendency is to minimize suffering, you're allowed to bring a coxswain to the event (whose goal is, of course, to maximize suffering).  The cox sits behind you, helping to pace your race and urging you on to your best possible time.  Since they banned horsewhips and tasers in 2009, the cox must now resort to verbal flogging to achieve these objectives.  During the course of a race, a good cox will break you down into your component ingredients and rebuild you 5 seconds faster.  All while helpfully reminding you that you are "weak like baby" and questioning your mother's choice in breeding stock.  In my experience, they also spend a lot of time telling you to stop crying.  In short, they bring the S to the S&M rowing experience.

For last year's race, I had adopted a CRASH-B training plan best described as being somewhere between haphazard and Des Moines.  I spent a fair amount of time on the erg, but without much in the way of direction, I found myself carving lazy turns around the basement rather than plowing headfirst into the suffering of a strict training regimen.  Since Mary Beth had decided to compete alongside me this year, I applied myself to constructing a joint program.  I scoured the internet to find a framework on which to build our customized plan, quickly learning to avoid using the terms "stroke", "cox" and "buck-naked" in my searches.

Mary Beth scotched my initial draft, which largely consisted of me sitting in a beanbag, eating pie and criticizing her rowing form.  I still think she would have ended up with a better time, but whatever.  My next draft was pretty sophisticated, but relied heavily on the annexation of Bermuda.  Similarly nixed.  I eventually settled on a variant of the popular "Pete Plan", loosely derived from the University of Michigan women's crew training plan, which was in turn inspired by the torments endured in the fourth circle of Hell.  Wanting to keep a little in reserve for future years, I abridged the plan a little and eliminated the thumbscrew component.  We hit the erg three times each week starting in early December, balancing long rows of low to moderate pace with intervals of various durations and efforts.

Many experienced rowers recommend breaking a 2000 meter row into four blocks of 500 meters, each of which is rowed using a slightly different strategy.  Last year I had no place for such highfalutin tactics.  It was every block for itself, and I'm pretty sure there were at least six of them.  My ill-planned suffering convinced me that I needed a blueprint for this year's race.  I started work on a 4x500 scheme, but quickly realized this approach wasn't subtle enough to cover the shifting mental and physical terrain of the race.  I needed to radically rethink the problem.

I don't idly throw around the term "genius", but how else can I describe my magnum opus?  A loose-leaf binder with a page for each of the 224 strokes I'd need to cover 2000 meters.  Stroke 63, for example, was to start "smooth and powerful, pulled in the style of a young Burt Lancaster" while ending with "a surprising carnival-like flourish of the handle".  Of course, I didn't expect Mary Beth to memorize the entire race script.  Let me correct that.  I did expect it, but since relationships are all about compromise, I learned to settle for not getting stabbed in the thigh with a pencil.

Training seemed to be going well.  About two weeks before the race, I finally settled on the number that was to become my mantra.  My initial target 500 meter target pace.  1:38.  Once in my head, I obsessed over this number.  I found myself doodling "1:38 & Greg" enclosed in hearts on scrap paper.  I'd shout out "What is 1:38?" in answer to nearly every Jeopardy question.  If I could hold steady at this pace, I'd end up at 6:32.0.  Not only would that be a nice improvement over last year's 6:43.0, but it would be a tenth of a second faster than fellow paddler Joe Glickman's time from 2010.  Pretty much everything I do in life is done with an eye towards bettering Glickman.  He's my #1 target in every paddling race, even when he's not there.  Heck, when I eat breakfast each morning, I wonder if my toast is more evenly browned than Joe's.  Of course, I'm 0 for all time in my quest for success, but a kid can dream.

Just as our time on this planet inevitably winds down to its fiery conclusion, so does that halcyon period prior to the CRASH-Bs.  On race day, we arrived at the arena to find it alive with unitarded rowers of every imaginable shape and size, assuming your imagination leans heavily in the direction of Norse deities.  At registration we ran into the only other ski paddler who made it to the CRASH-B's this year, Tom Kerr.  Together with Mary Beth and the rest of clan Kerr, we found a place in the stands and began our ritual prayers for deliverance.

Rowing casually in the warm-up area soon after, I savored those last few moments before I'd be strapped into my designated torture device and put through its paces.  As the heat before the senior master group finished, the condemned and the damned shuffled gloomily to meet their fates.

With my entrails tying themselves in knots, I quizzed Mary Beth one last time on strokes 42, 103, and 211 before settling onto the erg I christened Doomslinger (you don't choose the name, it chooses you).  I took a few strokes to fine tune the damper setting.  The announcer instructed us to settle down to await the start sequence that would appear on our erg's console.  The previous year I had gotten a crash course in those 4 most dreaded words in the English language: Sit Ready.  Attention.  ROW.  Unaware of the details of the sequence, after "Attention" I had expected some kind of public bulletin, say about a red Buick with its lights on, or a special in aisle 7.  This year I'd be ready.

I coiled on my machine like a viper waiting to strike, all sinew and clamminess. Sit Ready.  I wondered if it was too late to abandon ship.  Attention.  Ooh, I wonder what announcement they'll have for us!  ROW.  What's that?  I said, ROW.  Me?  You mean me?  Yes, ROW.  My mind dulled by adrenaline, it took a while for the message to sink in.  I should probably ROW.  And so I released my pent up potential in a single mighty stroke.  An epic stroke likely to propel me through the first 100 meters in one blow.  A stroke so titanic... that I lifted off my sliding seat and landed with a painful thud on the rail behind the seat.  Man overboard!

With my feet strapped into the machine and my hands occupied by the handle, I wallowed backwards, trying fruitlessly to regain my equilibrium.  I could hear a collective gasp as the spectators realized the horror of the situation.  With the grace of an epileptic worm, I contorted my body hither and yon in a bumbling attempt to wriggle back onto the seat.  Just as the top rowers were finishing their races, I finally managed to remount and recommence mine.

My precious stroke plan!  I could hear Mary Beth behind me, rifling through the pages of the notebook in search of the appropriate contingency plan.  Alas, though there were neatly labeled tabs for what to do in the case of power outage, killer bees, or a severed toe, I had inexplicably left my coxswain rudderless in this circumstance.  Despite its virtual inevitability (see blog title).

Now lacking any coherent plan, I relied upon that oldest of strategic standbys.  I panicked.  In a frenzied attempt to make up lost time, I pulled at a pace that would quickly exhaust a jet-ski.  Everything was elbows, knees, and the angry whir of a flywheel about to melt its bearings.  After some seconds of this, I finally absorbed my coxswain's repeated calls to ease down.  I gradually settled in between 1:37 and 1:38 in the hopes of getting my average pace down to 1:38 by the 1000 meter mark.  As the meters accumulated (on the same approximate timescale as geological layers accumulate), I started to realize that the disastrous start hadn't completely torpedoed my chances at a good time.  It defied logic, but the cost of my derailment was apparently measured only in tenths of a second.

Although I took solace in this realization, I was starting to feel the impact of my pace.  Despite a growing discomfort located somewhere in the vicinity of my entire body, I managed to recall a snippet of my original plan.  And so on stroke 96 I dedicated 1.8 seconds of silent reflection in honor of those brave souls o'ertaken by the Visigoth hordes at the Battle of Adrianople in 378.  Tu pugnaverunt viriliter.

Having thrown "224 Strokes to Greatness" aside, Mary Beth ad-libbed and called for me to increase my pace from 1:38 to 1:37 at the 1000 meter mark.  Imagine you're nestled cozily in bed under a down comforter in a log cabin early one morning. And then imagine someone crabbily yells into your ear from about 5 inches away that you need to get up, go out into sub-zero weather, and chop some damn firewood.  You don't want to get up.  You want to stay at 1:38.  Better yet, throw on another comforter and ease back to 1:40.  Of course, this analogy may mildly exaggerate my comfort level at 1:38.  My coziness was in fact pretty severely compromised by the enraged badgers under the covers with me.

In any event,  I answered the call and upped my pace.  For about four strokes.  Then I dove back into bed with those furry balls of teeth, who now seemed more like lovable scamps.  Mary Beth tried to coax me out with the promise of cocoa, but I was already starting to take leave of this world.  The buzzing confusion of the competition floor gradually faded into misty oblivion.  I was alone with my 1:38 and an increasingly distressing level of physical misery.  I began to question the existence of a just God.

At 500 meters, from far away somebody made a ludicrous suggestion that I take it down to 1:36.  Heck, why not 1:26?  Evidently we were pretending that I wasn't hanging on to my current pace by a gossamer thread of resolve.  I decided (in a very loose sense of that word) to stand pat.  I entered this world of hurt at 1:38, and that was how I was going to go out.  Assuming that time didn't come to a thorough stop, as it was now threatening.

With 250 meters left, I depleted the last of my muscles' energy stores.  I was now powered solely by the barest wisp of pride, flickering uncertainly in the deep gloom of my soul.  An eternal sea of anguish stretched before me.  Somewhere, in the distance, I could hear the mournful howl of Mr. Flappers.  And then, as tends to happen despite any melodramatic posturing, it was over.  Time quickly spun back up to its normal pace.  It took a while to decipher the LCD display through my tears, but when the numbers finally swam into focus, they stood at 6:31.4.  I made a mental note to give a joyous whoop at some later date at which gaiety was again possible.

There was no time to savor my agony.  Mary Beth's heat immediately followed.  I dragged myself on leaden legs over to her assigned erg (Blisswagon) and collapsed onto the coxswain chair as she settled in to her saddle.  To our left was a real live German rower, with a German uniform and a gruff German coxswain.  See... world championships.  Let the fraukrieg begin!

Before we knew it, the start was upon us.  Apparently hopped up on the excitement of the race, Mary Beth peeled out at the start.  Once I finally caught up with her, I started gently urging her to ease back from her sub 2:00 pace.  My soothing voice had no apparent impact.  I was tempted to physically restrain her, but I was pretty sure that'd earn me a red card and black eye.  Eventually, she relaxed back to her 2:08 target pace and settled in for a well-deserved nap.  I was glad she didn't require much active encouragement at this point, because I was feeling decidedly green about the gills.

At 1000 meters, I suggested ever-so-casually that we were getting low on firewood.  To my surprise, Mary Beth leapt from her comfortable 2:08 pace and started chopping away at 2:07.  Clearly, she had been sand-bagging.  As 1500 meters approached, she started slipping unprovoked into the 2:06 range - her target finishing pace for the final push.  I tried briefly to steady her at this rate, but you can't get a caffeinated squirrel to lay off the acorns.  She had gone out too slow and was now bursting with energy.  In my excitement, I started yelling random interjections at the top of my lungs as she gobbled up the remaining meters with increasingly powerful strokes.  Go!  2:04.  Wunderbar!  2:01.  Howzah Zowie!  1:58.  It was negative splits on a stroke-by-stroke basis!

Mary Beth accelerated through the finish at 8:21.0, swerving at the last moment to avoid a couple of inattentive volunteers.  Next door, the Teuton kept rowing for another 15 seconds.  Having established world domination and shattered her goal of 8:30, Mary Beth hopped lightly off Blisswagon and cavorted a while to burn off excess vim.  I remained lump-like.

Feeling satisfied with our respective performances, we got cleaned up and settled into the stands to have those self-satisfied smirks wiped off our faces by the unreal times of the open class rowers who closed out the competition.  We did take some consolation from the fact that it's mostly just age, stature, musculature, genetics, pain threshold, training, and willpower that separate us from the elite.  I'm going to work on some of those for next year.  Probably concentrate mostly on age and genetics.

Rowing for Home

Over at SurfskiRacing.com, I had read some articles about a curious indoor rowing race - the "CRASH-Bs" - that a number of my paddling buddies had participated in the last few years as a winter treat.  Although none of them were going to make it this year, I decided to give it a shot.  My usual cross-training activity is running, but after cracking a bone in my foot back in the fall (in The Fall), I had bought a Concept 2 rowing machine (ubiquitous at gyms around the world) for an alternative work-out.  So in December I started training for an exploratory foray into a new domain.

An earlier heat at the CRASH-Bs.

The Concept 2 machine has what can best be described as a psychotic fan base.  Twenty-some years ago a group of Boston-area rowers decided to hold an indoor race.  This has since grown into the CRASH-B world indoor rowing championship, where a couple thousand competitors meet to tackle the 2,000 meter time trial.  At 6 to 8 minutes in length for most rowers, this distance falls in that dark intersection between sprint and endurance where Pain and Suffering meet up when they want to let off some steam.  The 2K trial evinces a near-mythic level of dread in rowing circles.

Given this, when the Sunday of the race rolled around with snow and bluster, I had half a mind to bag the event.  However, I decided I couldn't just throw away the training.  With Mary Beth along for moral and strategic support, we headed down to the city.  Upon entering Boston University's Agganis Arena, it immediately was evident that we had entered a world quite different than that of surfski races.  A world built on explosive speed, power, and youth rather than on, uh, middle age (at least in our neck of the ski woods).  While there were certainly quite a few older participants with normal human proportions, you couldn't help notice the preponderance of young, gene-pool lottery winners in the CRASH-B crowd.  As we walked by spandexed groups of towering, broad-shouldered competitors from various rowing teams (like, for example, Antigonish Rowing Club and Germany), I fought my compulsion to make burnt offerings in hopes of appeasing them.

One thing that makes indoor rowing marginally more fun than, say, waterboarding, is that the Concept 2 machines provide you with a versatile digital console to distract you from your suffering.  Besides elapsed distance and time, the console shows stroke rate and your running 500 meter split time (the time it would take to finish 500 meters at your current pace) and your average 500 meter split time.  As a novice indoor rower, when asked to submit a 2K time for seeding purposes I was forced to make an uneducated guess.  Although my training had included intervals of varying lengths up to 5 minutes, whenever I thought about trying a full 2K on my own, I decided that my time would be better spent hurting less.  So I submitted a safe time of 7:15, which fell somewhere between "conservative" and "sandbagging", depending on your perspective.  By the race date, however, I felt pretty confident based on training times that I could break 7:00.  This would require four 1:45 splits.  For comparison, the best half-dozen or so rowers in the competition would break 6:00 (with 5:37 being the improbable world record).

Before the race...

After warming up for a half-hour in the bullpen area, we made our way onto the competition floor, where three phalanxes of 30 or so rowing machines waited.  Based on my seed time, I had been assigned a place in the "B" phalanx.  I try to slip the word "phalanx" into everything I write, so I'm pretty thrilled to finally be able to use it more-or-less appropriately.  I found my assigned machine (trusty ole number 60), and curled up on it for a quick nap after my slightly too-exuberant warm-up.

 I was awakened from my slumber by the eerie stillness of competitors mentally preparing themselves for the start.  I hadn't exactly done my due diligence when it came to prepping for the race itself.  So when my display showed "Sit ready" and we were told to grip our handles and watch our displays, I wasn't sure if this was the start of a long sequence (perhaps "Sit ready", "Prepare yourself", "Take a deep breath", "This is really going to hurt, you know", "Drink Coke!", "On your mark", "GO!!!") or if the next message would just be "GO!!!".  When the display changed to "Attention", I flinched while my fevered mind struggled to suss out the meaning of that word, but managed to avoid a false start.  I really had my heart set on "GO!!!" as the starting message, but the subsequent directive of "ROW" was short and had an O in the right place, so I got a pretty good jump.

I kept my race strategy simple, so that when I my brain started to shut down to shunt oxygen to more important parts of my body, I'd have some hope of remembering it.  Try to maintain a sub-1:45 pace for the first 1,500 meters, then just pull like hell for the remainder, throwing all form and continence to the wind.  Mary Beth was serving as coxswain, keeping me on pace and gently reminding me to avoid going into the light as the end neared.

Within a few quick, short strokes I had achieved a near perfect state of cotton mouth, as if I had once again ignored the "do not eat" labels on a half-dozen packets of desiccant.  Parched it would be, then.  I noticed that my early split was under 1:40. With bursts of adrenalin fueling me, this didn't feel like an unreasonable effort, but I forced myself to back off and settle down.  The 2K is all about pace.  Pace and thirst.

With Mary Beth urging me on (with the typical "Faster!  Come on, maggot!  Twenty more to go!" that I'm used to hearing when washing the dishes), I settled into a steady pace in the 1:43 range.  I discovered that in addition to the normal performance stats, the Concept 2 console also showed my place within the "B" phalanx.  That provided some additional motivation, as I recovered from a relatively poor start in 20th place to gradually climb the ranks.  At 1,000 meters I was maintaining my pace and had broken into single digits.  I wouldn't say I felt "good", but I did feel "not entirely suicidal".  It seemed like 7:00 was doable!  At 1,250 meters, I began to feel a vague sense of unease.  I knew I was forgetting something.  Something unpleasant.  Some dark thought was yearning to breathe free.

At 1,400 meters, that dread kraken slipped its surly bonds and broke through to the surface of  consciousness.  The sprint.  Was coming.  Soon.  And then it arrived, red in tooth and claw.  Although I felt like I had a lock on 7:00 given my pace over the first 1,500 meters, a sense of honor/greed compelled me to meet the beast on its own terms.  If that monkey-licker wanted a fight, he'd get one.  I started pulling like my time depended on it.

My pace dropped to 1:37, where it was damn well going to stay for the next 97 seconds.  Longer, if that's what it took!  To conserve strength, I discarded most of my visual field to spreading blackness, locking in on the console alone.  The remaining distance decreased at a rate that I can only describe as tectonic in pace.  Fittingly, the discomfort of exhaustion was being rapidly replaced by the searing magma of lactic acid build-up.  Perhaps I could ride that molten flow right to the subduction zone.  Might have pushed that metaphor a little too hard.  I was tired.

At 400 meters left, I tried closing my eyes for a few seconds, only to somehow find myself at 425 meters after this experiment.  Evidently you have to look agony in the eye.  At 300 meters, I realized that my labored breathing had been replaced by a rhythmic series of thundering yawps.  And not those life-affirming barbaric yawps of Whitman, but the primal bellowing of a wildebeest struggling to free itself from a particularly sadistic crocodile.  I was a bit self-conscious, but first you save your skin, then you make your shame-faced apologies to the herd.

So in the final 200 meters, I abandoned all sense of propriety.  Like Beethoven, slobber was flying everywhere and I was deaf to everything but my own anguished shrieks.  I'm pretty sure I was crying.  At 100 meters, I had an excellent view of the competition floor as I floated above my ruined shell of a body, still somehow rowing along without me.  Time slowed and I was filled with an overwhelming sense of peace.  A smell of persimmons filled the air.  I saw my childhood dog, Mr. Flappers, running towards me.

After the race...

And then it was over.  I was snapped back into my body so fast that I nearly swallowed my moistureless tongue.  The sounds and smells of the arena stormed back into existence, as did a profound oxygen debt.  Hunched over my seat attempting to imagine a time when everything wouldn't hurt so much, I managed a look up at the console.  I had finished 2nd in B Phalanx at 6:43 - a far better time than I had any reason to believe I could achieve.  I'll never understand the vagaries of day-to-day performance differences, but I hit this race at just the right time.

Although I've never won a race of any kind that had more than a half-dozen participants, I've finished well enough in some bigger races to know that, even though you realize that some people finished before you, it still feels good to think that there are many other competitors still out on the course.  I have to admit, however, that it's a considerably more joyful experience to finish well and then to actually see those slower competitors still suffering all around you.  Of course, I'm well aware that in different contexts (like 25 meters over, in A Phalanx), I'd be the one providing the joyful experience to someone else.  Seems a fair bargain.

You can find the results of all the day's races here (I'm in the Master's Men (40-49), Heavyweight division).  And at the Concept2 website, you can replay an animated version of my race (and all the other races of the day), which is kind of nifty.  Naturally, I'm also re-running the race in my mind.  I'm already forgetting the agony and foolishly believing that I could have shaved a second or two off my time if only I had pushed harder in the first 200 meters, or started my sprint a little earlier.  I may be hooked.  I'm definitely delusional.

See you next year, Mr. Flappers.