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.