Category: Rowing

gender policing · Rowing · stereotypes

Ladies, do you even lift? Gender and the norms of strength

Sam B4 Comments
YWCA women's rowing team carry their boat from Gardner's Boat Shed, Australian National Maritime Museum
YWCA women’s rowing team carry their boat from Gardner’s Boat Shed, Australian National Maritime Museum

Rowing requires strength. Friends think that it’s upper body strength and that I’ve chosen it as an additional activity to round out my cycling but it’s not quite that way. Says Wikipedia, “Rowing is one of the few non-weight bearing sports that exercises all the major muscle groups, including quads, biceps, triceps, lats, glutes and abdominal muscles. Rowing improves cardiovascular endurance and muscular strength.” That’s because you push off with your legs and you just need upper body strength to balance the strength in your lower body. It reminds me of track cycling that way.

I’m struck by how much strength is required both in the water and to lift the boats from the racks where they’re stored down to the docks for launching and vice versa. Sometimes I think a workout wasn’t that hard really and it’s not until I go to lift the boat out of the water that I realize how tired I am. Still, I like it that we carry our own boats. I commented on one of the other crews at a regatta recently having husbands (well, men anyway) help carry their rowing shell.

I told that story to a friend, a former Olympic rower, who said it was only in the 1970s that women were allowed to carry their own shells at the Olympics. That was the case even though the women regularly carried the boats for training. She thought it was a case of old fashioned norms about women and strength. It’s okay to be strong, to race, but you shouldn’t “show off.” Instead, men got to play the role of “knights on white horses” rescuing fair rowing damsels from the plight of being seen to be strong. She said the Canadians and Australians were first in changing the norms around boat carrying with the Brits and others following after. I don’t know the history here but it’s kind of fascinating. I like the story below too about when women’s rowing became popular as a sport. If you know any good books about the history of women’s rowing, feel free to recommend them!

This portrait depicts the crew of a Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) rowing team not far from shore. Read about the Trixie Whaling collection in Signals vol 102. The 1920s and 30s were big decades for women rowers as more women joined the workforce and women's team sports became popular. The 'lady rowers' of the early part of the century eventually emerged as popular women's teams in the 1920s and 30s. This period saw a boom in women's rowing through the formation of amateur associations, the successful staging of national sporting events and the increased coverage of women's sport in the national press. The Australian National Maritime Museum undertakes research and accepts public comments that enhance the information we hold about images in our collection. If you can identify a person, vessel or landmark, write the details in the Comments box below. Thank you for helping caption this important historical image.
This portrait depicts the crew of a Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) rowing team not far from shore. Read about the Trixie Whaling collection in Signals vol 102.
The 1920s and 30s were big decades for women rowers as more women joined the workforce and women’s team sports became popular. The ‘lady rowers’ of the early part of the century eventually emerged as popular women’s teams in the 1920s and 30s. This period saw a boom in women’s rowing through the formation of amateur associations, the successful staging of national sporting events and the increased coverage of women’s sport in the national press.
The Australian National Maritime Museum undertakes research and accepts public comments that enhance the information we hold about images in our collection. If you can identify a person, vessel or landmark, write the details in the Comments box below.
Thank you for helping caption this important historical image.

Aikido · athletes · Crossfit · cycling · martial arts · racing · Rowing · running

On being a Jill of all sports

Sam B11 Comments

Or here’s another way to put it, I’m a polyamorous athlete. There are lots of different sports and physical activities I love.

I spent a lot of time with people who really only love one sport–Aikido, rowing, CrossFit, or cycling, for example. Sure they may do other sports but those activities are in service of their one true love. They lift weights to build strength for cycling off season or they run so they don’t get winded on the mat in Aikido but if they could just cycle or do Aikido, they would. I find the worst mono-exercisers to be runners and I’ve written a bit about that in the post Is there life after running?.

My son is like me. He plays rugby, basketball, and football. He loves all three but he’s at an age where he’s being pressured to make choices. He’s a good size for rugby but a bit small for football. He runs well for his size but getting faster might mean getting smaller. And tackling styles vary between rugby and football. Specialization lurks.

But me? I’ve got no serious future in sports. I play for fun. My primary passion is cycling but I’ve come to love rowing too.  I’m a green belt in Aikido (middling rank) and I dabble in soccer and CrossFit. In theory, it ought to be okay for me to play the field, so to speak, but in practice there are challenges. Here are some of them:

1. Coaches design training schedules assuming you’re doing one thing, their thing. Sure, they say you can substitute one workout each week with a crosstraining activity of your choice but often they don’t have much idea of what you’re up to with your other things for which their thing counts as crosstraining. It can get messy.

2. This get worse when training gets more purposeful. You might be in the “build an aerobic base from which to add power” stage of one activity while the other is focused on “developing explosive power.” Yeah, right.

3. Then there’s race schedules versus training schedules, building and tapering and recovery all thrown into one big mess. This year I considered doing a rowing regatta the day after a mini duathlon and while I think it would have been okay (both events weren’t that long) I can see why others were skeptical. That’s one nice thing about triathlon. You get to do multisport but with a training plan where the sports fit together.

4. You are often arriving at one activity tired from the other. I felt bad for teammates in soccer when I showed up for a game the day after a century bike ride. On the one hand, I was there. But on the other, I couldn’t exactly run my hardest.

5. Sometimes it feels too much like an excuse. The rowers think I’m really a cyclist. The cyclists say, well you haven’t been out much this year, you’re too busy rowing. The CrossFitters know I dabble and running, it’s always third string. I make no great claims in that department.

6, And it can be frustrating. I watch the people who do CrossFit everyday or who row everyday or who are at Aikido each night and see them make terrific progress. They advance much faster than me and I’m jealous.

6. But on good weeks? It’s amazing. I’m doing lots of different things I love. I’ve got a waiting list of new things to try. And the world of physical activity looks rich and full of choices. I’ll never be a star but I will have an awful lot of fun. I promise!

cycling · Rowing

Rowing and road riding: Another similarity, the rules, oh, the endless rules

Sam B6 Comments

Road riding is a fussy conservative sport. So much so that I’ve jokingly compared it to analytic philosophy for its fussiness, gate keeping, and inability to laugh at itself.

Cycling’s list of rules is very funny, but mostly the humour derives from the fact that real people do in fact take these rules very seriously. I like Rule 12 personally. “While the minimum number of bikes one should own is three, the correct number is n+1, where n is the number of bikes currently owned. This equation may also be re-written as s-1, where s is the number of bikes owned that would result in separation from your partner.”

Rowing has its own tongue in cheek rules, based on the set for cycling. See here for rowing’s rules. “Calluses are to be cultivated and your hands kept completely badass.“

And of course they share rules about tan lines (cultivate them and keep them sharp!) and toughness. Both sports endorse the rule, “Harden The Fuck Up.”

motivation · Rowing · stereotypes · training

On knowing yourself, changing yourself, and ending the negativity

Sam B11 Comments

The other day a friend was asking me about rowing. I talked about how much I was enjoying it. She’s a runner by habit and expressed concern about the technical skills required to row. She asked how much coordination rowing required. My mother smiled and said it couldn’t take that much because I could do, right? And then she looked at me for affirmation.

I smiled back, a bit puzzled, and then realized she’d said that not to be mean, my mother is very kind and gentle, but because I used to describe myself as uncoordinated. It was part of my story of myself as a non-athletic book-loving person. I’d been calling myself uncoordinated since elementary school.

Funny. I don’t think that at all anymore. Rowing, in fact, takes lots of coordination and while I’m not a natural, I’m doing okay. But Aikido takes lots of coordination too and I’ve made great progress there. Ditto cycling. Ditto track cycling. And cross country skiing. And Olympic lifting.

I think it’s safe to say both that I’m no longer uncoordinated and that I know it.

Being uncoordinated turned out not to be a deep fact about me. It was something I could fix and change by learning things that required coordination. I’ve been wondering about the role negative stories we tell about ourselves play in shaping our lives. Tracy wondered recently if she should stop telling herself that she could run but that she’d never be fast.

I know now I’m not uncoordinated but I should have figured it out years ago.

Do you have any negative stories you used to tell yourself that you realized weren’t true?

racing · Rowing

The 5 Bridges Fall Classic: My first rowing regatta

Sam B

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My first race on the water!

Okay, technically my second. We had a London Rowing Club in house mini regatta at the end of summer so that some of the rec rowers who wanted to try racing could give it a go.

But that night the weather was bad and the lake was decidedly uncooperative. We had white caps right up to the dock and so while we did go out and race, we only did one 500 m race and in our double we focused on staying upright. So I’m not counting that.

Saturday was the opposite. Brilliant sun, clear skies, calm water and beautiful fall colours. 5000 + metres, not 500.

The Head of the Welland was held on Saturday at the Welland International Flatwater Centre.

Welland International Flatwater Centre is a significant water-based recreational area that combines international-standard competitive water sport facilities with recreational and social opportunities.Set in 411 acres of parkland and 272 acres of water, WIFC is the premiere calm water surface in the heart of the Niagara peninsula.In 1972, a new shipping channel for the Welland Canal was diverted east of the City and the remaining waterway, the Welland Recreational Waterway, was born. Known affectionately as the “Old Canal,” this beautifully landscaped water park area runs through the heart of the City of Welland.

It was a terrific day. The four of us, our quad, drove down together. I liked that. It gave me a chance to chat with more experienced rowers about racing and I didn’t have to worry about getting there in time, getting lost, parking, or any of those pesky details. Thanks Wendy!

An aside: I fear this is part of an inevitable trend, long rambling race reports written on the weekend.  See here and here. Professors usually spend a serious chunk of time on the weekend reading, writing, preparing for class. When you race on the weekend, that gets squeezed out and I’m afraid it’s tightly composed blog posts that are taking the hit. Given that I raced Saturday and I’m spending all of Sunday working at the Ontario University Fair and this post is being written on the train ride there, the time crunch is worse than usual. I’ll continue with more random race observations but you’ve been warned.

First, when you’re doing a 5.3 km head race and you have to row out to the start to race back that’s a lot of rowing. The way it works is that people row down one side of the canal to get to the start and race back on the other. It’s an awful lot of rowing for people doing multiple events. The two experienced rowers in our quad went back out and did a second race in a double. Phew.

What’s a head race?

From Wikipedia: “A head race is a time-trial competition in the sport of rowing, also known as crew to a few USA organizations. Head races are typically held in the fall and spring seasons. These events draw many athletes as well as observers. In this form of racing, rowers race against the clock where the crew or rower completing the course in the shortest time in their age, ability and boat-class category is deemed the winner.Common categories of age may be high school and college-aged rowers as well as adults. Those over the age of 27 are typically referred to as “masters”.”

On the way out to the start, I thought the 5 km seemed long but coming back it flew by. On the way out I looked at the birds, the other rowers, and the gorgeous colours. On the way back, I stared intently at the back of Jen’s hat and counted bridges.

Second, when your club’s trailer is the furthest away from the docks and you’re carrying a quad on your shoulders that’s a lot of work too. Thank you CrossFit for making this part of the event doable. One of the other master’s quads had male partners carry the boat but I’m glad we can do it on our own.

Third, I found the handicapping system a bit disconcerting. Racers in the master’s category have their time adjusted based on the average age of the rowers in the boat. We’re 49.5. One boat was 35 and another was 54. We beat the boat with the average age of 54 on time but not on age adjusted time. On age adjusted time they beat us by 3 seconds. The youngster in our boat, just 40, joked it was her fault.

In theory I approve of age based handicapping systems. I like age group medals. In practice I’m motivated by the boats around me and I like knowing that passing is really passing, for example. If we’re ahead of another boat I’d like to know if we’re really ahead, etc. You have to guess a bit anyway as the boats are sent off singly and you’re a bit ahead of some boats, and a bit behind others, from the start. The experienced people in our quad could keep track of that. Not me. More to learn…

Fourth, I liked the atmosphere at the event. Each club had an open tent for shade where you could leave your stuff and sit and watch rowers in other events come by.  Some clubs, notably the visiting Americans, had a pretty flash set up. There was music, as at most races, but because people were taking part in different events there was a good crowd around for most of the day. Lots of people and boats coming and going. The coloured oars and unisuits made sense now as it allowed me to tell the different clubs apart. There was a great mix of ages, young teens through to the masters rowers, and I liked that a lot. I also didn’t mind wearing my unisuit when I was surrounded by people wearing unisuits! ( See No Way Am I Wearing That! for my thoughts on body conscious athletic wear.) A pet peeve about all sorts of races, no vegetarian food. Only the Gran Fondo came through on that front. Along with my own wrenches, I’ll bring more food next time.

Fifth, I should have brought a bike! There’s a path that runs alongside the canal and you canride up and down the 5 km route and watch the boats go by.

Sixth, diner dinner after was terrific. Nice to have a chance to socialize with the other women in my quad. And the pie was amazing. Thank you all!

Oh, and seventh, I’ll definitely do it again.

welland1 welland2 welland3 welland4 welland5

cycling · Rowing

First times and fear of falling

Sam B4 Comments

When I was kid adults told me to watch out for bees and wasps and to be careful not to get stung. I did as I was told and stayed far away. I was scared of getting stung. But when I was stung for the first time, in grade six, I was sort of shocked. “That’s it?”  I mean, yes, it hurt but not that much and certainly it wasn’t worth being scared about.

Sometimes we build things up to be worse than they are in reality. My partner tells a similar story about getting “the strap” in elementary school. That happened back in our day, when corporal punishment was administered by school principals, and we were all scared of it. And his reaction, like mine to bees, was “wow, that’s it? ” It never worked again as a threat in his case.

Falling off your bike, or “coming off the bike” as people say (as if it just happens, like oops, I came off the bike) is kind of like the bee sting. You dread it. You live and ride in fear of it. And then when it happens, you realize it’s not the end of the world. Yes, it hurts. There may be blood. You will be scraped and perhaps bruised and sore. There may even be tears. But if you’re wearing a helmet, likely it’s not the end of the world.

To be clear, I’m not talking about a crash. Coming off your bike at speed hurts and it’s to be avoided. Ditto collisions with other bikes and especially cars. I’m talking here about your basic low speed fall.

This happened to my friend David this week when he was riding on the sidewalk (bad cyclist thing to do usually, though he does have a good excuse). He went on the grass to make room for pedestrians but then caught his wheel in between the pavement and the grass when trying to go back on the sidewalk. Big scrapes but otherwise okay. And it happened to a fellow fitness and feminism blogger when she was first riding with clipless pedals.

You know you’re over it when you fall and your first reaction is to see if the bike is scraped!

My new as-yet-unrealized fear is tipping in a rowing shell. I’m a fine swimmer and we’re never that far away from land so it’s not drowning that’s scaring me. It’s losing control of the boat.

The boats are so tippy that Wikipedia lists that feature in their paragraph about the boats:

“In watercraft, a racing shell (also referred to as just a fine boat (UK) or just shell) is an extremely narrow, and often comparatively long, rowing boat specifically designed for racing or exercise. It is outfitted with long oars, outriggers to hold the oarlocks away from the boat, and sliding seats. The boat’s long length and semicircular cross-section reduce drag to a minimum. This makes the boat both fast and unstable. It must be actively balanced by the rowers to avoid tipping. Being able to balance, or “set” the boat while putting maximum effort into the oars is therefore an essential skill of sport rowing.”

I’ll let you know what it feels like when it happens. I’m hoping it’s like a bee sting or falling off my bike, in that it’s nowhere near as bad as I imagined.

I’m hoping not to have to master this skill:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw9UXJpE0CU

Is there any bad, but common thing, with your sport or fave physical activity that you’re dreading?

family · Rowing

Sunday busy Sunday

Sam B

Sundays this summer have been super busy. They start with rowing, usually a row around the lake at 830 am, with the London Rowing Club’s masters group. It’s about a 12 km trip. (See Lake Fanshawe above.) And typically Sunday has been ending with soccer. Tonight our game was at 8 pm, complete with lights. Autumn is definitely upon us.

Sometimes I get a nap in the middle but today was busy all day through. Between rowing and soccer I went to the Aikido picnic in Port Bruce, got groceries, and walked the dogs. No naps for me.

I considered missing soccer but when I voiced that plan to my kids they said back to me things I’d said to them in the past about teams, commitments, and how I was probably mostly hungry, not tired. So they fed me vegetarian lasagne and sent me on my way to the game.

They were right. I’m glad I went.

We tied 1-1.

Now it’s bedtime. Night night.

motivation · Rowing

Lessons sports teach you: Perfection is the enemy of excellence

Sam B1 Comment

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Our rowing coach told us today to think about improving the ratio of good to bad strokes rather than striving for perfection. I think that’s terrific advice in many areas of life. Rowing, yes, but writing too.

Don’t let your bad days define you.

The idea is to put bad strokes behind you instantly. They’re gone, they’re over, don’t dwell.

No one is perfect. I got a good reminder of this on the weekend when I worked one of the rescue boats at a regatta hosted by our club.

Our job is to help ensure the safety of rowers. We kept sailboats and kayakers away from the course. We also were charged with seeing if “flippers and tippers” needed aid. If they can get back in their boat and row on they can continue in the race so you need to ask if help is wanted.

Only one boat flipped on our watch. It was in a women’s single race, under 23, I think. Everyone assumed it was one of the novice rowers but no, it was a member of the national rowing team who’d flipped her single. She was in the lead at the time.

Thinking about performance in terms of ratio of good to bad, helps you think about getting better. Otherwise, we default to all or nothing thinking.

I sometimes think feminists need this awareness, maybe progressive people generally. We criticize most harshly ourselves and others for our mistakes when we’re getting it right eighty percent of the time.

Would it be better to get it wrong all the time?

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aging · family · Guest Post · inclusiveness · Rowing · stereotypes

Rowing Widows (Guest Post)

ceag11 Comment

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Yesterday it was Henley Royal Regatta, the highlight of the rowing widow’s calendar. On this day, rowing widows of all ages, sexes and other stripes get to sit about with a glass of something lovely in the sun and bask in the glories and joys of their partner/friend/parent/child/etc’s sport.

All the other days of the year, the life of the rowing widow is less glam. On the other days the rowing widow inhabits a world of blisters, enormous carb consumption, lycra-draped radiators and arcane terminology (cox, stroke, crab…). Thank goodness then for Henley (and cognate summer regattas the world over), which are our present to our much appreciated rowing widows.

Football of course has WAGs, ‘wives and girlfriends’, stereotypically coiffed and swigging Bolly in a hospitality suite, in reality they spend time on windswept five-a-side pitches, and are afflicted with the ‘footy results’ each weekend. They may also suffer the indignity of football memorabilia in their houses (my brother has a Lincoln City collection).

Note too the gendered badge: wives, girlfriends…. because no women play soccer of course… The rowing widow badge carries the trace of that gendered interpellation but is inhabited by people of all sorts, and long has been. This, in my view, is one of the many virtues of rowing. It is very inclusive as to both participants and supporters. This is quite remarkable, given the ‘room of one’s own’ imperilled status of women’s sport/leisure in general.

Nevertheless, when I returned to the dating scene some years ago, friends advised me ‘don’t let on that you row so much!’ Newbie rowing widows should watch out:
(1) this sport is addictive. You may well succumb to the ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ adage.
(2) the belief that if you are dating a rower you will be with a tanned, toned god/goddess is soon dispelled. We eat a lot and like to be chunky. It means we can exert more power in the water.
3) We mutter about rowing in our sleep and ad infinitum (friend Rupert openly says ‘I just glaze over after a while!’).
4) Some of us put FB posts when we are away somewhere with telling locutions about how we are missing rowing… oh and our family… (can’t think who that was…!). Some of us row on Christmas Day…
On the good side:
1) Rowers are all lovely people (I’m not biased, of course)
2) You will always know what to get us for Christmas (my fave last year was a mug from my sister that says ‘A bird in a boat is worth two on the bank’)
3) We are full of endorphins, so generally a prankster-ish and jolly bunch.
So, in the afterglow of Henley, I am raising a glass to all the rowing widows in my life: cheers, you are wonderful for putting up with me!!

Claire Grant is an academic but her true loves are rowing and poetry. She has been rowing since she was a nipper. She lives in Cambridge, England, on the banks of the Cam, dodging swans and river barges. Claire rows for Cantabs and for Boar’s Head. Her principal rowing widows are her partner Liz, her son, Freddie and her bestie Rupert.

Crossfit · Rowing

The Aikido, Rowing, CrossFit triathlon?

Sam B1 Comment

So an attentive reader might have noticed that I’m doing three physically active things regularly: Aikido three times a week,
Rowing three times a week, and Cross Fit three times a week. Occasional bursts of soccer, bike riding and dog jogging have occurred.

Now Tracy and I (along with a friend and my daughter) are  committed to doing a try-a-tri distance triathlon in the middle of the summer, the Kincardine Women’s Triathlon and from my schedule you might have thought it was Aikido, Row, and Fran (a tough CrossFit workout).  And while there are quite a few unique triathlons  the one we’ve signed up for is your standard issue: swim, bike, run. From most deathly to least deathly activities…

Clearly, one month out, it’s time to ramp up the biking, running, and swimming!

In light of that looming mid July deadline I’ve revised my schedule as follows, once I return from this round of conference travel:

Monday: CrossFit AM, Aikido PM
Tuesday: Swim AM, Rowing PM
Wednesday: CrossFit AM, Aikido PM
Thursday: Swim AM, Rowing PM
Friday: CrossFit AM, Bike ride PM
Saturday: Swim, Bike, Run
Sunday: Row AM, Soccer PM

I’m the least worried about my cycling. It’s a short distance, 12 km, I think, and I know the course. I’m also riding some recreationally. I commute by bike lots. And I’m a strong cyclist. But I want more time on the bike anyway to get ready for some other summer events.

Running is covered in a way by all the CrossFit running and soccer along with dog jogging. No doubt I can run 3 km. I just need to get faster and be able to do it after swimming and biking. Saturday is my brick day when I’ll practice biking after swimming and running after biking.

It’s swimming I’m actually nervous about. I need to make a wet suit decision and practice in it. And though it’s a short distance I want to be completely comfortable that I can finish it without resting. You can read about my past triathlon challenges here.

This time I also want to practice the transitions and get used to swimming in a wet suit. You can read about Fit and Feminist learning to swim in a wetsuit in open water here.

Any other advice? We all have our weak spots. Tracy’s is cycling, mine is swimming, and Mallory’s is running.  Here’s me on the right, below, the last time I did this event.

wetsuit