I Do It For the Spandex Tan

Every day I question why I do this, why I get myself out of bed at 5:10am every single morning. Every muscle in my body aches and yells at me when the sound of my alarm pierces the silent air of my cozy room. I feel the hours of erging, lifting weights, and practicing on the water coursing through my body as I go about my day. But it’s a good sore, a sore full of accomplishment and pride. Pride in my decision to become an NCAA Division I athlete; pride in being a part of the Santa Clara crew team. Oh yeah, and I do have a pretty sweet spandex tan.

Have you ever heard the phrase, “Our sport is your sport’s punishment”? Crew takes that phrase to a whole new level. For us, a day off from practice might be spent running or swimming. For us, “your sport is our sport’s day off” makes a lot more sense. We are probably the only people who cheer when it rains because we know that our beloved reservoir is filling with water. We groan the site of teammates walking in late to practice because it signals the dreaded “sweet sixteens” which involve sprinting the width of the basketball court sixteen times. At the end, we are left gasping for breath, secretly cursing the teammate whose watch was five minutes slow. Our friends hate that we get priority registration, even though we would kill to be able to sleep as late as they do. Because of my 5:10am wakeup call, I fully intend on majoring in English and minoring in napping (only kidding). We are those annoyingly talkative people sitting in Benson at nine in the morning who get weird looks from people walking by thinking, “they are WAY too awake right now.” Oh if only they knew how much we can accomplish by nine am.

“So what? I’m still a rock star. I got my rock moves…” SLAM! My alarm abruptly falls to the floor, as it does every morning when I begrudgingly roll over to turn it off and save myself from listening to Pink’s generic obnoxious lyrics. I pull on layer after layer of UnderArmor spandex and my wool ear warmer, specifically ignoring the spandex tan that graces my legs. I stick my Crocs in my bag, strap my visor around my head and tuck my water bottle into the side pocket of my backpack. Morning after morning, we drag our tired, weary bodies out of our warm beds at 5am to drive the 17 or so miles to our boathouse. We pile into the vans and the hum of the engine lulls us back to sleep in the back as we weave our way through early morning traffic on I-880. Nestled in the hills above Los Gatos, it seems as though the sun is still sleeping as we pull off the freeway and meander through the hills to Lexington Reservoir. Never eager to get out of the warm car, we delay our re-entrance into the cold morning air as long as possible. Groans fill the air as we take a warm-up jog that never seems to get any easier together up the boathouse hill to the road and back down. We can see our breath as we huddle together and grumble about the cold while stretching our angry, tight muscles.

After our coach reads off the lineups for the morning’s practice, we shiver as we strip off unwanted layers of clothing. Practicality trumps warmth as the extra sweatshirt comes off for fear of it getting wet and uncomfortably heavy during the practice. “Hands on the Gigolo!” (Yes, the name of our varsity eight boat is the Gigolo. It started out as a joke but the name stuck) is the signal for our eight girls to slowly stand and ready ourselves to lift and carry a 200 pound shell down the never-ending hill to the water. Permanent grooves are etched into my sculpted shoulders. “One inch..ready..up!” We are perfectly in sync as we easily (well, not that easily) lift the shell from its home on the boathouse racks. We inch out to the middle of the boathouse, being careful not to bump the all-important rigors that line the sides of our expensive, though well-worn equipment. “Up to shoulders, ready, up!” I give a slight bend to my knees and back and heave the boat up to my stiff shoulders. I take a deep breath as we begin the steep decent to the muddy, debris-filled Lexington water. My watch reads 6:35 am, which means that the water now owns me for the next two hours.

As we reach the end of the path, we step on the precarious dock, trying our hardest to avoid the side of the dock that always dips into the water under the weight of nine people and a two hundred pound boat. We bring our toes to the edge of the dock and bring the boat up and over our heads and carefully place it in the water. We kick our shoes off and groan when one lands in one of the small piles of bird poop that dot the dock. We gently step into the boat, pushing our oars across to prevent any chance of tipping. Brigid, our pint-size bullhorn of energy known as the coxswain, instructs us to “shove in two” as she settles in the front of the boat in a seat so small that no normal-sized human should ever be able fit in there. We lean towards the water and shove away from the dock.

The definition of team states, “a number of persons associated in some joint action” (dictionary.com). In rowing, that joint action is the catch and swing that drives our thin but powerful shell across the glassy water as the sun finally breaks over the mountains. If one person is having an “off day” the entire boat is affected. The set (balance) of the boat won’t be as strong, the strokes won’t be as firm, the connection of the rowers can’t be complete if everyone isn’t on the same page. That connection separates the mediocre teams from the elite teams, the ordinary athletes from the Olympic athletes. The “all for one” mindset can mean the difference between a win and a loss, between success and failure. As actor Al Pacino so emphatically puts in his infamous “Inches” speech from the movie Any Given Sunday, “Now I can't make you do it. You gotta look at the guy next to you. Look into his eyes. Now I think you are going to see a guy who will go that inch with you. You are going to see a guy who will sacrifice himself for this team because he knows when it comes down to it, you are gonna do the same thing for him.”

And the spandex tan, oh the glorious spandex tan. It’s so much easier for guys, whose thighs can be hidden under baggy gym shorts or boxers. Their spandex tan can be conspicuously covered while girls have to work extra hard or our tans will be there for all to see. The bottom of our uniforms hit the awkward point right in the middle of our thighs where skirts are either too short or too long. Regardless, we see it when we sit down, and it sticks out like the chalk line that my 7th grade English teacher always had on the back of her black skirts when she leaned against the chalkboard. It seems like my spandex tan follows me wherever I go. It makes its appearance at the most inopportune times: laying on the beach in Santa Cruz on a sunny Sunday afternoon, the first time you decide to wear the strapless shirt…BAM! There it is, a very visible reminder of how crazy we really are. But there is a certain pride that comes with that spandex tan, a “yeah I’ve got a spandex tan, I’m a badass” type of attitude that gives a team the mental toughness to race 2000 meters every weekend.

A rowing shell is a fickle beast. It always seems to know when we feel well and when we don’t. When we’re on, we’re really on. As our blades slice through the silent morning water, our muscles move in perfect syncopation. Our bodies are in perfect connection; our feet push hard against our shoes creating the ultimate cohesive unit of our feet, quads, back and arms. Our oars feather and square in smooth transition, never touching the water below. Our finishing heights are even and high, extending the balance and letting the boat glide beneath our bodies. The slightest bobble of our hands or cock of our head can throw the boat to one side or the other. The art of balancing a racing shell is much like trying to balance a pencil on your finger, once you find the perfect placement, you spend the rest of the time trying to keep that balance or find that placement again.

The beginning of my relationship with crew was a bit of a fluke. My sister, in search of a way to stay in shape for lacrosse season, joined our hometown crew team. Her fall afternoons were spent running the Portland bridges, lifting weights, and developing her skills on the ergometer “erg” and in boats on the waters of the Willamette River. I spent many a morning watching the rowers come under the bridges of the Willamette as I drove to work, never imagining that I would end up being one of those people. As Portlanders settled into the comfort of winter drizzle, my mom decided that she had had enough of me coming home from work in the afternoons and not doing anything.

“Come to crew with me, Margaret!” said Eleanor, “you’re so freakishly strong that I bet you’ll be super good at it.”

“Spending my afternoons with a bunch of goofy high schoolers? No thanks.” I said, probably a little harsher than I should have.

But it was the truth. Here I was, in my year off between high school and college with my friends all away from home as I was spending my days as the P.R. gopher at my old high school and itching to get out of being with the same people everyday. There was no way that I was going to be spending my precious free time learning to row with a bunch of kids who were… GASP…born in the ‘90s! However, after much conversation and a little threatening on the part of my mom, I agreed to “check it out” the next day.

Of course, it was pouring rain the next day as I pulled into a parking spot across the street from the entrance to Rose City Rowing. The menacingly black sky did nothing to calm my nerves as I walked into the cold concrete building. I was suddenly surrounded by rows and rows of brightly colored oars and rowing shells, with these awkward bars sticking out of them that I would come to know as rigors. I can thank those rigors for a small scar that sits prominently on the front of my right thigh; my own fault for running in the boathouse. But, I digress.

The whoosh of the rowing machines blew cool air throughout the enormous room, and provided a strange type of white noise that I hoped would drown out my frantically beating heart. For the first time since my freshman year of high school, I was in a very public situation with kids my own age and honestly didn’t know a soul. I’m not the most outgoing person, so I knew this was going to be quite a new challenge for me. A round jolly man named Andrew approaches me with my sister at his side. He introduces himself as the novice coach and points to a group of gangly kids goofing around in the corner of the room. There were some who only came up to my shoulder, and they were boys! I knew I was in for an interesting ride.

I spent the next weeks becoming acquainted with the art of rowing. My shoulders ached from my newest enemy, the ergometer. I’m not sure if there’s a proper way to describe the erg, except as hell on wheels. Its adjustable resistance gave Andrew free reign to crank up the intensity of our workouts whenever he pleases. I quickly discovered the infamous “500s”. 500-meter all-out sprints, as many as you can do while holding approximately the same average time.

The first 500 is the easiest, but also the hardest. It was during these workouts at Rose City that I discovered the phrase, “Don’t fly and die”. The first 500 is done with fresh limber muscles, increasing the chance of getting a better time. Your strokes feel long and clean and powerful. After the first 500, you’re feeling pretty good, thinking, “this isn’t so bad, I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing and crank these out.” Suddenly, you realize that your rest time has mysteriously evaporated and you quickly begin erging again, faster than you probably should so your time doesn’t get messed up. However, you’ve basically already screwed yourself at this point. By the end of your second 500, your muscles are beginning to tense up and that rest time seems to be going fast and faster. “Slow down!” you keep wishing as the clock ticks towards zero. The end of the third 500 is when the need to heave might start; that’s the classic picture of flying and dying. Muscles twitching, quick shallow gasps for air, feeling a little lightheaded. But there is your coxswain, right in your ear, cursing you out, telling you you’re not strong enough, you’re too tired. This makes you angry, really angry. That’s when the adrenaline starts pumping. You’re staring the impossibility of continuing square in the face, but the prospect of quitting is way worse. That adrenaline is at its best when you think you can’t do any more.

After these pieces, it was not uncommon to see even the strongest of my teammates dry heaving over the garbage can having giving every bit of their energy to their 500s. Of course, the natural next step was for our coach to have us all get back on said death machines and continue to erg. To the rowing outsider, the whole routine makes absolutely no sense. We beat ourselves silly every day at practice for a six or seven minute race. But to us, it was the little things that we knew would boost us into competition with the elite west coast crews.

Fast forward two months, the weather has finally started to clear and we come to our first day on the water. After having spent the previous two months erging, lifting weights, and running every afternoon, time on the water seemed like it was going to be a walk in the park. Uhh yeah, that wasn’t the case at all. Being the tallest girl on the team by a good three inches, I got to spend my time on the walk from the boathouse to the dock with the majority of the boat lodged into my back shoulder. As we reached the dock, swung the boat over our heads and placed it in the water, the sun began to break through the February clouds. As we carefully rowed away from the dock, I could finally put all I had learned over those months to use. Straight back, slow knees, quick wrists. It all began to make sense. Little did I know those first strokes would put me on a path I never expected; the path to being a Division I athlete and a varsity rower for Santa Clara University. And while I couldn’t have known it back on that cold clear February day, my decision to learn how to row turned out to be one of the best I’ve ever made. When I took my first real stroke in the boat, I knew I was home.