Authors: Ginny Gilder
She smiled and held out her hand. “Give me back that paper. I'll get you on Dr. Jokel's schedule so he can get you started on daily medication. Ginny, I promise you will be all right.”
Molly hugged me. She was not a small woman, and she didn't scrimp on the care or affection she bestowed on her charges. Her body felt soft, yet her words were strong. I didn't believe I could be okay, but I knew I had to trust her. For me, that was an unfamiliar feeling, confusing and unsettling.
Breathing is so basic. A normal person doesn't have to devote conscious thought to inhaling and exhaling. A normal person can rely on her lungs to do their job, allowing her to focus on the world beyond. But my body was an unreliable partner.
I had tried to bully my way through my asthma. That had always worked before, with everything: just keep going and no one will notice. But someone noticed this time. Someone stood up for me. Molly saw that I needed help, and she threw me a buoy. I grabbed it and hung on.
8
I took medication every day, twice a day, and still ended up in the emergency room a couple more times. I developed mononucleosis, too, and missed more training in the winter. Good old Anne Warner wasted no time in early February sharing her prediction with me: “You'll never make varsity this year.”
There's a black-and-white photograph of the 1977 Sprints-winning Yale women's varsity eight, right after the end of the race. The stroke has left her seat and is standing with her back to the coxswain, facing her teammates who normally see only her back: Olympic stoic Anne Warner. Her feet precariously balanced on the boat's gunnels, she towers over me. I am sitting directly in front of her at her feet. To reach me, she has climbed over four rowers and now clasps me by the shoulders, caught forever in the careless glee of victory. I am returning the embrace, reaching for her with the same sense of unmitigated joy.
That photo likely captured the only time Anne and I smiled at each other that entire year. Anne was tough on me, no question. And no question, I deserved it.
Everyone knew I was abrasive, obnoxious, and brash. No one, not even I, knew I was timid, anxious, and afraid. I had never won anything big. Nothing. Suddenly, I was a champion, best in the Ivy League, a member of the fastest crew at a major regatta. I had helped something good happen.
We landed at the awards dock, proudly received our medals, and
gave our coxswain the traditional victory toss into the lake, but the best moment was standing in a huddle with my teammates after the victory ceremony. The taste of closeness derived from shared success, not suffering. For once, caring enough to go the distance worked. I had learned how to pull, if not quite for myself, for my teammates. I was still unsure whether I deserved to win, but I knew for certain they did. I had become a team player, in spite of my external attitude and my internal disarray.
A month after our Sprints victory, in late June, thirty women rowers from all over the country converged on Madison, Wisconsin. Jay Mimier, the women's coach at the University of Wisconsin and the head National Team coach for the women, had invited us to participate in the selection camp. Four Yalies, including me, were vying for a seat on the US National Rowing Team. Nat also joined us; Jay asked him to serve as an assistant coach during the camp.
One coxswain and ten rowersâan eight and two sparesâwould be named to the National Team at the end of the monthlong process. That team would travel to Amsterdam, Holland, to compete in the 1977 World Rowing Championships in August.
I was finally taking the first step to realize my dream of Olympic stardom.
Madison summers were hot and humid. Thunderstorms frequently rolled in across the wide and often wild Lake Mendota in the late afternoons, chasing our boats off the water and shortening our afternoon practices. I welcomed the weather only because there were so few other opportunities to escape the heat. The lake water was so warm that swimming felt like bobbing in a bathtub, and the only place that offered sustained air conditioning was the movie theater. The lack of cooling doomed everyone to a near-constant state of sweating. Our rowing clothes, perpetually damp, disintegrated into moldy threads.
The entire point of a selection process, irrespective of the program's competitive level, is to determine the combination of rowers who together will best move a shell down the race course. Coaches consider rowing technique, power application, physical fitness, raw strength, and mental toughness in matching athletes and composing lineups.
They devise various challenges to identify individual strengths and weaknesses, both on and off the water.
Practices were scheduled twice a day: in early mornings before the wind kicked up and disrupted the sunrise gleam of perfectly flat water, and in late afternoons, which often took place on land or were cut short by the bad weather. Regardless, we rowed six days a week, with Sundays off, usually cramming in eleven or twelve practices.
I was eager to prove myself to Jay, but as the weeks ground on, my confidence diminished. The selection camp differed radically from the atmosphere of college, and I was not ready to rely solely on myself or to fight only for myself.
College athletics centers on a team experience. Of course, there are dog-eat-dog aspects of competition: my team certainly had our share. But those weren't the only moments or even the defining ones. We all knew we were stuck with each other as long as we rowed. We were part of each other's experience, and we came to rely on each other for inspiration, consolation, and honest appraisal. We were each other's cheerleaders, even if we didn't all like each other so much. Besides, our bond had extended beyond our on-water experiences to our lives beyond the boathouse. Many of us weren't merely rowing buddies anymore, but friends. And finally, we had endured difficult experiences together, character-forging moments that required us to stand together in order to move forward.
I was not prepared for the dearth of camaraderie that characterizes the National Team selection process, or for the psychological demands of that process. Emotionally, I wasn't equipped to stand on my own two feet, to cheer myself on, to quell my private doubts, to reinvigorate my resolve, to discern what to focus on, or decide what to ignore. I hadn't realized the powers of persuasion my Yale Women's Crew sisterhood wielded when it came to muting my private demons.
It wasn't that my fellow National Team aspirants were unpleasant. They just didn't care about me or the team. They weren't behaving callously or selfishly; they weren't rude or careless. They knew how to get along without going deep or getting weepy. They focused on the job they were there to tackle: competing against everyone else to win a seat. Pure and simple. They had to survive the selection process; then teamwork would matter.
Without sufficient emotional grounding, lacking a determined “I'm a top dog” belief in myself, the question of my physical prowess ended up moot. All the cardiovascular fitness and muscular strength in the world couldn't help me. Scaling the heights to greatness is impossible without a foundation of internal solidity. I needed mental toughness as much as I needed lung power and leg strength.
The Yale Women's Crew had supplied me with a ready-made structure of support, a community I could be part of, learn from, and lean on. I had not yet realized I was missing a piece of the competitive puzzle. My inner voice knew how to prepare me for the next disaster, but it wasn't used to cheerleading. Usually galvanized into action by fear of the future, I had no experience with positive thinking. My ignorance cost me.
A few days before making his final selection, Jay scheduled an afternoon run of several miles in lieu of going on the water. The course was an out-and-back romp along the lakeshore. The group set out and remained bunched together for the first half of the run. Once we turned around and headed for home, everyone knew the distance that remained. The pace picked up and the group stretched out into a long strand of individual runners. Jay loped along the course with the slower runners, lagging behind as the end approached. As we came into the last half mile or so, he pulled alongside me.
“Come on, let's see what you can do.” He puffed the words out between short breaths. Of course, I picked up my pace to match his, determined to stay ahead. “You better beat him; otherwise it's all over,” I thought.
I started to sprint the last bit, keeping up with him, pushing to make sure I would take him.
“I can't do it. My quads are burning. I'm running as fast as I can. I'm just too slow,” I said to myself.
No other internal voice piped up to challenge me. The kick-ass, show-me voice that spoke so loudly and authoritatively during practices vanished in my moment of need, silenced by the pressure to prove myself to an outsider, one who didn't have a stake in my success and who just wanted to see what I could do. I translated that neutral stance into a negative, believing that Jay wanted me to fail, instead of hearing his challenge as an invitation to show him how great I could be. That
mental lapse cost me. Just like that, my sprint died. Jay passed me and left me in his disgusted dust.
The end of my first National Team tryout came with no surprises. No one wants a quitter. Before Jay announced the final set of cuts, I already knew I wouldn't make the team.
A day or two after the lakeside run, he posted the list of athletes comprising the 1977 US Women's National Team eight. Of the four Yalies who'd spent the better part of the summer sweating through the selection process, just one earned a spotâAnne Boucher, who had been a mere freshman the previous year. Forget the fact that she had rowed in high school with a rowing résumé twice as long as my meager two years; she was a more seasoned athlete in nearly every dimension, calmer and more confident, stronger, better technically, and apparently unflappable. But, still, I wasn't prepared for the wallop of disappointment and the internal turbulence that began battering me immediately.
I stood at the boathouse door, staring at the list of ten names. Mine was absent. I felt a flush of heat rush to my face and my eyes flood with water. I swallowed hard and blinked my eyes rapidly to tamp down my reactionâ“You got what you deserved.”
I returned to the rowers' group house to pack up. I just wanted to slink away without a trace, evaporate from the scene like morning dew. Unfortunately, my exit was more like scared sweat drying on a dress shirt, marked by stained ovals of perspiration and animal stink.
Loser!
Bouche came in while I was packing. She stood in the doorway and hesitated before speaking. I glanced up at her and then away, studiously focused on my task. “I'm sorry you didn't make it,” she said.
Yeah, sure. I hated her, yet I had to say something that would not alienate her forever. She was my college teammate. We had a life together beyond the confines of this dreadful National Team camp, and I had to do my part to preserve our relationship.
I could only speak gruffly, in short bursts, “Yeah. Well. That's how it goes.” I sounded so angry, as if it were her fault. I knew it wasn't, that she shouldn't have done anything different. It was ridiculous to expect her not to be a better rower than I was or to give up her seat for me. Winning required someone to lose; that equation is a fundamental
law of sports. This was my first up-close and oh-so-personal lesson, and there was no place to hide.
Bouche was only the first person I wished to avoid. News of my failure was not a private tidbit I could stuff in a drawer and unfold when and how it suited me. Anyone who cared about the composition of the US women's rowing team would learn I wasn't on the roster. The rest of my college team would hear. I would have to tell my family; they knew where I'd been all summer. I had no control over my image, no way to package myself as a success. Everyone in my world would know I wasn't good enough. My inferiority was now unavoidably public.
“You'll never be good enough,” I said to myself. I shuffled around my small, humid bedroom, stuffing everything together willy-nilly into my suitcase. And I finally said to Bouche, “I hope you guys have a great time, and go really fast.” I couldn't come up with a sentence that included “congratulations,” so stingy was I in my rage with Bouche and with myself.
“Thanks,” Bouche replied. She sounded like someone had died. We had never negotiated this unmapped territory. She had to figure out what to say to someone she'd just beaten out, who'd been summarily cut, essentially exposed as insufficiently qualified, not up to National Team snuff. “Tough shit, eat my dust” wasn't the right expression of compassion. Of course, she was happy to have come out on top. She'd accomplished what she'd set out to do. Possibly she'd have chosen me as a teammate if she'd been in charge, but maybe not. This was a true zero-sum game. Some folks won and got to go on; most lost and had to go home.
Years would pass before I appreciated the courage of any aspirant, regardless of endeavor, who is willing to put herself on the line and take a public, steeply down-sided risk. Without people willing to subject themselves to public measurement, no competition could ever take place. Many more of us lose than win. The grace of all these people is what makes sporting events possible. Losers create the conditions for winning. Yet the myth is that only winning holds value.
The silence between us grew from awkward to unbearable.
“Do you know how long you'll stay here before you head over to Amsterdam?” I asked as I glanced up at her quickly. As I kept packing, I saw her dark brows folding toward each other. There was no trace of
a smirk, not even a smile, only concern and uncertainty from someone who by all rights could be dancing on the rooftops and singing that a dream of hers had just come true.
“No, not yet. I guess we'll hear all about that this afternoon at practice, or maybe tomorrow.”
We had traversed the hardest part of the conversation. I didn't break down in humiliated tears, and Bouche didn't succumb to a glimmer of a gloat. Her decency was more magnanimous than my fury, which was sliding into despair. I kept my voice gruff to avoid tears and to stop my anger from wrestling free.