Authors: Ginny Gilder
Yet nearly every journal entry in my training log following the trials chronicled only exhaustion. Here I was on top of the only heap that mattered, and all I longed for was sleep. I didn't know what the hell was happening, why my attitude didn't match my accomplishments. My confidence was ebbing instead of overflowing, as if I'd failed at the trials instead of winning.
The US Olympic Committee offered me the chance to test a new single that offered cutting-edge technology. I accepted, thinking a new boat might give me added speed. Manufactured in nearby Watertown by the same company that had built my personal shell, this Van Dusen was also extremely light. However, in a complete reversal of my history with rowing equipment, its riggers moved and the seat remained stationary.
My problems with the boat began immediately. Nothing felt right. The catch was completely different. My power application was wrong. I kept missing the precise moment of transition to the drive and jerked my limbs into action without smoothly linking the various muscles in their usual sequence. My body fought the stationary seat, which chafed my lower back and etched a strip of raw meat into both sides of my tailbone.
The equipment did nothing to help me mentally either. I ricocheted between confidence and terror. I wanted to believe in myself; for long moments, threaded together by my tally of the work I'd done and the victories I'd won, I could. Unfortunately, the smallest error derailed me, and there were many of those as I tested the new equipment.
It was big news, an honor, that the US Olympic Committee had offered me cutting-edge equipment. I recoiled at the prospect of establishing a reputation as a half-ass who couldn't meet the challenge of adjusting to new technology, who insisted on staying with the dog-meat-slow outdated stuff and didn't know how lucky she was. My self-talk flashbacked four years, dredging up an ancient status quo: it was me against the world, no one believed in me, and I had to prove myself all over again, as if I'd never made an Olympic team and never won the trials. I had laboriously crawled from underdog to top dog over the past couple of years, leaving the shadows of “wish I were good enough” and arriving in the fully exposed sunshine of “damn, I am good.” I was
alone in the limelight, without any teammates. I wanted it this way: no one to blame, no one to hide behind, and the ultimate opportunity to test myself and prove my toughness. Coming from the dark recesses of the land of underdog, I never contemplated the pressure that would greet the top dog at the pinnacle.
I couldn't stop the storm of negativity that washed over me and threw me overboard. I dreaded every workout. The effort required to maintain my training overwhelmed me. My speed diminished. My five-hundred-meter times leaped upward. Everything slowed to a slog, as if I were rowing through marshlands instead of clear water. I cried on the water after practices, barely able to retain enough self-control to stop myself from combusting into full-blown tantrums.
Thank god for Harry. He saved me from myself.
“It's fine to use your own equipment. Do what's right for you,” Harry instructed, shutting down further second-guessing. Problem solved. Then, we moved on to focus on training.
I don't know why he continued to coach me solo. Strayer charmed him into coaching our double, but I was a pain in the ass from the moment we met. I needled him constantly. I downplayed his stature, poked fun at his accomplishments, and playfully resisted acceding to his superior knowledge and considerable experience. He responded in kind with his own teasing banter, utterly unoffended by my lack of visible respect and apparently amused by my behavior.
His coaching plate already groaned under its load. Add to that his own maniacal commitment to his continued fitness (he still trained in his own single, raced annually in the Head of the Charles, and routinely ran stadiums with his rowers during winter training, beating many of them), not to mention a hot, high-performance girlfriend to keep him extra busy, and a pair of sons he saw at least occasionally. The last thing he needed was a moody, mistrustful prima-donna single sculler.
I had been easy on my first coach: I came to Nat as a college freshman in full ignorance and with no expectations. Seven years later, however, I was a head case masquerading as a know-it-all, my hopes and dreams routinely colliding with apprehension and doubt.
Harry couldn't design a training regimen without back talk from me. No matter what he wrote in the twelve to fourteen boxes scattered
throughout the weekly calendar that comprised my training schedule, my inevitable questions followed: “Don't I need to do more work than this? Is this really enough? Why only four five-hundreds? Why not six to eight?” I maintained a ravenous appetite for demanding workouts, regardless of how tired I felt, physically or mentally. I was a master of overtraining, hurting myself physically to shore up my mental state.
During these repetitive conversations, Harry remained implacable and imperturbable. No matter how I behaved, Harry persisted. He sketched out training plans, accompanied Lisa Hansen on launch rides, watched me row, and occasionally offered terse technical tidbits. He clearly enjoyed himself.
One morning, out in the basin, on the Boston side of the river between the MIT and BU boathouses, he and Lisa puttered in their launch behind my shell. Eyes ahead, I concentrated on pulling hard while maintaining the technical adjustments they suggested.
All of a sudden, my port oar whacked something big. My boat careened to starboard and I jammed my body to port to stay afloat. Instantly flooded by my standard terror of drowning, I looked over to see what I had run into. Bobbing gently in its usual place, a giant buoy that I always managed to avoid when rowing solo seemed to wave hello.
I glared at Harry and Lisa. “Why didn't you warn me?”
They were laughing too hard to answer immediately. “We just wanted to see what you'd do,” Lisa replied when she finally caught her breath.
As my adrenaline level returned to normal and I calmed down, I couldn't exactly laugh, but I did realize they would rescue me if I fell in.
Prepare, prepare, prepare. To me, more was always better, despite monthly bouts with colds that wormed their way into my chest and exploded into full-blown asthma attacks, each time derailing my training for several days. Despite having suffered with this health condition since age twelve, I wasn't much better at handling the symptoms or the aftermath at age twenty-five. My asthma presented a trifecta of symptoms whenever it broke ranks into a massive attack that kept me up nearly all night and required increased medication to bring it back under control, three to four times each winter: the inability to breathe, an uncontrollable fear of dying, and an instinctive self-blaming
mechanism. Every time my exhaustion from overtraining slid me over the edge into a cold, and my airways narrowed with viscous yellowish-green mucus, I lost at least a night of sleep. I had to sit up to breathe because lying down made forcing air in and out harder, and sleep did not come easy in that position. Worse, I was afraid that I would die if I wasn't awake to make myself keep breathing.
Somehow, my attacks always seemed to come at night, or maybe my busy schedule helped distract me from the symptoms during the day. At any rate, the middle of the night was the worst time for an attack, as the minutes seemingly ticked by at half speed in the dark silence and the rest of the world slumbered peacefully, breathing offensively carefree. As I sat propped against the pillows, I tried to focus on my breathing, to ignore the scratchy whistling and muffled wheezing that sounded inside my chest and to repeat the mantra that would, with any luck, break the attack: slow, deep, relaxed. I had to resist the temptation to breathe out hard, to force out air and free up more space for incoming oxygen. Inevitably, such energetic expirations inflamed the situation and exhausted me more quickly. I also had to stop myself from reaching for my inhaler, which could help prevent an attack, but lacked sufficient power to calm already-inflamed tissue.
In the moments when I forgot to remind myself to remain calm, I rewarded myself with a multiversed chorus of self-denigration and blame. Weak. Inadequate. Damaged. A problem and a disappointment. The litany of criticism stuck in my brain, skipping through the same tired phrases, like an old, scratched, forty-five-speed record, drumming my failure into the silence of the night, adding to my desperation and frustration. I had been singled out by the universe for a reason, and this illness was my fault. I knew that, even though saying as much out loud sounded like crazy talk. I couldn't explain why, but I felt that I deserved what I was getting.
Somehow, in the morning, I woke up, weak and groggy, but breathing easier, relieved that I was still alive, back and chest aching. Miraculously, as daylight peeked in the window, my resolve to combat this bodily failure of mine, this supreme indignity of being undermined so profoundly by my physical self, rose with the sun. The memory of the night's struggles faded quickly, a victim of my determined denial; regardless of my health, I would soldier on. There was work to do.
Harry knew I struggled with asthma, but I kept the frightening details from himâthe emergency room visits, the increased doses of medication required, the doctor's advice that I back off from training. I did not view the prospect of arming Harry with more data that could keep me off the water as helpful. Harry stayed the course. He listened to my tirades when I was injured and couldn't train, when I got sick and couldn't breathe. He was helpless to stop me jabbing at myself, but not when it came to repairing the damage. Accessible and available, immune to my anxious gibberish and my belligerent attitude, Harry gave me what I needed most: an unsinkable buoy.
I knew how debilitating my fear was, and how much more powerfully it gripped me when I was racing alone, but I always swallowed the experience. It was just the way of my world. In my years of rowing, no teammate or training partner ever talked about how they felt before a race.
Lisa broke that silence by raising the topic of race preparation. “What do you eat before your races?”
“What makes you think I can eat? Besides, more food would just mean more bathroom trips.”
“Ah, the good old PRTs. I remember those.” The pre-race trots. Apparently I wasn't the only one whose intestines liquefied on race day.
“I feel awful before races,” I said hesitantly. “I'm so afraid I won't be able to pull hard. Warm-up is nearly impossible. All I can think about is how badly I might do.”
“Of course it's difficult,” Lisa replied. “But if you love racing, you have to love all of it, and you have to be ready for all that it involves. That includes the fear: that sick feeling you have when you wake up in the morning on race day, the heavy sensation as if your leg drive leaked out overnight. The questions about whether you'll be able to make your body respond to the starter's commands or pull hard enough the entire race in spite of the pain.”
“What are you telling me? Everyone is afraid?” Really? They feel shaky and exhausted on race day? Too many toilet paper swipes rub their butts raw too?
“Fear is a matter of interpretation. Physiologically, what's the difference between excitement and fear? Your heart rate rises, pulse
quickens, respiration increases. You decide it's fear. You're the one labeling your emotion. You could just as easily describe your bodily sensation as excitement,” Lisa continued. “But whatever you call it, you have to embrace it all as part of the sport you love. And you have to be ready for it on race day.”
That interaction was startling enough, but Harry topped it with a conversation of his own prior to the start of the World Championships. We sat together talking at the end of dinner one night in Duisburg, Germany, a few days before the racing started. I twirled my fork on my empty plate as I listened to him describe the racecourse and its normal weather patterns.
Then he caught me completely off guard. “I think you can win a medal here,” he said.
You think I can what? Of course, that was the obvious goal. Go to the Worlds and go for gold. But honestly, I had discounted the likelihood of winning a medal before I boarded the plane to Germany. So many more competitors lose than win and go home with nothing to show but their name in a program. Yet I knew by now that Harry didn't bluster, rarely spoke effusively, and didn't exaggerate.
“Ginny,” he said. I saw the weather-beaten lines of his face creased in his most serious expression. “You're prepared. You know how to race. You'll do well.”
He thinks I can medal.
I nodded, shocked. I came to the Worlds happy to have made the team, yearning to be a standout, afraid of making a fool of myself, and unsure how I would measure up. Here was my coach, setting the bar and raising the stakes all at once.
I left our conversation in a trance, awed by the extent of Harry's confidence in me. Over the next few days, I found some new confidence in myself. Well, if he thinks I can do it, I guess I can. All these months of second-guessing the guy and, finally, I believed him.
Five hundred meters gone. The two-fifty-to-go marker was coming up pretty damn quick. My semifinal race in the women's elite single at Duisburg was blowing by. I was out of it, far back in fifth place, barely ahead of the lone rower trailing me. To progress to the finals, I had to finish in the top three. I craned my neck to gauge how far behind I was.
Wow, what happened?
It's okay. Top twelve your first time at the Worlds in a single is pretty good. Maybe you can win the petites.
What? I felt a surge jolt through me. What do you mean it's okay not to make the finals? What is that shit? You come this whole way to race in the petites? What the fuck are you talking about? Get going!
I stepped into overdrive. I jerked my head on straight, dug in my oars, and raised my cadence. I stopped listening to my raging inner debate. I stopped negotiating and arguing. I lost track of my competitors' positions; I stopped tracking my own. I heard oars splashing in and out of the water. I felt the ache in my muscles accelerate into a full-body burn, flames rushing down my throat to set my lungs on fire, but the pain seemed blurry and far away. I paid no attention to the conversation my body tried to restart, something about needing to stop or ease off just a tiny bit. I shut all that down.