Alexandersmap

    Category: Rowing

    • The Hardest Stroke

      “The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.” ― James Clear, Atomic Habits

      In rowing, 2000 meters for time is the standard identity test. Instead of asking, “What do you do for a living?” the question amongst rowers passion level is, “What was your time?” Meaning, how long did it take you to row 2000 meters. It’s a way of quickly gauging how one person’s personal best stacks up against another’s. And outside of a competitive athletic event it doesn’t mean a damned thing beyond ego stroking.

      Most of us move on from that level of intensity after college and perhaps a little club rowing. Some keep at it for life. For me, rowing is that habit I fall into and back out of again and again. One moment I’m building a streak of days and watching my splits come down to respectable levels, the next moment I look back and realize it’s been months since I sat on an erg.

      And once again I’m getting reacquainted with the erg. I began rowing again, beginning with my least favorite workout; 10,000 meters. Why begin with one’s least favorite? Isn’t that a recipe for failure? Sure, I could have done intervals, which break up the monotony and lend urgency to every stroke. I might have hopped on the bicycle and ridden one of my favorite loops while the weather was nice. Or I might have taken the pup for a long walk on the rail trail, but each of those are workouts that help me avoid the one I’d been dreading. We must face our demons, and mine is an extended stay on a rowing ergometer that doesn’t care a lick how long it’s been since I last used it.

      We are either reinforcing our desired habits or straying away from them. Long steady-state rows can get a bit tedious. They can also be pretty uncomfortable when you aren’t conditioned for them. The trick is to push through those feelings and finish anyway. The time doesn’t matter, but finishing what we told ourselves to start matters a great deal. We are building a life-long system of health and fitness, and it always begins with following through on that next promise we make to ourselves to do what we said we were going to do.

    • Our Many Short Races

      “Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after the other.” — Walter Elliot

      Fortitudine vincimus (by endurance we conquer) — the family motto of Sir Ernest Shackleton

      When we look back on our lives thus far, we often gloss over the small, daily challenges that we had to overcome just to get through the day and only remember the good times we had. Sure, we remember the big setbacks and the losses (it’s hard to ever forget a gut punch). But each small challenge conquered honed and shaped who we are. The race was won, at least that day’s race, and we moved on to the next.

      My favorite rowing workout is an interval workout of 10×500 meters. It’s an intense burst of energy applied to a relatively short distance, and then a brief rest period before doing it all over again. I’m still covering 5000 meters, but there’s no time to settle in to a lower standard of performance or to get bored. Work, rest, work again until the work is done.

      So why not apply this process to our creative work? Write quickly, take a minute or two minute walk away from the work and then jump right back into it again. It adds up to more work, but often better work too. There’s no time for distraction, no time for anything but producing our best in that short burst of time before we earn another break.

      Every day is a series of challenges that must be overcome for us to earn the knowledge, skills or nerve to move on to the next. We climb ever higher, we get pushed back, adjust and push forward again. It’s not a long slog into infinity, it’s simply today’s short race. When we focus on the short race we’re currently working through, we think less about the short break someone else may be posting pictures about on social media, or the work someone we admire just published that feels out of reach for our current ability. We’re in a different race, after all, and our task is simply to finish this micro burst with focus and intensity.

      Zoom back out, and we see seismic shifts happening politically, economically, culturally… and it feels like this race may be too overwhelming for us to be in. But we’re in it just the same. We forget that that larger game at play isn’t our weight to bear alone. Don’t let the bastards grind you down (that’s what they want us to feel—ground down and powerless). Focus on the race we’re running and chase personal excellence in the things we alone are doing with our time. Life may indeed be a marathon and not a sprint, but all races are completed one stride at a time.

    • A Bundle of Memories

      And the ghosts that we knew will flicker from view
      And we’ll live a long life
      — Mumford & Sons, Ghosts That We Knew

      My vehicle turned 100K yesterday, which in itself indicates nothing more than time and mileage together. The very point where it digitally flipped from 99,999 to 100,000 was a point on Interstate 495 known for being a choke point. Sure enough, I was in traffic barely moving when the odometer flipped, and took a picture for posterity in the relative safety of not really moving much at all. If I’d had my druthers, my truck and I would have done 100K on epically beautiful roadways while circumnavigating the continent, but alas, most of us simply drive from here to there again and again. The location was appropriate for the places in the northeast I’ve driven to. And just like with any other birthday or anniversary or milestone achieved, I simply kept on going.

      Earlier on this same trip, while taking the train from New York to Boston, I looked out at the Thames River in New London, Connecticut as we crossed the bridge there. Just upstream I saw the Coast Guard Bears Sailing Center at Jacob’s Rock, which back in the days when I rowed was roughly the finish line for the 2000 meter course. Sitting on that train looking upstream at that spot, the entire race came back to mind in a flash, with a different version of me sitting in the five seat. We ended up losing that race when we stopped just short of the finish line. Call it home field advantage or an oversight on our part, either way I never got a Coast Guard shirt.

      The thing is, we often cross paths with the ghosts of who we once were as we navigate the world. The train track itself has carried many versions of me to and from New York, the stairs that I walked down this morning have known a quarter century of me as I’ve known each step. Every day is a milestone, every familiar path carries some older version of us we may revisit. Life is change and familiar routines, all rolled up into a bundle of memories. We may hold on tight to them or let them drift away until some random glance brings them back into view. ’tis best to give our ghosts a nod and keep on living this life in the now. One day it will be today’s version of us that will be the ghost. Just what will we think of it then?

    • Far More Than Nothing

      You get up every day, you are entitled to nothing.
      Nobody owes you nothing.
      You can have talent, but if you don’t have discipline, you don’t execute or focus, what do you get? Nothing.
      If you’re complacent and not paying attention to detail, what do you get? Nothing.
      So nothing is acceptable except your best.
      Everything is determined by you trying to be your best so you can build on positive performance.
      That is the only thing, and there should be nothing else.
      We can’t accept nothing but our best.
      — Nick Saban, The Importance of Nothing

      We must ship the work in its time, as Seth Godin reminds us, even when it doesn’t feel like the best we could offer the universe when it ships. Nothing matters more than putting out the best we’ve got at the moment. We learn and refine and grow from that release of our work to the universe, and must then leverage that to do it all over again, but better.

      Our best changes all the time as we change. My best rowing time for 2000 meters was in my early 20’s, and I know I’ll never see sub-6 minutes again in my lifetime. But I can get more fit than I am now, and beat the times I’ve posted earlier this year. Improvement is relative to where and who we are now. Better is always on the table for something.

      I’m a better writer than I was ten years ago, simply because I do it every day and I’ve developed the muscle memory to convey what I’m thinking into words on a screen. More than that, I’ve read a few hundred books in that time span, lived through a pandemic and my children growing up and people I care about passing away and a whole host of other experiences that have tangibly changed who I was then to who I am now. Simply put, our best is way better at some things now than ever before. There is always a season for some highly developed skillset or knowledge that we may bring to the world now.

      Without shipping our work we have nothing. Doing our best at the things we feel are most essential for us is the clear path to personal excellence (arete). Perhaps a poetic speech by an old football coach will be just the thing to shake those ideas loose, that we may do our best in our one and only today. Perhaps arete will be evasive today, but we may get that much closer to it than ever before. Maybe our best will be enough for today, or maybe not. But the attempt to reach it is far more than nothing.