back in the saddle
So this week I got a summer membership at the Y, because although I've managed to start running again (if not enough) this spring, the recent heatwave has evaporated all desire to be in Prospect Park for the purpose of anything more exerting than lying on the grass (preferably while drinking illicit alcohol). I've been missing the strength and flexibility I had when I was a rower, and know it will take more than running to resurrect those abilities. I haven't been feeling very at home in my body lately, and need to do something about that.
I signed up after work on Thursday, and being late for dinner with a friend, had no time for a real workout. But I found the rowing machines, and decided to do a 2k before leaving.
It was the first time in years that I've touched an ergometer. I always hated the erg--working out on a rowing machine is all the painful effort of the sport, and none of the pleasure. Technique is boring, all timing and pacing and fitting your body to a machine: none of the joyous unpredictability of contending with the water, the wind, the other eight people in the boat and the rhythm you create together. I always regarded erging (balefully) as nothing more than a means to an end, that end being every minute spent on the river.
But it's been three years (!) since I've set foot in a racing eight, and maybe it's only because I yearn so much to be back on the water that this pitiful substitute suddenly feels so good. My body took to the machine with an excitable familiarity, and the mental side of it came too, unbidden, effortless: the posture, the pacing, the coach-in-your-head coaxing you down through the last 250 metres, the calibrated regard to split and rating. All of it flooded back in the first few strokes.
My 2K time was still pitiful in comparison to what I'd have expected three years ago, but I kept the split in a respectable range, and impressed myself with a nice ten-stroke surge at the end. I'll be working on this for the rest of the summer. Columbia has a boathouse on the Harlem River--and while I have no idea if there's any intramural or informal rowing for those not in the university team, I'll have every intention of best trying to start something if it doesn't already exist.
I walked out of the Y on legs of jello, breathless and smiling. It wasn't until few minutes later that I noticed my palm smarting, and looked down to see the telltale redness and the swell of blisters, at the ridge where the fingers meet the palm--the kind that won't break, if I'm careful, but will instead heal into a ridge of rough, thickened skin. I don't miss the bleeding blisters and the ragged nails, or the band-aids patched across my hands, but I've missed my calluses. For three years everything I touched, every book and every body, was felt through that roughness, evidence of the palm's familiarity with the oar handle. The loss of them, in the months after I left Oxford, was a tangible sign of a certain bereftness: for the people I'd left behind, for work unfinished, for the river and the sport and all that they taught me.
Since Thursday, my right thumb has been absentmindedly tracing the sore spot at the base of my ring finger, as if to say welcome back. And I went back again yesterday and rowed another 2K, faster and better.
I signed up after work on Thursday, and being late for dinner with a friend, had no time for a real workout. But I found the rowing machines, and decided to do a 2k before leaving.
It was the first time in years that I've touched an ergometer. I always hated the erg--working out on a rowing machine is all the painful effort of the sport, and none of the pleasure. Technique is boring, all timing and pacing and fitting your body to a machine: none of the joyous unpredictability of contending with the water, the wind, the other eight people in the boat and the rhythm you create together. I always regarded erging (balefully) as nothing more than a means to an end, that end being every minute spent on the river.
But it's been three years (!) since I've set foot in a racing eight, and maybe it's only because I yearn so much to be back on the water that this pitiful substitute suddenly feels so good. My body took to the machine with an excitable familiarity, and the mental side of it came too, unbidden, effortless: the posture, the pacing, the coach-in-your-head coaxing you down through the last 250 metres, the calibrated regard to split and rating. All of it flooded back in the first few strokes.
My 2K time was still pitiful in comparison to what I'd have expected three years ago, but I kept the split in a respectable range, and impressed myself with a nice ten-stroke surge at the end. I'll be working on this for the rest of the summer. Columbia has a boathouse on the Harlem River--and while I have no idea if there's any intramural or informal rowing for those not in the university team, I'll have every intention of best trying to start something if it doesn't already exist.
I walked out of the Y on legs of jello, breathless and smiling. It wasn't until few minutes later that I noticed my palm smarting, and looked down to see the telltale redness and the swell of blisters, at the ridge where the fingers meet the palm--the kind that won't break, if I'm careful, but will instead heal into a ridge of rough, thickened skin. I don't miss the bleeding blisters and the ragged nails, or the band-aids patched across my hands, but I've missed my calluses. For three years everything I touched, every book and every body, was felt through that roughness, evidence of the palm's familiarity with the oar handle. The loss of them, in the months after I left Oxford, was a tangible sign of a certain bereftness: for the people I'd left behind, for work unfinished, for the river and the sport and all that they taught me.
Since Thursday, my right thumb has been absentmindedly tracing the sore spot at the base of my ring finger, as if to say welcome back. And I went back again yesterday and rowed another 2K, faster and better.
posted by kitabet at 4:40 PM
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