Rowing is one of the most esteemed traditions at Oxford so of course I have to give it a go. The Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race is the second oldest intercollegiate athletic competition in the world and began in 1829 (two years after the first Oxford-Cambridge cricket match) when a Cambridge student challenged one of his Oxford friends to a race down the Thames. Oxford won and every year since then the loser has demanded a rematch the following year. Cambridge leads the competition by a slim 78-80 and Oxford won last year. In addition, the college boat clubs have their own competitions. Every November the novice boats race in the Christ Church Regatta and the senior teams compete in the Torpids and Summer Eights series. The Isis (part of the Thames river) is too narrow for head-to-head races so these are bump races where teams compete in single file line and try to “bump” the boat in front of them without being caught by the boat behind. The series lasts for four days and if a crew bumps the boat ahead of them on each of the four days without being bumped themselves, they are awarded “blades”- the right to get trophy oars painted in their college colors. In Summer Eights 2011, St. John’s entered six boats and both the men’s and women’s first boats won blades, making St. John’s one of the most successful boathouses on the river.
I have only been rowing for about two weeks but I have already concluded that it is the type of sport that fetishises pain. Tuesday I did five 1000m intervals on the erg (rowing machine), which took about twenty-five minutes and by the end of it I had five blisters on my hands. Yesterday was out first early morning session. And it was cold!! Maybe forty degrees doesn’t sound that bad, but I’m from Southern California and was wearing workout clothes rather than a parka. We meet at the porter’s lodge at 5:20 for a 6:00 water practice (also called an outing, which makes me think of a picnic or a stroll through a park and thus is comically misleading). The point of the rendezvous is to make sure that all eight rowers managed to drag themselves out of bed. Because if we walked twenty minutes down to the boathouse only to realize that we were missing someone, I think everyone would be pretty miffed. Oxford has a lot of rules for the rowing teams, which suggests that people probably have a tendency to overdue it. Each college can only have one boat on the river at a time, no boat can go out without a full crew and no boats can be on the water after 8:30AM.
So it’s freezing, the sun still hasn’t come up and I’m sitting on a narrow slab of wood that seems specially designed to grate against my hip bones. Eventually my hands go numb holding the oar, which is something of a relief since my blisters are still fresh. Watching from the bank you have no idea how much work is required just to keep the boat level. Right now our novice boat lacks the coordination to have eight people row at once, or at least I assume we do since we haven’t been allowed to try. So four people sit with their oars flat on the water and either push up or down to restore balance as the boat tilts from side to side. This is incredibly important because when I am on the recovery of my stroke, if the boat is leaned to far to my stroke side (which is in fact bow), there is not enough space between the end of my oar and the side of the boat to push the blade of the oar all the way out of the water, so I may end up pushing the blade backwards through the water and slow the boat down. The worst is when the blade can’t even clear the water at the finish of your stroke, so you are quite literally pinned under the oar handle until the boat levels out again.
Meanwhile, the cox is yelling out odd commands, like “come to backstops!” “bow four ready!” and all of us have to take a few seconds to translate each request in this foreign language. I for one spent a great deal of time reflecting on how inefficient the terminology is. For example, I sit in the back of the boat (which is actually seems like the front) and my seat is called stroke while the person at the opposite end of the boat is called bow. But the rowers with their oars on the left side of the boat are called bow side and stroke side is on the right. So when the cox says “stroke take a stroke” it means something very different than “stroke side take a stroke.” In the first case I take a stroke, in the second case all the rowers with oars on the right take a stroke. I mean honestly, there are enough nautical terms to avoid this confusion- why not just call the right and left port and starboard and refer to the front and back as bow and stern. Meanwhile our coaches are biking along the bank and barking instructions as they chase us up and down the river. For every ten minutes of rowing in any given direction you have to spend three to five minutes turning around. At one point the coaches were yelling for bow to take a stroke while the cox is asking stroke (me) to take a stroke and the person sitting in the bow seat has forgotten that that term refers to them. When bow finally figure it out, the pulls from the bow and the stroke are canceling each other out until finally the coaches and the cox realize that they are giving contradictory commands. By this time one of the senior boats is bearing down on us, the swans are upset at having their morning swim disrupted by all this ruckus so they start honking and before you know it absolute pandemonium descends on the river. Now whoever said watching the sunrise is relaxing?
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