Real Men Wear Unisuits

I can’t remember if we were watching a college wrestling match or a ballet performance a few years back when Number Two Son looked at the form-fitting outfits that one of the participants was wearing and declared emphatically, “I’ll never wear one of those.”

Of course, those of us with a few more miles on our odometers and who’ve forced down our fill of crow over the years could have reminded him of the old adage: Never say never.

This past fall after club soccer season ended, Number Two was looking for a way to get into even better physical condition and for a sport to occupy his time during the spring since his school didn’t field a soccer team. Someone suggested rowing. The Rocket City Rowing Club has been around for a few years, drawing high schoolers from around the Huntsville metro area down to the banks of the Tennessee River and into sleek, cigar-shaped shells with names like The Enterprise and The Black Pearl (whose crew motto is, “Once you go black, you never go back”).

But as Number Two found out, one doesn’t simply show up and sit down in one of these beauties, grab an oar and start splashing. Something else must come first.

Pain. And lots of it.

As a novice, Number One was put through the full gauntlet of rib-splitting, quad-scorching workouts that the club has devised over the years to test out wannabe rowers and determine just how serious they actually are. Long runs, endless push-ups, crunches, and of course, countless hours of “erging” were necessary before the first trip out onto the water. And that’s not even counting the “scut work” demanded by the upperclassmen on the team and the little bit of hazing that goes on in such situations. As it turns out, the more the upperclassmen like a new rower and the more potential they deem him to have, the more he gets hazed–and Number Two got a lot of it.

There were many times in those first few months when Number Two limped home and headed straight for the couch after throwing back a fistful of ibuprofen. He told me that he often thought about quitting as the pain peaked on those 2K ergometer time trials. But each time, after he had finished and discovered that he had covered the distance a few seconds faster than the time before, he became more curious and asked himself the question: Just how far (and fast) can I row?

And somewhere along the line, he looked down in amazement at the new muscles that were popping up in places where he never knew muscles existed and became proud that he had tested his limits and pushed past them to levels that before had seemed impossible. It’s an inspiring thing to watch a young man testing himself and exulting in the strength of his youth.

The pain paid off. Number Two made it onto the water, learned to row both starboard and port positions and soon was holding a single oar and sitting on the bow of a novice four man “sweep” boat. But his first race almost didn’t happen. The team traveled to South Carolina for the Clemson Sprints, only to find that for some reason they were the only high school novice four-man boat to show up for the regatta. Just when they thought that they weren’t going to get a chance to race, the meet director offered to allow them to row in the college novice division race.

Psyched to be rowing against students several years older, the two sophomores and two freshmen rowed for all they were worth, losing (barely) to boats from Clemson and Tennessee, but beating several others, including Georgia Tech and Florida State. They followed this up with a string of medals from several other regattas around the Southeast, and the quartet concluded their spring season with a hard-fought third place finish at the regional championships.

Medals are nice and all, but another reason Number Two has taken to the sport is its “laid backness” and the opportunity for free spirits like him to express their unique personalities. As you can see from these pictures from a recent intra-squad scrimmage, Number Two and crew went with a Braveheart theme hoping the warpaint would be worth a few extra seconds when the going got tough. Rowing doesn’t quite have the radical, “surfer-dude” mentality, but it’s something close to that. I think there must be something about being on or near the water that loosens up the inhibitions a little and brings out the “wild-at-heart” in people.

Number Two just returned from the USRowing Youth National Championships at Harsha Lake near Cincinnati, Ohio. There he served as an alternate for the Rocket City varsity 8-man boat, apparently an honor that is afforded to very few novices. Although he didn’t compete this year, he did get a taste of a big-time competition and liked what he saw. His plan now is to win one of two varsity positions in the 8-man boat (the aforementioned Black Pearl) which will open up this fall and devote himself full-time to “going black.”

This, sadly, means giving up soccer. Watching two sons end their soccer careers in as many months is almost more than this old footballer can take. But Number Three will still be taking to the pitch, and I’ll have an opportunity to follow the fortunes of Number Two and learn a new sport which I presently know absolutely nothing about.

Just how far (and fast) will Number Two row? Time will tell. But he’s already learned two valuable truths:

Physical limits are often figments of our imagination.

And, much to his surprise, real men wear unisuits.