Tapping in the Fog
When you walk through the front door of Weld Boathouse and look to the right, the first thing you’ll see is a 2003 NCAA Championship banner hanging on the brick wall. Radcliffe won the Division I National Rowing Championship that year in Indianapolis, my junior year of college.
It took me a long time to say that it’s the championship that “we” won. Even now that pronoun can sometimes ring a little funny in my ears. I was in Cambridge when our first varsity 8+ crossed the finish line in Indiana ahead of the other five boats in their Grand Final and solidified the win – the first and only NCAA championship in our program’s history. Live streaming wasn’t a thing back then, so I was sitting at my computer hitting “refresh” on the results (relatively pointless – real time results weren’t really a thing then either) when my friend Meghan, who sat six seat in the second varsity, called me from the shoreline to tell me the 1V had clinched it and our team had won the overall points trophy.
That spring had been a hard season for me. Mostly because the fall and winter had been so good. I was finally starting to row decently well. And since I no longer single-handedly screwed up the set of my team boat, I was getting a lot more water time by the end of October. That winter I trained harder than I ever had in my life. We lifted three mornings a week, boarding the 5:45am shuttle from our dorms to the weight room across the river, swaddled in our team jackets that were closer to sleeping bags than outerwear. We erged every weekday afternoon and every Saturday morning. We put in extra “hour of power” sessions between classes and on Sundays. And we did it for a long. time. Those who were rowing in Boston between 2002 and 2003 may remember that was the winter that the Charles first began to thaw the third week of March. There was a grey afternoon in February when Harry had his guys erging in front of the dock at Newell, on top of the effing river (rumors swirled that he and Charley had sawed through the ice that morning to measure it and found it was three feet thick). The winter of ’02-‘03 was four straight dark, frigid months of suffering. But it worked. Our whole team saw splits we’d never hit before. PRs were set practice after practice. I remember pulling a 2K that was thirty seconds faster than I’d gone the prior season (for you non-rowers out there, that’s a lot). I was really proud of the work I’d put in. My arms didn’t fit in the sweaters I’d worn the previous winter. And after two and a half years I finally walked into that beautiful building on the Charles, a place that had made so many champions over the decades, and felt like I belonged there.
I was in the best shape of my life – and so were all of my teammates. I remember opening my heavy-as-hell laptop after a long afternoon of classes and seeing the email I’d been waiting for all day: the racing lineups for our first dual of the season against Penn. I read the names of the women boated in the 1V and 2V – not because I thought I’d be in there, but because I was curious to see where everyone else had landed. And then I scanned the names of the women in the four. From stroke seat to bow.
My name wasn’t there. I hadn’t made a boat.
I remember crying when I called my dad to tell him I wasn’t racing. Not even he could make me feel better that night. I remember my coach Liz looking sad when she told me she’d understand if I wanted to take a little time off. I remember that for the next couple days I didn’t walk into Weld at all. But most of that spring I went down to the boathouse by myself in the afternoons, put on one of our well-worn winter training CDs that I could hum every lyric to, and erged while the team was out on the water. I knew that a few of my other teammates who’d narrowly missed being boated were doing the same thing. Every once in a while we could throw together a four and get out on the water with one of our walk-on coxswains. I watched the varsity boats dominate race after race all season. I stood at the finish line in front of the Cambridge Hyatt and cheered when we were at home. I remember being really self-conscious. I felt more like a spectator than a teammate.
The first weekend in May I got an email I hadn’t been expecting: our second varsity four was going to get to compete for the first time, in the last dual race of the year. I’d be sitting in 3-seat. Our race would go off at 5:30am that Sunday. We were going to race a stern-loaded four – a boat configuration where the coxswain sits upright facing her rowers instead of lying down much more aerodynamically in the bow. It may be the slowest, heaviest type of rowing shell there is. These logistics do a decent job of telegraphing the overall noteworthiness and importance of our race in the grand scheme of things – but my boatmates and I immediately started instant messaging one another (Instant Messenger was a thing) about how pumped we were. I called my dad to tell him. He wished me good luck and said he was proud of me.
That Sunday morning I woke up a little after 4 and put on my racing uni. I met my teammates in the boat bay where we pulled our clunky stern-loader from the rack. We walked it down the dock, locked in our oars, and shoved off in the dark. We warmed up all the way down to the lower basin, turned, and got into our lane, facing east. There still wasn’t a hint of light in the sky. It was too early for the stake boat holders or officials to be out there, so we did a floating start. One of the coaches yelled two words we hadn’t heard all season: “Attention…go!”
As our crew approached the Mass Ave Bridge, the halfway point of the 2K course, we were in the lead with absolutely zero humans awake in Boston to watch us. We had open water on the other crews in our race. I heard our coxswain’s voice call for our “Radcliffe Twenty” – a 20-stroke move that every Radcliffe crew takes at the mid-point of a race to build momentum going into the second half. Our boat jumped out even further on the field. Our coxswain yelled, “YEAH, RADCLIFFE!” and it echoed in the archway as we shot through. Then I heard a different voice: "Go Catherine!" I looked up just for a second. It was my dad. He was standing in the middle of the Mass Ave bridge, all alone, in the dark, with his arms stretched above his head.
A thousand meters later we won. Our season had lasted a little less than eight minutes. Six or seven people in the world knew about it. My little boat rowed home to Weld and we put our shell back in the rack for the last time that year. I felt wonderful.
A few weeks later Meghan and I were wrapping up our conversation, she on the banks of the racecourse in Indy and me in my dorm room. “Congrats, champ,” I said, about to hang up. “Congratulations to you, too,” she said, “We’re both national champions.” I remember sitting at my desk for a while afterwards, looking at my flip phone, thinking…maybe that’s true.
I met up with my team at Lowell House that night when they got back from Logan. There was cheap beer and loud music and plans for black and white Radcliffe oar tattoos. The seniors on the team came up to me and told me how important it was that all of us who weren’t boated kept working so hard. They’d noticed it. They never felt safe in their seats. They could never coast. We kept them working for it, they said. This win belonged to all of us. They gave me a backpack that they’d gotten for me at the course in Indianapolis, embroidered with the 2003 NCAA National Rowing Championships logo. I used it as my carryon luggage for every vacation and work trip I went on until the threadbare bottom fell out of it in the middle of Terminal C in 2012. I still have the pieces of it in the back of my closet.
I’ve felt pretty overwhelmed the past few weeks. More overwhelmed than I’ve felt in what has been a very overwhelming year. I’ve been really self-conscious. I’ve acted more like a spectator than a teammate. Spectating has left me in awe of a lot of my friends – the pieces they’ve written and posted. The fundraisers they’ve started. The magnitude and speed of change they’ve instigated, in their companies and communities.
Those couple of days after not being boated my junior season, when I didn’t go down to Weld, I thought about giving up. I did more than think about it. I tried it on for size. I was discouraged and feeling bad for myself. I looked at those names in the email and told myself the season was in the hands of other people – stronger, more powerful, more capable. I could go down to the boathouse or not. I could keep trying or not. And it wouldn’t make a difference either way. But those couple of days of doing nothing didn’t make me feel better. They didn’t make me feel like me. I thought about the women I’d trained so hard with that past winter and for the past three years – how much I respected them and how much I looked up to them. They deserved better. I could do better.
For twenty years I’ve been graced with teammates who remind me that what I do, what each of us does, makes a difference. My whole life my dad has taught me how important it is to show up for the people you care about. And how important that can make someone feel. I’m lucky to have memories that double as wake up calls: the times in my life when I’ve most felt like quitting are the times when I let everything become about me – even though the whole reason I started in the first place was the bigger picture I wanted to become a part of. I’m even more lucky to have friends who’ve given me concrete, little things to do to start making a tiny dent in the world around me.
I saw this in the Times a few weeks ago and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. It was written specifically about COVID, but to me it’s the best synopsis I can imagine for our current context:
“The best prophet, Thomas Hobbes once wrote, is the best guesser. That would seem to be the last word on our capacity to predict the future: We can’t.
But it is a truth humans have never been able to accept. People facing immediate danger want to hear an authoritative voice they can draw assurance from; they want to be told what will occur, how they should prepare, and that all will be well. We are not well designed, it seems, to live in uncertainty.
Human beings want to feel that they are on a power walk into the future, when in fact we are always just tapping our canes on the pavement in the fog. We must accept what we are condemned to do in life: tap and step, tap and step, tap and step…”
I think this is all dead-frigging-on except for one word. It’s not a condemnation. It’s a brief. One we can all use to keep showing up and keep trying. Do what you can to make one small thing a little bit better. Squint through the fog to see if it worked. If it did, do it again. Tell someone about it. If it didn’t, try something else. Ask someone for help. Tap and step. Tap and step. Tap and step.
Attention. Go.
