Rowing Into The Sun
Bundled up in a bulky orange jumpsuit covered with yellow reflectors and a white knit hat, Michelle Guerette clutched a bullhorn and looked like she was dressed to run into a burning building. In actuality she was motoring across the Charles River before sunrise on a blustery morning.
The former rower at Radcliffe (a.k.a. Harvard’s women’s crew) and silver medalist at the Beijing Olympics pulled her motor boat up to yellow scull filled with four former college rowers.
“Alright, you guys have to get back for work, right?” Guerette, 29, asks around 6:45 a.m. on Wednesday, about an hour after the men began their workout.
The members of the boat, which will race in the club fours event at this weekend’s 45th annual Head of the Charles regatta, all nodded in the affirmative.
“Gotcha, just checking,” Guerette replied before giving the crew final instructions for their row back to the Union Boat Club’s boathouse, where Guerette is in her second fall as the rowing coach and program director.
The rowing shell was one of five Guerette was instructing Wednesday morning. But her rowers were among countless crews clambering to get in workouts before the world’s largest regatta with 1,900 boats and more than 8,800 athletes competing this weekend and roughly 200, 000 spectators watching.
And with so many of those crews rowing before dawn this week so their rowers can run off to work, the traffic on the Charles can get a bit scratchy well before a the bumper-to-bumper backup begins on the Southeast Expressway.
“Three days prior [to Head of the Charles] all the crews come to town,” said Peter Schnorr, who leaves his Marlborough home at 4:45 a.m. three days a week to workout with UBC’s master’s eight team. “Nicole [Nitchie] our coxswain went crazy this morning try to keep track of everybody. It’s dark out and she’s dodging boats in the dark trying to make sure we get the workout we need so we can get down the course fast.
“It’s fun to compete and it’s a great way to stay fit,” continued Schnorr, the former Naval Academy rower. “We were all competitive and we are all competitive. We like to race. Even as you move on you want to keep your hand in the game competing and racing.
“Cruising down the river with 1,000 screaming people, it’s a whole different environment, even when it’s really bad weather it is wild.”
Appropriately named, Chris Storm was hardly detoured by talk this week that race organizers would shorten the world-renowned 5-mile course this weekend because of potential horrid weather conditions.
A law student at Suffolk University who rowed for Penn before graduating in 2007, Storm said it is more challenging to row now than it was in college.
“Although I’m not training as hard as I did when I was as an undergraduate, those workouts were harder because we did more of them, it is harder now because more is at stake in law school; everything is GPA driven,” said the 24-year-old, who trains eight to 12 hours a week and spends another 18-20 hours working at a law firm. “It’s not a neat balance. I don’t always do the best job at it. A lot gets put on the back burner. It all gets done eventually. After Head of Charles I have to refocus on school.”
Preparing to race in the club singles this weekend, Storm, who lives on Beacon Hill, rises at 5:15 a.m. each morning but can’t imagine trying to maintain his schedule with a wife and kids and commuting from the suburbs like many UBC members do.
“I love rowing but that kind of commitment, getting up at 4:30 and not getting to bed till late, I don’t know if I could do that,” he said.
That is the story of Storm’s workout partner Edward Demetriou’s life. To make matters worse, the 36-year-old lawyer living in Cambridge with his wife and two-and-a-half year old son has insomnia.
But Demetriou endures his hectic schedule because he said rowing is therapeutic, even more so after his father died this summer.
“It’s my sort of yoga,” the former Dartmouth rower said. “With all the stresses in life I need an outlet to make me focus and not worry about other stuff. Rowing is an all consuming sport. You need to focus to get the technique right. That focus is similar to meditation. It’s my stress relief.
Demetriou’s, whose wife rowed for the US national team, said he’s finally learning how to put rowing in perspective. “I used to punish myself always, do it no matter how I felt, whether it was a stress relief or stress inducer,” he said. “Now if it is a stress inducer I don’t do it, I take a day off. What complicates things is putting in an entry in a race like the Head of the Charles. I don’t want to embarrass myself.”
Joy Stark, a member of the regatta’s race committee this year, is just learning how to take days off. Moving to Boston solely for its crew culture, the former University of Texas rower lives in Dorchester, works fulltime in Waltham and takes night MBA classes at Boston College. Guerette noticed Stark was wearing down earlier this week and suggested she sleep in for a few days.
“Taking a couple days off this week seems so counter intuitive,” said Stark, 31, who will take two hours off from parking boat trailers on Sunday to compete in the master singles. “You just want to go out and row and get every last bit of workout you can. I decided to take her advice and didn’t practice Tuesday and Wednesday and went out [Thursday] and felt great.
“She really knows what she’s talking about.”
Of course skipping her 5:30 a.m. workouts has its downside too.
“When I don’t row in the morning and I’m stuck in traffic on my way to work I curse myself,” Stark said, “because I could’ve avoided it.”
Demetriou commutes from Cambridge on his bike and doesn’t have to worry about traffic but he still struggles with Stark’s problem of knowing when to let up.
“Rowing is the kind of sport that if you start putting a little time in you see improvements and want to put more time in and you feel like you can always improve,” he said. “At some point you have to draw the line because it starts to take over. It’s frustrating when you have to draw the line before you reach your potential, it’s especially frustrating as get older and you’re potential isn’t what it used to be.
“But it’s a lot more fun when you can just row and not have to worry about other responsibilities. At the same time life is more satisfying with other things going on. My mood is not tied directly to how well I’m rowing, which it was in college.
“I feel proud of the fact that I can actually row and race and not have a family that is completely dysfunctional.”
After his Wednesday morning workout Demetriou showered in the boathouse and climbed down a wooden ladder to where Storm was tending to his rowing shell.
“I’m coming in early tomorrow,” Storm tells Demetriou.
“I’m not rowing tomorrow,” Demetriou says as he walks out the door, unlocks his bike and rides down the esplanade toward his office.
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