Dichroic Reflections

Rowing for rabbits

Rowing details

Monday morning, distance day. Ugh. Two half-hour pieces, each at 65%-75% pressure. My hands look like an incubator for blisters. On the good side, I think my technique was looking better (and to prove it, I got yelled at less than some of the others in my boat). The stuff the other coach/rower (I’ll call her Queue, I think) told me really helped.

End of details

I still want to talk about rowing, just not in detail here. I had the oddest thing happen this morning. The sun was risen, but still low, and I was squinting against it, into about the last quarter of practice (i.e. I was very tired). Suddenly, and just for a few seconds, everything turned into a photo montage. It was rather like the snippets of cinematography they sometimes use for movie previews:

*snap* arms reaching out *snap* snapping the hands in to my chest *snap* Seven’s blade entering the water *snap* I got splashed *snap*

and back to regular rowing.

And speaking of irregular rowing, last night was surreal. I coxed one of the boats (two eights and a four) in two Easter events. The first was a 1000 meter race, during which the cox had to balance a large plastic egg on an oar. We tried balancing the egg on the oar blade inside the stroke rigger, to provide some extra stability, but the judges ruled that cheating (though it was not against any announced rules) and made us stop, at which point we dropped the egg, drifted way past it and had to back uup quite a distance. Rowing shells don’t back well, so we ended up DFL, by quite a margin. T coxed the four that won, by the way, but managed not to be obnoxiously smug afterward.

We did much better in the second event. For this, Coach DI, dressed in full bunny suit, scattered egg-sized plastic eggs all around the lake, and we were then sent out to pick up as many as we could. We got 21 eggs, beating the other eight by a good margin. T’s boat got 26 eggs, but then a four is much more maneuverable than an eight (40’ long as opposed to 60’ long).

I will try to start putting together the rowing glossary Evilena requested, and possibly also a Dramatis Personae, just to help me keep track of my aliases. By the way, last night before going to sleep, I attempted to explain to T some of the reasons why this journal matters to me, and why I really want to update it every day. I always underestimate him -- I thought he would think it was stupid, because it seems so foreign to anything he would do. Instead, his first question was whether I was backing up my entries, so they would be preserved if something happened to the D-land server. You can’t see me, but I’m just shaking my head in wonder. How awful it would be to live with a man who was either comepletely predictable (as distinct from reliable) or who consistently did no come up to your expectations.