Dichroic Reflections

marathon roundup

I am being brave and trying prepackaged cafeteria sushi. It's cooked stuff (krab) but still, if I don't show up to write tomorrow, you may all blame the sushi.

Slightly later: Bleah. No better than you'd expected cafeteria sushi to be, but with the added bonus of Extreme Wasabi. I have a reasonably high wasabi tolerance, but this stuff was painful, so much so that I actually wiped some of it back off my sushi. (With my finger, which I hope won't be a problem eight hours and several handwashings from now when I remove my contact lenses.)

So, the marathon report. It was a very good weekend, possibly not quite as much fun as last year when we had both an extra day and She-Hulk with us, but very good nonetheless. We had several things go wrong and several right; the former were (ultimately) fixable and the latter pleasant.

First, when I checked into security, they confiscated my rower's wrench. This thing is about six inches long, 1/8" thick aluminum, with an open wrench at one end and hex-shaped holes in it to act as wrenches in other sizes, and is about as innocuous as a small piece of metal can be. Apparently there's a "no tools" rule, though, so security had to take it just in case I figured out how to commit mayhem with it. (Tweak someone's nose, maybe?) Meanwhile, apparently bringing on sharp metal knitting needles is not a problem. The next issue was minor, but annoying. When Rudder and I got on the plane, I realized that I'd forgotten that on last weekend's trip I'd finished out the skein of yarn on the cabled scarf I'm knitting, and hadn't brought any more. Fortunatley, I'd brought the Telecon socks as a backup project, so I did have something to knit on the flight and the drive, but the scarf is intended for a present and so has a deadline, and it was disappointing to miss out on all that knitting time. At least now I know what to do in this weekend's flight to Philly.

We got to the airport in Houston just as the Old Salt and family were getting ready to leave their son Stevie Mo's place to come get us, so didn't have too long to wait (cell phones make complicated trips so much easier). They picked us up, then we went to get his girlfriend, who lives in the Rice Village, which is pretty much the coolest part of Houston. (She's a grad student and bartends at our former favorite pub there, even.) The drive to Louisiana was fairly uneventful. Once we got there, we went straight to the race start, to unload and rig our boats. This is an extremely well-organized event; one aspect of this is that the race organizers, Northwestern State University, have students camping there overnight to make sure the boats are OK. While unloading, I was standing on the van's driver seat, and went I went to get down I slipped, hurtnig my hand as I grabbed the van on the way down. It left swelling and bruising on the fleshy pad below my right thumb, a it worrying with 26 miles to row the next day. When we began to rig, we ran into the next snag, the most serious problem of the trip: in the fuss of packing, the Old Salt had somehow managed to leave the foot stretchers for his double back home. The foot stretchers are the shoes and the assembly that braces them and connects them to the boat, and it is not possible to row without them, because rowing shells have sliding seats, and the feet are the fixed point. We were terrified that after three days of driving, the Old Salt and Dr. Bosun wouldn't be able to race.

We took a two-pronged approach, after much discussion and throwing ourselves on the mercy of the locals and anyone who'd brought a trailer. The Mobile Monet, Dr. Bosun, Stevie Mo and his GF went to a hardware store, where they bought various chunks of wood, tools, nuts, bolts, washers, and anything else they could think of to construct some sort of substitute foot stretcher from scratch, while the Old Salt went with one of the local crew's students to their boathouse to see whether they could find anything to borrow that might fit. During all the talking, Rudder and I had finished rigging our singles, so we rode with the Old Salt and the students. We were in the back of the pickup and it was glorious: rolling through a rural Lousiana sunset on a warm November evening. All we needed were a couple of beers to make it perfection, though of course on the day before a marathon, we wouldn't have been able to drink them on the day if we'd had them. The college crew didn't have any spare doubles that weren't racing, but someone at the boathouse had the brilliant idea of borrowing the stretchers from the bow seats of a couple of their more beat-up old eights, because the boats are narrowest at the bow ends. The students couldn't have been more helpful, and as a result of the Old Salt's appreaciation there will now be a coupole of Arizona Outlaw hats sported in Northern Louisiana. After drilling out the attachment holes to make them into slots and a little work from the fancy new Leatherman tool Stevie Mo had fortuitously brought along, we were able to get the footstretchers to fit well enough to work for the race, a huge relief for everyone.

The next issue was that the PortaJohns didn't show up when they were supposed to before the race. When you're about to spend 3-5 hours in a boat, believe me, you want to empty out a bit first. Thhe truck finally showed up, naturally, right after Dr. Bosun and I had given up and found a couple of bushes.

The race itself was painful, of course, but no more than expected. I tried to pay attention so I'd remember the whole experience, but I mostly remember it in flashes. There are some gorgeous houses along Cane River Lake. The weather was much better than last year, so there were a lot of people sitting out on their porches to watch the race go by; since I was in a single this year it was reassuring to think there were people around in case I'd had any problems. Since I was rowing harder than last year, no pee breaks were required, which of course helped my time a lot. The high point of the race for me was when a men's four from my old club in Texas went by. I yelled "Go, BARC!" and they hollered back over. Their bow rower was in a men's eight that I coxed and Rudder bowed for a few years, so we know him well. As they went by me, he called to his crew, "Let's give Dichroic a hip hip hurrah. Hip, Hip!" The other rowers responded, "Hurrah!" "Hip, Hip!" "Hurrah!" "Hip, Hip!" "Hurrah!"

There were some gusty headwinds that made it impossible for me to maintain the splits I wanted the whole time, though otherwise I wasn't too far off. As the Old Salt said, the most frustrating thing was that just as you'd come around a turn that should have changed the wind into a tailwind, it would die down.
My back and butt hurt afterward, and though I was able to slide out of the boat, I needed help standing. The worst injury was my hands. I think it was because I did a higher percentage of my training on the erg than on the water this year that they weren't as tought as they should have been; there were not only the expected blisters, but also heat and tenderness in the rest of my hand, in areas that don't even touch the oar all that much. Fortunately, the bruise form the day before didn't cause any problems. I put my gloves on at ten km into the race, took them off at 20, put them back on at 30km and kept them on from there out; the gloves themselves cuased a few extra blisters in odd spots, but rowing with them didn't hurt nearly as much as rowing without them. Even so, I rowed the final ten km trying to figure out how to row without touching the oars with my hands. I'd get a hold in a position that was just tolerable, then have to readjust to minimize the pain again after every stop. Final tally: sore butt, sore lower back, sore elbows, hip joints that felt inflamed (better by that evening), about 5 blisters per hand, and glowing red, sensitive palms. Not too bad for five hours in a boat.

I didn't quite make my goal of finishing under 5 hours, and I think the hands were the reason. I had more power in my legs, but just couldn't apply it to the oars. Still, I finished in 5:02, which is pretty close, and it's a full forty minutes faster than in the double last year. Rudder didn't quite break the course record, and the double finished in 4:17 and change, More importantly, Rudder, the Old Salt and Dr. Bosun, and I all won our races! That's four Arizona Outlaws, four gold medals!

Granted, that's because I was the only one in my race, but I'll take it - and after rowing a whole marathon in a single, I feel I earned that medal no matter who was or wasn't there. Plus. I came in ahead of quite a few other boats, not only the eights who started way after me but also some singles who should have started around when I did, so I'm waiting eagerly until results are up to see all the other times.

After the medals ceremony, Rudder and I went to our hotel room to shower and lay down and recover. Having taken the whole course at a much higher speed, he was feeling worse than I was despite having been off the course for two hours longer. After an hour or so, I decided to go for a walk to stratch out. Almost as soon as I left the hotel, I ran into the Old Salt and Dr. Bosun, and walked around with them for a while. We made sure to see the Natchitoches Walk of Fame, then headed home to meet everyone else for dinner. We met a couple of rowers from Los Gatos (a club in San Diego) for dinner at a pub down the street, and enjoyed conversation and beer over po'boys and etouffee. This is a pub the locals hang out at, not just for tourists. The row of them out front as we entered and left made sure we knew it, too. "We like tourists. We hear they taste like chicken!" I answered, "Reassuring that you only know from hearsay!"

The ride back to Houston was OK, and I did manage to finish my second sock (Despite not having the ends woven in, I'm wearing them now, in fact.) Though we got to the airport unreasonably earlyl again, somehow the wait there wasn't quite as excruciating as it was last year, and the flight home wasn't too bad. Fortunately the seats in the van, at the airport and on the plane were cushy enough not to abuse our still-sore butts. I'm enough better by now to be sitting on my usual Swiss Ball/office chair; the joints are all fine, the palms are better, the back is only a little stiff, and the blisters have deflated.

And did I mention I won a medal??

Posted by dichroic at November 14, 2005 02:33 PM