Rowing is best left to the coxswain.

“Power ten right here! That’s one, two, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and ten!”- lmao you skipped one.

“2nd seat, could you take a stroke?”- Eek! (Correct me if I’m wrong) but I’m certain it’s 2 seat and that bothers me.

*gasp* okay we’re at the 1500 *splutter* this is our sprint *cough* last 500!!!!!- I get that you have to yell a lot, for a long time, to motivate us but please don’t die.

“You’re almost there, just a little farther.”- Wow, very helpful.

“I can see the finish line!”- The course is pretty straight so I mean you can see it at the stakeboats.

SO. MUCH. POWER.

I said we were going to start walking on the other boat and we did! I called a power ten to get their bow ball and we did the thing!

This morning it took us a while to find our swing and our power, but when we were on we were hauling. I could hear the bubbles as the bow loaded and we started to really build speed. We took the other boat on the outside of a turn during the last piece. We hanging bow ball to stern deck with 20 strokes to go. I called for a power 10 to get their bow ball and my voice was all gravelly. We walked in 10 and kept going.

It felt so good to swing together and then to walk another boat and then to know that my calls had made a difference. Oh man, my inner coxswain was doing aggressive backflips.

There is a wonderful passage in The Boys in the Boat. The book, which tells the story of the University of Washington rowing team in their pursuit of Olympic gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, focuses mostly on a young man named Joe Rantz. Rantz had experienced a horrible childhood. His mother died when he was four years old, and his stepmother began throwing him out of the house around age ten. In the end, he would end up abandoned by his family and end up hunting and foraging for his own survival. His father would eventually intervene, only to abandon Joe again when he moved the entire family.

Asked by his fiancee why he wasn’t mad about all of this, how he seemed to take this betrayal and loss so stoically, he tells her:

“It takes energy to get angry. It eats you up inside. I can’t waste my energy like that and expect to get ahead. When they left, it took everything I had in me just to survive. Now I have to stay focused. I’ve just gotta take care of myself.”

And of course, Rantz was well-served by this strategy. A longshot for making the crew at University of Washington, his team would end up narrowly beating Italy in the 1936 Olympics and winning the gold medal. But even if he hadn’t achieved all that success, had he not “gotten ahead”—to use his term—he still would have been right.

The Stoics saw anger as a destructive, draining weight that we add on top of already difficult situations. Like Rantz, they questioned who can afford to burn up so much energy? Things are tough enough, why put yourself further behind just because it might feel good to yell? Or to carry a grudge? Nobody abandons a family because they didn’t know it was wrong. Nobody is going to stop hurting you because you resent them for it. And no amount of rage will ever change the past.

It’s hard enough to survive life as it is. Getting mad about the unfairness or maddening randomness of it all wastes too much energy. Let’s focus our energy on where it can actually make a difference.

Be like glitter. It is the herpes of the craft world. You can’t get rid of glitter.

Be like glitter. It’s obnoxiously persistent. It’s impossible to ignore. Once unleashed glitter spreads.

Be the competitor no one can shake. Be the one who gets in everyone else’s head. Be the competitor they can’t get away from, that they can’t get out ahead of no matter how hard they push. Be the one they never saw coming and the one they never forget.

-Coach

Things did not go according to plan. By the end of the semester, we were staggering into class smelling like dead fish, still wearing neon spandex, and within five minutes of taking our seats we were all out cold. We tried. We really truly tried. We brought coffee. We poked each other. We set vibrate only timers on our phones. Nothing stopped the head bobbing.

In the end, through lots of group study sessions and and by pooling our notes we all made it out of that class with our GPA intact. (The team that studies together stays together and if you can make it through a 2k you can make it through physic’s homework)