The summer heat is finally here — makes you want to get out on the water and splash around with some oars, no? Especially when you see tranquil scenes like the cover of this book, how can you not get up for a little boating?
Except the problem with rowing, as I've held forth before in this very space, is that for those whose feet are tied into shells like these, it isn't all Thomas Eakins-oil-painted calm and aquatic recreation. Those aren't boats out there; they're torture devices.
To its credit, "The Boys in the Boat," which came out in June and tells the remarkable story of how a University of Washington crew won a gold medal at the Berlin Olympics — and the touching, even more remarkable story of how rowing enabled one of the crew members, Joe Rantz, to get a college education and overcome poverty and familial abandonment — doesn't skip over this reality.
When you row, the major muscles in your arms, legs, and back — particularly the quadriceps, biceps, deltoids latissimus dorsi, abdominals, hamstrings, and gluteal muscles — do most of the grunt work, propelling the boat forward against the unrelenting resistance of water and wind. At the same time, scores of smaller muscles in the neck, wrists, hands, and even feet continually fine-tune your efforts, holding the body in constant equipoise in order to maintain the exquisite balance necessary to keep a twenty-four-inch-wide vessel — roughly the width of a man's waist — on an even keel. The result of all this muscular effort, both on the larger scale and the smaller, is that your body burns calories and consumes oxygen at a rate that is unmatched in almost any other human endeavor. Physiologists, in fact, have calculated that rowing a two-thousand meter race — the Olympic standard — takes the same physiological toll as playing two basketball games back-to-back. And it exacts that toll in about six minutes.
A well-conditioned oarsman or oarswoman competing at the highest levels must be able to take in and consume as much as eight liters of oxygen per minute; an average male is capable of taking in roughly four to five liters at most. Pound for pound, Olympic oarsmen may take in and process as much oxygen as a thoroughbred racehorse. This extraordinary rate of oxygen intake is only of so much value, it should be noted. While 75-80 percent of the energy a rower produces in a two-thousand-meter race is aerobic energy fueled by oxygen, races always begin, and usually end, with hard sprints. These sprints require levels of energy production that far exceed the body's capacity to produce aerobic energy, regardless of oxygen intake. Instead, the body must immediately produce anaerobic energy. This, in turn, produces large quantities of lactic acid, and that acid rapidly builds up in the tissue of the muscles. The consequence is that the muscles often begin to scream in agony almost from the outset of a race and continue screaming until the very end.
And it's not just the muscles that scream. The skeletal system to which all those muscles are attached also undergoes tremendous strains and stresses. Without proper training and conditioning — and sometimes even with them — competitive rowers are apt to experience a wide variety of ills in the knees, hips, shoulders, elbows, ribs, neck, and above all the spine. These injuries and complaints range from blisters to severe tendonitis, bursitis, slipped vertebrae, rotator cuff dysfunction, and stress fractures, particularly fractures of the ribs.
The common denominator in all these conditions — whether in the lungs, the muscles, or the bones — is overwhelming pain.
Now, all sports extract pain. I know, I've seen the Gatorade commercials. But here's the thing about rowing: you do all that rowing, all the hard training, so you can . . . row some more, in more rowing races. The guy throwing around truck tires in preparation for the football season, he's still a football player, with a football game waiting for him. A rower isn't a player, doesn't get any games. A rower is really just the human form of a single verb: to row. What's more, much of that verb's action consists of going back and forth, back and forth, between two spots on a river or lake. Or even going nowhere, either on ergometers or in indoor rowing tanks.
But what "Boys in the Boat" shows — as does the life of Harry Parker, another Olympian oarsman, who died last week shortly after finishing his 51st season coaching at Harvard, where he won 16 official and unofficial national championships (and finished second to Washington this spring) — is that sometimes all that going back and forth, all that repetitive churning of the water, all that pain and no games, still sometimes take you someplace great.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 2, 2013
An earlier version of this post misstated the surname of a member of the University of Washington rowing crew who competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He was Joe Rantz, not Rotanz.
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