Confessions of a Port Oarswoman

The rower I admire most is the one who can row either port or starboard. I aspire to be that person. But my hands and body do not. In truth, I am a port oarswoman who can row starboard if pressed.

Rowing portside works with my body's natural flexibility. The beauty of being a rower is that we learn just how flexible we are, as we sit at full compression at the catch. We pivot around our rigger with a twist of our core, our arms between our knees, and we know that pull along the lats, the low back, and the stretch of our quads.

And because we can reach that full compression, we kid ourselves that we are flexible.

However, when asked to row on the opposite side, we learn that the mirror image of that "flexibility" perfectly illustrates that for every stretch in one direction, there is an equal and opposite rigidity in the other.

I reach forward in the body angle, and I feel fine. I come up the slide (always too quickly) and begin that twist of the torso, and I feel every taut muscle resist. The body memory urges me to twist to the right, and I push through that to the left. My outside hand tries to feather, but my brain sends urgent commands to my recalcitrant left hand "FEATHER THE OAR, STUPID!!", so it catches up, but not before the coach notices the subtle flick of the right (or in this case, wrong) wrist. I brace myself for the well-deserved critique. "You feather like a port--get over that and row like a starboard!!"

My inside shoulder is too high, my outside arm too bent. My body leans to the wrong side, and my neurons are all firing in a chaos of confusion. It is the ultimate in anarchy.

But slowly, with a few hundred strokes, the signals begin to sort themselves out. My body surrenders, and my brain stops fighting and actively rethinks every part of the stroke. Press, release, tap down, feather, hands away, pivot, up the slide, twist to the left, catch. Step by meticulous step. A rewiring, a revisiting of the details. A reminder of what I should be focusing on. I start to feel that solid connection from the water up through the right arm and lat. The pull of the oar with the press of the legs. Every muscle alert and engaged. The breeze blowing my hair across my cheek, the sweat building across my back, my breathing syncing up with the rhythm of the boat.

By the end of the row, I feel like a starboard rower. Until I flex my hands, with their new blisters and sores. Hands do not lie. They hold the evidence that my brain denies: I am a port oarswoman who rowed starboard today.