Rowers reach respected ranks through tireless toil and persevering past pain

Junior Je-woo Im was breathing hard, struggling to keep pace in his 2,000-meter race in the USRowing Southwest Junior Championships hosted in Sacramento in early May. His hands were covered with calluses from four long years of gripping the rowing oars. His crew streamed along the water, desperate to row past the finish line before their long-time rivals, the NorCal Crew.

Because the school does not have a rowing team, students who wish to pursue the sport must travel to local rowing clubs located on large bodies of water suitable for these types of sports. One popular option is the Los Gatos Rowing Club (LGRC), with its training facilities located at Lexington Reservoir.

The training schedule for rowers is intense. In addition to the time spent during commute, athletes like Im spend 2.5 hours from Mondays through Thursdays, 3.5 hours on Saturdays and 2 hours on Sundays, adding up to a total of 15.5 hours a week.

The season for rowing is also much longer than those of most school sports; it starts in September and ends in May or June, depending on the qualification status for the USRowing Youth National Championship.

Although many students may become discouraged from pursuing rowing due to the $4,400 per season cost and the pain and soreness that result from intense practices, most who persist say that the sport is worth the cost.

Many rowers face the temptation to quit at some point and must endure. For sophomore Emily Choi, who started began rowing last year and is part of the Redwood Scullers Club in Redwood City, the sport is something that brings together people of different backgrounds to work together toward a common goal.

“It takes a certain type of person to row,” Choi said. “Not everyone can do it. Last year, half of my team ended up quitting because the time commitment and environment allowed for only the most self-disciplined, responsible and hard-working people to persist.”

Choi admits she has had times when she too wanted to quit, either because she had been performing badly during practices or because she wasn’t improving as quickly as others around her. She characterizes this conflict of perseverance as a game of mind over body, where athletes push their bodies to limits they never thought were possible.

Victories in this game of endurance, however, are not easily or consistently won. In her novice year, or first year, she went through a series of unsuccessful practices where she blamed all the boat’s problems on herself.

“I just had a really bad mindset, and I almost quit,” Choi said. “I’m so glad that I actually didn’t, because after three months of no improvement and plateau, I finally started improving again. Without those three months, which were probably the worst in my entire life, I would be way more mentally weak.”

Like most racing sports, rowing requires athletes to strive toward speed goals that may at times seem impossible. But unlike many other racing sports, rowing requires perfectly synchronized perfection among team members. Some people call it the ultimate team sport: Every detail, aspect and person must be identical, subtle and flawless.

These team dynamics facilitate deep bonds among teammates and with coaches. The dozens of hours team members spend with each other further enhance their cooperation to a maximum.

“The team ends up being a small group of people extremely dedicated to rowing, so there is actually no team drama,” Choi said. “All the typical whiny, gossipy, ungenuine people end up quitting, so a group of amazing people is left. Your teammates end up becoming a second family.”

Junior Dominick Richiuso, who rows on the same boat with Im, said the friendships resulting from the difficulty of rowing are tight. Although the two teammates do not see each other much at school, they occasionally exchange greetings and comments about their shared pain.

The agony of rowing, whether it be waking up early in the morning, fatigue in the middle of a race or the torment of persisting in a 2,000-meter erg test, has earned the sport a respect among athletes from other sports. It is also one of the most recruited sports for colleges.

According to Scholarship Stats, around 10 percent of male rowers and 18 percent of female rowers in high school continue to compete at the college level. According to Im, all the Ivy League schools, as well as Stanford and UC Berkeley, are competitive in rowing, making the sport potentially rewarding, despite the pain and hard work rowers must persevere through to succeed.

“Every single piece on the rowing machine gives me pain, and when it starts hitting me, I really want to quit,” Im said. “But when I see my teammates pushing as hard as me and suffering as much for the team, when the boat is relying on me to make the boat go faster, I just can’t quit.”