The Boat Was Heavier Than My Excuses

I was forty-four and I could not carry my own shopping

It started with a bag of dog food. Twelve kilograms, the big one, and I had to put it down twice between the car and the gate, standing there in the dark with my hands burning and my breath going like I had run somewhere. I was forty-four. Nothing was wrong with me that a doctor could name. I was just soft in the way you get when you spend fifteen years sitting at a desk, driving, sitting at a table, and telling yourself you will start something in the new year. I had been telling myself that for a lot of new years.

A woman I knew from work, Sindi, rowed. She mentioned it the way people mention things they assume you will never do, as a sort of personality fact about herself. Come down one Saturday, she said, we always need bodies. I think she meant it to be polite. I turned up because I had said I would, and because I am worse at breaking a small promise than at breaking a big one.

The club sat on the edge of a dam, a low building with a tin roof and a smell of river water and rubber and old coffee. The boats hung upside down on racks like something slaughtered. A single scull, when you see one up close, is a ridiculous object. It is longer than a car and about as wide as my hips and it weighs very little, which is the cruel joke, because it will still find a way to be the heaviest thing you have ever handled when you are trying to lift it over your head and walk it to the water without taking anyone's eye out.

The coach who never once made me feel clever

His name was Barend and he was maybe sixty, with forearms like fence posts and a way of watching you that made you suddenly aware of all your bad habits at once. He did not flatter people. I want to be clear about that, because I had half expected the gentle, encouraging type who tells a beginner she is a natural. Barend told me, on the first morning, that I sat in a boat like a person falling off a chair in slow motion. He was right. I did not row that day. I sat on the ergometer, the rowing machine they keep in the shed, and he stood behind me and said the same four words about two hundred times. Legs, then back, then arms. Legs, then back, then arms. I got it wrong in every possible order.

I went home with blisters starting in the soft part of my hands and a strange ache in muscles I did not know were muscles. I also went home, if I am honest, a little bit in love with the whole stupid thing. Nobody at that dam cared what I did for a living or what I weighed or how old I was. The water did not grade on a curve.

The early mornings nearly finished me before the rowing did

Rowing on a dam means rowing when the water is flat, and the water is flat when the rest of the world is asleep. My alarm went at a quarter to five. The first few weeks I hated the person who had agreed to this, who happened to be me. It is a particular kind of cold, that pre-dawn air by the water, and it gets into you while you are still too stupid with sleep to defend yourself. I kept a flask of coffee in the car and drank it in the dark in the car park, watching the sky do nothing, asking myself what I thought I was proving.

But there is a thing that happens out there that I have no good words for. The dam at that hour is glass. You push off and the only sound is the little chuckle of water under the hull and your own breathing and the squeak of the seat running up and down its slide. The town is a smudge of lights behind you. For the length of one outing you are the only person who exists. I started to need it. I would lie there at four forty in the morning arguing with myself and I would lose the argument every time, and I was glad to lose it.

Barend talked about food the way he talked about blade angles

Here is the part I did not expect. I thought rowing would make me fit. I thought the work happened on the water. What actually happened is that about two months in, I hit a wall. I was training more and getting slower. I was tired all the time, not the good tired, the hollow kind. My hands had healed into hard little pads but the rest of me felt like it was running on an empty tank.

Barend noticed, because Barend noticed everything. He asked me, in his flat way, what I ate after I trained. I told him. He made a face. You cannot pull hard on nothing, he said. You are tearing yourself down every morning and then you go to work on a slice of toast and a sense of achievement. The achievement does not rebuild muscle.

He was not a supplements man, not really. He was a meat and eggs and sleep man. But he did say, plainly, that at my age and training this early, I needed more protein than I was getting and that I would struggle to eat it all as food before my stomach rebelled at five in the morning. He mentioned that a lot of the squad used a Whey Protein shake after the harder sessions, simply because it was quick and went down easily when nobody felt like chewing. He said it the way he might have told me to keep my wrists flat. A plain practical thing, no drama attached.

I was sceptical, in the way you are sceptical of anything that comes in a tub with a lot of writing on it. I stood in the shop reading the back of one for about ten minutes feeling like a fraud. In the end I bought a plain Protein Powder in the most boring flavour they had, took it home, and started having a shake after the long outings. It was not magic. I want to be careful not to pretend it was. But over a few weeks the hollow feeling lifted, and I stopped dreading the second half of my sessions.

What recovery actually meant, once I finally listened

The bigger lesson was not any one thing in a tub. It was that I had treated rest as the absence of training, as wasted time, when rest was the thing that actually made the training count. I started going to bed earlier, which at my age and with my life felt like a radical act. I ate properly. I drank water like it was my job. Barend mentioned once, in passing, that some of the squad took Creatine through the heavier winter training blocks, and a couple of the younger women asked me later whether they should, and the honest answer was that I had no idea, so I did what Barend always told us to do with anything, which was read about it properly and not just copy the person next to you.

I am not going to tell you I became an athlete. I did not. I am slow and I am still built like a woman who sat at a desk for fifteen years, because I did. But a year on, I carried that same bag of dog food from the car to the gate in one go without thinking about it, and I only noticed afterwards, standing at the sink, that it had not cost me anything. I stood there and laughed on my own like an idiot.

The boat is still heavier than my excuses. That is the point. I just stopped letting the excuses do the lifting.