Two Minutes

In rowing, before the start of each race, a two-minute warning is issued. At this point all competitors are expected to lock their boats into the starting platform and prepare for the race to begin. For me, these two minutes were sometimes moments of great clarity and reflection. At other times, they were filled with feelings of impending doom, when I questioned what I was doing, whether it was all really worth it, and whether I was crazy putting myself through such anguish. Those questions never went away, but as I taught myself how to race, I slowly learned to focus my attention, even if just for a short few minutes, exclusively on the course ahead. While some say the Zen moments in high-intensity sports are the ones where competitors persist through great pain or adversity, I feel that the real moments of enlightenment come when you are cognizant of the adversity you are about to inflict upon yourself, yet deliberately and even enthusiastically move from your position of comfort to one of inevitable pain and uncertainty. Not being ready to end your quiet two minutes isn’t always a sign of fear, or even weakness. It may just be your subconscious mind’s way of telling you that it’s not completely confident you will make it out the other side. So just as the start of each rowing race is preceded by its two minute period of reflection, I think it’s fitting that the first real post to this blog reflect a bit about the events and experiences in my life that brought me to this particular starting line, and gave me my passion for AccesSport and its beneficiaries.

Sports were not always a part of my life, though they now are integral to it – socially, professionally and personally. A late-in-life athlete who was much more geek than jock, I competed in my first of two Olympics at age 27, and spent more than a decade of my life training and competing as a rower. The path by which I came to the sport was not unusual, but it was by no means the path from which a typical recruit advances to the rarefied athletic strata of the US Olympic Team. And as the girl who flunked all her PE skills tests in high school, an undiagnosed asthmatic who had not exactly lit the world on fire with performances on the two “no-cut” policy sports teams I’d graced in the past, I was probably the last person anyone would have imagined attempting, let alone succeeding via the route I took. My first exposure to rowing was as a college freshman, from the edge of Montlake Cut in Seattle. Something about watching those eight people moving and pulling in synchrony captured my imagination. Without skills, all of my earlier attempts at team sports were characterized by long periods standing, arms up or down depending on the sport, waiting for someone to pass me a ball. But because I lacked skills, understandably, this almost never happened. And because no one ever passed me the ball, I never had the chance to practice what I might do if I had the ball. So I never improved. Looking out at that boat, I thought how the best person and the worst person in it both took the same number of strokes each day, and that both therefore had a chance to become better. When I decided I wanted to row, it was because I hoped that somehow, surrounded by water and beautiful scenery, I might get the chance I was looking for to improve myself and finally be part of a team.

Groucho Marx is famous for saying that he would never want to join a club that would have him as a member. Fortunately for me, at least in the sport of rowing, this was a problem I rarely had to face. From the start, it seemed there was always some reason I just wasn’t right for the job. My college rowing team had strict height standards that I did not meet. So I did what every aspiring Olympic athlete doesn’t do: I gave up. Four years later, in the spring of my senior year, I signed up for a 5-week intramural rowing class. In wide fiberglass boats that resembled in no way that graceful eight I saw, I bobbed around Lake Washington with an art major, a mathematician and a couple of graduate students. We were all different shapes and sizes. We were slow. And we laughed a lot. I was hooked from the minute we pushed off of the dock. I spent the following year looking for a place and a group where I could continue in the sport. In Portland, Oregon, I joined the only club that returned my phone call. Since most rowers trained to compete, and races catered to either collegiate or masters’-aged (>27 years) competitors, I was stuck in a 6-year-wide no-man’s land in which I was neither old enough to row with masters nor young enough to still be in college. With no one else my age, and desperate for any opportunity to be on the water, I drove to the boathouse each morning at 5:15, hoping someone might be sick or oversleep, and that their seat might be open for the day. Over a year passed and I was becoming antsy and frustrated at my lack of opportunity, when one afternoon, a club member took me aside and offered to let me use his one-person shell. Though I felt this would take me further away from that synchronous eight I’d seen in the Cut, I saw it as the only opportunity I had to stay in a sport I had come to really enjoy. And so I reluctantly formed a team of one.

In my experience, high-level athletes come in two basic types. The first is someone for whom athletics are merely a canvas on which they display their ambition, competitive drive, discipline and persistence. For these athletes, being the best at their chosen sport is an extension of who they are; victory is mastery, defeat is incompletion. The degree to which they achieve domination in their chosen sport is directly related to the magnitude of their drive. And though their own anthropomorphic characteristics may steer them towards one sport over another, if all factors were equal, it would not matter to them whether they played basketball, lifted weights or ran marathons – the goal would remain the same. The other type of athlete is someone who may also be ambitious and driven, but the key to his or her success lies within the sport itself. “I just love to swim,” Wendy Boglioli, the 1976 US gold medal-winning swimmer, often says in her talks, describing how she got her start in the sport not in a pool, but swimming in a pond near her house in Wisconsin, with her father coaching her from a nearby rowboat. Periodically one hears a high-level athlete like Wendy attribute success in their sport to their passion for that particular sport, although this seems to be the far less common, if even accidental route to the top. In fact, more often, you hear the opposite. In his recent autobiography, tennis great Andre Agassi wrote about his near-lifetime hatred of the sport of tennis, and on how surprised he was when he revealed this secret hatred to another tennis great, only to be reassured that he was by no means alone, and that nearly everyone at the top hated their sport.

Being an athlete was never part of who I was. Not only did I not view rowing as a platform for demonstrating prowess, I did not view any sport as a platform for self-expression in this way. I was not out to prove anything; I simply loved to row. In the process of enjoying the world from the waterline, becoming aware of how my actions affected the motion of the boat and water around me, and because I learned how to affect change to that experience through my training, I became fast. A breakthrough moment came when I realized that sports were not something I was destined to always be bad at, but rather, were something at which I could improve with effort and practice, like spelling or math. As time went on, there were many workouts I would dread, but the distinction between not wanting to row and not wanting to do some particular training exercise was always clear. Even in my last year of competition, training three times daily by myself, the former rarely happened. With training, my speed and skills grew, but my size continued to be a barrier to my inclusion on many teams and training groups I aspired to join. Equally as often, it was my untraditional background, lack of formal training, age and professional ambitions that rendered me unsuitable for entry to the higher eschelons of the sport. Speed earned me the right to compete at the top, but beating others on the water proved much easier a task than gaining acceptance.

Improvements were rapid. Within two years of my first voyage in a single, I had won several National titles as a sculler. A year later, I represented the US at the World Championships for the first time. Two years after that came the Olympics. But despite all the things I learned in competition, I feel the most important lessons I learned from my experience in the sport had little to do with winning, racing or even rowing. Over the course of my career, I spent over 15,000 hours – the equivalent of a toddler’s life span – training alone, giving me ample opportunity to reflect on what I hoped ultimately to gain from my practice. I learned to focus when there was no tangible goal, or when I knew that my chances of reaching my goal were vanishingly small. I learned to find pleasure less in the outcome and more in the performance, and in the process that prepared me for that performance. Finally, I had to learn to cheer for myself, even when every voice from the sidelines was screaming for my competition. Immersed in a sport for which I was never quite right, I had to make peace and be right with myself. Though I spent most of my time as a high-level athlete being judged on my speed and size, at the end of the day, the most important lessons that sports practice taught me are ones that are relevant to anyone at any age or level. It is these lessons that I think are so critical to the athletic experience, and so important to make available to everyone.

Eventually, like many Olympic athletes, my competitive path influenced my professional one. At the time I was sure that taking a non-traditional route to the top of my sport hampered me competitively. But years later, there is no question that the skills I acquired in negotiating that route laid the groundwork for what would become my career in rehabilitation medicine and my research interest in exercise and brain recovery. During long stretches when I was without a coach, I watched videos, read books and articles and taught myself about exercise physiology and biomechanics. Without comprehensive health insurance, little injuries grew into big ones. So when physical therapy and preventive medicine were financially untenable, I read everything I could about injury prevention and sports medicine. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know, and the more interested I became in using that knowledge to help others resolve their injuries and return to doing what mattered most to them. As a physician, the more I saw the many ways in which the body could go wrong, the more grateful I was for the healthy body I was lucky enough to have.

But of all the skills I picked up along the way, the one that has the most bearing on this particular effort is that of fundraising – and the enduring impact of having to depend on private donations to reach my goals. Training unsupported by the national team, I was left with debts that the majority of my Olympic teammates never experienced. I faced a choice: give up trying, or swallow my pride and beg people for money. In the year leading up to the 2004 Olympics, I lived almost exclusively off of private donations and the generosity of others. Without prescription drug coverage, I depended on a pulmonologist in Alaska to send me boxes of samples of my asthma medication, which I rationed so they would last through important races. A sympathetic former employer donated to my cause after my training and competition demands precluded continuing in my job. Friends donated frequent flyer miles so that I could attend Olympic Trials. And when the Olympics was over, and the United States Rowing Association sent me a bill, I paid them with cash that friends, supporters and fellow rowers gave me. Though I concluded my competitive experience never really knowing what I might have accomplished if I’d been adequeately supported, there was an unexpected benefit to taking this path. As one whose competitive career was financed primarily through private donations, I will always remember how it feels to have my destiny linked directly to the generosity of individuals. Because people who knew and supported me were willing to give me the chance to realize my dream, it is now my job to pay this gift forward and help other unconventional athletes who might not otherwise have access to the equipment and opportunities they need to realize their potential.

From these experiences – personal and athletic – comes my passion for sharing sports with others, and belief in their ability to change lives in so many ways. The barriers I encountered in my sport were utterly trivial in comparison to those experienced by the athletes in AccesSport’s programs. Today I challenge you to reflect for a few minutes on what sports have brought you or someone you know. If this, or anything you’ve read here, resonates with you, please consider making a donation to AccesSport America.

Jennifer