Gently down the stream

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There is a specific moment in the process of learning to row in a scull on water – sculling, with two oars, as opposed to sweeping, which uses one, which we’ll come to in a moment – when a great deal has to happen, technically, at the same time, in the same limited space.

Specifically, just as the rower’s legs, the major driver of a stroke, are extending fully and exposing the rower’s midriff, the rower’s hands must pull the oar into the body, just below the sternum, and then quickly drop down one above the other, always in the same order, to feather (or flatten) the oars for their resistance-free return barely above the water at the same moment the lower body slides back to crouched position to “catch” the next stroke.

It’s a lot to think about at once, with the result that the novice and, er, older rower can overthink the stroke and deliver repeated blows with his clenched and oar-filled hands to what can be referred to as his crotchal region. Especially surprising is that the over-focused aging novice can strike and restrike the danger zone over and over and over again before his overworked brain figures out what hurts and why.

And this is only one of the challenges of learning to row, an ancient pastime currently undergoing a reputational redo. Until recently, rowing was an agonizing grunt practised by Viking-adjacent sadomasochists who rose in cold darkness at 4 a.m. and vomited after races. No more. The way rowing is taught and coached is ever-changing, and the allegedly proto-preppy sport is being repitched as a pastime for all. What with Canada’s women’s-eight crew winning gold last week in Santiago at the Pan American Games, several classes of the world rowing championships coming to St. Catharines, Ont., next year, and the keenly awaited release this Christmas of director George Clooney’s The Boys in the Boat (based on Daniel James Brown’s best-selling book about the hard-scrabble U.S. rowing team that defeated Germany for gold at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin), rowing’s having a real moment.

None of that, alas, makes it any easier for the novice to stay in the boat.

Some coaches (admittedly rowers) claim rowing is the most technical sport known to humankind. The pastime is divided into the aforementioned sculling (which involves two oars, one in each hand) and sweeping (each rower pulls one oar, staggered on alternate sides of a needle-like shell). From there the distinctions only multiply: singles and doubles and quads and eights (men, women and now mixed, a spicy new class at the Pan Ams), further divided by weight class, with and without coxswains (the ultralight steerers who face rowers from the stern of the shell and call out instructions; you don’t pronounce the “w” and in Canada we call them coxies). Rowing races – anywhere from 500-metre dashes to seven-kilometre head races and 20-kilometre marathons – take place side by side or end to end. Coastal rowing – sprint down a beach to a rowboat, row out to and around and back from a string of buoys, sprint to the finish line – will be a new feature at the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.

All these competitions occur with the rowers facing backward, a state of dual-consciousness that further complexifies an already demanding endeavour. Going backward can be bewildering to the novice rower who might think, for instance, if he is sweeping and his oar is on his right side, that he is a starboard oar, even though he is actually a port oar, which is why, though the coach is saying “down port oars, down port oars” again and again, he is, ahem, not doing so.

I recently got up early and went sculling (two oars) at the Hanlan Boat Club, a 48-year-old rowing club and working boatyard on the eastern flank of downtown Toronto’s lakefront. The club is named after Ned Hanlan, the 19th-century Canadian five-time world sculling champion who was the first rower to effectively use a racing scull’s sliding seat, which is a Canadian invention.

At the boat club, Janet Bolton, the club’s president, a 56-year-old lawyer who took up rowing six years ago after her children left for college, and vice-president Sunny Edmunds, a digital-strategy consultant who was part of Cornell University’s 1989 National Collegiate Championship women’s eight team and is now a masters-level sculler, did their best to convince me that rowing is a sport for everyone and not the elite WASPy private-school sniff-fest a lot of us think it is.

From the beginning of April to mid-October, Bolton and Edmunds row for 90 minutes four times a week at 6 a.m., the flattest and least-crowded time of day on the water. “But you don’t have to do that,” Edmunds said. “We have people who just want to be alone on the water. You don’t have to be my colour of skin to row. [Edmunds is white.] You don’t have to have a university degree.”

Adventure rowing (think sea kayaking in double rowing shells) is now a thing, as are indoor regattas, at which hundreds of people, many of whom have never seen a rowing shell, race each other on stationary rowing machines, or ERGs. (The world indoor rowing championships – yes! – were held this year in Mississauga; Kristen Kit, the St. Catharines cox who won gold in Tokyo in 2021 and again last week in Santiago, was one of the commentators. Janet Bolton placed fourth in the world in her age category.) Some amateur rowers are keen water racers – all around us, men and women were loading sculls onto trucks for a weekend regatta near Peterborough, Ont., which 50 members of the club planned to race in. “But some members never race at all,” Edmunds said.

Most reassuringly, the women claimed, rowing is no longer the physically debilitating nightmare it used to be. (Throwing up, passing out and even dying after a race are not unheard of.) As Sunny Edmunds put it, “no pain, no gain is no more.” The latest training theories, at least at the non-elite level, emphasize skills and long-term athletic development, rather than winning.

“And,” Edmunds added, “there’s a huge contingent of rowers in their 70s and 80s.” She was looking directly at me. “Because rowing is one of the safest sports for older people.” Rowing famously engages 85 per cent of the body’s muscles and isn’t load-bearing, which is more than you can say for jogging. Edmunds kept glancing out over Lake Ontario as she spoke, scanning for a rower who had been out on the water for an hour and a half. “Oh,” she suddenly said, “there’s Satinder now.” Satinder Singh was walking up from the dock toward the club’s boathouse, carrying his sculling shell on his shoulder. He was 82 years old.

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Our chat ended. Edmunds and Bolton were then joined by Tony Tremain, a well-known Canadian coach and rowing educator (“well-known” is a relative term in the microscopic world of rowing). Together, the trio gently coaxed me, as if I were a potentially explosive package that had been found abandoned at an airport, into a 19-foot-long, 2½-foot-wide single coastal scull. It had rowing shoes already attached to the footblocks, two gangly three-metre-long oars, and a seat so shallow and slidey it felt vaguely pornographic. All in all it was like sitting inside a toothpick.

For five minutes I did nothing but wobble and bobble dockside. (And this was a fat coastal scull: in a 17-inch wide racing shell I would have been el reverso.) “It’s almost impossible to fall in,” Edmunds assured me. Pause. “Of course, we’ve all been in the water at some point.” Did I mention it was half past six in the morning? That the lake was frigid? Then they told me to row away while they held the boat in place at the length of a rope. Another 10 minutes went by that way. To my surprise, no one broke the stroke down or explained its overall mechanics, beyond telling me to keep my thumbs on the end of the oars. Then I set out on my own.

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Human beings have been rowing for at least 8,000 years. The oar was mankind’s most important invention before the wheel came along. By the end of the 19th century, rowing was associated with the educated professional classes emerging from Oxford and Cambridge and Harvard and Yale, which have staged annual regattas since 1829 and 1859, respectively.

Historians think of this as rowing’s version of the chicken-egg quandary: Does rowing’s brainy physics and theoretical complexity attract the educated and the wealthy? Or are the educated and privileged more likely to grow up with parents and housekeepers and drivers and a support system that allows them to eat supper and go to bed early enough to get up at 4 in the morning and make their way to the waterfront (to which access is generally restricted) where they can splash about in racing shells that cost as much as $70,000 each? Eton College has its own 2,000-metre rowing lake.

But in fact – with apologies if you were working up a bracing theory re the injustice of rowing as a product of rapacious empire – rowing is at least as proletarian as it is preppy. Tony Tremain insists it costs more for kids to play hockey than it does to have them row. The first regattas in Venice in the early 1600s were competitions among working gondoliers. Professional watermen in London – the Uber drivers of their day – were racing down the Thames from Chelsea to London Bridge as early as 1715. Ned Hanlan hauled his father’s fish to market before rowing to school from Toronto Island. Working men – hard men familiar with physical labour and relentlessly punishing routines – are the heroes of The Boys in the Boat. These days boat clubs across Ontario recruit newcomers by staging indoor rowing-machine contests in public high schools. Imagine the pheromones in that gymnasium.

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A few weeks later I went out again, this time late in the afternoon, as part of a team of eight sweepers.

Technically, sweeping (one oar, versus two) is easier to pick up, but harder to understand and refine, because you are rowing with other people. I was in seat three, counting forward from the stern – one of the so-called “engine room,” where technique matters less than power. You’re less exposed to your own mistakes when you row with others, which is one reason certain countries, such as Germany, stream their best rowers into sculls, leaving lesser louts to sweep. Sweeping, even as a novice, you become part of the team, and stronger – yay! – but you can’t do anything without the team, which erases your ego (also possibly yay). Sweeping is like working for a corporation. “If you’re sculling by yourself,” Tremain explained, “you get really immediate feedback from the boat, and you learn by yourself. Whereas if you’re sweeping, you have to learn with others.”

Kirsten Ryan, our coach for the afternoon, has been coaching rowers for 20 years. She represents the new, non-shouting, non-assholic species of rowing coach, the polar opposite of several prominent men who have been publicly excoriated for crossing the line between passionate coaching and shaming athletes into better performances. It’s a controversial topic.

“Relax,” Ryan suggested through her megaphone from a small motorboat as she followed our shell. She could have been chatting over tea. “Watch your blade on the recovery, don’t sky them,” she said. She didn’t call me Three Seat; she used my name. “All the way up the catch, Ian. Reach forward, slide forward.”

Data has not yet fully revealed if kinder, gentler coaching has improved elite rowing times, though it doesn’t seem to have hurt them. But rowing is definitely less narrowly obsessed with winning and performance than it used to be. Podcasts such as Broken Oars spend hours discussing whether elite rowers can be satisfied if they aren’t as fast and strong as they once were. Certainly age hasn’t affected Sunny Edmunds’s enthusiasm. “We want to expand rowing,” she said matter-of-factly, “because we want people to be as obsessed with it as we are.”

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This is what I remember that early morning as I set off sculling on my own: the autumn sun was reluctantly rising across a mackerel sky. Other, better rowers skimmed across the grey morning water like insects. I was part of something, but also on my own, and unexpectedly grateful to be outdoors, on the water, in the middle of a big city. I rowed down to the end of the bay we were in, then back, then did it again.

Remembering all the details of a single stroke – reaching, catching, feathering, recovering, breathing, pulling my slide forward with my toes – was beyond me. “The amount of focus we’re asking of a rower,” Tremain told me later, “is the same as is required for a golf swing, except that we’re doing it 36 times a minutes for six minutes in a row.”

I’m not saying I did it well: There was the testicular interlude, and I forgot to sit upright. My “catch”– the germinal second the blade re-cups the water to start a stroke – was more of a cannonball, and twice I backsplashed so violently I almost upended the boat. Out of the hundreds of strokes I took that morning, no more than 20 felt right. I focused and blew it and focused and blew it again and then forgot to focus and boom: For a moment, the boat seemed to accelerate of its own accord. And just as fast the glory glissed away again. The rhythm of rowing is like trying to pull yourself up and over the always-beckoning but never-quite-reachable crest of freedom or happiness or love or success or accomplishment, all those kingdoms we’re supposed to conquer, trying and failing and trying and failing and then trying again, over and over and over. Rowing feels like life.