Women's Rowing Journal - Kelly McGaw
12/5/2005 7:00:00 AM | Women's Rowing
Dec. 5, 2005
On Friday morning I awoke to a shadowed figure hovering over my face delivering quick pokes to my shoulder. I had slept through the incessant beeping of my apparently ineffective alarm clock. At 6:02 a.m. I stepped from bed into my tennis shoes, grabbed my water bottle, and flung myself into the chilling semidarkness that fills the sky just before dawn breaks. That first step outside is the dreaded moment of every morning, but after a few moments, when I'm cognizant enough to think clearly, I remember why I am subjecting myself to morning rowing workouts- "yesterday was so much fun!"
Just one week ago the novice and recruit rowers were initiated into the demanding exercise regime euphemistically known as winter training. Winter training, as we have only just begun to experience, will help us to build upon the basic physical skills that will improve both the strength and speed of our rowing when the spring season comes. Running, weight training, erging, core work, and general cardiovascular fitness are the main focuses of our morning workouts. Although we do all of these things, for me, morning workouts are about sweating, singing, laughing, and spending time with the girls that, for the last 10 weeks, have become my closest friends at Bucknell.
The heightened time commitment (and more specifically the actual time of practice: 6:15-7:45 a.m.) has come as quite a shock to the system for myself and many other first-year rowers. But after over a week of morning practices they became something that I truly look forward to. The fact that all around campus rowing girls are tearing themselves out of bed to come to practice, and the fact that we all end up at the fieldhouse with great attitudes and a willingness to work hard and have fun, makes morning workouts that much more rewarding.
If you ask any novice rower what they get out of morning workouts, answers will vary from extremely sore muscles (which indeed is a painful reality for all of us) to stronger muscles and faster legs, and great bonding time (my personal favorite). But no matter what the answers, the most evident and amazing reward of each morning, the realization we come to as we trudge back to bed or 8 o'clock class, is the fact that we are all learning to push ourselves just that much harder than the day before; harder than we'd thought possible.
-Kelly McGaw `09