practice

this morning, at the unholy hour of 6 am, i met up with shani and headed down to the boathouse to erg. i was shocked by the sight that greeted my not-quite-opened eyes: there were crews out on the water. the digital thermometer on the dash of shani's car fluorescently proclaimed that it was a balmy -2˚C. i felt it this morning in a way i haven't been feeling it up until now: the rowing season has started.

soon, i'll be tumbling out of bed at 5 am, blindly tugging on my unisuit (unless i've decided to go to bed in it the night before to save myself the hassle of dressing in the dark! ... yes, i know it's gross), stumbling down the stairs, hopping on my bike and only fully coming awake as i round the corner at bay and bagot. the mornings will be dark, and the sun will only just be settling into the sky as we dock our boat at around 7 am. many mornings, i'll have not layered sufficiently, and the bike ride home will be excruciatingly cold and my only thoughts will be of a hot shower and eggs and toast.

soon, my body will begin that weird metamorphosis, as the weight i inevitably put on in the off season (a testament to my on-again off-again romance with the erg, and this year to the rigors of teaching) disappears and i become, to quote a friend, "all muscle-y". the backs of my calves will bruise from the slides, my hands will become adorned with callouses across the top of my palms (more so on my right hand than my left, as i feather my oar with my right hand) and my appetite will go through the roof. weekend brunches with confessing mermaid will begin to require orders of extra toast. i will once again become a prime consumer of the superbreakfast at morrison's diner. i will start complaining about how single serving containers of yogurt are a joke -- how can that little yogurt be satisfying?!

this year, the start of the season hit me the way it did because this off season has been different from others. with the possibility of not being here in k-town next summer, this final 6 months of rowing bliss is incredibly poignant (note the palpable nostalgia present in the previous two paragraphs!). because of this reason, i wasn't as diligent with my erging over the winter, and thus i'm starved for time with my hands on my blade and my feet pressing against the stretchers. what has kept me sane during my absence from the erg is the way in which i've managed to adapt some of the training techniques i've gleaned from my sessions in a boat and apply them to my dissertation.

a few friends will groan and possibly begin to bang their heads against their keyboards when i say that writing is a lot like rowing. i first breathed life into this simile by comparing the inevitable pain associated with each undertaking. rowing hurts, i'm not going to lie, and for me, often times, writing hurts just as much, if not more -- lactate build up ain't got nothin' on the stomach churning fear i have often fought down as i'm faced with a blank computer screen. this winter, i expanded my understanding of this simile in a variety of ways. after writing an article that theorizes the practice of rowing as a woman using hélène cixous idea of l'écriture feminine, i saw other possibilities. what if i was to take some of the structure provided by my experience as an athlete and apply that to my unruly (and if you're my dissertation committee, my choice of adjectives will seem like a massive understatement!) life as a writer? the result was a sense of writing practice -- and i like the overtones of michel de certeau in that moniker. every day, i spend a certain amount of time building up my writing muscle. i've set myself a training schedule of sorts that requires me to put in so many pages worth of time at my keyboard. i have a training plan, a training diary, and believe it or not, as corny as it sounds, it's working. i'm just under half way through the first draft of my current chapter which up until a couple of weeks ago was woefully behind schedule.

this morning, with the sight of singles and 8+s out on the water, i had a fine sense of the season beginning. life at the boathouse has picked up -- shani and are no longer the only early morning denizens, and now that teaching is winding down, i face eight months solely devoted to work on my dissertation. it's okay, i keep reminding myself, i've been practicing.