My family and I went to see The Boys in the Boat at the Flicks Movie Theater last week, and holy cow, that brought back a flood of memories and feelings from my freshman year at the California Maritime Academy.
I arrived at the school not knowing anyone on campus, but a few girls on the orientation tour said they rowed crew and that I should consider coming out for the team.
Intrigued, I said yes.
Soon after, I found myself in a long, narrow, and very tipsy row boat (called a “shell”) trying to figure how to not tip over and row in exact unison with my crewmates every day after school.
We started the season with a coach, but for reasons I can’t remember, he quit, moved away, or was fired, so our team had no coach. But we did have some Sophomores and Juniors who had rowed the previous seasons. They helped keep the team together and coordinated practices and the trips to the regattas where we would race these boats.
I discovered from practice sessions on the rowing machines that I was pretty strong compared to other rowers, and I was decent at keeping a rhythm.
It wasn’t long before our 4- and 8-man boats were moving with great speed through the water, even with freshman rowers, and often I was sitting in the first position, setting the pace for the boat.
The movie The Boys in the Boat is about a Junior Varsity team that shocked everyone by beating the best teams in the nation and winning a bid to row in the Olympics. I won’t share more details, but I will say it’s an awesome underdog story.
If you look closely at this old photo I posted, I’m the first rower, followed by Carl, Harry, and Levi. Sadie was coxswain.
It’s super cool that someone took this photo and that I have a copy of it, because it was taken moments before we won a race that we were given zero chance of winning.
It was up near Sacramento, and we arrived with no coach, and even worse our boat had a broken part, so we didn’t even know if we could race that day.
We asked around and luckily we were able to borrow a 4-man boat from Berkeley. You know Berkeley, the team that has scholarship rowers, and a history of being one of the top rowing schools in the nation (they were featured in the movie, which took place nearly 90 years ago as the best team then, too).
I think Berkeley felt sorry for us and gave us their back up J.V. boat.
We were racing against half a dozen schools, including Berkeley and Stanford, the West Coast power teams.
The Berkeley boat was definitely nicer than what we were accustomed to, but we barely had time to figure out how to get strapped into the darn thing before we were ushered to the starting line.
They fired the gun to start the race, and honestly the rest of it is a bit of a blur, but here is what I remember.
We didn’t have a great start because we were still figuring out the boat, but we soon found a rhythm and were almost keeping pace with the other boats.
The four of us were decently strong rowers, but Harry and I were freshmen, this might even have been our first race, (I can’t quite remember).
Sadie called out for a Power 20, which is the equivalent of going from a hard run to a sprint. You can’t sprint forever, so in crew, you often set an amount of fast power strokes at strategic times to get an edge on other racers.
Not knowing how to pace myself and with my heart bounding with adrenaline, I just started pulling with all my might and as fast as I could.
My crewmates kept pace with me, and we shot out in front of the other boats. I remember seeing us take the lead, and the excitement gave us an extra kick.
The problem was… we had a lot of race left.
Sadie kept calling out power 20s. It felt like we kept up that sprint for the whole race, and I thought I was going to black out or my heart would explode.
We won.
We were all initially in shock.
Everyone watching the race was in shock.
How did we do that..?
It was a glorious feeling and an awesome achievement, one that we repeated at our next event in an 8-man boat in Humbolt, CA, where we again raced against Berkeley and Stanford, but also the University of Washington and some Oregon schools.
We took home a trophy that was taller than me. It was ridiculous, and for the first time I realized that we were winning races for which we hadn’t even been considered a contender.
I’d forgotten about these stories until I watched The Boys in the Boat.
It was so hard for me to sit still watching the movie, as I felt compelled to move in rhythm with the boat during the race scenes. I had the urge to start rowing, right there in the movie theater.
Anyway, it’s a delightful movie, and one I highly recommend, especially because it’s a wonderful true story of grit, teamwork, and seizing opportunity.
Until tomorrow,
Cheers to you and yours.
Mike Turner
P.S. If you are wondering why I put DAY 6 of 365, my birthday was on Jan 6th, and I committed to writing a daily journal for a year (and publishing it to hold myself accountable). I plan to use this challenge to share my journey to reaching some big, ambitious goals this year. I won’t always publish here, so if you want to follow along in my journey, you can subscribe to my email list here: turner.ck.page/mikes-blog