My Mornings As A Land Warrior
My experience rowing at Princeton and how giving myself time to succeed (a long runway) has enabled me to achieve more than I thought possible.
It was January of my junior year of high school. I was a starting 125-pound wrestler for Perrysburg High School, a public school outside of the rust-belt city of Toledo, Ohio. I was the #1 ranked 125-pound wrestler in the league facing off against the #2 ranked wrestler in our home gym. All the lights in the gym were off and only a single matt light illuminated the two of us. The entire gym was packed, and it was loud. Wrestling in Ohio is no joke. Our team was one of the top teams in the state, and wrestling was our high school’s best sport this particular year. I’d faced this opponent before. He was from the rival school. We didn’t like each other.
I lost.
The gym was filled with several hundred now-silent fans. It was the biggest moment of my sports career up to this point. And I failed and felt humiliated.
Then I quit.
That was the last match I ever wrestled. It was my junior year. I was likely in line to be co-captain of the team the following year. I had plans to go to the state championship that year. I was cutting a lot of weight, 125 pounds on a 5’ 11” frame (I would later grow by 2 inches once I started eating). And I just gave up. I gave up.
I was haunted by this for the next two years. Not the loss, we all have losses. But by the decision to quit.
I told myself I would never quit anything again. Ever.
Two years later, during freshman week at Princeton orientation, I sat on the floor of the Princeton boathouse. John Parker, the coach of the lightweight crew, talked to about 70 freshman lightweight hopefuls. Many were recruits or had rowed at East Coast boarding schools. Some of us had never been in a rowing shell.
I liked to work out and push myself. In wrestling, I pushed my physical limits—through a starvation diet of about 1,200 calories daily, two workouts a day, and punishing combat, literally trying to bend my opponent to my will. And my opponent tried to do the same. During the first two weeks of freshman crew we did long runs, ran the stadium stairs, and learned how to row in a boat and on a rowing machine. This seemed like a sport that was based on increasing one’s input and quantity of workouts and tolerating pain—I reckoned these were my strengths.
That year, we would field only two freshman boats, 16 rowers total. With some spares, I predicted only about 20 of the 70 of us would make it.
Initially, I was horrible. I was very slight of build, had never been in a boat, and still needed a lot of work to build my endurance. We didn’t test our VO2 max (the ability of the body to efficiently absorb oxygen) during those early days, but my guess is that initially, I was near the bottom of the team.
The Concept II rowing ergometer—or “erg”—allowed you to measure the output of every stroke during training. We rowed about 30 strokes per minute, thus we received new feedback on our output every two seconds. In addition to being grueling physically, it was also a mental game. Should I go out hard and bank some time? Should I go out slowly and save myself? If my splits start slipping, should I let them go or do I need to increase my strokes per minute? Is it time to start sprinting? Or will I run out of gas?
Every so often, we would have an erg test. We would set the number of meters at a specific distance and pull as hard as we could until we completed that distance. The most common erg tests for us were 2,000 meters—the distance of actual crew races in the spring, or 5,000 meters—the distance of the fall races.
One of our very first erg tests was a 2,000 meter. To put this in perspective, the U.S. record at the time was about 6 minutes, 15 seconds. I made the mistake of keying off the recruit rowing next to me, who was in much better shape than I was at the time. I told myself I was going to keep pace with him and I did so for the first 1,500 meters. Then I started slowing down and by the end, I could barely even move my legs. I recorded a time of 7 minutes, 30 seconds, one of the worst times on the team, and more than a minute off the world record.
A few weeks later, the coach posted a list of the top 16 guys who would be in the two boats that would actually go out on the water and row. My name was not on the list. He then told us that the rest of us were “land warriors,” and that we could use the ergs and the weights in the boathouse and as we improved our times, we could vie for a seat in one of the boats.
There were no “cuts” per se, and at this point, there were several dozen of us remaining who had been designated as land warriors. So, I did some math. There were about 15 ergs in the boat house. There were three teams—lightweight, heavyweight and women’s—and each team had at least 20 people who were going to be land warriors and thus vying to use the 15 ergs. Princeton’s classes started at 8 a.m., and I figured that most people would come down to the boathouse before class. With an hour for a shower, a quick breakfast, and getting to class, the land warriors would need to finish by 7 a.m. and therefore start their workouts by at least 6 a.m. And likely they were all doing this same analysis and would come down even before 6 a.m. to lay claim to an erg. So, the next morning, to avoid the rush on the ergs, I arrived at the Princeton Boathouse at 5 a.m.
I was the only soul in the boathouse. I organized my water, fastened my feet into the straps and began to row on the erg. It was mesmerizing to watch my splits. With every single stroke, I could see how a change in the length of the stroke, the speed up and down the slide or the power with which I pulled the handle would impact my splits. To break the U.S. 2k record, I would need to row at 1:33 splits for over six minutes, and I couldn’t even pull that for one stroke.
About 20 minutes into watching my splits, I realized there was a man pulling the erg across the room. This man was like nobody I’d ever seen. He was 6’ 3”, slender, had a 1970s mustache, and his body seemed like it was all legs. And he was pulling hard. When he pulled, the erg made a totally different noise than I’d ever heard. After about 10 minutes, I expected him to settle into a steady rhythm, but every stroke looked like he was pulling the last stroke he was ever going to pull. And he did this for an hour!
As I finished my workout, I walked past him to get to the locker room and glanced over. He was pulling 1:40 splits—for an hour. I just couldn’t imagine how someone would be capable of doing that. And there was literally a pool of sweat underneath him. I was in awe!
The rush of land warriors vying for ergs never came. In fact, no land warrior ever came to the boathouse. The term “land warrior,” most understood, was a euphemism for “you’re being cut.”
But I continued my routine. I came down early and started my workout and the only two people in the boathouse at that hour were the ironman with the mustache and me. A few times, I arrived later or he arrived earlier, and we saw each other in the locker room. I always smiled and said, “Hi,” and he simply nodded. He wasn’t unfriendly, but he wasn’t looking to make conversation at 5 a.m. with a freshman, either.
One day, several weeks into our routine, we ran into each other in the locker room and curiosity finally got the better of him. He asked me what I was doing down at the boathouse. I told him that I was trying to improve my erg times so I could make the team. Actually, I told him, I wanted to break the U.S. 2k erg record.
“Well,” he said, “your form is horrible.”
As time went on, I came to learn that my new super-human friend was Mike Teti. Mike was the Princeton Freshman heavyweight coach and was also a rower on the U.S. national team, having made two Olympic teams previously and earning a bronze medal. In addition to coaching at Princeton, Mike was training for the upcoming 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.
Mike helped me with my form and also educated me on the basics of endurance. The bread-and-butter workout, he proposed, was rowing at about 80% of my maximum output and holding this level as long as I could. This was called the aerobic threshold. At the aerobic threshold, he said, I could avoid building up lactic acid in my muscles. Lactic acid is what causes pain and, more importantly, what requires recovery time. Since we were rowing every day, minimizing recovery time was critical. He proposed to row at this aerobic threshold for an hour. Mike’s aerobic threshold was 1:40 splits, and he was only one of a handful of people on the planet who could hold this pace for 60 minutes. My pace was a dismal 2:10 splits, and I needed to take long breaks every 10 minutes or so. Sir Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen further than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.” Mike Teti was a giant and his sage advice literally shaved years off the time it took me to improve in training.
Because I was an 18-year old novice, I was improving nearly every day. And because the feedback on the erg was so definitive and so immediate, I could see the tangible evidence of this improvement. The initial 2:10 splits became easier to hold. And I could lower my splits ever so slightly on each subsequent workout. Even though the absolute times were laughable by any competitive standards, my rate of change was exciting and rewarding. I learned a valuable lesson that I still take with me to this day, “Don’t compare yourself to others; instead compare yourself to yourself yesterday.”
“Don’t compare yourself to others; instead compare yourself to yourself yesterday.”
I continued to row all four years at Princeton. By midway through my sophomore year, my erg times were competitive with the varsity team, though my poor rowing form still kept me from making the top boat. By my junior year, my times were near the top of the team. And by my senior year, I surpassed the prior U.S. record in one of the 2,000-meter erg tests, and thus for a brief time I am told, I held the U.S. 2k lightweight record. My senior year, I was elected captain of a team which had lost 17 seniors the prior year and had only a small number of upperclassmen. In what was to be a “rebuilding year” for our lightweight team Princeton that year, we won the national championship!
I didn’t realize it at the time, but in hindsight these mornings my freshman year as a land warrior were the most important and formative not just of my rowing career but of my life. I learned that I loved the journey of improvement. I loved pushing myself and throwing myself fully into a big goal. I had nearly infinite patience, discipline, and tolerance for work or hardship as long as I was passionate about what I was doing and seeing improvement along the way.
I learned that most things worth doing take time, and that most people don’t give themselves that time. They either lose patience or they lose heart. I lost heart many times during my rowing journey. In the four years, at times I failed to translate my power from the erg to the water, lost my seat in the boats many times, and lost plenty of races. I wrote at the top of my journal nearly every day—“I am going to be the best rower in the U.S. I don’t quit.” and many days, I simply wrote, “I don’t quit.” I knew, like in high school, I would always look back with regret if I quit.
One of the gifts I’ve given myself over the years is a long runway. I’ve allowed myself to be patient and given myself time, not declaring victory or defeat too early along the way. It is cliché to say that life is about the journey, but that is a factual statement. We spend the actual minutes, hours, days, and weeks in the pursuit of something, not in the achievement of it. The magic in my life has been to find pursuits I enjoy and that are in some way meaningful to me. And when I’ve been successful achieving them, I’ve been able to give myself permission to persist even in the face of big setbacks. And that’s a good fact, because in most pursuits, I’ve begun each journey (starting a firm, teaching, parenting, running) as the equivalent of a 125-pound novice land warrior, working just to get a little bit better each day.
“ It is cliché to say that life is about the journey, but that is a factual statement. We spend the actual minutes, hours, days, and weeks in the pursuit of something, not in the achievement of it. ”
I’ve learned that I’m more likely to achieve big exciting goals than smaller ones, primarily because I’m more likely to persist. There are very few things in life that don’t yield to consistent progress and a long enough runway.