Let Me Be Water

At first thought, one might think that it is the rock that is the strongest and most prevailing of all elements.  Then you must think of water, for it is the water that morphs and changes and bends and washes over the spaces and the forms that it needs to become to prevail.  Water will wear down the rock, water will put out the fire and water will never break apart and weaken itself by acting alone.  Water will always win because it cannot be broken; water is relentless.

A Seal and a Dragonfly on the Rotsee

     Every year in rowing there is a world cup held in one of the most magical cities in the world:  Lucerne, Switzerland.  Most nations in rowing attend this wonderful regatta because it is usually the last world cup prior to the world champsionships.  In the Olympic year; however, the Lucerne world cup is held second of three and Tracy and I have returned here to race for our third time together at the Rotsee as a lightweight double.  On this course, Tracy has won in the double with Mara Jones, Tracy and I have placed second, we have placed first and I have won the single here the year that she placed second with Mel Kok in the double.  So one might say that the Rotsee has been a favorable course for us.  There is something about the calm conditions, the tucked-away placement and the weight of the water that makes rowing on the Rotsee one of the most exhilarating and pleasant things a rower can do: or at least for Tracy and I.

      When Tracy and I were out this morning, I started thinking of our record here and how perhaps there was something about this water that complimented the way we row.  Then this led me to think of our spirit animals.  Background on the spirit animal: national team member and my boyfriend, Gabe Bergen is well known on the Canadian team for distributing spirit animals to people.  However, you don't just ask for a spirit animal from Gabe, one must earn it.  There are moments or acts or things one says that will trigger Gabe to determine what animal in the world best represents you.  Years ago, when Gabe and I started dating, I earned myself the spirit animal of a seal.  I have large brown eyes, I can be
playful, yet scarily aggressive and I am notorious for not being very sure of foot
on land.  Tracy, on the otherhand, flits around chatting and socializing with everyone she comes across and therefore, has earned herself the dragonfly.  Dragonflies are quick, poised and in every flower's business.

     Now, being from the west coast, I know animals, especially sea animals, to be a very symbolic and precious part of the West Coast Native culture, so I did a little research for this post and found some interesting things as I assumed there had to be more to the seal and dragonfly than being chubby and flitty respectively.  What I found is that seals are the power animal symbol of the inner voice.  Native culture believes that because seals exist both on land and in the sea that they show us there are two necessary things to fulfill our dreams and aspirations.  In other words, we must not only use our abilities to achieve but we must use our inner belief to envision our dreams coming true.  Are not the most successful athletes in the world imagining themselves as champions before they are able to achieve?

     A dragonfly's ability to scurry across water represents an act of going beyond what's on the surface and looking into the deeper implications and aspects of life.  Do you see the connection to water in both animals?  Also, Tracy has always had a beautiful poise to her rowing and sees herself as powerful enough to get in front and then relax into a melodic rhythm of speed which is reflected in the dragonfly's ability to move in all six directions all while flapping it's wings a mere 30 times per minute as compared to a housefly at 1000 beats per minute.

     So you see?  Perhaps there is something about the water on the Rotsee that appeals greatly to a seal and a dragonfly.  We know not what is to come of the racing this weekend as there are some exceptionally strong crews here in this exciting Olympic year, but it can be said that a seal and a dragonfly have the flow and power of the water supporting them.  Although an unlikely pair, I would believe the seal and the dragonfly represent something of an even more powerful and inspiring duo.
   

The Final Countdown

I have been thinking a lot lately about what it means to go to the Olympics.  For me, one of the things it means is that it will likely be my last international rowing race.  That scares me.  For some reason I have always been excited to attend the world championships.  The world championships have been an opportunity to show the world what my training has done, how well Canada works as a team and to have the best race possible to feel good about myself.  The Olympics seem so much bigger.  Part of that feeling is all the media attention the Olympics spurs and also the expectations of fellow Canadians who tune in to watch.  I think when I imagine the Olympics being something so much bigger than the world championships, I get seriously overwhelmed.  What if that last race is not the race I want to have?  What if that last race doesn't bring gold?  What if the Greeks and the Brits and the Americans and the Aussies and the Kiwis and the....and the...and the...the list goes on.  But then I think this, I haven't been training for this regatta for one year, I've been training my whole life.

       Some of you might be a facebook friend and for this entire training season, I have listed each training day of the year and paired it with an inspirational quote.  Today, for example is day 151, however I realize that it is actually thousands of days into the training cycle.  Every bump in the road, every failure, every bad coach, every good coach, every team mate, every family member, every practice I ever had (including those of volleyball, track and softball etc), were pieces of the Olympic training puzzle.  I have always been competitive, I have always wanted to win, I have always been dedicated to practice and I have never missed training for unimportant reasons.  I have been training for this one and final race my whole life and that makes me ready.

      I think at the end of all of this winning isn't the measure of what I have accomplished.  We might win, we might not.  We might not even get on the podium, but I do know that the preparation that has gone into giving myself the best possible chance of winning has been done.  This event isn't something different when it comes to racing to show the work we have done as a team.  It's different in that there will be TV's, there will be numerous interviews, there will be other sports and there will be every athlete in the world at the absolute peak of the their game, but it's still a race that presents the best of the thousands of days and millions of hours of hard work that went into having the best race possible.  I can not control what other countries have done, and I most certainly can not control what other countries will do on race day, but this race will show what I have accomplished as an athlete and that is what I have control over.  All I want is to walk away from the course at Eton and say "Damn, that was a great trip.  I did everything I could and I am the happiest I have ever been. I am the best I will ever be."

Four Months in a Nutshell

Ok, so I really fell off the pace of writing blog posts. I'm not exactly sure what happened. I guess partly I felt that people just didn't care to read and also there were just so many political things going on that to write a blog post and not talk about those things would be faking a post and to write a post and talk about it would probably have got me in trouble and it's not really a free-speaking world in the world of elite sport so I'll leave it at that I guess.

Basically the things that have happened since I last wrote:

1. The national championships in Welland, ON placed Patricia first, myself second and Tracy third so we are now the targeted women for the Olympic lightweight double.

2. Santa came to town.

3. The new year was rung in with excitement of finally getting to say that it's 2012!! The year of the Olympic Games!

4. I finally call Mike Spracklen my coach along with Kenny Wu who makes training always so interesting with his calls and ESL ways of explaining the stroke

5. I achieved a personal best on a 6k erg test by 14seconds!

6. Currently in Sacramento on training camp

The lightweight women were left behind on the last training camp and here are some documented events of our winter training camp in Victoria.

Generally speaking, in Canada, our winter training camps are referred to as "warm weather" training camps, so as you

can see it was a little disappointing when our first camp of the year had the first snow fall of Victoria's winter in store for us. Patricia set up camp at my house and we hosted our own "winter training camp" .

Our cooking and meals were far superior to whatever one could find at a hotel however, so that was a major plus! Here you can see the epic nachos we came up with one Saturday afternoon after a particularly hard 3x4km workout. I have to say that the food right now in California

just can't match what we had going on at our winter camp, but the training (which is really the more important thing) is going really well. We have a reached a point in the camp where we are trying to decide if we'd rather eat a hot pepper or do the 16x90sec at race pace that is prescribed. We have yet to have a day off and I have to say that I'm getting close to wanting to run the streets of Sacramento naked than do another 7km piece. Thankfully, we have to just get through tomorrow and then we can enjoy a full 36 hours of just eating and resting and no rowing.

Sarcasm aside, the camp is great. We are finding speed every practice and the environment in which we go to work every day is positive, inspiring and most importantly, it's an environment that we believe can help us to succeed in every sense of the word. May 2012 bring the best we have ever experienced!

A Title Lost, Confidence Gained

My last post was some time ago and I can say that mostly the reason why was that I just wasn't inspired to write. I promised myself that this blog wouldn't just be about racing and it wouldn't act as some sort of public diary of my day, but rather would be written when I felt I had experienced something that held some valuable lesson within rowing.

This past world championships found Canada's lightweight double in a position that I do not believe it has ever found itself before. Four weeks before the world's final, Tracy was diagnosed with a rib stress fracture. There was a very small chance that the fracture would heal well enough to have her safely race in the Olympic qualifying regatta. As Randy Starkman put it, "...in steps super spare Patricia Obee." With few days to get our double to the standard of qualifying Patricia and I embarked on one of the toughest, mentally challenging experiences I have had in rowing. I was coming off a year as a world champion, Patricia is in her third year of rowing and we had the job of making sure that Canada's lightweights could say that they were training this year for the Olympics. We had a huge job. However, that all being said, we had complete trust in one another. We put more focus and attention into detail than I have ever mustered in anything I have ever done. The risk in that though (especially in rowing) is over analysis. One can be paralyzed by thinking too much, trying too hard and being too picky. We had to ride the fine line between picking apart every small little imperfection to the point of destruction but also leave no stone unturned in the effort of getting as fast as possible. I think the toughest part for me was that everyone around us seemed to be in denial that Tracy would not get back in the double. The decision to have Tracy in or out dragged on and on and on to the point that I didn't know which way to tune my mind. I didn't know whether to think of Patricia as a girl who was sitting in the double to help me get in workouts, or if she was to be the girl critical in the process of qualifying our double for the Olympics.

The one thing I did know by the time our heat came was that we were fast. We were a double that if we did everything we knew how to do could go down the course believing that if we were not in a qualifying position, that we needed to work harder because we should be. When you have trained with someone all year and you see what they are capable of and you know what you yourself are capable of, when you get in the middle of a race and things are not panning out as you believe they should based on the knowledge you have of yourself and your partner, you go harder. You make the right call, you push your legs harder and believe with everything that you know, that your bow ball should get where it needs to be or you aren't doing everything you can. I knew going into that regatta that the double that Patricia and I worked to be was a medal contending double and that we just had to lay it all on the line and we would be proud of our performance; win or lose, we could be proud. Why did I have such confidence in us? Because we stuck to our guts all year. We trained where we were told that we would lose financial support if we stayed, but we stayed because it's where we knew that we would give ourselves the best chance of being our best. Ironic no? That the two people who were told that Victoria was not where they were allowed to train were the two people who managed to qualify the double for the Olympics and only because we had stayed where we were told not to stay.

The Greeks are now the reigning world champions in the lightweight women's double. They are the champions because they must have done absolutely everything right. They are strong, powerful and they row very well as a unit; they deserved what they earned. I might no longer be the world champion but after this summer, I now have no uncertain faith in the ability of Canada's lightweight women to be Olympic champions given the best preparation. I by no means am saying that we are going to win, I'm saying that we have every reason to train this year believing that we have the capacity to do so. We can be confident that if we work extremely hard, we are not going to the Olympics to participate, we are going there to win and if we don't win, we will have helped push someone else so hard that they reached their highest capacity ever. That is the beauty of sport. That even when we don't win, if we have given everything to be the fastest we can possibly be, we have helped to create a champion that was faster than she has ever been. How special is that?

You can check out Patricia's and my races at www.worldrowing.com

Game, Set, Match

I left London, Ontario for Holland on June 21st with the women's team and did a terrible job (as some followers probably noticed) on keeping up to date information on racing. My blog was never intended for the mundane details of racing and race plans and what I do on international trips, but I feel that because Tracy and I learned some very important things about ourselves in our last races we can get a bit philosophical here.

Amsterdam was not our best. Period. Why was it not our best? Well, that was what was scary at first. I think it was hard to place exactly what went wrong and what led to an eight second loss to the British on the second day of racing. One might like to point out that there was a jet lag factor as we flew in to Europe and raced three days later. I preferred to ignore the fact that my body thought it was asleep when it was awake and vice versa. However, maybe I should have understood that that might have been a factor more than I did. Secondly, rhythm. Without getting too much into the boring details, there's a thing known as rhythm in racing and we didn't have it. We were like skinny white girls at a hip hop concert. We had guts, we had eagerness to race, we had some fun, but ain't had no rhythm.

See, here's the thing I love about Tracy and I. We love to win. We don't just love to race or medal, we love to win and we knew that our training camp in Italy following the racing in Amsterdam was our chance to refocus, grab the bull by the horns and figure out how the heck to be the double we know we can be. I'm extremely proud of us because there's no question in my mind that we found that double again. We found that double and then some because a true test of character is not what you do when things are hunky dory (I don't even know how to spell that stupid phrase). Character is what comes out when you struggle and must overcome. We were cranky for a few days, I'm not going to lie. However, that was a good thing because it showed each other that we care, that we both want to be better and after our small temper tantrums, we got to work and we got faster. Tracy and I have now gone through a series of very high highs and lows and we have come out with a gold medal at the third world cup in Luzern. This regatta is notoriously the most prestigious of all the world cups and it gave us a chance to prove that we were not a one hit wonder last year and that we are here to put up a serious fight to defend our title as world champions. The racing in Luzern reminded me once again of what it feels like to race with someone who is so focused and intent on being the best stroke seat on the race course. We won our heat, our semi, and the final and every race built on the last. Confidence breeds confidence and in this case (as in tennis) to win the match, you must win the set and to win the set, you must win the games. It would have been easy to go out in Luzern in our first race and only think of having been beat pretty severely only two weeks earlier, but we didn't. We were fearless and most of all, we trusted each other to do the job we needed to do. I am so glad to have gone through this testing period because now I know we can overcome, we can fight and we can win.

Following is a song that I have listened to before racing and I think for this post, it's most appropriate. I want more!!!

Shades of Gray

Two and a half weeks ago, selection was completed and Tracy and myself are back in the double training for the World Cup III regatta in Lucerne, Switzerland. I then settled comfortably into my new apartment (with the generous help of Patry Inc.) with team mate Patricia Obee (lwt. 1x). It was a pretty great week to have made the double and find a new and more permanent home to reside in while in London.

The first week of training in the double was fun but definitely a bit shaky. It was clear when we started to take strokes together again that we were not exactly where we left off last year, but the base speed and technique were still there and we knew it was just a matter of time before we started to feel like our "old selves". Two full weeks have past now and the double is really starting to get back to where we left it but I guess it's frustrating to think that we had to leave it in the first place. Every time we have a less exhilarating piece, I think "what if?". Every time I see some bad habit that has crept into the stroke, I think "what if?". What if we had been rowing every day for the last six months? (Sundays off of course). I do not like "what ifs" and I especially do not like them when they have been forced upon me; when they are there because of no choice of my own.

I was thinking today how simple things could be if there were no shades of gray. Does A make you faster? Does B make you better? Then do A and B. There should be no clauses, no compromises, no acceptance of less. If A and B are the best and the things that make you believe you can win, then that's exactly what should be done. I'm not being silly here. If you think a McDonald's big mac every day makes you better then you probably need to see a psychologist, but if you think doing your sport every day as much as possible and with intent and focus is the way to be the best, then that's what you should not only do, but be allowed to do.

All athletes have a goal. Some or many of those goals vary and are quite different from athlete to athlete, but we are always taught that you can not get anywhere without a goal, and that the goal must hold you steadfast. What if one of the main components to reaching that goal were sacrificed by some force uncontrollable to you? How then do you reach the goal? When you see something as paramount to success and that thing is taken, what do you do? If there were no shades of gray, you go find it. You do whatever it takes to have the answer be black and white so the end result can be gold. How do I know what makes people win? I don't. There are no sure answers, but I do know that whatever someone BELIEVES makes them win is the most driving, most powerful force behind coming first.