I spent seven years swimming. Seven years of waking up at 5:30 AM, pulling on a cold Speedo, and sliding into chlorinated water that never felt like anything other than a medium to move through. The pool was always the same: the black line on the bottom, the white tiles, the icy cold water, the fluorescent ceiling reflected in the surface. Lap after lap, stroke after stroke. My own lane. My own silence.

Swimming was solitary in a way that felt almost spiritual to other people. The meditative escape of it, they’d say. Just you and the water. But I never felt that peace. I felt isolated, like I was suffering alone while eleven other people suffered alone beside me, separated by lane lines that might as well have been concrete walls. We didn’t know how they felt about each set. We didn’t know how they were doing. We just knew our own pain, our own breathing, our own black line stretching toward us infinitely.

I was good at it. That was never the problem. I made sectionals for every event I swam except for butterfly. I cut time consistently. But I never loved it. I never felt that mythical connection to the water that swimmers are supposed to experience. The water was indifferent to me, and I was increasingly indifferent to it. I trained because I was supposed to. Because I was good. Because there was nothing else.

Then I met rowers.

My friend, and one of the greatest mentors I’ve ever had, had just won the New York State Championship in the varsity 2- with her co-captain yesterday. I watched them come off the water the day before in a 4+, rain-soaked and exhausted, and there was something different in their faces — not just the exhaustion, but something underneath it. A kind of knowing. They had suffered together, and the suffering meant something because it was shared.

I didn’t know how to explain it before I started, I just knew that if anything, rowing was something the person I looked up to had loved with all her heart, that it was the love of many… especially in our school.

The first thing we did was erg.

If swimming is silent, erging is the epitome of sound — the flywheel spinning, that repetitive whoosh and whoosh that fills the room like a heartbeat amplified. My entire winter, I sat on that machine and pulled, and pulled, and pulled. My bad knee (a lingering injury from swimming) made every stroke uncertain. I felt physically awkward in a way I hadn’t since I was twelve. My form was probably terrible. I couldn’t feel the rhythm the way I was supposed to.

But there was something different here. There were people around me. We were all suffering, yes, but we were suffering in the same room, at the same time, to the same sound. That whoosh became strangely comforting; the ground you fell onto after a piece seemed like a sanctuary for all of us. It was a kind of companionship that swimming never offered — not because we were talking, but because we were all pulling our guts out together.

Erging was, objectively, more monotonous than swimming. But I tolerated it better. I wanted to be there more. That should have told me something.

When spring came, and we moved to the water, the competitive culture at the boathouse hit like a wall. Rowing wasn’t a spring sport. It wasn’t even a fall sport. It was an obsession that consumed the entire year. Every practice was building toward something. Every single row mattered. Our coach, who was brilliant and quietly confident, looked at our novice 8+ one day and said, almost brushing off her shoulder, “Oh yeah. You’re going to win States.” Not, we’ll try. Not, we have a shot. We’re going to win. The reasoning was simple: most schools couldn’t even field nine freshman rowers. We could. The competition was sparse.

I believed her.

And I was seated at the stroke.

Stroke seat is the most exposed seat in the boat. It’s not the most important in a technical sense — the bow pair sets the pace at the beginning, power comes from the middle — but stroke carries the responsibility in a way that no other seat does. You are the metronome. You are the keeper. Every single rower in the boat is following your timing, your length, your pressure, your pace. When the boat is good, you feel it and you hold desperately onto it. When the boat is bad, you feel it first and you feel it most.

The problem is that you can’t always control whether the boat is good or bad.

Our novice 8+ was not a great boat at all. We had a rush problem — the momentem that crashes when the rowers toward the back of the shell can’t control their recovery or their speed at the finish of the stroke, so they collapse forward before receiving the catch properly. All that uncontrolled energy came traveling down toward me like a wave, I told my friends it was like an exponential function, increasing by exponents on every variable. And I was the output of the greatest input.

The boat would lurch forward. My timing would fracture. I’d try to lengthen my stroke and couldn’t because the momentum was already crashing into me.

I’d try to maintain the pace and feel it slip away.

Usually there was nothing I could do about it.

That’s the mental violence of stroke seat. Not the pressure of leading, but the helplessness of feeling problems you didn’t create destroy the thing you’re trying to build. The back of the boat could be falling apart, and I’d absorb it. The boat could be coming apart at the finish, and I’d feel it at the catch. I was supposed to be the steady hand, the rhythm keeper, the person holding it together. But sometimes the boat was falling apart around me, and I could do nothing but feel it happen.

I tried to hold steady anyway. That was the job.

The first regatta was at Saratoga Fish Creek in late April. We woke up at 4:00 AM for a 7:30 AM race. Our event was first of the day, which meant we were racing with almost no time to settle our nerves. None of us really knew how to race yet. We’d been in the boat together for maybe two weeks and only 2 practices of all 8. I suppose we were there mostly to learn the course, since Saratoga would later host the State Finals.

The warmup row was the best we’d done all season. I felt the boat run. I felt the rhythm lock. For maybe fifteen minutes, before we even hit the starting line, the boat was there. It was light and alive and responding to us. We rowed well. We rowed together.

Then the starting judge called us to the line, and we raced.

Within the first 300 meters, every boat had passed us. By the halfway point, we weren’t even on the same planet as the boats we were racing against. It wasn’t close. It was a complete and utter demolition. I remember the numbness of it more than the shame. We were so far out of our depth that there wasn’t even anything to feel embarrassed about. We were children. Everyone else knew something we didn’t, they were club members with years and years of experience. One boat stopped completely due to a crab at around 400, we passed them, but they came flying back to us.

We all accepted it exactly as that and nothing more. No one was angry. No one was crying. We were just tired and cold and learning what racing actually was.

The irony was sharp, though — the best row we’d done came in the warmup. We peaked before the pressure mattered.

My coxwain was all that I looked at, and she smiled at me becuase she knew how bad the rush was, she knew how much I struggled. And I tried to smile back in our short race, and I calmed myself down and reminded myself that all I had to do was to keep the boat at a maintanable high rate.

Two weeks later, we were back at Saratoga for States. This time we swatched out all non-freshman rowers, for the experienced ones that were in the 4+ before.

We left campus at 8:00 AM for an 11:15 AM race. The later time should have been easier. Should have given us more time to settle, to prepare mentally, to visualize. Instead, it only extended the anxiety. Three and a half hours of waiting. Three and a half hours of your stomach slowly tightening.

The weather was terrible. Cold rain. The kind of wet that gets into your bones. I’d worn the wrong clothes and didn’t pack enough — a tank top that was inadequate for April in upstate New York, and I became completely fixated on the cold. Not strategically cold, where you’re aware of it as information. But obsessively, overwhelmingly cold. During timed trials, all I could think about were my legs shaking and how hard I’d already pulled and how I had nothing left to give and how freezing I was.

We made Finals A though.

At the starting area, between timed trials and Finals A, another team realized who we were.

“Yo, you all in the freshman?” one of their rowers called out.

We nodded.

“HAHAHAHA WE STEADY STATED THE TIMED TRIALS BECAUSE IT WAS OBVIOUSLY A FREE ENTRY.”

The words landed like a punch in the dead rain. They hadn’t even tried. They’d coasted through their race because freshman rowing was considered uncompetitive, a formality. And we’d somehow beaten them.

I don’t remember feeling proud. I remember feeling small and embarrassed and doubly aware of how little we knew. We’d stumbled into something harder than we were ready for, and everyone could see it.

The Hudson River was almost never calm. We trained in wake and current and wind and between numerous fisherman waiting for their catch. Our best rows, somehow, happened during regattas when the water was not as rough and wild and demanding. In the quiet of late afternoons during the week, we’d be fighting conditions. But come race day, when the water was calm and set, something would click. We’d get aggressive. We’d find a rhythm somehow in the clamity.

I think that made us stronger, in some ways. We learned how to row through adversity. We learned how to handle a boat that was fighting desperately us.

But it also meant we never really learned how to control things. We never had the chance to feel what a well-balanced boat felt like in still water. We never developed the technical confidence that comes from understanding exactly what your body is supposed to do and then doing it perfectly. We rowed rough water well, but we rowed smooth water like we were still fighting current. And that roughness followed us everywhere.

The States Finals were where it came down.

We were fast enough. We trained hard enough. My captain was the best rower I’d ever seen — composed and powerful and somehow able to hold rhythm even when everything around her was falling apart. But we couldn’t quite get there. We almost qualified for nationals. Almost. Two seconds between us and nationals.

I remember seeing red bouys and the 2 boats next to us so close to our stroke. So close, and they slowly passed us with their screams and groans and the cox’s pleas in the shuddering rain.

The regret was acute. Not the kind of regret where you beat yourself up irrationally. The kind where you think clearly about what you could have done differently. We could have pulled harder in that last 200 meters. We could have trained harder in the winter. We could have believed harder in ourselves.

But we also hadn’t trained in dangerous conditions because the river had been treacherous. We hadn’t had consistent water time because weather had canceled practices. We’d done the best we could with what we had.

That didn’t make it feel better.

This is what I learned about stroke seat — it’s not just about controlling the boat. It’s about absorbing the weight of things you didn’t create. It’s about sitting in the most exposed position and feeling every problem that exists in the eight bodies behind you. It’s about knowing that other people are following your rhythm, depending on your steadiness, and having that be impossible some days because the boat itself is conspiring against you.

Swimming had taught me isolation. Seven years of that. The black line, the silence, the knowledge that nobody knew what I was suffering and nobody needed to know.

Rowing taught me something different. It taught me that suffering could be shared — that eight people could pull toward the same finish line and feel, in that moment, like they were one thing. But it also taught me that within that shared suffering, there was still loneliness. A different kind. The loneliness of responsibility. The loneliness of being the one who has to hold steady while chaos travels toward you.

I loved rowing in a way I never loved swimming. I loved the boat. I loved the people. I loved the whoosh of the flywheel and the cold rain and even the horrible moments when I felt the boat lurch forward and knew there was nothing I could do.

But I also learned that there is no escape from loneliness in sport. You just get to choose what kind.