2011 Bainbridge Marathon

I didn’t row the race. Rather, I loaned my Maas 24 to Jennifer Devine and got to watch the fun. But from my perspective (and with my bias as a Maas dealer), this was one great, fun day in the best tradition of Sound Rowers. Here’s my experience.

Jennifer contacted the Maas Boat Company several weeks before the race, introduced herself as a former Olympian and competitor at the World Championships. She explained that she would be moving to Seattle later this Fall and wanted to try open water racing. She asked if a shell would be available for the Bainbridge Marathon. Maas put her in touch with me, and we began a fun correspondence to make arrangements and prep her shell. She had lots of great questions about preparing for the race. Some of them were the same questions everyone asks before their first Sound Rowers race, and some were pretty technical about rigging.

 

In the course of these emails, we shared thoughts about the culture of sprint racing in contrast with the spirit and soul of open water races. She wrote this:

“Though I wouldn’t presume to speak for anyone else on the issue, I’d say one of the draws of open water vs. flat water racing is the nature of the challenge.  Whereas flat water racing tries to control and optimize as many of the variables to performance as possible, open water racing forces you to work with all kinds of challenges simultaneously.  Which seems less contrived to me, and more like training for the rest of your life.  Some people like that it’s not clear-cut and that there isn’t a buoyed course for you to follow where you know at every second whether or not you’re winning.  And for some people, that would drive them nuts.  

“When I was competing, I had a theory that top athletes come in two very distinct flavors.  The first are the people who use sports as a forum in which to prove to themselves or the rest of the world that they can be the the best at something.  These are the ones who could just as easily be rowers as they could be runners or swimmers or fencers or weightlifters, if they were born with a different body type.   For them, the accomplishment isn’t their mastery of the sport itself so much as their domination over everyone else in that particular sport.  Then there’s the second kind of athletes — the ones who get really good at their sport because something in them clicks with a particular sport, so they spend time practicing and learning all about it, and get good mostly as a byproduct of their interest in it.  When you get to the Olympic level, the vast majority of the people competing are of the first variety.  Because for athletes of the first variety, every chance to race is a chance to be better than someone else.  And also because, for most athletes of the second variety, having to spend so much time and energy on the BS associated with making it that far competitively simply detracts from how much time and energy can be spent at mastering the sport, which is what they’re actually in it for.  For athletes of the first variety, the main goal is to win, and in order to win, they have to practice and train.  For athletes of the second variety, the main goal is to master the sport, and to do that, they have to practice and race.  There is overlap, but the underlying goals are different.  I’ve come over the last few years to the realization that I’ve always been of that second group, and that being a hyper competitive person was never part of what drove me to want to row fast.  But since most of the people I worked with — coaches and athletes — were all from that first group, I often felt like I simply didn’t belong in that environment.  Even if, speed-wise, I clearly deserved to be there.  It seems like open water racing offers a lot more to athletes of that second variety because there are any number of challenges happening simultaneously.  Doing well feels more like mastery than winning. I did my first master’s sprint regatta last weekend in RI and commented to people at how weird it was to be doing a race where only the winner got a medal.  Ever since the Olympics, pretty much all the racing I’ve done has been the kind where just finishing is a big enough deal that they give you a medal — marathons, long-distance open water swims, that sort of thing. “

Well, Jennifer did the Marathon and had a great time. She loved the boat. She picked a great course (and I feel she picked the best direction around the island, though most went the other way). The weather was great, so there were many pleasure boats motoring on the Sound and no rhythm nor consistency to the wave action. The wind picked up from the North to between 10 and 15 knots. Not an easy day to be sculling.  Those who chose counter-clockwise had the leg home up the East side of the island into a stiff quartering wind.

In addition to Jennifer’s adventure, we were joined by four men with a Hudson quad borrowed from Pocock Rowing Center. These guys were from Boston where at least three row with Union Boat Club. One, Jeb Besser, holds the current course record for this race with Grant Dull. Another, Aleks Zosuls, has been the overall winner in the North American Open Water Championships (with Steve Tucker). Their shell took off (clock wise) and soon left everyone in their wake. We fully expected them to set a new record and perhaps break three hours for the first time. But it was not to be. They anticipated the need to bail water, so they rigged four small electric pumps; however, coming through Agate Passage, their pumps failed and their shell filled to the gunnels. The last leg into the finish was painfully slow. Not only did they fail to break the record, but they were beaten across the line by Peter Hirtle and Conal Groom in a Maas Double (which has self-bailers) and who had chosen the counter-clockwise route.

Advertisement