row2k Features
The Care and Feeding of Lightweights
May 16, 2002
Rob Colburn

The 24-hour focus of being a lightweight rower ingrains a special intensity. The number 155 dominates their lives; it is literally stitched into much of their rowing clothing. Everything they do -- and everything they eat - is part of the experience, and gives them that unmistakable "lean and hungry look" Coach Shakespeare warned us about. Intense, self-driven, a coxswain's dream. After a hard practice when you tell them you're taking the mile and half back to the dock at race pace, they look at you like you've given them a new toy. Just don't wave a snickers bar in front of them; you might lose a hand.

[Editor's note: readers should be strongly cautioned that the author was a lightweight coxswain and -- if you let him -- will convince you, in defiance of all logic and sanity, to row lites for the rest of your life even if you have never touched an oar before. You should on no account agree to anything at this point in the column. Beneath that deceptively mild slave-driver exterior lurks a slave-driver interior.]

While all rowers -- to a landsman -- may seem a bit crazy, lites freely admit to being out of their collective tree, even while quietly hunkered down in a Worcester hotel room the night before a regatta watching Haagen Dazs commercials.

You must keep all food safely covered and away from them. If you must feed them (after weigh-in, for example, almost the only time they can eat), slide the bowl or dish down the table with a long stick, then s l o w l y back away. A boatful of lites coming ashore after a race (the other time they are allowed to eat) will simply engulf anything edible within three miles - often while walking the boat back to the slings. (You know you're a lightweight when you can derig a shell with half a bagel in your mouth.) Neither wheat thins, fig newtons, nor small furry animals are safe from them. (When was the last time you saw any squirrels at Cooper River?)

Not that food is always on our minds or anything, but since we're on the subject and this looks like a good place for a paragraph break, lightweight nutrition is simply a question of balancing the food groups and getting the most nutritional bang for your caloric buck. Rowing lightweight need not condemn you to four years of rice and tomato soup. Oreo cookies (low in sodium) and pizza (excellent source of vitamin A) are perfectly good building blocks to start the morning. (Breakfast being the most important meal of the day.) Build your protein store through the middle of the day with a cheese steak (the onions are high in vitamin C), making sure to obtain an adequate supply of trace minerals such as magnesium and zinc from the peanuts in your midafternoon snickers bar. For supper, go somewhat light with burritos (good carbs) or rice crispies in peanut butter. Having been good all day, you can then indulge yourself guilt-free in a Caesar's Salad as a late-night pick-me-up.

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