Where Type A’s all take a back seat
UNDER COVER OF MONDAY MORNING DARKNESS, A 46- year-old architect creeps out of his bed in Mar Vista, tiptoes past his wife and cats and climbs on his bike. Fifteen, maybe 20 minutes later, Chris Kruszynski will be at water’s edge.
A few miles away, 49-year-old Peg Moline slips on sportswear and steps past her sleeping husband and grade-school daughters. She’s headed where Kruszynski is headed. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, it’s the same place.
By 5:30 a.m., they have converged at Loyola Marymount University’s Lions Rowing Club boathouse in Marina del Rey, along with 14 confederates and a handful of coaches. They chatter, quip and stretch. They watch the board to see the morning’s seat assignments from program director Sara-Mai Conway. They gently raise a pair of eight-seaters overhead. And in the gray, inversion-layered dockside light of early morning, looking like pallbearers hefting the longest, thinnest coffins you’ve ever seen, they set their precious vessels on the water and climb aboard.
This is the joy of their day: to dip 12-foot oars in the calm water, bow to the commands of coach and coxswain, to pull and pause and pull and pause from one end of the marina to the other. Most of these people never got around to this sport as undergraduates, but now they see these boats, these 64-foot, 200-pound, $25,000 instruments, as tools of transcendence.
The lure is “that rush of getting it right, so that the boat feels like it’s on top of the water and just flying,” Moline says. In those moments, she says, you’re “using your whole body to hammer and pull through the drive, then letting go and floating up again. When we get it right, it is heavenly, so rhythmic and exhilarating, a kind of hard ... soft soft soft ... hard.”
If this is all beginning to sound a little more mystical and compulsive than your regular workout -- well, then you’re beginning to get it. Many adult newcomers to rowing, especially women, see it as a path to a new calm, confidence and all-around personal growth. Olympic medalist Holly Metcalf, who founded the Boston-based Row as One Institute 10 years ago, has made a specialty of teaching the sport to post-collegiate adults, inner-city girls and breast cancer survivors.
Not everyone has such stuff in mind at the half-dozen organizations that send rowers into the waters of Marina del Rey every morning. But at the Lions Rowing Club, which is just 2 years old, most of the 50 members are women who did not row as undergraduates. Some of these “masters rowers” are eager to hone their skills in competition, some are happy with a head-clearing, heart-pumping, no-movements-wasted workout that looks more inward than out. Either way, these people concentrate.
On the water, with a coxswain at one end to bark orders and nudge a rudder, the eights surge across the silvery water, a stroke every three seconds. In competition, they might cover three miles in 20 to 24 minutes. In one of these 90-minute sessions, with “pause drills,” coach critiques and such, the crews usually cover 9,000 to 12,000 meters. Between coxswain’s commands, the eights are silent, except for those moments when the team exhales together, a hiss like a blast of whale’s breath.
Then all is calm -- at least until coach Iva Boteva, a former junior girls’ champion from Bulgaria who stands 6 feet 2 1/2 in bare feet with daintily painted toenails, swoops in at the helm of a motorized launch.
“Mike and Denise,” intones Boteva through a megaphone. “Your body angles are just not matching at all.” The rowers nod, say nothing.
On land, the coaches agree, most of these women and men manage big budgets, oversee underlings and conduct high-achieving, Type-A lives. Despite or because of that, something drives them down to the water in the damp, chilly dark, where they must forget all else, focus on hands, wrists, knees and ankles and submit to the hollers of a Bulgarian disciplinarian.
“When you’re in a boat, and you’re connected to eight other people, and you’re making something happen together that you could never make happen by yourself, it’s a brilliant experience,” says Jill Murphy, a 5:30 a.m. regular who has been sidelined by back trouble. “That’s the high. That’s why you put up with all the other stuff.”
Murphy, who spends her weekdays as chief of staff for Barry Munitz, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, started coming down here three years ago, when a friend invited her. She flailed.
“And I don’t like it when I can’t do something,” she says. “So I went back and took a class. And then I loved it. It’s an obsessive sport. You’re never going to be perfect.” Within months, Murphy was rowing five mornings a week.
“It’s just amazing how much people learn when they start getting out there and trying to compete,” says program director Conway, who will row in the prestigious Head of the Charles regatta in Boston in October. “Even when you’re learning, and you don’t really know what you’re doing, you’ll have these moments. The perfect stroke. And that feeling is the best feeling in the world.”
Now it’s nearly 7. The crew glides in, hoists and rinses their boats and oars, and scatters to their lives on land. Moline will make the 7-minute drive home, rouse her daughters, then report to work as editor of Fit Pregnancy magazine. Kruszynski, who for 90 minutes has been thinking nothing but pure ergonomic thoughts, will pedal 7 1/2 minutes to his office. He looks at a clock and sighs.
“People are going to call me in about 19 minutes,” he says, “and ask, ‘Where’s my building permit?’ ”
The spell is broken -- until Wednesday morning.
To e-mail Christopher Reynolds or to read his previous Wild West columns, go to latimes.com/chrisreynolds.
