Reasons to Work Out, Part 1

I started my professional career (work as an adult anyway - “career” feels like a stretch) as a rowing coach. I’ve done a few different jobs, but that one was the most rewarding, though it made the least money. Rowing is a strange world. It started as a good ole boys club, like football for filthy rich men. In the late 1990s, when Title IX went into effect in college athletics, many schools added women’s rowing to help equalize the expenditures between men’s and women’s sports. Boats are expensive, as are rowing facilities, plus a full slate of scholarships for a rowing team is 20, paltry in comparison to the 80 it takes to fully stock a football team, but it’s the second largest number of scholarships the NCAA makes available. The late 90s saw the addition of women’s rowing, women’s water polo, and women’s lacrosse, among a few other sports, to many universities that were already funding a football team.

I started rowing in college as a novice, having been on sports teams every season as far back as I could remember. I wouldn’t have known what to do with myself and all of that energy, so I walked on the rowing team and let it take over my life. It was a group of strong, hilarious women who were willing to wake up before dawn and either freeze or sweat their asses off, depending on the season. Our coach was a man (a good one, thankfully), but every other person associated with our team was a woman. It was the anti-good-ole-boys club, and I loved it. I would learn the back-assward ways of the sport outside our and many other all-female bubbles after I graduated and moved east, but that’s a story for another day.

Fast forward a few years, and shortly after my husband and I got married, I was coaching at a small and fairly conservative university in northern Virginia. I loved the women I coached. The athletic department was super weird, as was the whole culture of the school, but the group of women who assembled themselves into that rowing team were funny and smart and awesome. 

I was coaching the novices, the newest converts to the sport, so I was trying to teach them how to row, how to train, and how to be athletes all at once, just how I had started. Somehow, despite the intensity, it was fun, at least some days. I got to know them pretty well, being careful to keep a brick wall between my personal life and their personal lives. But being newly married, they asked to see my wedding photos at one point, and still being giddy about them, I obliged. I was 26 or 27 at the time.

After this overshare, they asked me about my wedding a lot. At some point, one of my athletes said something to the effect of, “you’re so lucky, you don’t have to try anymore. You can just let yourself go.” (It may not have been exactly those words, but that was the gist.) I was HORRIFIED. What on earth was this smart, fairly liberal (despite the school demographic), interesting, motivated young woman saying to me? That trying to get a man was the purpose of taking care of myself? Holy shit, no! 

At the time, I couldn’t put into words why this bothered me so much, but I’ve thought about it a lot since then. It’s all tied to identity. I have thought of myself as an athlete for as long as I can remember. I had Olympic dreams in 3 different sports, starting with soccer as a really little kid, then track as a mid-aged kid, and ending with rowing coming closest to reality post-college, though obviously not close enough. Exercise was never about looks, and thinness was never about sex appeal for me. 

I guess technically it is partly an aesthetic thing to “look the part” of an athlete. I always wanted, and still want, to look lean, fit, and strong. I have wanted to look like an athlete in training, like I could run or row or lift faster or better or more than most. And efficiency plays a part as well. I want all of the parts of my body to be in use, nothing extra or superfluous or wobbly. That’s not how things are going these days. There are some wobbles, but nobody’s perfect, I guess. 

This is what I try to reclaim by working out now, the sense of my former athleticism and to explore what that looks like now, with my 40 year old body. Thinking that someone might see me running and think sexy thoughts about me absolutely gives me the willies. Full body gross-out chills. The idea of my body being objectified by anyone, even myself, makes me want to hurl. It might be naive to think a woman can exist in this world without being sexualized, but whatever. Call me naive. I hate it. Working out has never been about being sexy for me. 

So thinking back on the young woman on my team, she didn’t know me very well. I wish I had taught this outlook, or at least shared it with them, these awesome college freshmen and sophomores who were learning so much and trying to navigate the world as women and also newly minted athletes. To see their bodies as more than a lure, to see themselves as more than a prize, to help them see themselves as fully formed individuals who didn’t automatically need to be paired off to be happy, to teach them that exercise could just be an expression of their ability and even their power - that’s enough to make me want to go back to coaching women’s rowing.