Ambivalence
By Alexandra Castro Iberico | IG: @alecastro00
A rowing race has a distance of 2000 meters and lasts 7 and a half to 8 minutes. The first few strokes are completed at a high speed; lactic acid begins to build up, heart rate increases, muscles start to ache, and the countdown to 2000 commences. Once you pass the first 500-meter mark, you know there’s no turning back. The next 1000 meters consist of holding on to each breath and feeling the burning sensation present in every muscle. With each stroke, it becomes more difficult to breathe and you realize you are alone in the water. The driving force that keeps you going is the sacrifice that led you to this moment. The only thing consuming your mind is making sure that it is all worth it. Somehow the outside noise becomes blocked and is replaced with your sharp and heavy breaths, the sound of every stroke, the slip of the boat, and the blades caressing the water. The physical pain that is experienced is indescribable. Rowing is one of the most painful things I’ve experienced in my life, both physically and mentally, but I come back every time for those last 500 meters.
Even so, the hardest thing about rowing is not those 2000 meters, but rather the story behind it. Rowing requires a lot of sacrifices and becomes something akin to a drug. It interferes with your sleep, it destroys your body, and it is not easy. I started rowing at 15, 9 years dedicated to something that ultimately saved my life.
Ever since I was little, I have always been very sensitive. Small things like someone yelling at me or looking at me the wrong way would push me to cry. However, as I grew up, those small things turned much more complicated and my sensitivity persisted on a larger scale. I watched as my dad lost himself to alcoholism and my stepfather to a cocaine overdose. My mother became more human instead of the superhero she had always been to me, and it is her that I love the most and who also hurts me the most.
Rowing was a part of me, something more than a lifestyle. It presented itself as an escape – a way out of my dysfunctional family and far from my own mind. I became addicted to the feeling and eventually started to build up a tolerance to it. I just wanted more.
After my first year, I made it to the national team. I began homeschooling and practicing 2-3 times a day, Monday through Sunday. It never got easier, but I got faster. In 2018 I made it to the World Championships and got recruited by 6 universities in the US, one of them being Boston University. I never looked back. Rowing has consumed so many aspects of my life and thus has become almost impossible to stop. On days when I had no motivation, the thing that would get me through is the idea of becoming a better version of myself. Therein lies the toxicity of this sport.
It isn’t realistic to always have good days. When I did experience bad days, when I wasn’t good enough and fell short of my goal, it was crushing. Rowing is the perfect example of a love-hate relationship. I both welcome and loathe the pain that it brings me, and have become addicted to the adrenaline.
To row is to be in a constant state of survival mode. It pushes you to your limit, and when you feel that your body can’t survive another millisecond of the pain, your mind saves you, and you persevere. That is why we keep coming back to the start, and in those last 500 meters, we all pull for something. We pull for our family, our friends and our teammates. We pull to not disappoint our coaches. We pull for the glory, and we pull for everything we are not able to control in life. At some point, we begin pulling for ourselves, and it all becomes worth it. That is one of the best lessons that rowing has taught me, that success and perseverance is mental, that when you really want something and you believe in yourself, everything is possible. So you endure, and without realizing, you cross the 2000 meter mark.
Sometimes I think about how much I’ve changed since giving that first stroke. Rowing made me tough, it showed me real sacrifice, passion, and perseverance. For many years I looked at it as my therapy. I got stuck with rowing because I believed that my life would not be the same; it gave me a second home, and it gave my life purpose. What is interesting to me is I have never been a competitive person, yet rowing is arguably one of the most competitive sports. As rowers, we all know that when you are not training, someone else is, so you put in work for 20+ hours a week. You wake up at 5 every morning and you put your body through pain every single day. Your social life dwindles, and all you think or talk about is rowing. It is a cutthroat sport, and tensions rise between competitors and between teammates themselves. However, for me, my thoughts do not stray to being better or faster than the person next to me, but rather to myself. The truth is that there are more bad days than good, and they destroy me completely. It has been a long time since rowing made me happy, and I think that when passion goes away you lose a sense of yourself. I lost myself for a while, but couldn’t figure out why.
During that time, a few events changed the course of my life and my body kept the score; I began experiencing panic attacks at practice. Somehow, I was still trying to convince myself that rowing was the only thing that made me happy, but in reality, it was having the opposite effect. I did not want to accept this realization because I was afraid of discovering myself without rowing.
One of the hardest and most beautiful parts of being human is letting go of something that had once saved me from myself. However, when I realized that it was no longer my escape, I let go. I began to feel alive again; I reconnected with myself, the panic attacks went away, and for the first time in my life, I learned to love myself. Because of my scholarship to Boston University, I am unable to let go of rowing completely. There is nothing so miserable in life as doing something every day that brings you unhappiness. However, what is ironic is that the lessons that rowing taught me are the only things that keep me going. Through it all, I’m still pulling for myself.
