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too, and began to learn a new set of terms and expressions, many of them stolen from everyday usage and angled slightly off their normal meanings to coin technical phrases. I loved discovering new meanings and learning to associate them with new sensations. I sprinkled rowing jargon like an old pro, name-dropping technical terms that mere months earlier I didn’t know existed and couldn’t have used in a sentence.
    Start with the “catch.” What a word. A noun and a verb. Play catch; catch the bus. It can convey aggressive action or passive reaction. Catch a thief; catch a cold. It can describe a hindrance: what’s the catch? It acts upon the physical domain or the senses. Catch fire; catch her eye.
    Within a rowing shell, “the catch” defines both a moment in time and an action. It marks the instant between forward and backward, a hovering between two states. In that brief transition, the boat flows under you as your body and breath poise for the next stroke. The controlled ease of the recovery is about to yield to the explosive effort of the drive.
    The catch begins with the oar’s blade seizing the water, initiating the transfer of your body’s energy into boat speed. The oar serves as the medium. It starts with a deceptively simple motion: at the top of the slide, just raise your hands to drop your oar into the water. Catch that precise moment when your body changes direction. From your roll toward the stern, against the boat’s forward momentum, reverse to move with the boat as you begin pulling backward toward the bow.
    This moment, combining timing and technique, is fraught with opportunity for mistakes. The oar can enter the water too early, before the recovery ends; too late, once the drive has begun; or badly, at the wrong angle. Poor timing and bad technique, alone or in combination, can kill your speed.
    Rowing well requires the development of boat sense, the capacity to feel your own body and discern the boat’s rhythm. Where are you on the slide? When is the moment of convergence when all the rowers catch the water with their oars and pick the boat up together? How is the boat flowing underneath you? Choppily, with a back-and-forth stagger? Smoothly, soothingly consistent?
    The ability to position your body correctly, to use your various limbs and muscle groups in optimal order, determines technical proficiency. The techniques to negotiate an oar in and out of the water—squaring up, feathering, releasing, catching—can be taught. Practice and focus develop the muscles’ cellular memory to the point that thinking is not required. But what about timing? Coaches can’t teach it: they can only notice its presence or absence. They can point out what to look and listen for, but they are bystanders, outside the experience.
    Spending time in the boat, paying attention to its inner workings, teaches timing. Listen to the gurgle of the water flowing by. Hear the whoosh of the shell gliding forward beneath the recovery. Notice the jolt at the catch when the crew’s change of direction jerks the boat backward for the barest instant. Feel how the boat responds to the energy transfer—like a lumbering backhoe or a streamlined Mercedes? Sense the quality of the crew’s cadence; is it rushed or relaxed? Twenty-eight strokes per minute can feel breathless and scattered, while thirty-five can feel controlled and light. Consider the impact of the oars’ finish on the boat’s momentum—does the boat slow and sink at theend of the stroke, or run out smoothly as the rowers gird themselves for the next?
    Rowing is a combination of attacking and yielding, of aggression and acceptance. You expend huge effort to create an outcome, and then you must let it unfold. You can’t make it all happen; you have to obey the established rhythm, even though you’re the one responsible for its cadence. Boat speed and boat sense come from your physical effort