“When do I work out? Ha,” my friend Melissa’s incredulous laugh rang through the phone line, making me feel better and worse about how, in the 13-plus-months since I’d given birth to my daughter, I’d tried and failed miserably to get back into anything resembling a regular workout routine.
I waited eagerly, hoping my friend — a former triathlete who’s now the mother of two toddlers and, as an anesthesiologist, works a schedule crazier than mine — might have some brilliant solution to my unsolvable riddle of a problem.
“I squeeze in a bike ride on the trainer in the basement at 5 a.m., before work,” Melissa said, matter-of-factly. “It’s hard though.”
5 a.m.? If I’m lucky, I’m still in REM sleep then!“Yikes. I don’t know if I can do that!” I told her.
This was back in February, when waking up at 5 a.m. in the cold, pitch black of Pacific Northwest winter mornings to work out felt daunting amid my mom-life schedule of juggling a full-time job with the needs of the cutest, but most demanding little boss I’ve ever had.
But as we speed through the final month of 2023, 5 a.m. wake ups no longer feel impossible. I’ve seen more sunrises this year than in every other year of my life combined and I can proudly proclaim that I’ve rediscovered a workout routine that I’m excited to wake up for, even on chilly winter mornings.
I have two Seattleites to thank for this gift: Bonnie Garmus and Daniel James Brown. What do they have in common? They wrote two remarkable books about rowing that inspired me to learn and find my workout mojo again.
I first read Brown’s “The Boys in The Boat” in 2017, deep in the Olympic weightlifting phase of my life, when I was training religiously four times a week at a Seattle-area CrossFit gym and competing at local weightlifting meets.
That uplifting read spurred me to attack weightlifting training with renewed vigor. I marveled at everything young Joe Rantz overcame in his hard-luck life ( in which his father and stepmother leave a high school kid living alone in an empty house hundreds of miles away?!) to win an Olympic gold medal. At the time, however, I was too obsessed with how many kilograms I could snatch or squat to fathom taking up another sport. Besides, the book doesn’t exactly make rowing sound fun. Reading pages and pages about how hard it was to master this sport, and how so much of it unfolds in cold, rainy weather at the crack of dawn, all I could think was, “ Good for you, Joe. Way to stick with it.”
I could easily relate to how he ultimately fell in love with the sport though.
From swimming to lacrosse, distance running, tennis and then my Olympic weightlifting phase, I’ve always been an intense serial hobbyist — albeit one whose overflowing enthusiasm for most athletic endeavors generally outweighs her actual athletic gifts. Throughout my life, I’ve generally been the try-hard, jill-of-all-trades who seldom beats out the superstar athletes, but who’s just happy to be there — soaking up camaraderie and team vibes while training my body to outperform itself day after day.
As a result, through the ups, downs and phases of life, there’s always been one constant I could count on to make me feel like myself: working out. It makes me a better, nicer human, and over the years, I’ve realized the most fun way to do it is finding a sport to obsess over and throwing myself into it.
Then came Samantha. A tiny, cherubic creature with my round face and energetic motor, and sparkly, alert brown eyes that never seem to shut for long because, she, like myself as a baby, according to my mother, is not a fan of naps — or sound sleep, for that matter.
Sam changed my life in so many wonderful ways. But as infants tend to do, she also robbed my wife and me of one prized commodity: time. Or at least, chunks of it large enough to squeeze in regular workouts.
After Sam was born in January 2022, carving out 90 minutes four times a week to resume Olympic weightlifting training felt mathematically impossible. I tried getting back into running, but couldn’t quite muster the motivation to make it a regular thing. My wife and I used to play tennis together, but we quickly realized that those days were over — when you have a baby, you go from doing everything as a couple to having to tag team if you want to do anything at all.
Amid all the baby relay baton-passing, middle-of-the-night feedings and breast-milk pumping, I read voraciously. Bonnie Garmus’ “Lessons in Chemistry” landed in my Kindle queue the month it was published, as I hit the tail end of my maternity leave. The story of how this dog-loving woman scientist who was terrified of motherhood, but eventually came to love little baby Mad, resonated deeply with me. Her story paralleled my life in that moment: In our daughter’s first couple of months, my wife, a dog-loving woman scientist and the nonbirthing parent, struggled to connect with our new baby much in the way the protagonist in Garmus’ novel, Elizabeth Zott, struggled to connect with Mad. Elizabeth’s evolution gave me hope that my wife too, would eventually get there. (She did!)
Elizabeth’s rowing hobby — a side plot in the book inserted in part, I learned, because Garmus is a rower herself — gave me inspiration because, as Dr. Mason, Zott’s gynecologist in the novel, helpfully points out, what is “so unsung about rowing” is that “it happens at a time [of day] when no one’s really busy.”
That’s how I found myself on the water right outside the Pocock Rowing Center in Eastlake, on a cool, sunny morning in May, trying to stay afloat in a “tubby” — the nickname for the squatty, kayaklike boats novices learn to row in. It felt good to be learning something new again for the first time in a while. But for the first half of that monthlong learn-to-row course, I was convinced that I, a power athlete whom no one has ever described as “graceful,” had no business learning a finesse sport that involves staying afloat in a very skinny boat while remembering 35 things at once. I started rereading “The Boys in the Boat” during this time, and it helped me to remember that Joe Rantz also struggled to find his pace — and his place — in the boat.
After completing the intro to rowing course, I kept coming back, increasingly enchanted by the sense of peace that engulfs me as I cut through the glassy water of Lake Union on those quiet early mornings. There’s something uniquely special about touring Seattle and its landmarks via its waterways. As I feather and square my oars in rhythm and take in the vibrant orange sunrise coming off the water, I always feel lucky to live here.
The switch happened unobtrusively, almost invisibly. But sometime this summer, weeks into what had become a steady rhythm of early morning jaunts along the water with my doubles partner or other Pocock sculling classmates, interspersed by the steady pings of new text messages from a lively group chatwith two women I befriended from learn-to-row class, I realized I’d found my new workout routine.
It’s now December. The Big Dark, with its cold, rainy mornings, has descended upon us. Much to my own surprise, I’m still rowing.
Elizabeth Zott was right: Rowing is good for the soul. Waking up at 5:30 a.m. to see my friends, navigate Lake Union, lap around Portage Bay or zip through the storied Montlake Cut doesn’t feel like a tiresome chore. It’s a respite. I look forward to these mornings on the water because they’re often the only time every day I get to take a breath, take in my surroundings and enjoy an hour of calm before the craziness of mom life sets in.
That’s how I described rowing to my friend Melissa when we talked recently. Now, she tells me she wants to try it too.
