It was a very good morning for the KU Crew! A clean sweep at the Stars & Stripes USRowing Central Masters Regional in Oklahoma City.

I’m late in posting this, but back on June 24th, these three ladies and their faculty advisor Steven Maynard-Moody, won all of their events at the Stars & Stripes USRowing Central Masters Regional in Oklahoma City.

Congratulations to these KU Crew rowers! Way to represent!

Results are here.

Socked in like a New England lobster fisherman. It looks like snow blowing by but it’s actually fog. Some run-off foam in the water just adds to the allure. (Yesterday morning.)

We have challenges enough, do we not? With every day presenting its difficulties, a multitude of small assaults on our well-being. We build up no credit for facing these struggles, and instead are told it’s possible there may also be bombs in the basement, strapped with electrical tape to the pillars of our sanity and our humanity.

Why then choose to add more difficulty to the day?

A particular individual has decided to get up early in the morning and go down to the river with the understanding that a number of other individuals will do the same. If that happens, they will form a group, and as a group they will put a boat in the river and attempt to row it.

Rowing a boat, any boat, is difficult and so these individuals have been made a promise. They’ve been promised that if they keep coming down to the river and trying to row the boat, something good will happen.

Today as we began the last part of our row, turning to head for the dock, I caught that look of frustration. There had been moments of good movement over the course of the practice, touches of the ideal, grasped but then let slip, making the bad strokes feel even worse.

Two metal towers of the city’s water intake system protrude above the surface of the river and a pair of geese have taken to resting on the one closest to the riverbank. As we pass by them, trying to find a few good strokes before we land, the gander raises his concerns.

He yells.

“Always with the noise, and the straining, and the flailing! What kind of bird are you? You have eight wings but you never fly!”

I can only respond, “We want to fly. We are trying.”

For my running and rowing friends.

“There was a moment in which he knew he could not go on. He had begun at the wrong pace, another and better man’s pace, had seen the man come almost at once to the top of his strength, hitting his stride without effort, unlimbering and lining out and away. And like a fool he had taken up the bait, whole and at once, had allowed himself to be run into the ground. In the next instant his lungs should burst, for now they were burning with pain and the pain had crowded out the last and least element of his breath, and he should stumble and fall. But the moment passed. The moment passed, and the next and the next, and he was running still, and still he could see the dark shape of the man running away in the swirling mist, like a motionless shadow. And he held on to the shadow and ran beyond his pain.”

—N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn

On a recent Facebook post, one of my friends made the comment “Crew coaches have the nicest offices.”

Here’s what mine looked like at 6 am this morning. It was 21º but you can’t ignore water like that. We launched a novice eight and had a great session to finish off the week.