As a naïve fresher, I was in no doubt that I had made the right decision to continue rowing at university, and that those who counselled me against it were wrong; I would indeed be able to achieve the impossible: namely to attend 12 training sessions a week, to do well in my first year of study, and to continue socialising with friends other than my crewmates.
Put simply, I readily believed that those who claimed this was impossible were exaggerating, and simply hadn’t tried hard enough. Fast-forward two years and I can only look back and laugh at my ignorance. Now in my final year of university, with two years of (somewhat intermittent) university rowing and six more of junior training behind me, I’ve finally come to the conclusion that it is simply not possible to achieve all three of these – at least, not if you want to be half-way decent at any of them. Partly due to the Covid-19 pandemic, but in reality more due to sheer volume of final year work, I decided to hang up my oar, putting an eight-year legacy of early starts, erg tests and callouses behind me. Now that my blinkers are removed, I can clearly see how difficult it is to balance competitive rowing with any other aspect of life, let alone studying and socialising.
Most of my squad had two of the aforementioned three down pat: generally speaking, they were monsters on the erg and BNOCs in the pub. Essay deadlines, however, were still something they were coming to terms with. There were those brave few who turned down socials for nights in the library, but there was always a sense that they were losing out on the best part of the sport, and besides, an overnight library session is never something you want to contemplate upon finishing a 30r20. Similarly, of the (few) friends I made outside of rowing in those two years, many were social butterflies who aced their exams – but had an erratic understanding of the concept of regular exercise.
Rowers are notorious for having one-track minds; the catch-phrase ‘did you know I row?’ certainly tailed me around campus after my flatmates learned that the banging of the door at 5am did not signal my covert entrance from a wild night on the town, but rather the beginning of my cold, dark trek to the frosted boathouse. Socialising with non-rowers becomes somewhat difficult if you’re in bed by nine every night, and more difficult still if they simply can’t understand why you’d rather be chopping your way up and down a partially frozen stretch of river six mornings a week than toasting gently under your duvet. That’s not to say it’s impossible to build friendships with non-rowers (they’re not a different species altogether), but when your schedules are so drastically different that you’re unable to stay up past pre-drinks, let alone make it out for coffee dates in the few precious hours you have left to catch up on work between training, you inevitably miss out on a certain amount of bonding.
Another factor which must be taken into consideration is – you guessed it – illness. Perhaps a rower’s biggest fear is knowing that as winter approaches so too does the season of colds and flu – your PB’s worst nightmare. Whilst I am aware that friendships are built on more than just shared, drunken experiences (or at least, I’d like to think so), it is true that for the majority of students, nights out are a prime opportunity for getting past initial shyness. Obviously, if you decide to forgo your eight hours of sleep your immune system will take a pretty big hit; it doesn’t take a genius to work out that a combination of not sleeping enough multiple nights a week, regular alcohol consumption and training for four hours a day will make you pretty ill, pretty fast. And what about injury? What happens when you’re stuck on the watt bike, or – worse – at home unable to train at all, and everyone you know is on the water or out with their closer friends, who they actually made the time to get to know?
Study doesn’t just mean attending school or lectures – homework and extra reading has to be accounted for too. Even if you make it to every class of the term, it’s unlikely that you’ll manage to get all the necessary work done (something even non-rowers struggle with) if you’re also training hard and socialising. For me, it came down to deciding whether paying £9,250 a year for what was beginning to look like a very expensive, three-year long (highly enjoyable) rowing camp was really a savvy investment. I decided that, seeing I was still a long way off conquering that other mythical trinity of GB trials, BUCS gold and Henley finals, it was probably best to become a well-adjusted, well-qualified non-rower than the strange boat-loving, sleep-deprived, under-read hybrid I was heading for.
In all seriousness – despite the occasional lucky few proving otherwise – though it may seem possible to keep on top of studies, train hard and have a great social life outside of rowing for the first few blissful weeks of a new term, for most of us the increasing pressures of university and school life tend to mean that sooner or later, something has to give.
That’s all for now. If you’re hungry for more, check out any of our other pieces from The Catch, listen to the latest podcast episode, or flick through our race previews.
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Photos by Roesie Percy and Fergus Mainland
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