Food, Fauna, and FRowing.

When I was thinking about my new life at Stanford, I decided that I was going to take a quarter off from rowing, just to get myself acclimated to life before I threw the most intense sport ever back into the mix.

Well, fortunately that lasted about three weeks. Last week I saw The Social Network and there are a lot of rowing scenes in that movie. In fact, that's pretty much all I got out of that movie. I miss rowing.

So I signed up for the Palo Alto Rowing Club's Masters program. Masters is a funny word because you can actually have never rowed ever at all in your life and still be a Master, just as long as you're not college-aged. All of you guys would be, in fact, Master rowers. Congratulations!

I coxed Masters women in Portland for the three months that I lived there in between D.C. and Outdoor School in 2007. It was the worst and I swore I'd never do Masters again. Crew is not as much fun when everyone is not your age, in fact a lot older, and there's no real team spirit. But, there is no graduate crew team at Stanford that I have found, and PARC is free. So far. For me. Because I don't row. So I signed up.

Basically, this morning's row was so fun. The women had only rowed four times before so it wasn't super ideal, but they weren't that bad. And the great thing about coxing novice rowers is that everything you do is impressive. Not that I'm not a competent coxswain, but the bar is way lower.

The whole time we were rowing I kept thinking about how much crew has factored into my life the past 6-7 years. I thought about CCRC and how fun and hard that was. I thought about my favorite regattas, like Bair Island, which I may cox again this year. I thought about winning races and losing races, really good rows and really bad ones. I thought about rowing in Australia and what a weird but fantastic experience that was. I thought about rowing at Yale and how much I loved that, the beautiful Housatonic River, the breathtaking boathouse, the wonderful people, and the huge cup with my and Matty's name on it when we won MVPs first year.

I'm sad I won't be doing crew with a college team, but it's not out of the picture. Given some time with PARC to learn the lay of the crew land, I might have it in me to start a graduate crew team at Stanford sometime in my infinite tenure here. Now let's look at some of my favorite crew-related pictures of all time!

Rowing in Newport Beach, CA with CCRC

Kelsey and I, after we won our first races and got ceremoniously thrown into the river. 

Melbourne Rowing Day 2006, the most insane crew day of my life

A classically REALLY INTENSE moment during a regatta, in which we were pulling ahead.

And one of my favorite moments, that I got to share with one of my favorite fellow coxswains. Our names are on that cup forever, my friend!