This is the lesson I learned after getting immersed in Nick’s former rowing life in Seattle this weekend. The two sports are similar in nature and the surrounding culture:

• Both require relatively rare types of water, limiting their scope and popularity.
• Both require expensive, specialized equipment that is damaged fairly easily.
• Both make athletes chronically cold, wet and subsequently tougher. And both develop the friendships that come with group suffering.
• Both require a sense of rhythm and technique that takes a while to learn (you can really tell who’s new), along with high levels of overall fitness.
• Both are dominated by high school kids and old men in spandex.
• Both are miserable sports for parents, requiring long drives to obscure places, generous funding, and standing around all day to watch maybe 200 meters of racing (most of the race is hidden).

The actual story is below.

Because Nick’s friend is coaching with their old club, we got to go out on the coach’s little boat for practice Monday. It was lots of fun, plus it was a really weird day at practice. First, some other kids backed their rowing shell into another one along the dock, puncturing its side. Serious oops.

Then, out on the water with Coach Bigelow’s novice guys doing mock races to see which pair works best together for the double, one of the racing duos flipped. I felt like a bad person ahead of time for kind of wanting to see someone flip, just to see how it worked, but it was pretty delightful when it happened after all. I felt so bad for the poor guys! They were shivering so much for the rest of practice.

Then, in another round of seat racing, we were all watching when suddenly there was a loud metallic popping noise. At first I thought it sounded like they’d scraped something metal. It was actually the rigger breaking, which was novel because it’s so rare. The same kid who did that (it wasn’t his fault, he was just rowing) apparently broke something not too long ago in a similar situation, so the team thought it was especially funny.

The whole thing reminded me of old days at team practices: the adrenaline, the sense of getting through the day’s agenda, and always the back-corner hope that something completely weird might go wrong.