There is a group of students who inhabit the time when the wee hours of the night transition into the very early morning; who—long before the rest of the world has stirred—glide across Creve Coeur Lake in perfect unison.
They’re proud members of the Washington University crew team. Five days a week, at 5 a.m., they board a bus at the Clocktower and travel some 30 minutes west to practice on chilly, often, frigid, waters. All of this for the chance to shave a couple seconds off their 2K time.
Rowers revel in the challenge. Ask a serious crew athlete about their sport, and they’ll gladly show you their hands. Blisters on top of blisters, palms that look like the surface of the moon. They won’t hesitate to tell you stories about the time the boat capsized in 30-degree water or the time they were so gassed that they vomited out of the boat.
What they might not mention is how peaceful it can be.
I wanted to see what this world was like, so I asked the new head coach of the Wash. U. crew team, Andrew Black, if I could observe a practice. He gladly agreed. The only thing I needed to do was get myself to the bus at 5 a.m.—no easy feat for a college student who usually falls asleep closer to that time then wakes up.
I settled on the Friday before fall break. The night before I set three alarms: 4:20 a.m., 4:30 a.m. and 4:45 a.m.
The second alarm is enough, but at this hour, opening your eyes is the easy part; staying upright and not bumping into walls is a different story. Wobbling bleary eyed from bed to dresser to bathroom sink, I had just enough brainpower to do one thing at a time. Bike keys? Check. Wallet? Check. Pants? God, I hope so.
When I do manage to make it outside, the crisp air is enough to snap me into focus. It’s around 45 degrees, chilly but not uncomfortable. You could call this the early morning, but let’s be honest, the sun won’t be fully up for another two hours.
Biking through campus that early provides an eerie feeling—like you’re looking at it through the wrong side of a mirror. Bauer Hall is still lit like a giant lightbulb, but campus is absolutely deserted—perfectly silent. There aren’t even any birds. Campus is rarely so peaceful.
When I make it to the South 40, a bright yellow school bus idles patiently in front of the Clocktower. Now I start to see other people, rowers, dressed in the most comfortable sweatshirts and sweatpants trudging toward the bus, where a girl stands waiting with a clipboard. Her name is Catherine Tiffany. She’s the captain of the women’s team, even though she’s just a sophomore. That’s mostly because the women’s team is so young (three sophomores and two juniors), inexperienced (she’s one of two who rowed before college) and small (you need eight to man one of the standard racing shells).
As I walked up to the bus, she greeted me cheerfully. Tiffany is a rare breed of rower who doesn’t mind the early hours.
“I’ve always liked going to bed early anyway, so it’s a pretty good excuse for me, to not seem like too much of a loser,” she said, as I spoke to her in front of the bus. She went to bed around 10 p.m.the night before.
I asked her how the team manages to keep students interested with such an unconventional schedule. Tiffany told me it’s all about overcoming those mental hurdles.
“You’re always going to wake up and think ‘Oh my god, I hate this’ for like the first 15 minutes,” she said. “But then after that, you’re awake; you accept it.”
Even after one morning of doing it, I already understand the sentiment.
A little after 5 a.m., we’re off and rolling.
Tiffany, who was so chipper five minutes ago, picks a seat in front of me and slumps over. And she’s not the only one. I stick my head over the back of my seat and see half the occupants of the bus with their eyes closed, heads leaning on glass. The rest are staring out blankly into space.
When you’re operating on less than five hours of sleep, there’s something hypnotic about the way the bus rattles your head against the window. It lulls you, sucks whatever energy you had. I wasn’t immune. Before long, I was in my own daze, watching the cityscape scroll by.
It’s about 90 minutes until sunrise when the bus finally pulls into the boathouse parking lot at Creve Coeur. The set up is way out in West County, just before you cross the bridge into St. Charles, Mo. The 1904 St. Louis Olympics rowing events were here 112 years ago. Now, there’s a jogging track.
The boathouse is basically a shack, but a really nice, big shack. The walls and ceiling look like they’re mostly made of plywood, but there are medals and knickknacks everywhere. The building was built back in 2004, as a joint project between Wash. U. crew and the St. Louis Rowing Club. There’s two main rooms: One with a bunch of ergometers—those rowing machines you see at the gym—and a huge hanger filled with crew boats (aka “shells”) stacked on racks. The boats have names like “Friends of Crew II,” “International Tycoon” and the extremely self-aware “Inspirational Latin Phrase.” The oars are huge, over 12-feet long and hang from these wood slats six or seven deep.
Black is already waiting by the Wash. U. section of the hangar.
“Hey, if you’re standing around with your hands in your pockets, start warming up,” Black calls out, stirring his rowers out of the lethargy of the bus ride and into jumping jacks, lunges and twists.
This is Black’s first year as head coach of the program. The move came after spending eight years coaching the boy’s high school program for the St. Louis Rowing Club, just a few bays down the boathouse. He fancies himself as more of a teacher than a drill sergeant.
“I think I’m a very strong technical coach,” Black said. “I’m maybe not the greatest disciplinarian. I’m not a guy who’s going to throw a bunch of very hard workouts at people. In many ways, I think it’s possible that the intensity of the workouts has come down somewhat, but I think the quality has definitely improved.”
Tiffany echoed that sentiment.
“In the past, things like our technique haven’t been great, so he’s just basically telling us ‘You’re doing this wrong,’ ‘You’re being an idiot’, ‘You need to step up your game if you want to be competitive,’” Tiffany said.
Four boats went out onto the water that day, two men’s and two women’s. Teams of four and eight slid their boats out of their racks, flipped them over and carried them down to the water on their shoulders.
Racing shells are an incredible feat of mechanical engineering. Made of carbon fiber and designed to cut through the water with barely a ripple, a new one can run a program for tens of thousands of dollars. The launch coach Black and I used was a wooden bucket with an outboard motor. It leaked.
When we got out onto the water, we flanked the women’s four, moving from port to stern to starboard and back again, checking for list, rhythm and form. At first glance, they look perfect: Their oars feather across the water in perfect time, they dip and drive, pulsing the boat forward. But Black is at his best when studying technique. Immediately, he notices that the women’s four is rocking back and forth. He brings use behind the shell looking right back up the stern. I start to see that the boat was having trouble staying level on the recovery, rolling to starboard. Speaking through a megaphone, Black guides his rowers through the stroke, talking through from catch to extension to recovery.
“We’re just going to shift a little bit of wait into the oar on the port side—just a little bit all the way down from the seat…There we go; that was an instant fix.”
“Don’t be too tentative about getting [the oar] buried. You want to, as you roll into the front end, as you reach into your fullest extension, you want the boat to be already by you,” Black calls out.
He does this for the entire practice, most of it in complete darkness. To help with visibility, two large colored glow sticks are attached to the bow and stern of the boat. They give off a ghostly orange and green glow that leaves deep lines in the rowers’ faces.
Every tip Black gives is a long form answer; he doesn’t bark commands. We circle the lake, several times, but it’s a slow process that they won’t fix before practice is over.
There are times when the women’s four turns around to make another pass around the lake, and Black cuts the motor. In those precious few seconds, I can start to rationalize why you’d come out here five days a week and sacrifice comfort, sleep and the skin of your hands to row in the cold and pitch dark. The lake really is beautiful. When the light starts to peak over the trees, streaks of orange and yellow reflect off the lake, its mirrored surface only broken by the oars, the outboard motor and the occasional jumping fish.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to reflect times as a.m. not p.m.