Learning to Let Go: We're Not in College Anymore, Toto

I’ve never been particularly good at letting things go. I have a number of people in Princeton who can attest to that, some more substantially than others. From missing out on the crown at the 2000 Miss Saint Croix Falls Pageant to my midnight curfew all through high school (compared to my three siblings’ non-existant curfews), to being a hopelessly dysfunctional romantic, there are some things that have just always gotten the better of me. But not all the things I brood over are things that I’m angsty about. My college experience, for example, was a series of amazing educational experiences on and off the water for which I am endlessly grateful and that I always say I’d do over again (even the stupid stuff). Now that I’ve been in Princeton for almost a whole year, and the 2007 collegiate racing season is ramping up toward championship time, I am missing my old home-away-from-home and what I’m sure I’ll come to call “the glory days” just a little more ardently (especially with the Windermere Cup happening this past weekend). So as I’m tracking results and polls and gossiping about who’s going fast in the collegiate field this year with the men and women at PTC, I’ve come to realize that homesickness and new-kidness has almost everything to do with collectively learning to let go of our collegiate rowing experiences in order to truly appreciate the compound nature of the team here.

The educational backgrounds of the group at PTC are pretty diverse, covering most of the major collegiate rowing programs in the US, and then some:

Erin Cafaro - Cal
Megan Cooke
Megan Dirkmaat
Julie Nichols

Megan Kalmoe - Washington
Anna Mickelson
Mary Whipple

Stesha Carle - Michigan
Brett Sickler
Ellen Tomek

Liane Malcos - Brown
Portia McGee

Caroline Lind - Princeton
Lia Pernell

Caryn Davies - Radcliffe
Susan Francia - Penn
Anna Goodale - Syracuse
Renee Hykel - St. Joseph’s
Jen Kaido - Cornell
Sam Magee - Stanford
Ala Piatrowski - New Hampshire
Lindsay Shoop - Virginia

East, West, and a few from in between; we’ve got it covered. Moreover, the women at PTC vary in age enough so that one rower’s take on the collegiate field during her undergraduate experience can be extremely different from others’. Our unique and varied experiences as student athletes at DI and DIII programs, and the Ivies during the 1990s and 2000s, make for some very lively and entertaining interactions between teammates from time to time.

I don’t see learning to let go as forgetting the college days in favor of living totally in the moment. Rather, I see it as an opportunity to keep our experiences relegated to the past as reminders of where we’ve all been, and how we all got here. Much of the camaraderie that keeps all of us going day to day is our telling (and re-telling) of war stories about This College Race, or That Championship; maybe passing So-And-So at the 750 mark (or being passed by So-And-So), boat stopping crabs, crazy crashes, coaching outbursts, and so on. Some of my favorite share and compare stories come out during the “who had to do the hardest workouts in college” game. As in college we were always kindly reminded not to go blabbing our workout plans to our friends at other schools, it’s fun now as alumnae to compare ergs from Hell or Death Marches of various sorts from different programs. This is entertaining both for reflecting on having survived our own workouts and for our morbid fascination with some of the terrible crap that other people had to do.

So no, I don’t see anything wrong with reminiscing, reminding, re-telling or even reliving our college rowing experiences with one another, because in so many ways those things make us each who we are as individuals and thus, who we are as a PTC team. I still stay in touch with my coaching staff at UW to give them periodic updates on how things are progressing. I stay in touch with my best friends from Husky Crew, both those graduated and still on the team. I still wear my Washington gear at practice and…well, who am I kidding, I wear it everywhere because it makes up about eighty percent of my wardrobe. I follow the results of the Huskies weekend-to-weekend and even get a little sassy from time to time talking up my team when it comes to dual weekends. But there is a point at which you have to draw the line with the undergraduate love affair and letting go needs to be a little more decisive because holding on doesn’t help those around you learn or grow from shared experiences.

No one ever wants to be “that girl” who shows up to all the crew parties after she’s been graduated for a year or two, or who morphs into a post-baccalaureate crewpie, lingering around the younger rowers’ social circles (though there is something to be said for younger men). Likewise, when I start to feel like every other phrase coming out of my mouth is “I remember this one time at Washington…” I have to remind myself that the "one time at band camp..." gag in American Pie was funny for a reason. So...maybe it's time to re-evaluate just how much letting go of my formative years I have left in order to keep from driving my teammates nuts with pointless stories.
Granted, I find myself relying on some sort of “once upon a time at Washington” throwback just about every time I post a blog, but in my case, without a more substantial international or elite experience, I have little else for a reference point. My transition is still a work in progress, no matter how many hundreds of k's I've rowed at Carnegie and Otay with the PTC group to this point. So the experience of simultaneously embracing my role as a PTC athlete and a Washington alumna has been an interesting one, if not just a little bittersweet.

Moving forward: writing this particular entry has made me wonder about how things will work when it comes time to let go of the PTC experience. Whether I’m coaching, teaching, or back in school, I’m sure that one day I’ll catch myself restraining urges to begin the majority of my sentences with “When I was training with the national team…” all too often. But the irresistibility of communicating in and about our sport is almost maddening at times, I think, no matter what level you’re at. The elitist component that follows becoming an accomplished endurance athlete makes it nearly impossible not to casually mention those experiences from time to time in the company of rowers or otherwise. After all, DI NCAA athlete experiences mark an individual as being part of an extremely narrow portion of the population (“world champions” and “Olympians” maintaining an even narrower field, of course). Doing a little advertising of one’s more unique or remarkable qualities is nothing more than natural selection at work: display, display, display. Even so, as charming and alluring as elite endurance athleticism may be, there is always a limit to how far you can get playing the same card over and over again; and then it’s time to let it go...or at least find some new stories to tell.

Keep your eyes peeled for more from the PTC women on the 2007 collegiate field on RowCoach Media, and best of luck to all the collegiate racers gearing up for post-season competition. I can’t wait for the Pac-10 races this weekend!

On a semi-related note, my “once upon a time at Washington” throwback for this week comes in the form of my first-ever
Letter to the Editor at the Seattle Times, which was published (!) in the Sunday Sports section, and the link was also picked up yesterday by Row2k. My letter is at the very bottom of the page.

Keep moving forward.

See you out there,

--MK