Blog of Bermanism

As you’re probably aware, Rachel and I (well, mostly Rachel) brought our first child, Sasha, into the world nine weeks ago yesterday (holy crap!!). As such, I was lucky enough to be able to have my first Father’s Day shortly afterwards. Rachel was also able to have her first Mother’s Day when Sasha was three weeks old, but insisted that I not do anything for her because she was such a new mom and we had all we could do to sleep and eat with this new little life that we had created. So, I felt that it was only fair that I return the favor and ask that she not do anything for me either. She, naturally, had to get me some very nice cards, but we otherwise didn’t do anything special, except RACE OUR ASSES OFF!

That’s right, we raced at the Lake Merritt Sprints in Oakland on Father’s Day this year, and it was a fantastic experience for me. It was the second race that Sasha has been to, and the second race in a row that I performed very well at. I’m starting to think that Sasha will need to be at all of my races from now on, since she’s such good luck. Rachel raced as well, her first race back since Sasha was born. I think she’s made incredible progress in the last nine weeks, but she feels like she still has a long way to go.

Anyway, Lake Merritt sets up a 1000m course for masters sprints. My team from the Marin Rowing Association has been doing very well lately and the depth to our rowing continues to increase to the point where our boats are usually coming in 1st and 2nd in the same race. So, I expected us to do well. But, I didn’t expect that I would win 3 out of my four races! This was a new level of success for me and it was a lot of fun.

Our 8+ flew down the course, and we won comfortably, which was a good thing since I had been seat raced into that boat against a very tall and very capable guy on our team. The 8+ was a very young boat, masters A level (21 – 35). I really wanted this boat to do well since we are starting to reach a critical mass of people on the team that can make up very competitive A boats, instead of B – F (which we still have). But, the young lineups can go harder and faster than the older crews, so they are fun to row. So, we definitely did well, but were lacking our main competition, Kent Mitchell Rowing Club. These guys are mostly ex-national team members and are naturally very, very fast. In fact, they are usually our litmus test, verifying whether we are actually fast or not. Either way though, it was fun and some of the other teams that were racing that day were very fast and made us work to get out ahead.

Next, I was in a pair with one of my great friends, Ken. This boat has been kind of our little secret until this last weekend. Both Ken and I tend to have really good boat feel, we can blend pretty well with whatever boat we’re rowing with. Since Ken and I are training partners, we thought it would be a good idea to try out a pair. Now, if you know nothing about rowing, a pair is just what it sounds like, a two-person boat. The kicker is that in this type of boat, each rower has one oar, which makes it, effectively, the most difficult boat to row out of all other types of boats. If the two rowers aren’t well matched or dont’t blend well together, the stronger of the two will pull the boat around in circles. Additionally, it is a really difficult boat to set (balance). Each person has to pretty much do exactly what the other person is doing or else the boat won’t go straight, won’t be balanced, and will go slower. So, if you haven’t gotten it by now, it is a real challenge to make one of these boats work. Ken and I have been practicing our pair for a little over a year now, and we’re starting to get very fast; fast in the sense that it would surprise some folks given our strength and size. We had raced this boat at LMS last year and done pretty well, but we were very rough, I didn’t steer a straight course and we wasted a lot of energy. The last year has been spent trying to clean it up, get stronger, and make the boat very efficient, and we seem to have hit a new stride in the boat in the last few weeks. We raced against another pair from our team, made up of two of our fastest and best rowers (who also won worlds in the pair together). So, being anywhere near them at the end of the race would have been awesome. We decided to row our own race, the way we had planned and practiced and see what happened. The result, we did very well. We didn’t win (we came in third, out of three), but it was the closest overall race of the entire day. Spectators thought that we were all pretty much even coming through the 750m mark, and indeed, we were very close. The River City boat that was also in our race was VERY fast (surprising, I was very impressed by them). Anyway, we ended up 2.8 seconds down at the end (after handicaps) on our other crew. We were actually really pleased with this result since we had made two fatal mistakes during this race. We didn’t do the start that we had discussed (and veered way off course as a result, lost a few seconds there for sure), and I didn’t call the sprint until we had 15 strokes to go. Corrections to both of those mistakes, and I have to believe that we could have won. It was really fun though, and I think Ken and I raised some eyebrows by being anywhere near those other boats at the finish, which was our goal. We are now racing this boat at SW Masters and at Nationals in August. We’re very excited!

On a side note, Ken and I went out this morning and hit a stride in that boat that was super fast and very efficient, not to mention really enjoyable. If we can do that for a whole race, we’ll be a serious threat to the other crews. Weird how I wrote the most about the boat that I lost in, huh?

Anyway, since I’ve already written a whole lot, I just do a quick synopsis of the other two races, which were equally awesome, but in very different ways.

My next race was a Men’s 4+, with some great guys from my team. We were supposed to be the “lightweight” boat, but not actually lightweight. There’s no doubt that we were smaller than the other Marin crew, and we were supposed to be slower. We ended up beating them by 6 seconds (that’s a lot in a 1k race). After the handicap, we beat them by 1 second, since we were a bit younger than they were. It was quite an upset and we were totally psyched, and came away with a gold.

The last race that I was in was a Mixed 4+ with Ken and I, and Rachel and her doubles partner Tanya. The four of us have raced a mixed quad for a long time, but we’d never tried a MX4+ (the difference is that the quad has eight oars and no coxswain, and the four has four oars and a coxswain). Anyway, the short of this race was that Ken, who was in stroke seat, just came off of the water from a pretty bad race and was mad. Rachel and Tanya hadn’t won anything all day in their other two races (they got screwed in one of the races, and just had some crazy competition in the other race), and I was tired from three hard races, but wanted to blow this one out. We didn’t know what kind of margin we had to win by, but we knew that at least one of the other boats had 12 seconds on us. All we knew is that we had to move out, and fast. So, we went out for blood. Ken set a pace out of the starting blocks that was pretty insane, but eventually settled down to a more manageable pace (for Ken and I, Rachel and Tanya were hanging on for dear life because they don’t usually race at those rates). The short of it is that we killed the field. We pulled what is affectionately termed, a horizon job, or as Ken likes to say, “Humiliating speed”. It was so fun, a great way to finish out the day, and a great race. We beat the next boat (which wasn’t even in our race, technically) by 15 seconds and the next boat by 23 seconds. It was pretty awesome, and we got to get Rachel her first gold medal since her pregnancy.

So, that, in a nutshell was my first Father’s Day. But, even though the bulk of this post is about the race, the best part of the day by far was that I was able to come off of the water and find my daughter hanging out with either Rachel or Kelly. It just brightens up any day of mine to see her cute little face. So, I gave Sasha all of my medals because in my mind, she’s the winner of the best daughter in the world award. Thanks Sasha, you’re the best and I love you more than you’ll ever know!

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