seat-racing

We start seatracing tomorrow, and people are already starting to freak out. I'm doing okay nerves-wise, but I can tell a lot of the guys are on edge.  

Seatracing is just incredibly personal.  When you race against an opposing crew, you are usually racing against complete strangers, and if you lose, you can just say "well, we had a bad race" or "well, they were just a better crew than we were".  They are the enemy, and they are trying to take something away from you, so it is easier to separate yourself from them.   It is absolutely dreadful to lose a race, some of the worst feelings in my life have come from hard losses in rowing (albeit this might just be a statement about the ease of my life). However, seatracing matches you up against your teammate, your friend, your brother in suffering.  When you win, youve beaten this friend, and there is nothing you can say or do to reverse what happened on the water.  Losing is far worse, because, well, you've proved yourself to be the inferior man.  While you only may be the inferior man on the water, or even only for that particular piece, it carries over to other parts of your life, where social status and ego are defined by rowing.  Because so much of a rower's identity is wrapped up in rowing, losing a seat-race is like finding out that you are a bastard child (okay, this might be an exaggeration, but the nature of the feeling is the same).

The results also have much greater personal impact than races do.  Every Olympic champion has lost a race at some point in their life, where few Olympic champions have lost seat-races.  I can point to two seat-races that could have ended my future rowing career, and its scary for me to think what would have happened had I been "off" on those days.  While I don't expect to be an Olympic champion unless I am very very fortunate, the dream is always there, that is, until one loses a seat-race.