U C Davis Crew

 My children are interesting people.  In high school, my son wanted nothing to do with physical activity.  He was a trombone playing robotics kid whose focus was solely on academics and getting high grades.  He competed in band performances and collected data on robots and the only heavy lifting he did was carrying his computer to the car to take it to a friend's house so they could create dungeon and dragon characters.  When he announced that he was going to try out for the Crew team in college, we all smiled and thought this would be a passing dream.

 He started two weeks before school started.  They practice at 5am and run, lift, crawl and push up.  He's lost 30 pounds in 5 weeks.

He earned the name 'Mama Bear' because one of the exercises they do, the bear crawl, is still pretty difficult for him.  The first time they did it, he was by far the slowest guy on the team.  Everyone else had finished and half the team came back to encourage him to keep going.  They told him to pretend he was a 'mama bear' and that his cubs were at the finish line.  They told him he had to go and save his cubs.  The nickname just stuck!
 
 Crew has to be the worst spectator sport.  I left home at 8:30 am so I could pick up some snacks for his team.  He had asked for some granola bars, lunch meat, crackers and bananas.  When my kids were little, I used to bring snacks for their soccer team, so it was nice to do this again.  I got to the venue around 10 am and expected a couple hundred people.  I was very surprised to have to park miles away because of the thousands of people there to 'watch' the event.  There was a shuttle that took us to the lake and then I had to wander around with the bags of groceries, trying to find the team.  The high school teams had their boosters with their bar-b-ques all set up and their tents and chairs.  After about an hour of the shuttle ride and searching through the huge crowd, I finally found their team in the bushes.  They had no booster support and they were all happy for the little bit of food I brought.  They were all so grateful and so nice and thankfully there were no leftovers for me to have to carry home!

The boys launched the boat around 11:45 for their 12:50 race and I thought that meant they would be racing early.  I was worried my husband wouldn't make it on time.  What I didn't realize was they had to row the boat out to the starting line and then wait for their turn to start.  I was starving, but didn't want to miss the race, so found a seat near the finish and watched boat after boat come past.  I couldn't remember what color their boat was, or what color they were wearing and wasn't sure if I had missed them passing.  My husband and son showed up around 1 and I thought that maybe they had missed the race.  He kept making fun of me because I was having such a hard time remembering what my son looked like!  Who does that?  But then I was listening to other parents say the same thing.  'I think that is my daughter's boat, but I don't know if that is my daughter in the boat!'  Then, I didn't feel so bad.



 Finally after more than an hour of waiting, my son's boat came past and I remembered his boat was white and they were wearing white shirts. :)  They did get passed by a green boat.  Instead of starting all of the boats at the same time, they start them 10 seconds apart, so you know if a boat passes you, they are faster.

 But, according to my son, his boat was 13th out of 14 boats in the novice race and they were the fastest on the UCD novice team.  Some of these guys have only been rowing for 3 weeks.  I guess the hard part is keeping everyone in the same rhythm.  One of the guys kept getting his oar stuck in the water, which slows the boat down.

My son is most proud that he is pushing himself physically.  He says he has never done that before and it feels good.  I'm pretty proud of him too.  It takes a lot of discipline to get up so early every day and go out and do something you aren't very good at.  At least he can see the progress he is making.

Row, Row, Row your Boat~