every year privately , the week after the results were in , to see how her own time stacked up . But now she had me to push around . With me in the stroke position , the race idea became a lark instead of a quest — I think it must have taken the heat off , since she could attribute our performance to her partner ’ s middling efforts .
And so it began ; like most odysseys , this one would be about the journey rather than the destination . Her boyfriend , a photographer , promised to hang off the bridges and record our efforts , even in training ; he went so far as to have race t-shirts made . Because we were eight years apart in age , with me the older , we thought , mistakenly , that we were allowed only a small window to race together while we were both in our 40s ; this proved to be untrue — doubles rowers ’ ages are averaged — but the imagined deadline drove us onward . Because we were both writers and both small in stature , we had the brilliant idea that we could bill ourselves as the Literary Lightweights — surely this would be good for a few sponsorship donations to the Head Of The Charles , as well as a few laughs . The real intensity of the training , though , probably fell to me ; Caroline already rowed her obligatory 5.5 miles each morning . So I was the one who rushed home to report that I had rowed in wind , rowed 6 miles , upped my strokes-per-minute to a piddling 25 . The first time we took out a double from Riverside , the odds were not in our favor : The boat had been rigged for giants , and the wind picked up to 17 mph somewhere around the course finish . My stroke fell completely apart ; Caroline , in a fit of laughing , rowed us halfway home .
We never got to race together , not officially ; the spring we ’ d planned to begin training in earnest was the one in which Caroline fell ill . And though we hardly knew it at the time , by then we had already learned that the race alone is rarely the point . The metaphor of rowing may have been what we loved the most : the challenge , the anticipation , the idea of September twilights and muscles spent and another 500 miles in the log book come November . Both of us possessed that single trait that makes a lifelong rower — endurance — and for years we had fantasized that we would row the Head together in our 70s , when the field had thinned sufficiently to give us a fighting chance . That was a dream made even more enticing and preposterous by how far away it seemed .
The Van Dusen , faithful old horse , has logged a couple of thousand miles since Caroline died ; her graceful , powerhouse stroke — indelible imprint in my mind ’ s eye — is still my golden mean and my best coaching tool . And if half the race is always about showing up , I know now , too , that the victory isn ’ t just
FORTY-SECOND HEAD OF THE CHARLES REGATTA23