I’ve written this newsletter for so many years now that I sort of know when an upcoming event is going to be featured. Sometimes, if I’m in a writing mood, I’ll even sit down and jot some notes or even a rough draft ahead of time, planning on filling in with details and pictures after the event happens. My little way of cheating to stay ahead of all the things I have to do.
About two weeks ago, I participated in my first regatta: Florida Masters Regatta 2025. I knew it was coming up, so beforehand I jotted a few notes in my journal about what I might talk about. It’s sprint season, so we race 1000 meters, which just means you go all out for four minutes; I thought I might talk about sprinting and pushing yourself to put everything you’ve got into something. In moments of hopefulness, I thought I might write about all of the hardware I’d bring home. That felt a little like I’d jinx it, but as it turns out, I did have a successful day, winning medals in three of my four races. Or maybe I’d talk about how nervous I was. A regatta is basically mildly organized chaos. Hundreds of rowers, hundreds of boats, races from 9 am to 4 pm going off every 8 minutes. Floating starts. Hot sun. A lot to deal with all at once.
But even after writing hundreds of editions of Life Lived Outside, it’s always fun to watch a story unfold that you didn’t expect. And so the story I’m taking home with me from my first race experience is about a group of underdogs who hadn’t all been in a boat together before, who hadn’t all raced before, who turned in an amazing time and got a bronze medal. I named our boat “Joey and the Girls” because we were the only mixed 4+ entry (that’s a boat with 4 rowers and 1 coxswain) to not have an even number of men and women. It was me, along with three women rowers and a woman coxswain.
None of us knew what to expect, and for all of us, it was our first race of the day. So we carried our boat to the launch dock, got in, strapped our feet in, and pushed off. You usually have about 30 minutes to warm up before race time, so we got our heart rates up practicing race starts and a few speed bursts, and then we settled into our lane to await the start. It was windy and chaotic, and the refs had a hard time getting all of the boats lined up; in the end, when they thought they had us aligned, we all started. And then they called a false start and made us all come back to the line to start again.
Chaos notwithstanding, this time the start was clean, and we rowed just as hard as we could for 3 minutes and 49 seconds. It wasn’t a perfect race, but our coxswain kept us on track and called for “Power Tens” (ten hard strokes of power) and encouraged us to keep going, to keep giving it everything we had, and we crossed the finish line in a solid third place. But here’s the thing: we knew we’d get a bronze medal since there were only three boats in our heat. In some Master’s regattas, they give medals by heat, not by boat classification. So by default, we knew we’d get a medal. But I wonder if that didn’t make us row harder. Or maybe it was the fact that the two other boats in our heat were wildly fast. There is no way we could have caught them, but it may have made us just a little hungrier to go faster. Once our official times were posted and we started looking at the other heats, we realized that with the time we turned in we would have won even if they’d put all of the mixed 4+s together. That made us feel amazing! Instead of a default medal, our medal was legit: we turned in a better time than a number of other boats and with the odds stacked a little against us.
And I think for all of us, especially since for half the boat it was our first race ever, it gave us confidence for the rest of the day. Tampa Athletic Club’s team of 27 rowers had a successful regatta overall, with just about everyone receiving at least one medal and lots of our boats turning in great times.
But there is one more silver lining to this story. After the regatta, when I started looking over all the times for the day, I realized that the “Joey and the Girls” boat was faster in raw time – they do handicap times by age, which is a whole different discussion, but in raw time our boat was faster – than half the men’s entries for the day! A pretty awesome feeling and an unexpected story from my first regatta. I think going into it none of us was sure what would happen with our boat. Not having rowed together before there was just no way to predict if we’d sync up or what kind of power we could produce. An unexpected result, a successful day, and proof that the whole is often more than the sum of its parts. I know there will be lots more regattas in our future, and I’m hoping that we get to race our “Joey and the Girls” boat again.
