Fall the finest season to row, row, row your boat

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This article was published 18/09/2020 (2147 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Fall, Janine Stephens says, is the most beautiful time to be out on the water. The mornings grow colder and darker, but the afternoons are crisp. The autumn leaves drop and travel down the river with you, and in the slow current of the season you can feel the boat moving under you with each stroke of the oars.

That’s what Stephens, head coach of the Winnipeg Rowing Club, is focusing on now. There are only about seven weeks left for local rowers to be on the water, and she wants them all to enjoy it. It was a season without regattas, without most of their big races, without even a chance to get into the bigger boats.

But there were silver linings, says Stephens, a two-time Olympian and 2012 Olympic silver medalist. Without the big races to prepare for, and with crews of four and eight still sidelined by the pandemic, rowers hit the water in single or double boats, and focused mostly on improving the fundamentals of their strokes.

“That’s what it’s really given us this year,” Stephens says.

“On the West Coast, they’re on the water year-round. We don’t have the ability to take as many strokes on the water. Usually, once we get on the water that could be in May, and come June we have a race the first weekend… we’re already in a race preparation mentality.”

The Winnipeg Rowing Club’s regular learn-to-row events were busier this summer than in recent years past. The introductory program was tweaked a little, to account for living in a COVID-19 world: instead of a six-class program it was reduced to a single day with a lower fee, and a faster move onto the water.

Normally, Stephens has newcomers start in boats of four people, with an experienced rower guiding the boat. This year, after getting a crash course in rowing patterns on indoor machines, first-timers got out on the water the same day in a boat of their own. It seemed to go well; many who came out to those events are still rowing.

“You could see their confidence go up,” Stephens says. “In a single, you learn so much more. You have to learn how to steer. You have to learn that both hands have to move at the same time and how the boats move underneath you.”

Still, there are things the sport has been missing. When rowing was given the green light to return early in the summer, they were allowed only solo boats. After about six weeks, they could get back into doubles, but crews of eight and four are still on pause in Manitoba, and are unlikely to return in what’s left of the season.

That was a complication for the rowing club, which does all of its fundraising in the bigger boats. Meanwhile, some recreational rowers took this season off, missing the atmosphere and shared goals they shared with the big crews.

“It’s just the sense of togetherness and that team atmosphere of being in boats and preparing for a regatta together,” Stephens says. “There’s always a lot of excitement that builds up in those bigger boats for those events.”

But there have been innovative ways to keep the sport connecting. This weekend should have marked the national championships in Welland, Ont. That was cancelled. Instead, Rowing Canada is holding an innovative indoor rowing challenge, where athletes will compete on indoor machines linked to animated images of boats on a screen.

About eight Manitobans will participate in that cross-Canada event.

“The idea behind it is kind of fun,” Stephens says. “It’s not just racing with the people you see every day. Your little boat is travelling across the screen, and they get it so you can cheer it on. They’re trying to make it as race-like as possible.”

Stephens is still getting new rowers out on the water, for these beautiful last weeks of the season. Anyone who is curious about learning to row can contact her through the Winnipeg Rowing Club’s website, she says. And she’s thinking about contacting schools to invite curious students to spend time on the water.

In the end, she says, rowing was lucky. It has everything it needs to weather a pandemic: you can do it outside, distanced from others. And there is a bond between rowers, she says, that has kept many of them coming back through the summer, even one in which so much was cancelled, or changed or suspended.

“For the people in the high-performance group, I had 13 this summer, for them with no races, who trained twice a day all winter and all summer, they’re showing up because of the connections and the friendships,” Stephens says. “They know they’re not going to go and race tomorrow or next weekend, but for them their social circle is also there.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca