Rowing News interview with LM8

row2k interview with coxswain Jack Carlson

Bee Aggressive

As racing comes closer and closer, the adrenaline begins to flow a little more.  We, the lightweight men’s 8, did some 500 meter pieces this morning.  We were trying to focus on swinging together and being aggressive.  There are some other Slovenian inhabitants bee-ing aggressive as well. 

Some of the first Slovenians we met when we got to Bled were the local bees.  They are not bashful.  They will visit while you are walking, shopping, rowing or running.  Austin was stung in between his toes.  Nick was stung while rowing and at least 3 others in our 8 alone have been stun.  I saw some members of the US heavy men’s 8 dancing around some bees this morning. 

Yesterday, as we were preparing to launch on the dock, I was putting my oar in and all of a sudden the dock began gyrating and I heard a lot of commotion coming from behind me.  It was Nick and he was trying to swat a bee with the towel he brings in the boat to prevent his water bottle from bouncing around.  It was hilarious.  Nick was jumping like a monkey and swinging the towel like I would imagine a caveman waving his club.  Unfortunately, Nick did not kill the bee and just managed to piss it off more. 

I was doing some postcard shopping with Kenny and Nicole Dinion from the LW4x and felt a pinch in my left thigh under my shorts.  I lifted the shorts to see what it was and I couldn’t believe it.  A bee (more like a yellow jacket because it didn’t die after stinging me) was lodged; butt first in to my leg.  It was flying furiously, trying to get away and did not do so until I flicked it.  It was funny, except the pain in my thigh began to grow and the humor began to escape me.  I couldn’t believe how aggressive that bee was. 

The first related story that came to mind was high school basketball.  I used to go to all of the Mathews High basketball games to try and socialize.  One of the things I remember is the cheerleader cheer (I can’t believe I’m documenting this memory) Be Aggressive, B – E Aggressive, B- E A-G-G R-E-S-S-I-V-E.  I can sing it for you some time to get the full affect. 

So like the bees, the US Team is hoping to go for broke on the race course and get the job done this coming week.  Only 1.5 days until racing starts!  Get Aggressive and BEE Aggressive.

- Jimmy

Bow Perspective

More Food for Thought

Blogging is hard.  I dabbled a bit last year with Shivani and her website www.shivspix.com  I’m going to be posting some blogs on her website again this year.  Shivani took a leave of absence from the 2010 World Championships, but is making a comeback this year in Bled.  We will all be excited to see her and you should be too!  Her pictures are amazing and definitely let supporters at home get a feel for what is going on at the regatta.  Anyway, back to my point.  Blogging is hard and I am finding it difficult to come up with things to write about.  The lesson I’ve learned so far is not to search for it too much.  The ideas will come at the most random time, when you don’t have a pen or computer to write it down.  I swear, I had an awesome idea yesterday, but forgot it.  So today I was walking around the shopping center across from the hotel and thought of another idiosyncrasy to tell you about.  I rushed my shopping a bit to type it out on the computer.  Again, amazingly, it is about food.  

When I was a plebe at the Naval Academy I would buy a snickers bar NEARLY EVERY DAY.  I guess I felt like I earned it.  I was in college, rowing and getting paid (barely… $100/month).  As I have gotten older and wiser I have learned to savor the gift of chocolate.  Also of note, if I ate a snickers every day 10 years after being a freshman in college I would not be a lightweight!  Therefore I try to get the most bang for my buck and only purchase nice chocolate.  You could say I’m spoiled.  Not that I couldn’t eat a snickers bar, they are delicious, but I really try to eat nice chocolate.  Think of Seattlites in coffee shops; I am a chocolate snob as they are coffee snobs. 

Well Slovenia is a gift to my madness.  I’ve only been here for 4 days and I’m on my 2^nd bar.  They have Lindt chocolate here, but I can get that in the States so I try to stay away.  Besides, my wife is from Exeter, NH which is very close to where the USA Lindt factory is.  We try to hoard some when we visit family, so I try to go for the local delicacies when away.  I just bought a milk chocolate bar made with honey and am eating it as I type this.  It is delicious and some of the best chocolate I’ve had.  I usually try to stay away from milk chocolate, considering myself a dark chocolate fan, but I am a huge honey fan and couldn’t resist.  The best thing about this piece of chocolate is it does not have a brand name.  It just says honey on the front.  For those of you looking to get in to great food, those are usually the best. 

We are about 10 days out from our race for lanes at the World Championships so I have to start watching what I eat.  I try to stay away from dairy and sugars.  Chocolate, honey and jam are about the only sweet things I continue to ingest.  The thoughts that go through my mind are, “you’re not going to get to eat a lot of it, so eat the good stuff.”  Well Slovenia is definitely providing some good stuff and I’m sure I’ll find more. 

Another sense of food snobbery comes in the form of bread.  Read about it at www.shivspix.com

- Jimmy

Traveling as a lightweight

Any kind of traveling is tough as a lightweight, but air cross-continental travel can be brutal.  Airports are littered with calorie rich goodies.  If you talk to any rower they will tell you that most lightweights have  a serious sweet tooth.  I, from experience can tell you it is a mental challenge to not inhale sweets all day. 

To avoid this predicament I have learned to travel prepared.  If I do not bring some food along I WILL end up snacking on trail mix, candy or tuna salad sandwiches (tuna salad in airports is mostly mayonnaise).  Trail mix may sound great too, but it is loaded with fat that does not make weighing in 2 hours prior to racing easy.  So I bring fruit, vegetables and premade sandwiches.  This trip was a pretty good one.  I had an apple, a crown of broccoli and baby carrots.  Obviously, I don’t think many people could last an entire trip on those foods alone so I do eat some of the airplane food.

Airplane food can be very dangerous.  It’s mass produced food, which I’ve had plenty of while in the navy, meaning it’s probably not healthy.  However, there are healthier versions.  I choose to not eat quite a bit of it as well.  Last night’s flight was a choice of bbq chicken and vegetable pasta.  I went with pasta.  The meal came with pasta, salad, bread, crackers, cheese, ranch dressing and a brownie.  I ate most of the pasta, the salad without the dressing (Tim McLaren would be proud), a little bread and of course the brownie.  There are a lot of bad calories in ranch dressing and the cheese that I don’t need.  The brownie is not the healthiest choice, but everyone needs a vice ;-). 

The best part about this entire process is the looks you get from fellow travelers.  I happened to be traveling by myself this trip so I didn’t have numbers of other lightweights to reinforce my “odd” eating habits.  I was sitting in the Atlanta airport and pulled out a ziplock bag of raw broccoli.  A family, just 5 ft away began whispering and giving me odd looks.  I almost stood up and bought and icecream cone to raise my self-esteem (j/k), but I stuck to my guns and nibbled on the greens.  On the plane I pulled out some baby carrots and received similar looks from my neighbor. 

There are some hazards to this healthy eating.  In Munich I caught up with the LW2X of Julie Nichols and Kristin Hedstrom and the USA M1x, Ken Jurkowski .   We took a flight together to Ljubljana, Slovenia.  We arrived, waited for a bit and took a van to Bled.  During the ride I was eating some broccoli and Ken made a joke causing me to laugh.  Well the laughing caused me to inhale and small bits of broccoli flew to the back of my throat and I began choking.  Headline:  Rower Dies Due to Broccoli Inhalation.

Thankfully, like parting my hair down the middle, this is just a phase in my life.  It seems to come and go in conjunction with my race schedule.  Weird, right?  Needless to say I won’t be eating this way on the way home!

P.S.  We had our first row today.  Bled is beautiful and the course is pretty amazing

'Round the buoy

"PRAY FOR A GOOD HARVEST, BUT KEEP ON HOEING"
                 - Slovenian proverb



'round the buoy 5k -- a Coach Roock special.  Here's the 1st half and a little bit of the 2nd half.

See you in Bled.

BIG DOGS ONLY,

Jack

"A hero is one who knows how to hang on one minute longer"

"A hero is one who knows how to hang on one minute longer" - Novalis

Our superhero-themed row, in support of the Children's Hospital at Dartmouth has garnered a lot of attention on row2k.  Check out the photo of the day, here.

Goodnight Hanover

It's a bittersweet night for the Hanover Training Center.  After a long summer of love, laughter, and crushing 11 minute anaerobic threshold pieces, our time in New Hampshire is coming to an end.  We fly out to Slovenia Friday.  Tonight will be our last in this charming New England town.  It's kind of sad.

You might think that the nine of us have seen little of this place aside from a stretch of the Connecticut river and the beds in which we spend almost all of our free time sleeping.  You might think that every day here is painfully, painfully boring.  You might think that some of us are absolutely dying to get the hell out of here.  You might even think I'm complaining right now on this very blog.  But nothing could be further from the truth.  Because this town has embraced us.  And we've embraced it in return.  

From the waitresses at Lou's Diner to the waitresses at Everything But Anchovies pizzeria to the waitresses at the Dirt Cowboy cafe, we've seen a fascinating cross section of genuine, warm-hearted people.  We've also met some people that didn't bring us food but really none come to mind right now.  Really, I think Lou's Diner owes the HTC squad a little something.  The amount of money we've given that place in the last couple months could put Lou's kid through college.  I think we deserve a plaque or a free omelet or something.

Each of us has also built a special relationship with the people that made this all possible - our host families.  Because they also give us food.  And because without them, we'd all be sleeping at the boathouse like hobos and assistant coaches do.  Or sleeping in our cars, like I do when I drink too much to drive.  

So for those reasons, we've been very lucky to have such wonderful hosts.  And between eating at their dinner tables and sleeping in their guest beds, we've become part of these families.  We got to know about their daily lives, their kids, their connection with rowing, where they keep the extra toilet paper.  You know, personal stuff.  Honestly, you do start to feel some kind of bond.  But tonight we break bread together for the last time.  It's going to be hard.  Like breaking up with a girl you were dating purely out of convenience.  Fortunately this time when I say it's because I'm leaving the country, it'll be the truth.

But as hard as it is to say goodbye to New Hampshire, the HTC can't wait to say hello to Bled.  This is what we've been living for.  The big show.  We've been busting our asses all year to prepare for the world championships.  And now game time is just a couple weeks away.  As the camp's progressed we've speculated about our speed and our chances at winning.  And we could safely give ourselves great odds because back then we had so much more time to prepare.  And we could go out for practice and just be content to try to improve a little.  But now that comfortable time for speculating and preparing and trying to do better is over.  It's time to get the job done.  The pressure is on, big time.

We'll be in Slovenia in a couple days.  Yes, we're fast.  But are we fast enough?  How fast it that?  Who the hell knows?  It makes me nervous.  Until the grand final, we'll have a handful of race pressure pieces to pull.  From here on out we just have to make sure we crush every one.  We can't settle for pulling "a pretty good piece considering the conditions".  Hearing that phrase is never satisfying.

Part of this reality check, at least for me, comes from the fact that entries were released today.  And looking at the opposing lineups, these crews will be seriously fast.  So the question is, "why should I expect to be able to beat these guys?"  And also maybe, "Why should I expect to win the world championship?".  The only way to answer those questions is by posting super fast times during our last weeks of practice.

Every single row is important now.  Like midgets at a urinal, we're going to have to stay on our toes.

But before we take off, I just want to say thanks for the memories, Hanover.  We'll never forget you.  We'll call you when we get back, we swear.

Matt