Locals enjoy the challenges and teamwork of crew
By Robin Shepherd, Special to the Los Altos Town Crier
 St. Francis student and Los Altos resident David Krueger leads crewmen Mike Ardizzona, Alex Shoemaker and Brad Bertaoldo in rowing practice on Lexington Reservoir in preparation for a national competition. |
Dorthe Clarke is getting good at getting up really early - which she jokes is “something my husband thought he would never live to see.”
Clarke rises at 5 a.m. four days a week to drive - quite often in the dark - from her Los Altos home to Lexington Reservoir.
There she joins other masters for a morning of recreational rowing over the mist-shrouded water. By 7:30 a.m. she’s headed to work at Sun Microsystems.
“Thanks to rowing,” Clarke said, “I am fit, less stressed and cannot imagine not having my time on the lake.”
Clarke belongs to the Los Gatos Rowing Club, but there are many other such clubs in the Bay Area offering programs for various age and experience levels, recreational and competitive. There are junior programs for middle and high school ages; collegiate; and masters programs for people over 27. In competitions, called regattas, rowers are categorized by sex, age and weight.
Rowing is a total body sport that works all the major muscle groups. “Contrary to popular thought, rowing is not an upper body sport,” said Jenifer Aguirre, a coach at the Los Gatos club and a masters rower. “It’s 65 percent legs, 30 percent back and 5 percent arms.”
Any competitive rower will tell you that success does not come without a large measure of commitment, discipline and sacrifice. Besides the rigorous practice schedule, rowers supplement training with workouts on rowing machines, running and weight training.
Clarke supplements her rowing with pilates, yoga, cycling and weight training.
The ultimate goal is to achieve a continuous, fluid motion by maintaining a consistent speed and well-timed, precise synchronization with the rest of the crew. Imagine a sweep boat or “shell” measuring 60 feet in length, in which eight rowers attempt to simultaneously pull 12-foot-long oars through the water at a cadence of up to 50 strokes per minute. With that much momentum, a split-second break in the concentration or rhythm of a single rower can destroy a crew’s chances of winning a race.
David Krueger, a graduating senior at St. Francis High School, has been rowing with the Los Gatos club for two short years - but already has competed at a national level with his teammates and has won a spot on Princeton University’s rowing team.
“Rowing requires more mental and physical endurance than I expected,” he said. He credits rowing with helping build the discipline he needed to make it in to the Ivy League school.
“The toughest part is time management,” he said. “We practice six or seven times a week. I get home from practice around 7 p.m. on weekdays, and I can’t sleep in late on weekends because of the morning practices. It eats into my free time quite a bit, but I don’t really mind … because I enjoy the time I spend at crew. “
Clarke grew up next to the local rowing club in a small town in Denmark, but didn’t get involved with rowing until some years ago after spotting a crew on a vacation in Vancouver.
When she got home, Clarke researched some area rowing venues and enrolled in the Los Gatos club’s Learn-to-Row program. Over the years, Clarke has fine-tuned her sculling technique in boats of eight, four or two people as well as going solo in a single boat.
“The sport has really exploded for women and girls in the last five years,” said Aguirre. This is due in part to the effects of Title IX and a resulting increase in scholarships for junior women rowers entering college. Rowing coaches from colleges and universities across the United States consider the Bay Area an increasingly promising region to recruit both junior women’s and men’s collegiate rowers.
Los Altos Hills resident Dave Leverenz was recruited as an undergrad for the Harvard University team by former Olympic coach Harry Parker because he was over 6 feet tall.
“I had played high school football and I thought rowing would be easy,” he said. “But I was wrong. It was tough.”
After graduation, Leverenz didn’t row again until his 20th reunion. The bug bit him once again, but finding a team in the Bay Area in the early 1990s was not easy. Leverenz organized teams to row and compete, regularly getting up before dawn to fit in a practice in Oakland before work.
In 1995, he joined the Los Gatos club. Leverenz helped build its masters program, and they began racing in earnest in summer 1997. Since then, the masters have competed in and won medals at events across the country as well as in the world championships.
“We’ve grown from our humble beginnings to over 100 master rowers now,” said Leverenz.
He’s seen a lot of changes over the years. “Today’s carbon fiber and fiberglass boats are ultra-lightweight and fast,” he said. “Boat hull design has changed, and so has rigging, with a lot of science going into technical design improvements over the years.
“But at the end of the day, it’s still the same deal. The sport is called ‘crew’ because it’s all teamwork - all synchronization.”
Alix Pruzansky, who graduated from Castilleja School this month, started rowing at the club’s summer camp program. She was worried that her relatively short stature as a ninth-grader would make it tough to fit in to a crew. But her height is perfect for the role of coxswain, and Pruzanky has done so well that she’s trained and competed alongside her crewmates at the U.S. Junior National Championships.
A coxswain is the on-the-water coach for a crew. Ideally, the person is physically small (less extra weight for the rowers to pull) yet able to communicate quickly and accurately to keep everyone motivated and steering straight.
“During a race the coxswain must let the rowers know where they are on the racecourse in relation to other crews in contention,” said Pruzansky. “When we are close to another boat, I have to make the correct call to pull us away. I tell them when to increase the rate, when to pressure and when to sprint.”
Wieslaw Kujda, head coach at the Los Gatos club, said there are many chances for personal growth in the sport.
“People do it for the pure challenge, enjoyment and camaraderie,” said Kujda, former Polish national and Olympic rowing champion and U.S. national coach. “Even in the eight (eight-person boat) one has to face his or her commitment to the team, boat and self.
“It requires unconditional submission of one’s ego to the race: the pain and uncertainty which one sometimes has to go through to see the other side of the tunnel, where both victory and defeat are waiting.”
Even in defeat there can be some victory, according to Aguirre.
“As a rower - honestly - any great row is the reward,” she said. “Whether at practice or on race day, when everything comes together the way that it should, it is truly a zen moment. When eight rowers surrender to the rhythm of the boat and it sets up on its keel, lifts up out of the water and moves effortlessly - it doesn’t get any better than that.”
The following Web sites offer more information on Bay Area rowing programs: U.S. Rowing, www.usrowing.org; Los Gatos Rowing Club, www.lgrc.org; Palo Alto High School Rowing Club, www.geocities.com/PAHSRC; and Southwest Junior Rowing Association, www.geocities.com/swjra.
