I Tried It: Learning to Row at Penn Athletic Club

Penn Athletic Club’s Learn to Row program helps get newbies out on the water. / Photograph by Patrick Pimentel

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Tell someone you are learning to row in your forties, and odds are they’ll say something like, “I would have rowed in college, but I didn’t want to get up that early.” To which I say: I wish rising before the sun was essential to rowing. That’s the only skill I could have claimed when, at 11 a.m. on a Saturday this past March, I rang the doorbell of Penn Athletic Club for the very first time.

I was joining 11 other novices for the club’s Learn to Row program, a progression of three six-week sessions that moves beginners from a rowing machine to, at least in theory, a single scull gliding serenely through the waters of the Schuylkill.

The group ranged in age from mid-20s to mid-60s. Many were after-work athletes: runners, cyclists, weightlifters, yogis. (That last one is me.) Most, though, weren’t really there for a new exercise routine. Like me, they’d been drawn instead by the history of the boathouses. As another newcomer who drove up from Wilmington twice a week for the classes explained: There’s just something special about learning to row in Philadelphia, the birthplace of the sport in the United States.

You can feel that legacy in the club’s Boathouse Row building, now almost 150 years old. Open the door from the mirrored weight room and you’ll suddenly find yourself in a wood-paneled bar covered with fading photographs of rowers from yesteryear. Some workouts take place in the adjacent Trophy Room, which doesn’t seem to have space for even one more accolade, though club members and the coaches charged with training both elite athletes and us newbies are still racking up the honors.

On the surprisingly warm first day of class, we moved rowing machines — “ergs,” as they’re called (one of the few familiar terms in a whole new language I’ve been introduced to) — onto the upper deck of the boathouse. Overlooking the river, program director Liam Jenkins taught us the foundation of the sport: the rowing stroke, a powerful thrust of the legs then a slight swing of the body with the arms following through, then the reverse in recovery. Legs, body, arms. Arms, body, legs. Though it is the exact same motion used by Olympic athletes, it sounded easy enough.

Except, as they say in the sport, ergs don’t float. You can build up a lot of confidence in two weeks spent on the erg and entrusted to carry the “quads” (four-person, 15-inch-wide boats, with two oars per person), which can cost $30,000 a piece. But the first time I sat in one of those quads, I discovered that the basic stroke, which is already far harder than you might imagine on land, seems nearly impossible on the water. Instead of “arms, body, legs,” I was chanting “don’t tip, don’t tip, don’t tip.”

We didn’t tip. But we did add to our rowing vocabulary in those early days in the quad. Among the most useful, most printable additions: “caught a crab,” for that inevitable moment when your oar gets stuck deep in the water mid-stroke, and “look ahead” when you suddenly realize another boat is on a collision course with you.

Being on the water is not just a physical workout. It’s a mental one. Arms, body, legs, multiplied by the variables of wind and current, the quirks of a specific boat and pair of oars, the style and skill of each of your boatmates; the patience of the other, more experienced traffic on the river and the mind-boggling fact you are expected to juggle that all while moving backwards. My brain got more exercise than my legs for weeks as I puzzled it all out.

That endless complexity in seeming simplicity reminded me, to my surprise, of my decades-long yoga practice. (The sense of balance I’ve cultivated in yoga was also an unexpected bonus in the boat.) I found at the boathouse many of the same things I love about being on the mat: a physical undertaking that can never be perfected, only tweaked and adapted, and a community of people who share that mindset. At least for beginners, rowing is a team sport, one that encourages coordination, communication, mutual support, and the occasional post-row potluck on the deck of the boathouse.

And so, I’m still out there with my teammates, long after I expected to be on that terrifying first day on the water, focusing on the details of every stroke, while chasing the oh-so-brief moment when they all drop away. When it is just the rowers and the river, as the moon rises over the Art Museum, and the only sound you can hear is the oars dropping into the — oops, caught a crab!