High-Five

My wrist has been sore lately. Not, as one may expect, from something like carpal tunnel caused by hours manipulating the mouse either filling in excel data cells or playing Snood in avoidance of filling in such data cells. No, my wrist hurts from too much high-fiving. A rowing friend of mine and I seem to have a serious case of self-congratulatis.

The illness began when the aforementioned friend, with whom I rowed in my more athletically spry years at Colgate, moved to Austin last summer and suggested that we join a local boathouse. In full disclosure (sorry Sarah) I was not particularly keen on this idea at the outset. While I like to think that I was a pretty decent athlete as a youth I hung up my running shoes and my oars in my sophomore year of college. (Okay, so I did do the 525 mile AIDS ride from Charlotte, NC to DC when I was twenty-four, but I chalk that up to a fluke attempt at self-discovery during a tumultuous time in my love life right before returning to graduate school.) Though there were moments that I missed my time on the track, the diamond, the court, and the water I felt satisfied in my early twenties to focus my energies on those things that I never allowed myself to do while I was intensely focused on sports in high school and during my early college years– reading philosophy, community involvement, writing, and of course drinking in fraternity and sorority house basements on a weeknight.

Truthfully, I had been resigned to say goodbye to my years of athletic prowess long before Sarah proposed that we start rowing together again. I had convinced myself that sports were what we did as kids and that adulthood was about careers, building the muscle of the mind, and focusing on marriage and adult relationships that were not founded upon hitting a ball or outpacing the other team down the river or around the track. Still, unable to say no to Sarah (I have a general problem with saying no to friends, family, dogs, co-workers, people with a pulse, etc.). I joined the boathouse and we started rowing together in January. For the first few lessons I was incredibly sore, felt like my lungs might collapse, and I generally worried about heart failure. On more than one occasion Sarah – a medical doctor – and I agreed that bringing a crash cart to practice was not a terrible idea. But the more we rowed the more the muscle memory of the teensomething body that seemed to be hibernating within my thirtysomething body kicked in.

Flash forward two months. Sarah and I agreed to row in a quad (four people rowing together) for a six mile race called the “Winter Warrior.” (I realize that six miles in a boat may not sound particularly far, but please remember that the boat is small, that there is no motor, and that the race takes about 38 minutes of steady strong rowing to complete. Not to mention that it is the strokes during the one mile to the start and especially the five miles home after crossing the finish line that can break you.) After our first practice run of the course Sarah commented that she felt about “2% Warrior, 98% like she had been hit by a Mack truck.” I concurred.

We thought about making T-shirts for the race with CPR instructions on the front and “In Case of Emergency Call (XXX-XXXX)” on the back. (Of course, the instructions had to be on the front so that the person working to resuscitate us could read them clearly.) We also considered things such as taking a picnic break half-way through the race or taking turns rowing by twos instead of all of four of us at once so that we could rest, but neither option seemed kind to our younger boat mates.

But the funny thing that seems to have come with awakening my muscle memory was an awakening of my competitive drive. I found myself really wanting to win. So, as a good “bow” rower who was going to steer us to victory, I put my Ph.D. to work and studied the course maps for days before our race. I ate well. I made sure I slept well. On race day we shaved six minutes off of our practice run and even passed a crew of eight on the course. (The only thing I have to say about the single rower that passed us is that the man clearly had to be an Olympian.)  We did really well, and the high-fiving that led to my sore wrist began as soon as we crossed the finish line.

I think Sarah and I high-fived and hugged each other in congratulations of our survival, let alone our novice boat win, no less than thirty times in the hour that we celebrated with our team as we tailgated after the race. I believe that we uttered the words “we did it” no less than fifty times over the course of the next week. And as we uttered those words the story of our row grew a touch more embellished. The course was seven miles (fourteen total) then it was eight (sixteen total) and I think in the last telling the round-trip was somewhere around twenty-two miles. I was okay with this exaggerating. We were thirtysomethings who engaged in a race that was really utterly meaningless, but that felt to us like an event on par with winning Olympic gold.

Two weeks later we rowed again in another regatta, this time in much shorter races. Our quad didn’t do so great, but our crew of eight won a silver medal (a small miracle given that we had practiced together only once). The high-fiving commenced again along with the self-congratulatory phrases such as “not bad for old ladies,” “see we didn’t need the crash cart after all,” and most honestly, “I feel really proud of us.” There was so much high-fiving among our crew of thirtysomethings that Sarah suggested that we had to either do low-fives to mix things up and/or start charging ourselves a nickel for every time we high-fived. She clarified that we definitely should not stop with the self-congratulating, but that we should at least make it extra worth it by contributing to a future post-race beer fund for each slap of the hands.

What I realized in all of this high-fiving is that we, as thirtysomethings, and fortysomethings, and sixtysomethings probably don’t congratulate ourselves enough. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was to feel really proud about something I did and to share in that pride with someone else who was on “my team.”

If we are lucky, as children and adolescents we are surrounded by various adults who build us up. People like our teachers, coaches, mentors, and parents who offer words of encouragement and who push us to believe in ourselves, even when we don’t. But when we get out of college we somewhat, though never fully, step outside of that network of up-builders. I know many thirtysomethings who haven’t been congratulated for who they are or for what they do in a long time. They work feeling unappreciated. They may be in relationships where they are not reminded enough that they are loved for who they are and that their contributions to their family are important. They always feel like they need to do better – have a better job, be a better parent, be a better daughter or son, be a better friend, or be a more active community member. And as our bodies change we feel we should fight back by eating better, exercising the body, and exercising the mind with something other than reality TV. What we thirtysomethings do never feels like it is enough to make those around us – or more importantly to make ourselves – feel proud of who we are.   

All of this high-fiving lately has led to me to see that we as a band of thirtysomethings, and maybe as a post-twenties culture as a whole, need to do more self-congratulating and up-building for others who have passed their twentysomething prime. I’m not talking about unjustified pride, arrogance, or toting that we are better than others. I’m talking about celebrating the things we do that required real work to do them. I’m talking about celebrating the 2% Warrior, even in light of the 98% Mack Truck injuries. I’m talking about doing more work up-building for each other and spending less time on the things that we feel we can’t or don’t do as well as (we think) others expect us to do them. Really, I don’t think it would be such a bad thing if more of us had wrist injuries from celebratory high-fiving.

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