My chronic illness helped me reach my full potential as a D1 coxswain

When I was a sophomore in high school, it was a humid spring day on the Ventnor Bay and we were practicing race pieces. I forgot my water and decided to take a sip of one of my rower’s bottles. I wouldn’t know until three months later that from that sip, I contracted mono and I would be sick for the rest of my life.

I am a senior coxswain on the rowing team at Temple University. No, I don’t just shout, “row.” I am in charge of the mechanics of the boat, steering, and correcting my rowers’ technique. I always have to be completely in tune with what motivates them, scares them, and help them become a better teammate and rower. I have been a coxswain for ten years, I began at a summer camp in the seventh grade and my life was never the same.

It’s true, I don’t have to be as physically fit as the rowers I am motivating, but even the casual twenty minute elliptical is too much for my body now.

Everyday I have a three-hour rowing practice on the water, and I am completely drained. On some nights, I am lightheaded as I think about how I have weight training at 6:45am the next morning. But still, I lay out my weight room uniform for the next morning: a cherry shirt that reads, “Temple Rowing” and black Under Armour shorts.

As I smooth out the uniform, I know in the morning, I will stumble in the dark to the bathroom, find the toilet, and with white knuckles, I will heave, breathe, heave again, and then get ready for practice. It’s a ritual I have become familiar with over the last five years, and one that may get easier, but will never go away.

Joseph V. Labolito/Temple University

Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome – POTS for short – is a syndrome where your autonomic nervous system does not do its job. My heart rate is high and my blood pressure is low, causing fatigue, dizziness, vomiting, tremors, brain fog, and more. It’s called an “invisible illness” because, well, I don’t look sick.

There’s a simple explanation for how chronic illnesses like mine work, called the Spoon Theory. One day, I wake up with three spoonfuls of energy. I can spend one spoon on homework, and another on practice, but I don’t know how many spoons I will wake up with the next day, so I have to save one. If I ever run out of spoons, my symptoms will arise, and I can end up in the hospital or bed-ridden for a week.

In high school, one practice a day depleted my spoonfuls of energy, so when I committed to a Division 1 rowing team, I was unsure how the transition would turn out. Administrators at my high school told me, “You can’t handle it,” “You should take a year off,” and “What are you thinking?” Meanwhile, doctors told me I would most likely have a heart attack before I was 21.

But I took the risk and I found a spoonful of inspiration I never had before: my Division 1 teammates. My teammates are not girls; they are women. Rowing as a woman you have to surrender a stereotypical female body image; you will have biceps bigger than your male friends, you will eat more than the average person, and you will feel body conscious when you’re not in a unisuit. But these women have done something not many people have: pushed their bodies to the complete limit, and then dug deeper and pushed even more, and found new strength and new speed.

They have healthy bodies, but they don’t live casual, normal lives with those healthy bodies, they use them. They take advantage of them, strengthen their muscles, build endurance, feed their bodies with healthy fuel, and then do it all again the next day.

If I had a healthy body, I think, as I watch them complete twenty-five front squats, this is how I would treat it.

In the boat, the rowers are backwards as I face forwards, so they have to trust me to be steering them correctly and making the right calls. If you knew your coxswain already had low energy levels, but needed to be on high alert all the time, would you trust them? This is an insecurity I often face with rowers who are not used to me as their coxswain.

As a coxswain, I need to know the energy level of my crew at all times. A workout we will often do is 6x1k, where we race over 1000 meters, six times. I scream my head off at these women to find more speed, together, and win the race. During one of these races I was completely out of breath and drained, my heart rate is just as high as theirs, due to my disease, and I saw black spots in the air. But I didn’t move – all I did was slide my fingers along the rudder and screamed. In our minimal rest time, all nine of us (eight rowers and one coxswain) were breathing heavy and heaving, and I realized – this is why I have this illness. I identify with these women, we are all in pain and we are all dead and we are going to somehow find new speed on this next piece, regardless of the pain and exhaustion. And when we do, and we get back to the dock, they know I’m not the little person that screams at them, they know that, just like they won’t be able to walk up the stairs when they get home from the lactic acid buildup, I will have tremors, and nausea, and pain just like them – I have ripped my body apart too.

The concept of my disease in a nutshell is that my body cannot perform autonomic functions. One way my body turns around on itself is when I have high anxiety. Everyone gets nervous and some people have a twitch or shake a little when they are nervous. My disease thrives in anxiety. The tremors are uncontrollable. And on race day, when I am the most nervous, I have to wake up an extra hour to make sure I have thrown up enough that my body is content and still have time to make the bus.

There is one race, the Head of the Charles, where we travel from Philadelphia to Boston to race teams from around the world. Traveling and anxiety are a recipe for disaster with my disease. But this race, called a “coxswain’s race” because it is three miles of sharp turns, was everything to me. The morning of my senior year at Head of the Charles, I threw up – for a while. I was more nervous than ever because this was my race, if I mess up one turn, we lose, no matter how well my rowers are performing. I did not want to freak out my rowers by telling them how I was feeling, even my roommate, who was in stroke seat and had seen me at my sickest on multiple occasions. But I was more freaked out than ever. I reached out to my boyfriend, also a varsity rower at Temple, and he reassured me: I was ready.

My disease was just checked off of my to-do list. I had to recognize it, deal with it, in order to move forward. Throwing up and losing my focus that morning would not define me, what I did that day would. I steered the best course I ever have, and cried through the finish line as my rower’s expressed this powerful moment we had all created together.

Now in championship season, when we line up at the starting line, we look across at the other women from other teams, in our specific seat. My rower in five seat will find comfort in her height over the other five seats from other schools, my bow seat has bigger quads than the other bow seats, and I know I put it in more energy than every other coxswain on the line.

So when I’m in that pain, lying over the toilet for the third time that week, when I can’t walk because my muscle aches overtake my body, when I throw my book across the room because my tremors don’t allow me to hold anything – I think of my teammates, those women.

Emily went 10 seconds faster on her 2k erg test, Jenna squatted 250 lbs, Lily sprinted early with 600 meters left in the race, Lea stroked the Head of the Charles with a broken foot. If they can do that, I can do this. So I get out of bed, I throw up, and I put on my uniform – it’s time for practice.