Lightweight Eats

The docks came out today, officially marking the end of the fall season. Granted, fall racing has been over for a month, but this seems like an appropriate time to recap the season. Sometimes, we need a month of space to make a valuable reflection on our performances.

Fall racing has never been my favorite. I'm not very good at it, and I have trouble taking it seriously without taking it too seriously. The best way to get better at something, though, is to practice, so that's what I've been doing.

I started my fall racing season with the Head of the Riverfront. To help me take it less seriously, Guenter had us 2k test the day before. Clearly, that did the trick—in a strong headwind/current combination against open weight competitors, I just went out to race hard and have some fun in the single. I came home with my first win of the season!



More importantly, I learned a lot. I learned that a second every 500 meters adds up over 5 kilometers. I learned to look back more often to find the best course. I learned that I sink into lulls when I'm by myself. I learned to race, and enjoy the back and forth of passing other crews.

All good lessons before the big event: Head of the Charles!

Last year, I put in a bid for both the single and double and got neither. I was super excited this year to get a doubles bid with Morgan—my doubles partner from Elite Nationals and 2 seat from our quad this summer.

We entered the Championship Double category, with a special lightweight medal designation. That meant that we had to weigh in (133lbs maximum weight) the morning of our event, and were much smaller than many of our competitors. This was a big disadvantage in the crazy headwind. The heavy double that started directly behind us made up almost 20 seconds in the first 500m as we barreled into the worst wind on the course.

Top 10 finishers in our event

Fortunately, our lightweight competitors were equally small in the wind. Morgan and I won the lightweight category, and placed lucky #7 overall.

We won a medal!

My final race of the fall season is by far my least favorite: Fall Speed Order. This race is a special kind of torture. Saturday there is a 130 pound weigh-in (way too light for this time of year) followed by a 6000 meter test on the Concept 2 ergometer. Sunday, on still tired legs, there is a 4.5km rowing racing in singles.

We were coming off of a few hard weeks of training, and had seriously backed off of training for a full week to try to recover for this race. I was starting to feel better, and so set myself three goals. Good: Just do better than last year. Better: Improve on the previous week's 6k test. Best: Set a PR.

It turns out none of those three were in the cards. I finished 11 seconds slower than last year's time, also a poor performance.

And so, with less than 24 hours, I had to pick my sorry butt up and get ready to attack a new day on the water. Overall, I was really pleased with a second place finish, closing the margin on Emily, the event winner on the erg and the water.


Once racing was over, we hit the ground running. Our next big regatta is US Rowing Olympic Trials in Sarasota this April. With 5 months to prepare, I've got a lot of fitness left to build.

Fortunately, I've taken nearly 30 seconds off of my 6k erg since Fall Speed Order! If I can continue that rate of improvement, I'll have the world record by trials. ;)

How did your fall go? Ready for winter training?

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Since I started training three and a half years ago, I've always been a big fan of "work smarter, not harder".

It has gotten me really far without any serious injury or illness along the way. I've dropped almost a minute on my 2k erg score, built out incredible base fitness, and learned to move a single incredibly efficiently.

But as my progress has slowed short of my ultimate goal, I have realized that working smarter is no longer enough. All of the athletes at the level I hope to reach are working smartly. They all have great training plans, great coaches, great habits and great boat skills.

Three and a half years is long enough to figure out the "right way" for me. And I think I've done just that–I'm on a training plan I love, in a place I enjoy training, with a coach I trust, in a boat that fits, eating food that makes me feel good.

It's time to start working harder at it.



Of course, that's easier said than done.

Unlearning the habits of three years of training is uncomfortable. No more calculations. If I pull 2:08 for another 1000 meters and then 2:02 for the last 300m, I can bring my split down by 2 seconds. No more strategizing. I can switch these two workouts and it will be the same volume but feel easier. Just work.

"Stopping thinking about the shoulds and the coulds—I should be lifting more or I could be fitter. Accept where you are and focus on just doing." - Krystal Melendez

There is constant discomfort during both training and recovery. I'm learning to accept, even embrace, it, rather than working to fix it.

During workouts, I've been searching for "flow", a concept Wil Heywood introduced to me several years back and I promptly dismissed. I find it best during my cool downs after weight-lifting sessions, when the lights in the erg room have shut off and it's too dark to see the Concept2 monitor. I set a timer on my phone, and just swing with the music until my time is up.

In the weight room, I've learned to stop thinking about how I'm going to finish the workout, and instead focus on just doing. I'm adding weight to the bar with no intention or thought of the repercussions—just to do it.

Most importantly, I'm learning to silence the voice in my head—the voice that tells me I'm tired, no exhausted. I'm learning to listen to the training plan and accept the wave of exhaustion that hits me midday on Wednesday, letting it drag my body through the riptide of Thursday morning and out to the calm seas of our afternoon off.

I expect it now. I know that fatigue and emptiness lingers with training or with rest and that sometimes the familiar discomfort of a long slow slog on the erg is better than the uncontrolled discomfort of moping in bed.

"Americans: they want everything yesterday." Guenter Beutter, coach extraordinaire

Now, I wait. You can never compare one training plan or approach to another, because you've only executed one of them. The most you can do is hope what you're doing takes you to your destination.


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What do you do when you suddenly come by 30+ pounds of tasty local organic apples? Put them in everything!

I was worried this sandwich would be too weird, but it was a tasty way to use apples and improve the protein count of a sweeter sandwich. A great alternative to PB&J, we actually ate these for dinner!

Here are the instructions:
- Slice the tofu into thin pieces and press to get out some of the water
- Dip tofu in liquid/fat (I used melted coconut oil, Earth Balance and cinnamon whiskey!)
- Dip wet tofu in cinnamon sugar mix (use some brown sugar for bonus points)
- Bake in the oven at 350°F for about 30 minutes, or until the sugar gets gooey
- Serve on soft whole wheat bread with sliced tart apples and a thin layer of peanut butter.

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Last month, Dan and I took a much needed vacation! We are both fortunate with flexible work schedules, and were able to head west for three weeks.

My coach gave me permission to take 1-2 weeks completely off. I knew it would be difficult to train away from home, so I fit in training where I could. I ended up taking about 1.5 weeks completely off and another 2 weeks of half-time training.

We started in California, where we were able to visit my parents, grandparents and sister. I went on some nice long runs and bike rides, saw a baseball game, hiked to Land's End, ate a lot of food, drank a lot of wine and generally recovered from a pretty stressful 11 months.

Mom and Dad during our Land's End hike.

Dan doing Dan things.

All of the fruits and veggies all the time.

My Dad's fresh bread

New sneakers!

The second half of vacation was spent in Oregon. I flew into Eugene, and immediately fell in love with the place. We had an awesome vegan brunch before heading to the coast to escape the heat.

On the coast, Dan found a crazy awesome camp site. We stayed two nights while we visited Dan's dad, who was docked in Coos Bay for boat repairs. We then drove up the coast, visited Dan's mom, picked blackberries, had an amazing meal in Portland and flew back to Connecticut.

Just a small haul of berries.

The only person in the world that makes Dan look short.

Our campsite.

Sunset in Coos Bay.

Back in Connecticut, it was time to get back to serious training. Our return coincided quite nicely with the Rowing World Championships. We were able to watch the races most morning before our training sessions, which was great motivation those first uncomfortable weeks.

Although the U.S. was plagued with injury and illness in this important year, the country still had a fabulous showing, particularly on the women's side. The U.S. women qualified all of the Olympic boat classes, and reached the A-final in all of the non-Olympic boat classes (including one gold and one bronze medal, no less!).

However, if you have to pick just two races to watch, I recommend the LM4x and M1x A-finals. Very exciting. Watch at worldrowing.com

Now that the 2014-15 season is all wrapped up, it's time to start looking forward to the Olympic year! I have always known that making the team in 2016 was a stretch. Gaining speed takes a long time, and improvements have been slow for me. However, I'm in a good place going into this fall season and poised to have my best year yet. Who knows what it will bring, but I'm excited to see where it will take me.

Check back soon for updates on my fall racing schedule, winter training plans and ways you can help support my dreams!

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Dan and I are loyal Aeropress users at home. But bringing an electric kettle and the Aeropress, however portable, on the road is a hassle. And hotel coffee? Not even worth it.

When you're travelling for races, morning caffeine is a necessity, not a choice. So I've found some alternatives:

1. Cold brew with a French press
If you prep your coffee 24 hours in advance, you can have a delicious cup of cold brew from tap water. I've found it to be not as strong as hot brew, but it's a decent substitute and is perfect for tropical vacations and hot training trips.

• Starbucks and Peets will grind their beans for you in store, so you can get them ground for a French press
• Look for sources of hot water—many hotels have microwaves or hot water for tea
• You can use the press to brew loose leaf tea as well!
• There are also travel mug french presses. (It's on my birthday wish list.)

2. Go out for coffee
I know this one is obvious, but I always forget it on road trips until we're already out the door. Hotel and gas station coffee is generally horrendous. Instead, check out local places on Yelp (or just find your nearest chain coffee shop) and make a date of it.

• For race mornings, I put my coffee into a travel coffee mug (the Contigo autoseal mug is awesome) so I can drink it hot after weigh-ins
• If you don't plan to drink it right away, iced coffee is much better at room temperature than hot coffee

3. Califia iced coffee
The price of this stuff was a bit off-putting, but when my only alternative was to go out on the daily, it became pretty economical. It's a pre-brewed, pre-sweetened iced coffee made with almond milk. The double espresso packs a mighty punch and is also delicious!

• Make sure you have a refrigerated storage option for this stuff.
• Pour it into a small re-usable bottle (or one of the hotel coffee cups!) and bring it with you

4. Trader Joe's cold brew concentrate
This definitely wasn't my favorite coffee, but they sell a decent size bottle of concentrate for about $8, which makes this one of the least expensive options.

• Dilute it with sweetened non-dairy milk

5. Caffeinated Clif bars and nuun tabs
When you're on a road trip, or about to launch your boat for a race, you really don't want to worry about bathroom breaks every 30 minutes. Coffee has a knack for running through your system and hitting your bladder hard. The Clif bar/nuun tab combination is great for combatting this!

• My favorites are the chocolate mint bar and the lemon-lime energy tab—but they admittedly don't go very well together.
• There are a lot of other caffeinated sport foods if you don't like Clif bars or nuun

6. Chocolate covered espresso beans
I have yet to find a vegan version of these in stores, but they're pretty easy to make. Mix melted chocolate with espresso beans and let cool. These are also excellent for bladder management, and an AWESOME excuse to eat chocolate for breakfast.

• Add them to yogurt, granola or trail mix to prevent over-caffeination
• Use a hair dryer to melt the chocolate—your hotel room should have one

7. Unsweetened iced tea
Most grocery stores carry bottled unsweetened black iced tea. I don't think there's anything wrong with sweetened iced tea, or the green stuff, but for purely caffeine purposes, the unsweetened black stuff is the best. You can drink more of it and there's more caffeine per ounce than green tea. Win-win. (Or at least as win as you can get without a hot cuppa joe.)


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With an anti-climatic end to the summer racing season, I can only looking forward to an exciting year to come.

My racing for 2015 is over, but the World Championships are still to come for Team USA. I will be watching carefully, as this year is the first chance to qualify boats for the 2016 Olympics in Rio.

Here's how it works:
- Countries can earn a spot at the Olympic games by meeting certain performance standards at this year's World Championships
- Those spots are by country—the athletes can change
- In the lightweight women's double, the Olympic qualification standard is top 11 at the World Championships
- For boats that don't qualify this year, there is another opportunity to qualify next year

With the great performance of the US lightweight double at their most recent international race, I am hopeful that we can meet the Olympic qualification standard this year.

The next major regatta for me is US Olympic Trials, to be held in Sarasota, Florida, from April 18th to 24th. Assuming all goes well at this year's World Championships, a win at that regatta would be a direct path to Rio 2016.

So what happens between now and then?

First, I am taking a much needed break. I've been working my tail off since December of last year, and made some great improvements. And now, I'm pretty tired. My body and mind need a good rest before I gear up for our next huge training block—which lasts until April! I will be spending some time with family in California and Oregon, some of it completely off and some of it cross-training.

Second, I'll be prepping for fall racing season. I'm considering a few different fall races, including Head of the Potomac/Green Mountain Head (same weekend), Head of the Charles, Head of the Fish, and Fall Speed Order. I won't attend all five of those races, but I'd like to fit in at least three.

Third, we'll be heading indoors to get fitter. We usually come off the water in mid-November. I'm a strong believer in getting in at least 8 weeks primarily on the ergs—with maybe a week of either rowing or cross-training sometime in the middle. That will take me through mid-January indoors.

Fourth, we are hoping for an extended trip to Sarasota to row and prep for Trials. Typically, we can't get on the water until early March, sometimes later. That is not enough time to prep for Trials, and 40°F days in New Milford are not productive training for 80°F racing in Florida.

Which brings me to money. At the moment, only two lightweight women receive any financial support from US Rowing, and that is minimal. I have been self-funded (and husband-funded) through this journey. As we come into the home stretch before Olympic trials, it's time to focus on training, not finances.

Over the next month, I will be putting together a budget for training and living expenses through April. Donations through our non-profit foundation (the Northeast High Performance Rowing Foundation) helped me take a three week training trip to Sarasota last spring that made a huge difference in my performance in the important early spring races. If you are able to donate, keep an eye out here for details about how to make a tax-deductible donation!

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As crazy as it seems, summer racing is over. When I left off, I was headed up to Princeton to race at World Championship Trials. If you didn't follow the results, we placed second, just 1.37 seconds behind the Riverside boat.

Our goal as a crew was to break 6:30, which we did, with an awesome time of 6:29.47. But, just like PanAm trials, we learned that wicked fast wasn't going to cut it anymore.

There were a lot of emotions, many of which I still haven't identified. I am super excited by our performance. I am disappointed to have not made the team—but less disappointed than I expected, which is confusing.



Whatever the emotions, we didn't have much time to process, as we headed back to the race course the following morning for the US Rowing Elite National Championships. All four of us tripled up, racing the light women's single, double and quad. (We were the only lightweight quad entered, so we raced in the open weight women's quad final and received our own medal.)


Overall, it was a great race. I placed 3rd in the single, then turned around and won the double less than two hours later. We came in second in the open quad race, but got a gold medal for being small! I came home happy but exhausted and in need of some recovery.

We had a taco feast:

Made some mojitos:

And ate veggies from our farm share:

And a week later, I got back in the car and went back to the swamp, a.k.a. Washington, DC.

Let me explain:
In April, US Rowing held the first National Selection Regatta, where I raced the open women's single. At the same time, the lightweight women's doubles raced. My doubles partner and I had only just tried our combination a week prior, and were not able to make weight for the race, so we didn't enter.

At that race, Devery Karz and Michelle Sechser won, and earned the right to race as USA1 at the World Cup 2 or 3—a series of summer races leading up to the World Championships. If they placed top 4, they would qualify automatically for the World Championships for the USA. Otherwise, the boat would go back to trials in early August.

Since Devery and Michelle elected to race at World Cup 3, in mid-July, we decided to practice the double in preparation for Trials.

Morgan and I raced and won the light 2x at Elite Nationals.

I headed down to DC on July 7th and got to work.

DC is hot and rainy, and exhausting. Practices were at 6am sharp—and parking was gone by 5:30am. The afternoon session started at 5pm most days, to avoid the hottest part of the day. But it was always hot.

We practiced and raced for a week, and by the 12th, Devery and Michelle had placed 3rd at World Cup 3 and I was starting to plan my drive home.

I'm disappointed that Morgan and I didn't get a chance to race our line-up. It would have been a great check point going into fall and winter training. However, I'm really excited that Devery and Michelle are going fast—we need them to place top 11 at this year's World Championships to qualify the US for the Olympics next year.

I'll write more about my upcoming plans in the next few weeks, but for now I am back in New Milford, sleeping, eating and recovering to prep for the next long training block.

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I'm never sure whether that hashtag is "what I ate this week on Wednesday" or "what I ate one day this week, published on Wednesday". I thought the former would be more honest: I couldn't choose the most conveniently healthy day of food from the week.

If you followed results from PanAm Trials, you may have noticed that the lightweight women had a dominating performance. Many congrats to Mary Jones in the light women's single and Sarah Giancola and Victoria Burke in the light women's double for pulling such fast times.

I was eliminated in the semi-final round. It was definitely disappointing, but it was a 10-second PR in the single for me, so I was still really proud of the result. There were a lot of mixed emotions to process—I knew I'd gotten a lot faster, and that was correct, but it turns out everybody else got a lot faster, too.

After a week of processing, I travelled down to Washington, DC to train with three other lightweight women out of the Potomac Boat Club. All four of us raced the singles at PanAm Trials, and have been spending the last few weeks trying to mesh as a crew.

On the drive up to Princeton

Starting this evening, we'll be racing in the lightweight women's quad at World Championship Trials, alongside Riverside and Vesper crews. For the last two years, there have been only two quads and a lot more singles racing at trials, so it will be fun to have a competitive three boat final.

It's been really fun to watch the depth increase over this Olympic cycle, even if it means working harder to get where I want to be.

Racing begins today with a late evening time trial that will determine lanes for Wednesday's final. The winner of the final will earn a spot on the 2015 US National Team for the World Championships.

Also starting on Wednesday are the USRowing Elite National Championships. Our quad will be racing the open women's quad (no weigh in!) because there were no other lightweights entered in the quad. We will also be splitting into smaller boats and racing the light women's double and light women's single.

More information about Trials.
More information about Nationals.

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The GMS crew is in Princeton racing at US Trials for the 2015 PanAm Games. We've got two open women's singles, two lightweight women's singles, a lightweight women's double and half of a composite crew in the lightweight men's double.

The time trials went down to the course last night. Heats and repechages are today. Heat sheets and results can be found here:
https://www.herenow.com/#/races/20148/results

In the lightweight women's single, there are three heats, and the top two in each heat progress automatically to Tuesday's semi-final. Everybody else races in one of two repechages this evening, where the top boat in each rep advances.

There are definitely huge advantages to only racing once today! The semi-final rounds are usually very fast, and having fresher legs is important.

Another note: this is elimination style racing—there are no B and C level finals. If a crew doesn't progress, their regatta is over. The first crews will be eliminated tonight during the repechage.


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Life for the last 6 months has been super busy, between an increased workload and an increased training load. We're starting to settle into a good spring/summer rhythm. Lots of sunlight means lots of time to get stuff done.

So, at long last, an update.

After a long, but productive, winter season, we headed down to Sarasota, Florida for some water time. We were there for 3.5 weeks, and ran and swam and rowed and biked as much as possible.

All this to prep for the first National Selection Regatta. Unfortunately, US Rowing changed the format of racing this year, eliminating the lightweight women's single from the NSR program.

This year, doubles were emphasized at the first NSR, but GMS is a very small club. That makes finding a partner difficult. We had used NSR1 in the single to help us find appropriate doubles partners. Without that option, I was without a partner.

Guenter (my coach) and I decided that focusing on the single was the best option. The open weight women's single was offered at NSR1 (although doubles were given higher priority). With only 7 entries (four of them lightweights!!), it was a good, low-pressure race to start the season.

Racing the time trial at the 2015 NSR1

And the results were a great starting point:

The two Potomac athletes are also lightweights.

My racing schedule for the summer is not yet finalized, but here are the domestic races I hope to attend.

PanAmerican Games Trials, May 17-20, Mercer Lake, New Jersey - Lightweight Women's Single
Senior I/U23 World Championship Trials, June 21-24, Mercer Lake, New Jersey
US Rowing National Championships, June 24-26, Mercer Lake, New Jersey

Notice that they are all in New Jersey? Currently all national team trials and most elite level regattas are held on Mercer Lake, just outside of Princeton. If you know anybody in the area willing to host a rower, let me know! Hotel costs add up quickly over the season (and hotels don't have kitchens).
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