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They drove three and a half hours for a seven-minute event in which their nervous anticipation and excitement was crushed by excruciating pain. At the end of it, they were nauseous, sore – and elated. The University of Vermont’s crew team wouldn’t have it any other way.

They were competing in the World Indoor Rowing Championships February 24 in Cambridge, Mass. As the Charles River, Harvard’s home course and the site of the world’s largest rowing regatta stood frozen, over two thousand rowers from around the world competed against each other indoors on Concept 2 rowing machines, called ergometers or ergs.

“We’ve been practicing since November for this,” says Greg Stewart, the UVM club president. Rowing on ergs, or “erging” comprises a large and painful part of their six-day per week winter regimen.

Rowing Indoors

The W.I.R.C. is a 2,000 meter competition rowed on Concept 2 Model D ergs in Boston University’s Agannis Arena. As with on-water races, rowers are divided by sex, age and weight. Times range from 5:30 to 7:40 for heavyweight men, and 6:20 to 9:00 for women. Lightweight rowers are an average of 20-30 seconds slower.

Spectators can see how well rowers are doing thanks to a computerized representation of the race on the stadium’s scoreboard screen. Sixteen boats move along the screen, trying to keep pace with one another as the rowers compete below.

There is a large college turnout, with student athletes placing high in the events. Tess Gerrand, of Yale, won both the Women’s and Women’s Collegiate competitions. Two other Yalies, Jamie Redman and Taylor Ritzel, took second and third place at the Collegiate level.

Scott Dotto, a Georgetown University rower, says the erging experience was strange. “Being out there with the spotlight on you, erging’s usually not like that.” Dotto placed second in the Collegiate Lightweight Men’s division, and fifth in Men’s Lightweight. With the erg monitor he saw that he was competing intensely with two other students. He also saw the man four ergs away was on a world-record pace. Dotto says he had to row his best just to keep up.

Origins

Rowers in the North and Midwest compete on water in the fall and spring, but in winter the rivers and lakes freeze, so they head indoors for winter training. This usually includes a regimen of weight lifting, running and erging. This has been the standard method for decades.

In 1980 a group of Olympic and World Team Rowers known as the Charles River All Star Has-Beens (“C.R.A.S.H.-B.”) created an erg race to add some excitement to winter training. The competition had humble beginnings in Harvard’s Newell Boathouse, says Maura Conron, the race coordinator. Over the years the event moved to accommodate more rowers. The race length was shortened to its present 2000 meters in 1996 to meet FISA standards, she says. That year the event became the World Indoor Rowing Championships.

Today the winner of each division is presented with a hammer, in honor of the first commodore of the C.R.A.S.H.-B., Tiff Wood. Wood rowed for Harvard, was a member of three U.S. National Teams and won the bronze medal in the single sculls at the 1983 World Rowing Championships. He was known as a “hammer,” a rower who values brute strength over technique. Hammers like Wood do well on the erg because it rewards raw power while requiring little skill.

This low-key award exemplifies the C.R.A.S.H.-B.’s “untraditional irreverence to all things that are not fun.” The ergometer is “serious business,” reads the C.R.A.S.H.-B website, “threatening to replace fun with pain, unless you can equate the two.

No Pain…

While rowing can be fun, rowers know that erging, when done correctly, is painful. “My excuse for running the thing is that I don’t have to compete,” Conron jokes. “I am definitely a water rower.”

Like the UVM crew, The University of Rhode Island Women’s Crew practices six days a week, says freshman Kim Racine. She had not rowed a stroke in her life before checking out the crew team. “It seemed like something fun to do, keep active.” Winter training brought the pain of ergs. “That’s not so fun, but you’ve got to put up with it,” she says.

Some become sick after the race because of the pain. A sign at the entrance tells competitors about the least coveted of the 200 volunteer positions, the “Program Coordinator of On-Site Human Hazardous Waste Material Removal.” In layman’s terms: barf patrol. Event after event, a few rowers would stumble to any one of the strategically placed garbage cans to expel their breakfast. For some it is a sign of dedication: blood, sweat and vomit.

Meghan Musnicki is an Ithaca College alumnus and rows for Riverside Boat Club in Cambridge. In college she rowed in the NCAA rowing championships twice in the Varsity 8, winning overall in 2004 and winning the “point trophy” for overall team success in 2005. This year she placed third in the W.I.R.C. As a rower, she says, a good portion of her life is dedicated to pain: “There’s gonna be pain regardless, and it’s kind of more of a mental battle at that point, because if you’re physically trained to be fast enough to do it, you can do it. You just have to overcome the mental part of your body telling you don’t want to do this.”

Though her race ended five minutes before, she was still breathing hard as she spoke, flush with elation and exertion, stretching the lactic acid out of her muscles. In her fourth year at the W.I.R.C. she beat her previous score by 11.3 seconds.

The End

At the end of the day, six world records had been set. Rowers watched the last event and filed out, happy or disappointed with a score, all worn from the piece. The collegiate rowers returned to winter training, but soon spring will come.

The UVM crew will head to South Carolina for spring training over spring break, but when they return, say the rowers, the Vermont winter will still be in full force. “It’s not uncommon for us to practice in twenty-degree weather,” says Stewart. But winter training gives rowers a sort of cabin fever, and the W.I.R.C. is fun because of its novelty within winter training. The UVM crew agrees that rowing, even in harsh conditions, beats erging any day.