Spring Break Training Trip: Day 2

Each spring, the men's rowing team travels south for a spring break training trip. For the past several years, the Orange have traveled to Clemson, S.C. to stay at Clemson Outdoor Lab with other collegiate teams from the north who spend the week training on Lake Hartwell.

While down in Clemson, S.C., senior oarsman and intern in the Syracuse athletics communications office Connor Toomey, will be journaling the team's week-long training trip to Lake Hartwell. Each day, Toomey will log his experience on the trip, which will be the last of his collegiate rowing career at Syracuse. Below is one of Toomey's entries.

Day 1: First Full Day

We all woke up around 7 a.m. this morning to find that it was quite cold and pouring rain outside. My cabin had a fun time planning and figuring out what to wear to be the warmest while wearing the least amount of clothing. Rory Taylor and I sprinted to Kresge Hall which is our meeting spot for breakfast, lunch and practice. I had a banana and chatted with Jack Gorman, Mack Carr, Cal Hansen, Stevie Chuck, and Chris Young while we waited for our pre-practice meeting/warmup. Turns out it was Adam Conrad's birthday today, so we all wished him a very happy birthday before launching! Coach Reischman decided to push practice back to 11 a.m. to avoid some thunderstorms that are rolling through the area. Chris and I sprinted back to our cabin in the rain making jokes about the weather. Chris is from Tennessee and is used to warm southern weather, so he was quite baffled why it is so cold in Clemson. I just made jokes saying I didn't sign up for this part of rowing as we sprinted through the wall of rain.

10:15 - Everyone met for breakfast in Kresge Hall. The hot options were eggs, potatoes, and bacon with cereal and fruit as other choices to have. With practice being at 11 a.m. we just went straight into a warmup and launched around 11 a.m. I went out in one of two eights with coach Reischman and Joe Biondolillo's launch. We did a ton of steady state and some drills to put together a 20Kish row. During the row it went from rainy and windy to calm conditions back to super windy depending on what part of the lake we were on. My crew consisted of Bricen Nygaard, Arnaud Buard, Joe Willis, Lachlan Doust, Ben Dukes, myself, Anders Erlandsen, Finn Conlon, and Murphy Waters (from Cox to Bow). At two points in the row we pulled the boats together and swapped Isaac Evans for Ben Dukes and then eventually swapped Anders for Cole Nordby before doing three sets of 3-2-1 minutes at rates 20-22-24 to take it home.

2:00 - Julie, our athletic trainer, was administering some treatment before lunch so some of us were in Kresge a little before 2 p.m. but for the most part everyone showed up at two. We had cold cuts, soup, salads, and snacks for lunch. After that we had about an hour before our second practice of the day.

3:30 - The squad launched for our second session after some boat meetings with the coaches. Coach Reischman explained that we are at the point in the year that consistency in the little things is important to keep in mind so that we can focus on other things in practice. It was also a talk about accountability where Coach told us "If the boat is down to your side, assume that you are the problem. Do what you can to make the next stroke better." After that we launched in eights and went for about a 10K row of drills, steady state, and some fun burst strokes to close out the session, completing around a total of 30K for the day. It was a cool row with the temperature being around 44 degrees, but thankfully it had stopped raining and there was only some light fog covering the lake. Once we were off the water, we all hit the showers and got ready to go to Clemson's campus for dinner.

6:10 - Tonight, at the Dining hall we ran into even more teams on spring break, most of them hailing from the Upstate/Central New York region. Rochester Institute of Technology and Colgate joined us at dinner along with Marist. Indiana's women's rowing team also joined this evening.

After dinner we headed back to the Outdoor Lab where the guys broke off to do a plethora of things. Some of the guys went to do some homework assignments for the break, others went to see our trainer, Julie, and then there was a group that went to go play video games. To close the night there will be a large group of us going to Kresge Hall to watch the season finale of "The Last of Us" using Stevie Chuck's projector and speaker at 9 p.m.