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.Â
7:00 AM
Hummingbird Cabin woke up to almost everyone's alarm going off at the same time. We all slowly got out of bed and got ready to head to Kresge to warm up and have some bagels, toast, or fruit before starting our team warmup at 7:45 a.m. After completing the warmup, we broke up into our boat groups and met with the coaches. Coach Reischman explained to the group that I was in that we were going to warmup doing some drills with inside & outside arm only to feel to drop and pickup of the blade in the water effectively. Coach ended his speech by telling us that we would have some fun with some hard pulling today. He told us that we would be doing four by eight-minute pieces with some switches between the eights. We launched in much nicer weather than the day prior. It was about 45 degrees, no wind, and the sun was rising through the clouds. By the end of the row the water was glass with slight wind depending on what direction we were going with the sun shining down on us.
Adam Conrad and Tristan Wakefiled celebrated their birthdays during our trip.
10:00 AM
Coming back into Kresge Hall after practice some guys hung out until breakfast was ready and the rest went back to their cabins to shower and drop off their bags. In that time, I learned that it we had another birthday on the team, Tristan Wakefield. All the guys know that I am doing my capstone for the Athletic Communications office and with our awesome SIDs at 'Cuse, so they are always asking me if I can edit their bios for cuse.com to sneak a joke in. Mark and I were talking about his bio that he sent me in the fall and how he wanted me to basically put down that he was Shaquille O'Neal when he was in his prime with the Los Angeles Lakers. For reference Mark is one of our coxswains and is one of the smaller guys on the team which is funny to think about. I unfortunately told him I cannot put that he is Shaq because we need to have some level of professionalism on cuse.com.
Other parts of the conversation included how everyone's row went and our thoughts on the Last of Us finale that most of the table watched together the night before. Before I left to go back to my cabin, Alex Degrado told me that I should check in with him later because he wanted to think of something fun to say for these logs. I'll check back with him later to see if he has anything to say.
Now the team will hangout, get treatment, do work, nap, game, or enjoy the nice weather. I will be doing some work for the capstone experience that I have been assigned for the week and then go see Julie (our athletic trainer) for some treatment before lunch at 2 p.m.
12:00 PM
I wandered down to Kresge Hall to continue some work and get treatment from Julie. I hung out with Ryan Elsinga, Adam Rajab, Mark Ezaki, and Ben Campbell-Reide. I am working on a research project for women's basketball where I am finding the quarter-by-quarter stats from the 2021-22 season to whenever women's basketball went to quarters from halves.
Lunch today was cream of potato soup, deli meats for sandwiches, salad, potato salad, pasta salad, chips and pretzels. After lunch I continued my work in Kreske for a little while, then walked back to Hummingbird to wrap up work for the day and chill before second practice.
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Chris Young and Scott Zimmerman outside a cabin.
In my cabin I played on Tristan's Nintendo switch with Tristan and Joe Willis. We played Super Smash Bros: Ultimate. Tristan is very good while Joe and I are reteaching ourselves how to play so it took us some time to be competitive. Some time went by and then it was time to row again.
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A view of Lake Hartwell from my cabin window.
3:30 PM
This afternoon we broke down into fours. There were six fours in total, four of which were with Coach Reischman and then the other two were with Coach Walters. I was in a four with Coach Walters where Murphy Waters stroked, I sat in three seats with Ryan Elsinga in two seats, Cal Hansen in Bow and Katherine Kelly coxing us. We called ourselves the "Old Man Four" because Murphy, Ryan and I are all seniors and although Cal is a freshman, we like to say he has an old soul at heart. It was the first time that we all had been in fours in a long time, so we started by pairs to get the feeling back. The weather was nice and sunny out, but a bit windy so we had to take a bit of an interesting course to stay protected from the wind. My four made some really good progress over the course of the session and had fun in the process.
Now I'm going to get ready to head with the team to dinner at the Clemson Dining Hall again and then after that I heard that some of the guys are going to play poker tonight while some others play a few games of quiplash on Stevie's projector. I will more than likely go see what both groups are up to once I double check to make sure I have all of my assignments completed for the day.
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