The Purdue Crew indoor training season the team is currently grinding through can be long, tedious, dreary, repetitive, tiresome, exhausting, monotonous, unrelenting, and generally feel like it's run on a bit too long. During this long gray twilight, the brisk Indiana wind cuts through athletes' coats and rips the breath from their body as they exit their cars and step into the boathouse before they can even let slip a cuss word in protest. It's cold. It's dark. It's hard.
And while that's all true, the team has been there each practice of practice of winter motivating and inspiring our eighteen brand new rowing recruits that just joined up this semester, as well as one another, throughout these hard winter workouts with stories of the exciting races and season soon to come. Because as dark as these days sometimes are, those days are just around the corner.
Each winter has an exciting groundhog's day moment on campus when you can feel the season's momentum begin to indelibly shift towards spring. A special day when the sun and temperature break the months' long script of cold and gray, and Purdue's campus becomes electric with a tangible optimism as daring college students tempt fate and walk to class in t-shirts, cutoffs, skirts, and shorts. This past Tuesday the sun finally pushed the mercury north of 50 degrees Fahrenheit and that moment arrived. Grinning rowers quickly shuffled out from their last classes of the day and popped down early to practice, pulling ergs and bikes through the boat bay doors and outside for some pre-practice steady state in the great outdoors. While any of us that have spent a winter in the Midwest can attest that we're more likely to see another blizzard this month than a day in the 70s, the delicate, seismic shift of the rowing season has started. In just one month the team will load up two charter busses and head down to central Tennessee for spring training and racing, and we couldn't be more excited about it.
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