Up the Creek with the Minnesota Boat Club

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I’m 15 minutes late for my meeting with Susan Tietjan of the Minnesota Boat Club on a weekday morning when I’m driving on Raspberry Island on the Mississippi and she is unhappy. “I just left you a long phone message,” says Susan, briefly gesturing for me to follow her to the 110-year-old boat club building. “I don’t get any emails here.” She waves my apology away. “We are now ready to go.”

I had confused the Minnesota Boat Club with the Minneapolis Rowing Club up my river neck, and it turned out that the Minnesota Boat Club is the oldest sports organization in Minnesota, celebrating its 150th anniversaryNS Anniversary this year (actually 151NS– the 150thNS Party postponed for a year due to COVID), it’s not a rare occurrence to be mistaken for its significantly younger counterpart in Minneapolis.

“That happens too often,” says Susan as we walk into the boat club’s spartan “erg” room, which is furnished with squat benches, dumbbells and a row of tipped Concept 2 Erg rowing machines. Susan is obviously exercising – she is six feet tall and rowing the Mississippi three to four mornings a week has made her legs and arms as strong as the towering First National Bank Building across the river facing. “I was recruited to row because I was tall,” she says. Susan grew up in South St. Paul and began rowing competitively at Archbishop Brady High School in St. Paul before joining the varsity crew at the University of Wisconsin. (Despite their football team’s ubiquitous slogan, the U of M didn’t start offering women’s rowing as a college sport until 2004, and men’s rowing is still a club sport.) After school, she returned home to race for the Minnesota Boat Club and switched to the Separate rowed rowing style. She says her biggest win was the women’s quad in Havana at the 1991 Pan-Am Games, and she’s still competitive in the Masters division more than 30 years later. But she doesn’t want this story to focus on her. The Boat Club invited me to Raspberry Island to tour their building – the new boathouse was built in 1910, replacing the previous boathouse from 1885 – for a tour and my first rowing lesson before their big party that Saturday morning, November 11th September, with an open day and boat races from 7 am

Susan leads me upstairs to the club’s large fireplace room. She tells me about the great Olympians who, sitting on their coats, won some of the trophies. Early 20thNS In the 19th century, crew was America’s greatest sport, and this boat club was the Twin Cities’ entrance to this world. Susan says the greatest rower this club has produced to date is likely Larry Klecatsky, who competed in a double scull at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. The boathouse was designed in the Spanish missionary style by George H. Carsley in 1910 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. Pointing out the terrazzo floors that were laid about 15 years ago, Susan says the Boat Club hired Mintahoe Catering to rent the space out for weddings and events. We go to the large veranda and look at the city that is beginning to awaken on the other side of the water. “I say we have the best properties in town,” she says. We watch a blue heron gather on the boat club dock and take flight.

Susan takes me back to the training room first and we all pull down a Concept 2. She says this machine is the industry standard in the rowing world. I imagine pulling the handle up to put the oars in the water, then pulling it up to my chest before pushing it down to get the imaginary oars out of the water and slide over my knees to return to the first position. Satisfied, she takes me to the boathouse.

“It usually takes ten hours of training to get on the water,” she warns. First of all, rowing has its own vocabulary – “Erg”, “Sweep”, “Scull”, “Shell”, “Coxswain”, “Ruderschloss”, “Button” – just a few examples of a glossary that is so extensive She shows me her own boat, which rests on a pair of clam racks out on the dock, an incredibly thin yellow carbon fiber composite that she christened XOXO. “It only weighs 30 pounds,” she explains, “and if you get in it could mistake your foot right through your butt.” She says it’s time to go back to the boathouse for my training bowl.

She first shows me how to carry my oars. “If someone asks for help, whatever he will do,” she says, which is not always easy for her, “always let him carry your oars.” Then she shows me how to pick up the training shell (“shell” is rowing for “Boot”) and how to avoid the rudder locking arms from hitting the other grenades. Then she shows me how to climb down the 60-degree angled metal ramp onto the boat club’s lower dock. Then we slide the training bowl into the water and it shows you how to get into the boat yourself. And then, out on the Mississippi, she demonstrates a couple of blows. “But I’ll make it look easy,” she yells. She climbs out, back onto the dock – now it’s my turn.

Getting into a 50-pound training bowl is an elaborate dance step in and of itself. You’ll need to place your left leg firmly on a reinforced plank just in front of the seat, then slide your whole body around your plant leg as you lower yourself into the bowl. Every fiber of my being has been destabilized and the dark waters of the Mississippi seem hungry for me. Susan literally tied a rope from the clam to the dock so I wouldn’t drift too far downstream from her. She’s an encouraging trainer, but all the little warnings that came in that morning had good reasons.

Rowing is on real water and not on an erg machine in a gym heavy. First of all, you do everything, counterintuitively, the other way around. My starboard is my port and port is my starboard. And sculling means there are two separate, surprisingly heavy oars with handles that you hold on top of each other with your left and right hands – the movements are all very close to the beating of the head / the rubbing of the abdomen, except in a pointy little carbon Fiber boat, on a river with a strong current. You need to incorporate every little movement into a coordinated stroke: first, slide the oars out of the water, use your wrists to twist them to the paddle position, and then pull them into the water. After 30 unsuccessful attempts, the application turned out to be too much for me. It was shaky and frustrating, and after 20 minutes Susan could see it. “Ready to come in?” She asked. Yes sir.

I was delusional – I imagined myself rowing a few miles up a peaceful, misty Mississippi at dawn, watching the beavers at work and listening to the bark of the foxes. It must feel so cool! I am hours and hours of coaching and training away from even near that level. But on Saturday I’ll be out here again and watch great athletes like Susan make this incredibly challenging sport look easy.

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