A Great Book Makes Me Look Back

Thursday, April 22, 2010

We had such a good rowing practice last evening. Our coach Hunter is great in being able to let us know what we are doing wrong. We flat out told him to yell at us when we screw up. We worked pretty much on improving our techniques and it really showed with a better boat set and better coordination all over. Tonight we will practice all out with kick ass racing starts and a mock race.

In the AquaticCenter in the room where the varsity crew works out, our first coach Alison posted this on the wall:

The athlete's anaerobic threshold is the point at which the body's muscles have exhausted their oxygen store and start burning other fuel. For regular folks, reaching that threshold is quitting time; anaerobic work is 19 times harder than aerobic work. But rowing is all about harder. Elite rowers fire off the start at sprint speed -- 53 strokes per minute. With 95 pounds of force on the blade end, each stroke is a weight lifter's power clean. Rowers cross their anaerobic threshold with that first stroke. Then there are 225 more to the finish line.

This is true for the Olympic level rowers. I’ve gotten up in the mid to high 40’s on the Concept 2 rowing machine doing sprint starts.

I’ll never have the strength and stamina of a collegiate rower, but I’m going to push myself to do the best I can.

Louis had a fantastic book, A Savage Factory: What a great read: it described the Hell of working at a Ford transmission plant in the 1970’s & 1980’s. It was like reading my life story. I devoured that book during my down times on the west coast.

At one point in the book the author described what he went through as he realized he was suffering a nervous breakdown. His Dr had parents who survived the Nazi concentration camps. He explained that what helped his parents survive the horrors of Auschwitz was to have hope and a sense of humour.

It was early on in my GM career back in 1979 I was working on the “blue lines” assembling air conditioning/heating units. These were huge lines with about 100 people working on each one. I worked with a good group of people. At that point in time I had a confrontation with management and was very bitter. I’ll never forget, it was “Dirty Dick” who explained the three phases of an auto workers life to me:

Phase #1 is when you hired in with all kinds of expectations and were all “gung ho” to excel. You lived and breathed your job.

Phase #2 is when you had been screwed over enough you turn cynical and bitter. You hate everything about the factory.

Phase #3 is that stage where you realize how “fucked up” the entire system really is. Finally it dawns on you that you can’t change anything. That is when you stop fighting and just laugh at everything.

When Dick explained that to me it made such perfect sense. I switched into “phase #3” mode and pretty much stayed there till I retired. GM was never my life after that; it was only a job. My life was outside the plant. The carrot at the end of the stick was the freedom to do as I pleased when retirement came.

My mind still has a hard time comprehending how things have turned out for me since I retired out of Corvette Assembly back in 2005. The friendships I’ve made through rowing and the other groups I’m associated with have so enriched my life. I look back to the years I spent with GM/Delphi and working in the factory now is like a dream…sort of like that season of Dallas!