Row, Row, Row Your E-Boat

My grandfather was a butcher. He was 5-foot 8-inches tall, weighed 350 pounds and had a 52-inch waist. He wasn't what you'd call a health freak. By the time I was a teenager, I'd followed in his footsteps: I was chubby. Naturally, I tried everything. I counted calories. I ran. I swam. I even tried out for the cheerleading squad. At my pudgiest, I weighed more than I would 10 years later, full-term with my first child.

In college I shed 30 pounds and never looked back, but along the way I developed a bad attitude toward exercise. Call me a Calvinist, but for me physical exertion has to be purposeful. If I'm digging my guts out trying to eradicate a comfrey from the garden, that's OK. Shoveling horse manure out of my neighbor's barn is all right, too. Walking to a destination is good. "Power-walking" isn't. My idea of a nightmare is going to a fitness center and throwing my Lycra-clad body against the cold steel frame of a weight-lifting device.

So you can imagine my reaction when a friend suggested that I buy an indoor rowing machine, an 8-by-2-foot steel apparatus made by the Concept2 company in Morrisville. Right. If I had an extra $800, I'd spend it on repairs to my 1985 Peugeot station wagon -- not an exercise machine. Still, the reality is I spend most days letting what little muscle mass I have atrophy in front of a computer screen. On second thought, maybe it wasn't such a bad idea.

Once I got past my initial baulkiness, I agreed to borrow a machine and check it out. What piqued my computer-oriented interest was the e-Row program that comes with it. E-Row offers more-or-less anonymous competitive opportunities in the privacy of your own home. It's sort of like answering a personals ad, except the raciest part of the experience, is, well, racing. All I had to do was virtually contact someone online, hook up my machine to the computer and race against them.

I went to a custom bulletin board on the Internet, where owners of Concept2 machines can look for scheduled races or set up a one-on-one. I logged onto the Internet, ran the Windows bulletin board software and looked for a good match.

My first e-Row encounter was with a rowing fanatic from Christchurch on the South Island of New Zealand. He wrote me a two-page e-mail promo about an e-Row relationship: "Every Sunday I race against another Kiwi... and nearly always improve my personal best time in this race. There is no way you could row that hard unless you were racing somebody else."

Determined to race, we tried to connect four times, through the e-Row chat room and the message board. But we never got the 18-hour, day-ahead-day-behind time differential worked out. After all that talk, we stood each other up.

Next time, I scheduled a 2000-meter race with a Stateside guy named Bill. He had also responded to my all-call, is-there-anybody-out-there-willing-to-race posting on the message board. But this time I was clueless as to his abilities. It was kind of like going on a blind date -- I had no idea if Bill was a couch potato or a member of the U.S. National Team. I just got an e-mail from him that said sure, he'd like to race, with a date and time. No braggadocio about his biceps, or self-deprecating remarks about how out of shape he was.

At the appointed time, I checked into the e-Row chat room, and received an e-mail from him asking me if I was ready. I wrote back yeah, and we cut right to the chase. As Bill and I logged on, our yellow stick-like "boats" appeared on the blue computer screen. I hit the program's Start button, triggering the countdown which appeared on the computer screen: 5-4-3-2-1-ROW. Eyes glued to the tube in front of me, I cranked the handle back as hard as I could, then folded my body forward with my knees balled up in a crouch and then pushed my legs straight, letting my bottom glide on the seat that slides along the steel beam supporting the rowing machine.