It's 5:30 am and I resist the urge to throw my phone across the room; instead I hit snooze (for the third time). Practice. Five short, early morning minutes pass while I suffer a mini existential crisis. "I'll go down to the boathouse, quit, and get back in bed." These thoughts have occupied my mind every morning for the past three years, which has me reflecting on why I haven't just quit yet. Queue soul search.
Whether I like it or not, by 5:50 my teeth are brushed, I'm dressed, and I'm scooting down to the boathouse while 2004's greatest hits drown out my self loathing.
I'm a little more rational at 6:00 and decide not to go through with quitting today. I see my friends and it's comfortable to see them just as sleepy and existentially confused as me, weirdly I think we find peace in questioning our sanity together. We exchange mostly exhausted looks and before we know it warmup music wakes up the boathouse, our coaches direct us and we're rolling.
By 6:30, somehow I'm in the middle of the Hudson River. My non-crew friends won't be awake for another three hours (bitches). A low, smoky fog rolls over water that hasn't cooled down from the summer and teases us all with pockets of warmth. The sun rises, and unfailingly the horizon catches all of our breath. Somehow has a different aesthetic every time you look at it. We are interrupted only by the instructions of our coaches and the hum of trains hauling commuters to New York City.
By 7:00, the sun is warming up the Hudson Valley and my existential crisis has been forgotten, at least for another 24 hours. Being out there, with a group of girls who show up and commit (regardless of what kind of hell we're going through academically or otherwise) cultivates a sense of community that I can't imagine college without. Being a member of a team at Marist has given me so much. That's easy to forget as I'm torn from bed at 5:30, but hey, you can sleep when you're dead.
