Jan. 15, 2003

Throughout the season, members of the UNC rowing team will provide TarHeelBlue.com readers with an inside look at the Carolina program and the experience of being a varsity athlete at North Carolina. This installment, the 11th of the 2002-03 school year, is by Meredith McIver, a junior from Cincinnati.

Hi Carolina Rowing Fans,

Our first practice back from winter break is always filled with excitement as we hit the ergs for the first time as a team since the beginning of December. Not only are we excited to be back together as a team, but we are faced with the sudden realization that the spring racing season is up and coming. And boy is it exciting!

Before we left Chapel Hill for the holiday break, Coach Haney stressed that not only maintaining, but improving our fitness over the break was of utmost importance to our team's success in the spring. In order to motivate us to hit the ergs over the break, she told us that our first week back in January would be spent taking a test battery. The test battery would consist of 500 meter, 6K, and 2K tests on the erg along with a timed test of an arduous run up the Franklin Street hill.

In order to provide motivation and maintain team cohesion over the break, our captains put together an intra-team workout competition, called the Winter Workout Extravaganza or WWE. Our team, both varsity and novice, was broken up into smaller teams of about five girls based on hometown. This competition gave a specific point value for every kind of workout, whether it be lifting weights, taking a 2K test, or doing a 30-minute steady state. Each team's point averages were ranked and emailed to the entire team each week by captain Lauren Yoder in order to motivate the teams to compete against each other. It definitely motivated everyone to work out even harder as we saw how intense our teammates were training. In the end, the Chapel Hill area team of Lauren Dowdy, Julie Domina, Michelle Hall, Anna MacDonald, Stephanie Hoffman, and Laura Haythorn were the winners of the 2002-03 WWE, turning in the highest point totals of all the teams.

Although competing against each other in the WWE was a great motivator, nothing compares to sitting down to do a hard workout with twenty other girls that have the same desire to win as you do. As we warmed up for our 6K test on Wednesday, we pushed aside all distractions and focused on being back together, training to blow our competition out of the water in the spring!

Yours in Carolina Blue,

Meredith