Weight Watchers

You’ll never see any of the Harvard men’s lightweight rowers at a Weight Watchers meeting talking about their splurges for the week. But though they avoid the diet shakes and packaged meals, many are forced to go to similar lengths in order to shed those last crucial pounds needed to race.

Every rower—light or heavy—is required to weigh in before each race. During the fall season the weight restrictions aren’t as stringently enforced, in part because a lot of lightweights still need to lose quite a few pounds—more than they safely could were the regulations applied in full.

But once spring comes, the guidelines become stricter and that scale can start to look exceptionally scary.

And whereas no heavyweight can ever be too heavy—that division has no maximum cutoff to race—all lightweights must weigh in under 155 lbs. to be able to compete.

Some are going to have to weigh in at significantly less than the required 155, though because in addition to the individual limit, each boat must average no more than 150 lbs. per person.

So it appears pretty inconceivable that any sane rower would choose to make the jump from the heavyweight division down to the lightweight division, but there are a brave few who decide to make the commitment and take the risk.

Generally the rowers who choose to drop down into the lightweight division are those whose weight hovers just above the maximum—they tend to weigh between 160 and 180 pounds. These rowers can row as heavyweights and let their size dictate how far they can go or they can row lightweight and use their larger size to their advantage to excel in the field.

“I ran the risk of either being a slow heavyweight or, hopefully, a fast lightweight,” said junior lightweight rower Dan Reid.

Reid decided to make the switch to lightweight after his freshman year. He weighs in at around 169 pounds right now, which puts him on the cusp for both teams, but he feels that he can make a much bigger contribution to the lightweight team than he ever could as a heavyweight.

But dropping the pounds can be a daunting task. It requires a high level of commitment to diet and exercise that aren’t as crucial in the heavyweight division.

When it comes to diet, eating healthy is the most important thing. These rowers don’t sit down to a lunch of celery and water—but they do have to severely increase their intake of fiber and fruit. More generally, they have to be very conscious of what they consume.

And whereas both Reid and junior lightweight rower Jonah Todd-Geddes say that dieting isn’t really that bad, Reid says that he does miss his old junk food habits.

“You never realize how much you want something till you can’t have it,” Reid said.

But the rowers don’t necessarily live at their rowing weight either. Most walk around heavier than ideal weight, so there is always a big push right before a race to get under the limit.

“You don’t have to live at that weight completely,” Todd-Geddes said. “[Plus] it adds a whole new dynamic to rowing.”

To help drop those extra pounds right before a race, all the lightweights will actually cut out water for a whole nine hours before weigh in. Water weight can add up fast and may just be the difference that swings the scale in the right direction.

But more important than diet are the changes that these rowers have to make in their exercise regimen. Rowers don’t do that much weight training anyway but they still tend to build up a fair amount of muscle. If they spend all winter riding the ergometer—a rowing machine designed to increase endurance—they are going to develop some pretty huge shoulders.

And while building up your arm strength is important, having huge shoulders is not entirely necessary. All that extra muscle just adds unwanted weight to the lightweights’ lean bodies.

So most lightweights tend to shy away from the weight training aspects as much as possible and try to load up their workouts with an increased amount of cardio and higher fat-burning exercises. The best cardio to melt away the pounds, though, is running.

“Running is a magic trick,” Reid said.

Reid ended up adding a lot of running to his daily regimen, while Todd-Geddes didn’t really have to make any adjustment at all.

“I didn’t have trouble keeping [the weight] off since I couldn’t even keep it on in high school [in order to row heavyweight]” Todd-Geddes said.

Now that they’ve made the transition, both rowers said that they wouldn’t go back to rowing heavyweight at Harvard.

“I [feel] that I [get] along with the [lightweight] team very well and I really [like] the guys,” Reid said.

While they do love their new team Reid and Todd-Geddes do miss the tradition that comes with the Harvard heavyweight division.

Every year for the week before the Harvard-Yale regatta the heavyweight team makes its way to a special training camp, Red Top, in New London, Conn., where all the rowers do for a week is eat, sleep and row. The lightweights, who race against the Bulldogs and Princeton earlier in the year, don’t get to be a part of that bonding, and sometimes feel a bit left out of the festivities.

But for Reid and Todd-Geddes, that beats actually being left out of a boat that has a chance at bringing home a win, and making their presence felt. Even if it’s a smaller, slightly more lanky presence.