Lactic Acid In The Erg Room
Audioslave: 'Cochise' + Trials of the growing body + Trials of the growing heart
“Audioslave, huh?” Coach Brown—no relation—barked at me, peering at the CD I’d handed him before snapping it into the erg room boom box, a 400-Watt Panasonic with those quintessentially 90s speaker cups that lit up neon.
There were maybe three dozen of us in that damp room above the boat club office, all saddled on molded plastic rowing machine seats, sliding our feet into stirrups and going through our personal warmup routines, trying to summon extra stamina or strength or the ability to ignore the pain our bodies were about to go through.
This was in the fall of 2002, a few weeks before Boston’s Head of the Charles Regatta. It was an important day—the 2k test, which would determine who made varsity A boat—and I got to pick the starting music because I’d been the first one to show up.
I told Coach to have us start rowing about 30 seconds after the song started, right when the guitar riff hit.
I was 13, and athleticism was new to me. Growing up, I’d been fat and stubby. I’d tried out the American jock trifecta of football, basketball, and baseball, but I didn’t have a particular talent for any of them. Then, in eighth grade, I got tall and lanky. My body felt like a pliable doll, stretched into a new shape overnight. I had the intoxicating sense that this new body could do things the old one hadn’t been able to. But what?
A couple years earlier, my father, a world champion heavyweight rower, had helped set up the Greenwich Boat Club rowing team. When I started joining their workouts, I realized my body had grown into a lever perfectly designed to pull oar handles. One day we went into Manhattan to visit my father’s best friend, an Olympic oarsman and fellow world champion who lived in a sprawling Upper East Side penthouse with an erg in the living room. They watched me clip in and glide a few hundred meters. “He has a perfect stroke. I’ve never seen that with someone his age,” my father’s friend said.
It was the first time I’d heard anyone praise me for something I did with my body, and I felt the unfamiliar warmth of my father’s pride shining on me. It was a welcome feeling: my parents’ marriage had been fraying for a couple years, and hairline cracks were starting to appear in my mother’s sanity. She spent most days hidden away in her room, turning into someone I couldn’t recognize. I wanted all the positive attention I could get, so I tried out for the team—and made it.
I was the youngest rower on the team by a good three years, and I knew some of the other guys thought of me as more of a cute mascot than a real teammate. There was only one way to change their minds: by beating them. It would have to happen in the erg room. Out on the water, it’s hard to definitively identify the weak link in an eight-man boat. In the erg room, you can study each link in isolation. How fast can you do 2,000 meters? And you? And you? Who would end up in varsity A boat? It had to be me.
“Cochise” starts with what sounds like the low rumble of a helicopter. A spartan drum beat. For 50 seconds, pressure builds: the guitar delay pitches up; the drums fill out. In my rowing era, I found this tense, ragged buildup useful: it made me feel like a leashed animal, growling and grunting and waiting to be let loose. The release when Chris Cornell’s gravelly vocals finally hit always helped me push past the crippling nausea of lactic acid buildup and get something from my body that it wouldn’t otherwise give.
Well, I've been watching
While you've been coughing
I've been drinking life
While you've been nauseous
I always felt like Cornell was singing about fluids and sweat and vomit, maybe because that was the direction “Cochise” often led me. I loved the way crew emptied me out and wore me down. It made me too tired to think about what was going on at home.
That day in the erg room, the song worked its reliable magic, transforming me into a machine with a brutal focus on a single task: pulling a chain connected to a whirring fan until I’d rowed 2,000 simulated meters. I still remember the number on my screen when I was done: 6:38. Good enough for the A boat. I remember hobbling down to the parking lot after, my legs and stomach full of nauseous jelly. I remember most of the team puking outside. I remember feeling happy. I’d done it.
A few days later, my mother had a rare bout of lucidity. I remember standing at the threshold of her cavernous bedroom one evening. “I told your father to move out,” she said. She had the lights off and she was laying on her side facing away from me, covered in a throw blanket. That was all she said. I turned around and walked down the hallway to my bedroom.
I quit crew a few weeks later. The sport felt like the road to becoming my father. At first, that had felt good; once I knew they were getting divorced, I hated it. I hated being good at a sport I no longer wanted to be good at, and any sense of accomplishment quickly morphed into a reminder of my dad’s impending absence. His pudgy son had finally become an athlete, like him—but too late to save the family.
I’m far away from all that now. I can listen to my dad’s old crew stories the way you expect a son to listen to a parent’s victory tales. I love them. I’ve heard the stories so many times that I can tell you how his boat looked on Lake Lucerne 50 years ago, the scull moving over the water like a skate blade on ice, my dad’s floppy brown hair lifting in the breeze. The stories have no weight to them anymore, carry no expectations I might disappoint. They make me feel like a kid.
I still have “Cochise” on my gym playlist, and I still pull it up when I need something extra. Weightlifting, I finally learned, is the physical activity I can love and find solace in. My dad had Lake Lucerne; I have a cheap basement gym on Fulton Street. I’ll put the song on to begin my set and start pacing, amping myself up, waiting for that guitar riff to start. Waiting to find out what I can do. ✹
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this was great. When you shared that line about the friend complimenting your form, it made me realize how much I crave that validation from sports, especially from a coach. It's weird to be socially conditioned to seek the approval of coaches like that, but then completely lose that outlet of physical validation as an adult!
This is an album that really needs revisiting in the age of Turnstile. My memory at the time (almost the same age) is that my young music nerd self accepted the common wisdom that this band was worse than the sum of its parts…but now, it kind of sounds like the best parts of RATM and the best part of Soundgarden just having a great time. It’s jock music, but it’s much, much better than the jock music that would come after (Staind, Nickleback, Disturbed, Avenged Sevenfold).