A quote has been reverberating through my head recently.
'This is how a species prepares to depart for the stars. You don't depart for the stars under calm and orderly conditions. It's a fire in a madhouse.'
Terence McKenna
That's Terence McKenna, the counter-culture philosopher and mystic, speaking in 1998. He was watching the early internet age ignite around him and reaching for language big enough to describe it. Nearly thirty years on, the quote has only grown more visceral.
But here's the thing. You don't need to look at AI or technology to feel the fire. If you're a masters rower, you've got your own madhouse to contend with.
The body that carried you through your thirties starts sending unfamiliar signals. Recovery takes longer. Injuries that once resolved in a week linger for a month. The split times you used to hit without thinking now require a negotiation between ambition and biology. And the coaching advice that made sense at 35 needs reinterpreting at 55. There is no stable ground. The conditions keep shifting.
Amid all this, we reach for explanations. Training plans, sports science, lactate thresholds, periodisation models. The information available to masters rowers today is extraordinary, and it is genuinely useful. But analysis has limits.
A training plan can help you make sense of the adaptation. It cannot know how it feels to sit at the start line at 62 and wonder what your body will give you today. Only another person who has sat at that start line can understand this, and can commune with you on the basis of that shared understanding.
This is a deep truth, and masters rowing keeps proving it.
What sustains masters rowers through the disorientation of ageing is not primarily the data. It is each other. It is the person in the next seat who knows, without being told, what a hard ergo session costs you now. It is the coach who has watched dozens of athletes navigate this territory and can say, honestly, this is normal, keep going. It is the group chat that lights up at 5am on a cold training morning, everyone grumbling and going anyway.
Authentic connection to other people is not incidental to the masters rowing experience. It is fundamental. It makes the sport what it is, and it makes us who we are within it.
That is why it means so much that 28,500 masters rowers have found each other inside the Masters Rowing International Facebook group. That number is not a vanity metric. It is evidence of something real: a global community of athletes who understand, without lengthy explanation, what this life asks of you. Every question posted, every race report shared, every word of encouragement offered to a stranger on the other side of the world is a small act of community-building. A small act of sanity in the madhouse.
As the physical challenges accumulate, that connection becomes more urgent, not less. We gather around shared effort, in boat houses and on water, in the corners of the internet where the conversation is real, because the alternative is to face the hard parts alone. And that is intolerable.
The sport will keep changing. Our bodies will keep surprising us. The fire will keep burning.
But in the end, what gets us through is a powerful truth that rowing has always known: our connection to the given world, and to one another, is what makes the whole thing worth it.
We need to keep building that. A Republic of Being Together, one stroke at a time.
The Republic of Being Together already exists. You'll find it in the Masters Rowing International Facebook group, where 28,500 rowers from around the world show up for each other every day. Come and join us. And if you want the training knowledge to match the community spirit, the Faster Masters newsletter is where that conversation continues. [Sign up in the footer below.]
