Traverse City Rower Jamie Chapman Reflects on Olympic Trials

The Northern Michigan outdoors is prone to inspiring sportsmen—golfers, fishermen, and sailors alike find themselves impassioned by the stunning landscapes and terrain of the area. Traverse City-born and -inspired rower, Jamie Chapman reflects on life as an athlete and the challenges involved in working to become world class.

She fought her way to the Olympic time trials, but ultimately did not make the team. Traverse Citian Jamie Chapman reflects on the intense training, the emotional outfall, and the hope she finds in seeing rowing teams get started in her hometown.

One week after placing fourth at Olympic Trials, I quit the National Rowing Team.

The night before meeting with my coach, I fell asleep mentally rehearsing my exact three sentences so as not to fill the inevitable silence with emotional babble. We met. I stuck to my script and fumbled anyway. My coach extended his hand and said three words: “Thank you, Jamie,” then nodded as I thanked him once more, blabbering a “Good luck—this sum—at the Olympics,” volume fading as I turned toward the mysterious abyss of My Future.

My younger, idealistic self could not believe what I had just done. During recess kickball games at Eastern Elementary, in Traverse City, I idolized the high school athletes on the adjacent practice fields and dreamed of someday meeting an Olympian, if I was lucky. Now, here I was. I had clawed my way to get an invitation to train with the team and once there, hovered around the bottom of the results sheet. The United States women’s eight rowing team is a dominant international force, having not lost a race since 2005. After four years of tunnel-vision training, I had just quit the opportunity to train with the highest caliber of rowers.

For two weeks afterward, I luxuriated in the spontaneous schedule of nothing—a welcome reprieve from the structured and monastic existence of an elite athlete. I wanted only to sit, be in the shade and quiet, in a non-stimulating environment that was tiring in no way. It felt beyond lame, as a person in superb physical condition, to refuse an activity because it might involve standing.

Every week, the team rowed a benchmark piece on the erg (short for ergometer, a rowing machine). One Wednesday, I crushed mine, rowing far faster than I ever had. My quads retained a burning sensation akin to icy hot for two days afterward. It was a massive personal victory and yet a very private one.

Regardless, that isolated success dumped lighter fluid on my inner fire. I texted my college teammate: “Whoa,” she said. “How do you feel?” I responded frankly and honestly, no clichés: “Like the sky’s the limit.” She wrote back, “It is, bébé.”

Scrawled after meticulous lists of splits, times, conditions, and results, my training journals offer brutally honest insight to the condition of my spirit. Many pages are laced with profanity, days when I cried purely from exhaustion, and moments of hopelessness. But many more pages reflect the powerful and omnipresent dream, encompassed in a poem by my friend Alexi Pappas, herself a 2016 Olympic runner for Greece: “[Row] like a bravey/Sleep like a baby/Dream like crazy/Replace can’t with maybe, lady.”

I started rowing by chance, but I became a rower by choice. My first time in a boat, I did not take a single stroke. Instead I sat in the boat with my pair partner while the other six rowers rowed. The connection with the water and with nature was swift and powerful—incidentally, both assets of a fast crew. Nature is humbling. Sitting aboard a two-foot-wide shell in a body of water, a rower is nothing. The wind will blow, currents will swirl, rain will rain. Only after I was able to maintain an inner Zen regardless of conditions and circumstance—after thousands of strokes spent fighting, losing, succumbing, and finally relaxing—did I deem myself a rower.

I recognize then and now that I was living a dream life of training and sleeping, and eating as much as I could stomach. I would eat a big sandwich only to feel slightly less starving. My go-to second dinner became a batch of brownies from scratch or a giant stack of pancakes. It was a calorie-input game. I had eaten so much, it seemed there was no food left to eat. Nothing was appetizing, but “nothing” did not give me energy.