Opinions on Goal Weight/Crew (Rowing)
This is long, so bear with me...
So here's the deal. I'm currently at 127 pounds, which is 33 pounds down from where I started. When I was in high school, I was little bitty and was a coxswain for the crew team. For those unfamiliar with rowing, the coxswain is a small person who sits in the back of the boat, steers it, and basically acts as a motivator/coach in the absence of the actual coach. I recently got in contact with a person on the men's crew team at my university and am planning on joining them as a coxswain again, because I love it and have missed it dearly in the past couple of years. The women's team isn't really an option because it's NCAA and I co-op (alternate school and work each semester with the engineering program), which makes things complicated.
Here's the thing. There are minimum weights for coxswains in the vast majority of rowing events. Usually for coxswains of women's teams, the minimum is 110 pounds, and for men's teams, it's 125 pounds, regardless of the gender of the coxswain. In high school, I was with a women's team, and it didn't really matter. Since I'm coxing men, though, unless I'm at 125 in racing clothes, I'll have to carry dead weight with me in the boat during races that's heavy enough to bring me to the minumum. A lot of coxswains will skirt this if they are slightly underweight by drinking a ton of water or other similar tactics before weigh-in and then peeing a LOT before the race.
My goal weight right now is 120, which is 5 pounds lower than the minimum weight. I have been aiming for 120 for ages, and I'm not sure why I chose the number, but I WANT IT. I'm fully aware that 125 is a perfectly healthy weight for my height, so I guess I'm not sure if I should just stop losing in 2 pounds or whether I should suck it up and get down to 120 (or even a little lower) and just deal with the fact that I will probably have to carry some kind of weight in the boat (no one really likes having to do that... you try sitting scrunched up for a 5k race with a heavy bag of sand in your lap!). I know this seems like kind of a stupid dilemma, but it is a concern to me, and I'm not really sure what to do this close to my goal.
Does anyone have any opinions regarding this? I know there are some people here who are rowers, so if anyone is, I'd love to hear your point of view as well. Thanks for reading this book of a question!
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