Why is it that people compete in sports that take them to, and sometimes beyond, the edge of physical endurance?

I took up swimming and rowing at school for a variety of reasons, most of which circulated around my hatred of running around a wintry mud field in heavy damp leather boots and sweaty woollen “kit” trying to pretend a love of playing with an even heavier leather football, whilst kicking others more frequently than the ball. I also found the atmosphere of the changing rooms and the appeals to ‘team spirit’ stultifying and infantile. I was much more interested in sports for themselves; sports in which I was competing with myself, or head to head against others, such as running, rather than team games. Although I’ve no real idea where this insularism of mine came from, I suspect I inherited the attitude from my parents, both keen sports players; both of them involved at one time or another in many individual sports from skiing to running to gymnastics to swimming.

My first trial for the rowing club was to be on a dank and misty October morning at a 1920’s wooden club-house perched alongside the narrow towpath of the River Lee, where it passed east of Stamford Hill. I was 12 years old, energetic, fit and relatively strong for my age.

In those days the River was still lined with the wharves and yards of the timber trade – mostly dealing in raw lumber from the Baltic and Scandinavia, but with the odd few specialist yards handling exotics like teak, zebra or brazil, whilst the roads leading down to the River were always full of heavy drays – some of them still horse-drawn, collecting sawn timbers for the furniture mills of the area. I can still recall the atmosphere and compound smell of fresh sawdusts, mildew, dank and oily water, crisped bacon sandwiches cooked over blindingly hot sawdust braziers at the gate of every wharf, and unearthly strong tea laced with a shot of dark rum. The people who filled the yards and wharves were a cosmopolitan mix of émigrés and expats from all across northern Europe: experienced timber men every one of them, with hard hands, red weather-worn faces above tough leather jerkins and woollen mufflers, and a mix of languages to fit: the language of the yards was a rough ever-shifting polyglot mix of English and Yiddish and many other dockside languages, too many even for my multi-lingual ears to decipher at first hearing.

I had no real idea how to handle an oar when I arrived for my trial, and no idea what to expect : choosing to row meant I didn’t have to spend my days on the football or cricket field – and the school rowers got more “training” time away from lessons. Our coach – an old boy of the school co-opted from a senior club on the Thames – was only interested in whether I had enough “puff” and “go” to make it worth investing time and money in teaching me. My “trial” was to be thrown uninvited and uninstructed amongst three of an experienced lower sixth four, all bigger heavier and stronger than I was, whilst we “rowed” up and down a mile-long stretch of the navigation. That first mile took a long and painful time whilst I failed to put the oar to water or, entirely out of synch’, hit the paired oar on my stroke, or fell painfully back over my seat as I pulled too hard with insufficient depth to the blade; maybe one stroke in three or four of mine actually bit water in a meaningful way, all to the accompaniment of jeering and ribald commentary from the other crew and the coach cycling along the towpath. Somehow by the end of the downstream reach I’d begun to find a rhythm – to watch what the two other crew ahead of me were doing and try to imitate that. By the time we made it back upstream I felt exhausted but happy. I believed I could row, after a somewhat limited fashion. The coach grabbed me on my way up to the changing room and told me to come back at the same time the following week, and gave me a book of vouchers for the term’s bus trips to and from the school. I guess I passed the trial.

As I walked up the steep road from the clubhouse towards the bus at Stoke Newington one of the three I’d rowed with passed me at a run, gave me a quick clap on the shoulder and said with a grunt “see you next week” – I’d joined the fraternity, for better or worse.