Talk to any of the women rowers around here and you will find they are all thinking the same thing. They are thinking Eastern Sprints; Eastern Sprints and nothing more.
Sprints, as all the rowers refer to it, is the race they have been training for. This is the one race for all the marbles. If a team can win Sprints, nothing else really matters.
And that probably explains why the races against Cornell this weekend were not all that important. Despite the near dominance by the Big Red out on the St. Paul's School race course, the losses were not all sour grapes for the Big Green.
For a crew that has been struggling with lineup changes all season long, the Cornell losses will likely serve as good medicine, and nothing more painful than that.
"We weren't necessarily happy with the race results," co-Captain Vanessa Santaga '96 said. "But we were happy to walk away knowing how we can improve and come back even stronger for the next race.
Santaga pointed to a lack of efficiency as the main problem for the Big Green during the race.
"We rowed together, we rowed well, but we could've had more swing and more stroke efficiency," Santaga said.
At the start of the race, it was pretty clear which team wanted the win more. Dartmouth jumped the line on the first countdown and was called back for a false start.
"But [the false start] was a good thing, because it allowed us to get rid of the pre-race tension in the boat," Rosie Kerr '97 said.
Thirty strokes into the race, Cornell bolted ahead and left Dartmouth back two seats.
The two boats swapped seats for the next 1,000 meters before Cornell stretched its lead out to four seats at the 750 meter-to-go mark.
At the sprint, the Big Red cranked up the pace and left Dartmouth down slightly more than a boat length at the finish.
The second varsity boat had a similar race. This boat started up a seat off the line and then struggled to stay even with a quick Cornell boat before trailing at the finish.
"We would make a move, but we never walked through them," Amanda Lawrence '98 said.
At the novice level, both boats finished second behind the Cornell crews. But again, the losses did not amount to a hill of beans when you look at the broad scope of things.
"We rowed strong and we had a good race," Kathryn Daly '99 said. "But we never tapered for this race, so I think some people were feeling tired during the race."
"[The loss to Cornell] was really a spanking that showed us how much harder we need to work if we want to win next weekend," Kerr said.
And after their races, the Dartmouth crews wasted no time in taking this tough lesson to heart.
Fighting off excruciating post-race fatigue, they stayed out on the water for a long steady-state row along the race course.
Then, as if that was not brutal enough, the crews hit the water for a third time once they got back to Hanover.
On Sunday, they started the day with an early morning three-mile run, then followed it with a double practice -- one in the early afternoon and another just before dinner.
With this exemplary display of hard core physical strain and conditioning, it is pretty clear what these teams want. They want to win, and they want to win badly.
In recent weeks, the novice women have been pulling double practices everyday.
According to Daly, this pattern of perpetual conditioning epitomizes the spirit and tradition of the women's crew program.
"Dartmouth is know for getting stronger every week and every day, while most teams just kind of level out towards the end of the season," Daly said.
Still, Kerr insists that the competition at Sprints will be tough this year.
"There are a lot of tough crews out there, especially Princeton, UMass and Wisconsin," she said.
But with confidence levels on the rise among the women's crews, Daly insists that "though teams won't expect it, I think we'll do well at Sprints."
