Very minor things that niggle at my brain

[hrj]

I've kind of lost track of how long I've been doing the dragonboat thing, though I know I started after the move to Concord. In my second season, I participated in some of the local races. (The first season, I hadn't been introduced to the vague fuzzy communication pathways of the club and had no idea how to participate and got really anxious when people pressured me about it.) But I think the year after that was my "year of clearing the decks" to see if I could write a novel in a year, and the year after that was when the team was doing well enough to win a spot at international meets and suddenly there was a lot of pressure to "go all out or go home". Well, I didn't have the available time and interest in going all out, and I didn't feel like being pressured into going home, so I stuck around to be a model of "just for fun".

My commitment to dragonboating consisted of one evening practice per week, and due to a complicated set of logistics, I settled on Tuesdays as that evening. Somehow--purely by coincidence, I'm sure--Tuesday evenings slowly became a dispreferred practice for many people. (During racing season, people were strongly encouraged to come on a particular day when their "crew" was practicing together.) So Tuesday attendance was often light--especially during the winter--but since we acquired a 10-person boat a couple years ago, and since I'm a qualified steersperson, my presence on Tuesdays meant that as long as we had at least four people show up, we could take a boat out. During light attendance periods, I was usually the only qualified steersperson present, so my presence often meant the difference between being able to take a boat out and showing up only to be disappointed. Knowing this, I got in the habit of posting on the club email list if I wasn't going to be able to make it--something that people appreciated.

This winter, the Tuesday attendance has been even thinner than usual. More than half the time, there aren't enough people to take the boat out, and about half of those times, I'm the only one who shows up.

So this week I gave up. I switched to Monday practice and let people know I wouldn't be there on Tuesdays for the indefinite future.

I don't know if anyone will care. There's been a shift in the feel of the club over the last several years. When I started, attendance was pretty well distributed across the practice days, newcomers were enthusiastically welcomed, the idea of participating for fun and exercise was common. Now there's a clear "class difference" between the people interested in training hard for international competition and the people who--for reasons of ability or interest--don't make that cut. The year I participated in racing, the standard was: if you sign up, you race. Now even for local races it's "sign up, pay your fees, but we'll make the cut for the team up to the last minute and you may get dropped with little warning." (This didn't affect me since I wasn't participating in races by the time that was going on, but it certainly didn't make me enthusiastic about starting again.) While there's lip service paid to "it's ok to be here for fun" the coaching follows the stereotype of high-school athletics with a fair amount of negging and body-shaming. The coach is notorious for changing the prescribed technique week-to-week and then changing it up again on race day. I don't think he's ever heard of the concept of muscle memory.

The feel of the club is likely to keep changing in the foreseeable future. The coach (who pretty much singlehandedly founded the club way back when and subsidized acquiring the first boats) has just be diagnosed with late-stage stomach cancer. He's undergoing treatment but the prognosis is what you might guess. What that means for the future of the club is hard to say. (The club has an independent existence, but he and his wife are definitely the emotional center. The two original boats are named after their daughters.)

Anyway, I don' t know where I'm going with this. I've been toying with the idea of not re-upping membership for next year. It's a decision that probably isn't best made in the dead of winter when club activity is always at its lowest ebb, but it's when membership dues come due and once they're paid then there's a sunk cost thing. Many members of the club rely on it for significant socializing, but I've always felt outside of that, not only because of not being part of the racing crowd, but because I know that if I ever stopped paddling with the club, those social ties would evaporate. But there are things I enjoy. I enjoy being out on the water. I enjoy muscle-driven outdoor sports in general. I enjoy contributing to the club when we do the community outreach events at 4th of July and other occasions.

So...anyway.
 

Comments

[zeborah]

I struggle with membership of... well, any regular club-like activity, whether it be choir or language practice or archery, and have left a large number for various proximate reasons -- eg in one there was too much small talk when I just wanted to do the thing; in one it just got too much same-same from week to week; in one there was too much pressure to progress to competitions when I just wanted to do the thing -- but ultimately it comes down to the fact that I'm a butterfly. I really enjoy learning new things, but I don't do well sticking with them forever. It's taken me a long time to realise this doesn't mean there's something wrong with me, and I still haven't figured out how to explain it to others. So far I've usually gone for "I'm too busy" which they understand but then they occasionally try to make contact again months later in case my schedule's now lighter....

This is almost but not quite entirely unrelated to your own dilemma, I realise, there just seemed to be some sort of thematic commonality we could mutually empathise over.

[hrj]

Yeah, for me to stick with something, I have to be getting something objective out of it that isn't related to the social context. For dragonboating, it's the physical exercise (and the joy of being out on the water).

And the thing is, "parallel play" is actually the best way for me to make friendships that go beyond the common activity, but even though it's the best way, it doesn't happen all that often.

[gurdymonkey]

Understood. I dropped taiko about a year and a half ago. The fees kept creeping up and we kept playing the same half a dozen pieces instead of learning some new ones and I didn't feel like I was going anywhere with it.

[hrj]

And that's the flip side of the "now that we're getting good we need to get serious" aspect. For the dragonboat club, it feels like it's the "get serious" people who took charge, but I can easily see that the flip side would have been for people who were serious about racing would drift off to join other, more competitive clubs.

There ought to be a happy medium where both workstreams are supported, but so often it's hard to achieve.