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The pressure of pulling your own weight in rowing One in three college rowers espnW surveyed said they have had an eating disorder. What makes them so vulnerable? The answer could lie in the nature of the sport itself. By D'Arcy Maine

Kayleigh Durm was a junior in high school and a coxswain on the school's lightweight 8 rowing team in 2005, when her coaches started jokingly asking her a question during team dinners.

"Oh, Kayleigh, do you really need to eat that extra breadstick?" they would say.

She was 4-foot-11 and weighed 95 pounds.

While she says her coaches made the comments in a teasing and good-natured way, the words stuck with her, and she started to question her own weight and eating habits and how they would affect her team during races.

"I became hyperaware of what I was eating and would always say, 'I'm full, I don't need any more food,' even when I was starving," she says. "I just didn't want to get to that point when I was adding more stress to my boat, where I was the coxswain who weighed 100 pounds and not 90."

After coxing for a year at Syracuse University, Durm left the team after feeling "burnt out." She ultimately transferred to Ohio State, where she didn't row, and graduated in 2011. She's now the director of rowing operations at Columbia University, after spending three years as a volunteer coach at MIT. She had rediscovered her passion for the rowing in 2012, posting about the sport on her social media accounts and quickly becoming an accessible resource for high school coxswains. That same year, she founded the blog Ready All Row blog.

However, it didn't take long before Durm discovered a dangerous trend. Over and over, she received one simple question from high school-aged coxswains, both male and female: "What laxatives do you recommend to lose weight?"

In a survey of 201 Division I college athletes by espnW, 32 percent of rowers answered "yes" when asked if they've ever had an eating disorder. (That compares to 14 percent of all athletes surveyed.) Fifty-four percent of the rowers said they have a teammate with an eating disorder.

And the rate of eating disorders among rowers outpaces that among women in general. According to a 2006 study from the Multi-Service Eating Disorders Association, 15 percent of women ages 17 to 24 have an eating disorder, and a study published in the National Center for Biotechnology Information found that 13.5 percent of women undergraduates an eating disorder.

So what is it about rowing that seems to foster disordered eating? Much of it seems built into the nature of the sport itself.

"Imagine how stressful that must be? You've been training for years and you might miss out because you're not at the ideal weight." Ruth Whyman

Rowers fall into two categories: lightweight and openweight (also known as heavyweight). Lightweight, traditionally for shorter, smaller athletes, commands a maximum weight of 130 pounds for female rowers, and the average weight for everyone in a boat can't exceed 125 pounds. Openweight has no official weight restrictions. In both divisions, the coxswain, who leads the team and steers the boat but does not actually row, must weigh at least 110 pounds, or otherwise must bring weight, such as sandbags or water, with them in the boat to make up the difference.

While openweight rowing is an official NCAA sport with championships in Varsity 8, Second Varsity 8 and Varsity 4, lightweight rowing is not, and only a handful of colleges have teams for women. Both divisions, however, are featured in the Olympic Games and in many high schools across the country.

Lightweight rowers are weighed on race day and can potentially lose their seat in the boat if they don't make the requirement, so some live in constant fear of not making weight. And it can become an all-encompassing obsession.

"I've been in environments with [lightweights] where weight and food is the sole thing they talk about in the run-up to racing," says Ruth Whyman, a former rower at the University of Washington and a member of Great Britain's national team. "They segregate themselves from heavyweights because it's easier not to eat around them, but all they talk about is food.

"Imagine how stressful that must be? You've been training for years and you might miss out because you're not at the ideal weight." Openweight rowers experience a different -- but equally demanding -- kind of pressure. From feeling the need to look a specific way to being measured using a ergometer (which determines how much energy one is using in comparison to their weight), openweight rowers are constantly thinking about their weight in terms of maximum efficiency in the boat. The best rowers are typically tall and lean because they have the best power-to-weight ratio -- a formula that divides a rower's energy output in watts by their weight to determine a specific score. As heavier rowers add more weight and drag to the boat, those individuals are expected to contribute more power to compensate.

"There is such a specific body type that people aim for in rowing," Whyman says. "But I do think that a lot of that pressure comes from within the squad itself. I have never felt pressure from a single one of my coaches. Whether it's my national team or for Washington, I've never felt pressure from them to lose weight."

While every team relies on power-to-weight metrics differently, with some putting more emphasis on it than others, many rowers put great stock in their own numbers -- as many college-level and professional athletes do -- and work to improve in this regard. The lighter the overall boat is, the faster it will go, and this concept is not ignored.

"The pressure for having the perfect rower body came from me, because I knew what I wanted," Whyman says. "I was comparing myself to a lot of other women constantly, and it's extremely different to be in the changing room and be self-conscious if someone else has what you're striving for, and you don't have it, and thinking that affects you as an athlete. Thinking, 'Maybe if I was just five pounds lighter, I could go a second quicker.' There's a lot of pressure put on me by me."

While other sports, such as gymnastics, seem to favor particular body types and focus on appearance and physique, rowing is unique in its emphasis on weight and numbers on the scale, regardless of division.

"The tough part about rowing in particular is that you are literally pulling your own weight," says two-time Olympic gold medal-winning rower Susan Francia. "If a rower is overweight they are literally weighing down the boat. In rowing, your power-to-weight ratio is pretty important, so it's a fine balance between encouraging athletes to be at their ideal weight and pushing them into body image issues, which control their eating habits."

Durm says that she did skip meals during her junior year in high school, which greatly affected her energy level at practice. (Her decision to cut back on eating was short-lived when she saw the effect it was having on her performance.) However, she remembers watching teammates and opposing crews go to drastic lengths before weigh-ins on race day to make the necessary weight.

"Everyone kind of experimented with losing weight," she says. "Especially when we were at a race, and we were an hour from weigh-in, you would see girls putting sweatpants and trash bags on when it was 84 degrees out -- that was some of the more obvious stuff. But there were other girls who would disappear into the bathroom for a while and come out, and you knew they had been in there making themselves throw up. But you couldn't directly say that to them without it causing a problem."

Coaches, on the other hand, must walk a thin line, says Meghan O'Leary, a member of the 2016 U.S. Olympic rowing team, as they might need to instruct rowers to lose weight without shaming or encouraging bad habits. According to espnW's survey, rowers said they've been called fat by a coach at the same rate as respondents overall -- about one in five.

"With some athletes, I might say, 'That's not a safe weight for you to be, so let's just forget that goal and be happy where you are.'" Elizabeth Avery

According to the Seattle Times, the University of Washington fired Bob Ernst, its longtime women's rowing coach, in 2015 after he reportedly made disparaging remarks about women on the team about their weight and performance. Rowers voiced concerns about pressure to skip class in order to meet a weekly quota of time-trial workouts, undergoing forced weigh-ins (which violated a school policy) and living with a general sense of fear, according to the Seattle Times. The school does not have a lightweight women's program.

Whyman, who graduated from Washington in 2014, said she never experienced anything like the complaints she read about, and she said she was surprised by the news. A spokesman for Washington declined to comment.

Coaches should be required to take classes focused on eating disorders so they know how to deal with athletes struggling, how to ensure they aren't doing anything to foster such behaviors and how to recognize warning signs, says Elizabeth Avery, a Boston-based nutritionist who works with student-athletes at Emerson College as well as in her own private practice.

"With some athletes, I might say, 'That's not a safe weight for you to be, so let's just forget that goal and be happy where you are and just try to get you to perform the best you can,'" Avery says. "What I always do with athletes, instead of focusing on their weight or their appearance, I talk about nutrition expressly around performance optimization."

Athletes can stop viewing eating as a negative, but rather as a necessity and an essential part of training, if they focus exclusively on how they can use food as the proper fuel for their sport, says Avery, who also helps athletes determine appropriate eating times for the ultimate benefit.

Avery, who rowed for Colgate University, says the risks caused by lightweight weigh-ins at the high school and college levels outweigh the benefits of having a class for smaller athletes who might be attracted to rowing.

"A lot of teams have an A and B boat, like varsity and junior varsity, and the bigger programs have a C and a D boat, and they should all be openweight," Avery says. "If you don't have the power to make the A boat, it's OK to be in the C or D boat, but you shouldn't have to worry about your weight. Because I think what may start out as simply trying to make weight can often lead to something much deeper, like a body image problem."

The NCAA, for its part, has recently made mental health, including eating disorders, a priority. In 2016, the organization worked with mental health professionals and organizations to develop a set of guidelines and best practices that have since been distributed to all member institutions in how to recognize, treat and prevent disordered eating habits, as well as other conditions.

"We know that there are a lot of benefits to sports, whether it's building self-esteem or promoting an active lifestyle throughout one's lifespan, or teaching skills and teamwork and character traits that are wonderfully positive," says Dr. Jessica Mohler, the coordinator of sport psychology services at the United States Naval Academy and a member of the NCAA's Committee on Competitive Safeguards and Medical Aspects of Sports. "Sports have the ability to provide that experience for our student-athletes, but we know that athletic competition also has some risks and it can also be stressful -- both psychologically and physically.

"And certainly the pressures of sport competition, the pressure to perform at a high level added to sports' body types and size -- sports that potentially emphasize thinness or certain body types related to performance -- those athletes have an increased risk to develop really disordered eating behaviors."

The NCAA also sent out modules to all coaches on recognizing the signs and symptoms for a number of mental health disorders in hopes of providing education for those who work with student-athletes on a daily basis, Mohler adds.

But for Durm, the first line of defense is teammates looking out for each other.

"Your No. 1 athlete could be doing some of this stuff that an athlete with a known eating disorder is doing, and you're not paying attention to her because she's pulling good ERG scores and looks healthy," Durm says. "You need to say, 'We can't have this -- it's not good for you, first of all, but also it's not good for others in the sport. We don't need to be perpetuating these behaviors."