The 2017 Senior Perspectives is the 12th in a series of annual collections. Senior captains and representatives of teams at Harvard have been invited to contribute viewpoints based on personal experience from both their senior seasons and full varsity careers at Harvard.

Serena Blacklow, Women's Lightweight Crew
Hometown: Cambridge, Mass.
Concentration: Bioengineering
House Affiliation: Leverett

“The most important ingredient—the X factor, the spark, the catalyst, the trigger, was the fire within me, hotter and brighter than the sun—my new soul” 

–Brad Alan Lewis, Assault on Lake Casitas

There is a point during a rowing race when you are in such pain that you are unsure whether you can go any harder, any higher, any faster. You are in extraordinary pain and let's just say you are losing the race. 

It is at this point that you must decide to go harder. And you trust that when you go harder, so do your teammates. You do it together, and, together, you believe that you will win.

I think the X factor is mental. It's the factor that determines what you do when you're down in a race with 500 meters to go or how you respond when you're ahead but see your competitor behind you speeding towards you. Rowing has taught me that the X factor—the “firey belief” if you will—wins races.

Rowing has also taught me that you have to practice having the X factor. You can't have it sometimes. You have to invoke it during practice; you have to channel it during races; you have to live it throughout the day.

I was a hair's width away from quitting the crew team senior year. Rowing was taking too much time that I could have been devoting to my thesis or my startup or my friends outside rowing; it was distracting; it was mentally (nevermind physically) exhausting to have to prove myself every day; and it was no longer an activity I looked forward to. Finally, after agonizing over the decision for a month, I wrote out the pros and cons to quitting. There was only one con I wrote down: “ditching teammates?”. In the end, that outweighed everything. I believed I could do it; I believed I could balance rowing with everything else on my plate, and they believed in me.

My teammates have always been there to pick me up during the worst of times and to celebrate with me during the best of times. They have supported me during presentations, cheered for me during performances, and pushed me during practice. They have raced the same races. They have felt the same frustrations. They have set the same goals. They have shared the same beliefs.  

I cannot imagine a better team to have bled, sweat, and cried with during my time at Harvard than the Radcliffe lightweight crew team. This team knows what it means to not just talk about commitment, but be committed, not just talk about perseverance, but be persevering, and not just talk about believing in each other, but actually believe in each other. This team has helped me understand, find, and begin to deploy the X factor.