Toby Satterthwaite
Hometown: Cranston, R.I.
Concentration: Physics
House Affiliation: Dunster 

The first half of my junior spring fell into an odd rhythm. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon I attended lecture for a course on Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. After each class I went to practice, and our hardest workouts of the week always seemed to line up perfectly with these lectures. Mondays were mid-length intervals focused on power, Wednesdays were short bursts focused on sprinting and Fridays were long pieces focused on endurance. Each day as lectures on Einstein's theory of gravity, and the intense mathematics behind it, wound down, I had to prepare myself for a di?erent kind of test.

It seemed only fitting, then, that I was sitting in this class when the news came that the Ivy League presidents had voted to suspend athletics for the remainder of the 2020 spring season due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The decision was neither surprising nor unwarranted, but that didn't minimize the disappointment that went with it. It had been months since our last competition, and we were looking forward to opening our spring season in just a few weeks.

The rhythm of my semester, as with everyone's, was disrupted.

Yet, there was still one final detail. Our spring two-kilometer erg test was scheduled for that afternoon, just after I got out of class. The erg piece is designed to test a rower's fitness, and this was slated to be a final assessment at the end of our winter training block. At two kilometers long, the piece is just short enough to be a sprint, just long enough to require endurance, and certainly challenging enough to be dreaded by all rowers. The piece is designed to do many things; however, it is not designed to be the end of an oarsman's collegiate career.

Campus around us was transforming. Students were loading boxes into storage containers, giving tearful goodbyes and fitting a semester's worth of partying into a few final days. The men's heavyweight crew, however, had a di?erent order of business to tend to. We would not be lining up against Yale in three months' time for the oldest collegiate sporting event in the country, however we would be executing one final piece. We would be taking control of that last workout, even as the situation around us seemed to leave few things still in our control. After a rousing speech from our coaches, the team did exactly that, and the crew noted several impressive personal records.

After a rowing career that has taken me from California to Lithuania, I have found myself reflecting on this experience the most. Every oarsman eventually hears the horn of the finish line for the last time; however, he usually knows when that happens. At the time, I could not have known that this erg test would be the last major event of my collegiate rowing career, nor could I have known that I would never again sit on a starting line as a Harvard oarsman. But amidst so much uncertainty, what ended up being important was that I executed a strong piece. Surrounded by my teammates, I pulled a personal best, even as the words of the email canceling our season bounced around in my head.

Since I returned to the Boston area last fall, I have been living o?-campus and training with a small group of athletes on the Charles River. Oddly enough, I have been longing for the days when I would sit in a stu?y classroom and mentally prepare for a hard workout on the erg — something that I never would have imagined idolizing. Those days will never return, but what will stay with me are the lessons that I have learned as a Harvard athlete. Perhaps the most important of these lessons has been learning to give every e?ort to each task in front of me, even the most routine ones, because I never know when it will be my last opportunity to do so.

Ex Nemo.