Row, row, row...

Photo courtesy of Monica Dunford

Monica Dunford couldn’t stop swaying when she finally got out of the boat after 15 hours, 33 minutes, and 15 seconds of hard rowing. The physicist and her four teammates had just won the Tour du Leman, held Sept. 22. Never again, she thought, would she do something so crazy as to row around Lake Geneva, Switzerland—that’s 160 kilometers—in a single day.

But a few days later, fully recovered from the competition, she thinks she might do it again.

“Some people just never learn,” says Dunford, a University of Chicago Enrico Fermi Fellow working on the Large Hadron Collider.

Dunford has certainly had ample opportunity to learn. She has rowed crew for the University of California at Irvine, played soccer (“horribly,” she claims) while living in Philadelphia, and run four marathons. When she’s not at the lab, she’s training. While preparing for the Tour, “I hardly got any sleep,” she says.

Dunford rows in a crew of five, among whom she is the only physicist. The others work in business and executive job search. The diversity of the group makes for interesting conversation during practice, she says: “They’re very interested in the detector—‘Why does it have to be so big and complicated," and "When is the beam going to turn on?’”

There was little chatter during the big race, though—just five people determined to reach the finish line. Every two hours, each rower would get a break to rest, eat and drink, and use the “bathroom”—a cup.

There were 16 boats in the race, 11 with all-male or mostly male crews and five more evenly mixed teams like Dunford’s. Her boat placed tenth overall, but first among the mixed teams.

For Dunford, it seems, there will always be another finish line looming. Right after the Tour, she was back in training. She had a marathon coming up.

Amber Dance