I broke my 2K record today. Shaved 4 seconds off, from 7:31 down to 7:27.5.

Four seconds might not sound like much, but I was proud of it. First, I finally broke the 7:30 mark. Second, I actually did it with the right strategy this time and negative split the piece (well, right up until the 250m mark, but close enough). That might not sound like a big deal, but compare it to how my old 2Ks used to go: fly and die, feeling like I was in living hell the second I hit the 1000m mark. Lactic acid headaches, stomach cramps, the whole miserable package. Don’t get me wrong, today’s piece was still hard, and it took me about an hour to fully recover. But at least I wasn’t on the ground groaning in pain afterward. For me, that’s a win.

What I actually want to talk about, though, is the feeling I had once I recovered.

I felt euphoric. Like I could take on the world.

So I sat with that feeling for a bit and tried to figure out where it was actually coming from. Obviously the PR helped, but it was more than that. It was this specific thought that kept surfacing: I want to do it again.

Yes, you read that right. I felt excited to do another 2K.

I actually had to stop myself for a second, because my first reaction was, “Wait, that’s insane. Why would I want to put myself through that suffering again?”

And then it hit me. I’m addicted.

I’m addicted to the process. Testing something out, finding out I beat myself, and wanting to do it all over again. I want to keep beating myself, over and over.

Where this diverges from my volleyball days

This is where I think my rowing journey is different from my volleyball one.

In volleyball, I was always looking to improve too, and I’m sure I felt this exact same pull back when I first started playing as a kid, back when every practice brought some visible jump in what I could do. But somewhere along the way, my volleyball journey went stale. I still enjoyed the day-to-day of it. What was missing was consistent feedback.

The only real way to know if I was improving was to play in games or tournaments. And if you’ve been an athlete after college, you know how hard it is to keep putting yourself in those settings regularly. On top of that, volleyball has so many more variables at play. Are you playing with the same partner across five tournaments in a row, or switching every time? You can always go back and break down your individual performance, but volleyball is a team sport built on skill and chemistry, and having a fixed training partner matters a lot for that.

If I’d had a consistent partner, someone to train with, compete with, figure out weaknesses with, and then go back and grind on those specific things, I think I’d have stayed just as hooked on volleyball as I am on rowing right now. But by the time I hit this point in my journey, I didn’t have access to that anymore. I wanted to compete for Malaysia, but studying in the US made that tough to sustain. No consistent partner meant no immediate feedback loop. And without that loop, the motivation slowly drained out.

Enter rowing

This is where rowing comes in.

When I’m on the erg, I’ve got a screen holding me accountable in real time. I can see exactly what my splits are, exactly what my time is. No ambiguity. And I’m lucky to be surrounded by coaches and rowers who actually know what kind of training I need, whether that’s building endurance, power, or anaerobic threshold (yes, I’ve actually started learning what these things mean).

After every test, we sit down and look at the results together. “Hey, looks like this is where you dropped off, let’s build these types of workouts to shore that up.” Then we go back to the drawing board. Test. Adjust. Test again.

And that loop is exactly what excites me. The idea that I can try something new and actually see, in numbers, whether it moved the needle.

I know this is only my first year of rowing, and I’m well aware that almost any new training stimulus is going to create some improvement right now just because everything is new to my body. Ask me again in a few years and the story might look different. But right now, in this moment, this feedback loop is what’s pulling me forward in a way volleyball stopped being able to.

That’s the thing volleyball wasn’t giving me anymore, and it’s the thing rowing is giving me in spades.

Addiction to the process. Addiction to improving. Addiction to pushing myself to the edge and seeing if I can do it again.

And again.

And again.