Welcome to Rowing in Akron

I am a physician with an interested in preventive health care, a healthy lifestyle and physical fitness. I was one of the "runners" in high school in the 1970's, and was introduced to rowing while standing in the college registration line when the coach was trolling for freshmen... "Son? Have you ever rowed?"

I'm glad that I gave it a try... getting out on the water to work up a sweat and build cardiovascular as well as muscular strength has been a habit (off and on) ever since.

I moved to Akron to complete my medical residency training, and would often comment to the woman who became my wife that there were some nice bodies of water in the area which would be good for rowing.

Then, in the summer of 2005, Barak Kraus, a somewhat frustrated athlete who had discovered rowing through the Western Reserve Rowing Association in Cleveland ( a great! organization), gathered together an intrepid group of newbies and formed the Portage Lakes Rowing Association which rows on Turkeyfoot Lake in Akron. I found out about this group (how else?!) but through the web... a news story on a local news website about the club, and showed up the next Sunday morning to join up.

I became a coach and a director of the club, and a fan ever since. The club has attracted a wonderful group of people interested in rowing and fitness and friendship as well as competition. In the summer of 2007, PLRA fielded a crew which took second place out of some 30 teams at the Summer Rowing League competition series in Cleveland.

Google has amazed me with the offerings of computing in the cloud. We have used Google Adwords to advertise our rowing club, and I could not believe how easy it was to get started. I've heard about blogging... a relative of the Usenet groups of the 80's and 90's, and decided that it was about time for the rowing technology geek in me to give it a go. It took me about 30 minutes to start a web page with Googlepages, and then create this blog which I plan to link to it.

Long live the Cloud.

Brad