COXING
DISCUSSION Chattercox
Zoe De Toledo and Katie Apfelbaum talk coxing
WORDS ZOE DE TOLEDO and KATIE APFELBAUM K 60
atie Apfelbaum and Zoe De Toledo had never met before they stepped into the Oxford University gym for the first day of training in
September 2011. From the first time Katie asked Zoe for a lift to afternoon training in Wallingford, they both knew this was going to be the start of a beautiful friendship (little did Zoe know, Katie suffers from terrible motion sickness, made worse when travelling in the minibus, so she was stuck with her in the car no matter what). Katie was born in Menands, NY, to Burt and Stacey, a former rower and cox, and followed her older sister to Trinity College, Hartford, where both her parents had previously coached the rowing team. At Trinity Katie became the first ever female to captain the men’s crew team, and after graduating headed to Oxford to study an MPhil in Comparative Social Policy. Across the pond Zoe was returning to Oxford to study an MSc in Criminology and Criminal Justice, having previously coxed Isis to a win in the 2011 reserve’s Boat Race.
Zoe learnt to cox on the Tideway at St Paul’s Girls’ School, and worked her way up through the GB Rowing Team, coxing at the Junior and U23 World’s and the European Championships. In the 2012 Boat Race Zoe coxed the Oxford Blue Boat, and Katie coxed the Isis crew (to a new reserve course record, no less). The following year Katie coxed the Oxford Women’s Blue Boat to victory, then rudely moved to Boston, USA, leaving Zoe on the other side of the pond, heartbroken, to cox the GB senior women’s eight. While Katie is the coxing coach for the Boston University men’s rowing team and an education research fellow with a Boston-based think tank, Zoe is working her way up to 365 press- ups in a day, finally settling the brains and brawn roles of the relationship.
was that we didn’t see each other as competition.
ROW360 // Issue 001
The biggest thing that helped us
How do you cope working side by side all season with other coxes who are your direct competition?
Zoe De Toledo: Having other coxes around you is what you make of it, and it doesn’t have to be a negative! Katie and I met when we were both coxing at OUBC, and whilst we did “click” as friends (OK, soulmates) straight away, we also recognized an opportunity to work together to better both our skills.
Katie Apfelbaum: The biggest thing that helped us was that we didn’t see each other as competition. Rather than seeing other coxes as obstacles to our desired seats, we worked to improve the things we could control: our own steering, knowledge of rowing, and racing strategy, in our case, racing on the Tideway. A lot of coxing is about processing and analysing (I’ll succumb to peer pressure and appeal to our international audience) information in order to solve problems and make decisions. By working together, we increased our capacity to see problems from different
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