Maggie MacLean was standing in the tall, wide doorway of Newell Boat House, just at the line that divides the vast room stacked with boats and oars from the grey pier that slopes gently down to the Charles River. Like the other ten women who stood in a semicircle listening to their coach. Harry Parker, she was wearing gym shorts and a tank top--hers was grey, with blue letters that said "U.S.A. Rowing Team Camp." But unlike the others, on her large, strong hands she wore protective leather gloves.

Parker was standing on the pier with his back to the gray seven-in-the-morning sky that hovered on the edge of a drizzle, making a few dry, formal jokes in his New England-patrician way. After a minute or so, he moved on abruptly to the business of the day, calling out the names of the ones who would row in the first boat of four, the ones in the second boat, the unlucky ones who would have to stay behind to work on the ergometer machine. No one knows what Parker will do from one day to the next, so everyone listened carefully. But this morning there were no surprises. Two boats of fours meant seat races--a standard process of elimination that involves switching two rowers to determine who is slower--and that was pretty much what everyone had expected.

Seat racing was the method that had been used to weed out 32 women from the 75 who had competed at the women's National Championships at Princeton in June, and once those 32 had arrived at the Olympic Camp at Harvard, seat racing had been used to trim the number to 11. As the crowds thinned out, the pressure had grown less and less intense; no longer was there a swarm of women to speculate about, to compare yourself to, to try to rank in lists. Now everyone knew more or less where they stood. It only remained to eliminate one more person, and the ten women who would represent the United States at the World Rowing Championships in Nottingham, England at the end of the month would be chosen, settled. Except, of course, for the question of who would be chosen to race in the boat of eight, and who would be chosen as the two spares.

But today the pressure seemed to have lifted itself, at least temporarily, gathered its forces, and landed heavily in one big lump on the shoulders of one person, Maggie, and she was feeling it. She was the one who was being seat raced this morning, and even though no one said anything, everyone knew it. Two weeks before, she had developed tendonitis as a result of rowing incorrectly and had asked Parker if she could have ten days off--she could feel the resentment about that, as if Parker had given her a vacation. Now she was getting another chance, but something had gone wrong. In the ten days that she hadn't rowed, the callouses that rowers cultivate had disappeared and her hands had gone soft.

When she went out on the river again for the first time, her hands had gotten chafed and cut so badly that she had to go to UHS for treatment. Then Harry put her on the ergometer machine, the erg, a contraption that measures the speed of your rowing. It looks like a medieval torture machine, and two minutes on it is like agony. The pain was almost unbearable, but Maggie kept going because, well, when you want to make the national team and Harry Parker tells you to do something, you just do it. When she went back to UHS and showed them her mutilated hands again, they told her, "You don't belong here--you should be up on the fourth floor--Psychiatric."

But here she was again of course, striding down to the deck on her long, gangly legs, carrying the slender red-and-white-tipped oar that towered above her, hoping this time wouldn't be the last. Her tangled, sandy light brown hair was pulled back carelessly into a pony tail, and her hands were protected as best they could be by bandages and gloves. Along with the three women who would be rowing with her in the four, she heaved the boat into the river, following the orders called out by the coxswain in a long, low shout. "Okay, hold, Ready? Lift!"

The two boats of fours shoved off a few feet into the river, where they drifted waiting for Parker, who was still on the pier conferring mysteriously with an assistant: "I don't think she knows that we know"... "Well, I hope she works hard, because when she's good, she's very good." Finally Parker climbed into the launch, the motorboat from which he scrutinizes his rowers, and chugged off to where the two fours were already gliding along. The rowing was smooth, steady, rhythmic, as the oars skimmed through the water and flipped up, over, back, skim, up, over, back. Broods of ducks, a few sculls, the Boston skyline, the beginnings of rush hour traffic, and a Coca Cola sign that flashed "7:32, 74 degrees," all passed by; the emerging sun sent gold glints off the State House dome:

"Hoooooo, ready!" Parker called through his bullhorn, and suddenly the boats surged ahead, followed closely by the launch. Parker stood majestically in the bow, his white shirt flapping in the breeze, his chiseled profile silhouetted against the now blue sky. He held his head high and watched closely as the two boats sped forward glancing occasionally at the silver stopwatch he held in his hand.

The surge subsided, and Parker made some notes on a yellow pad. Then he directed Maggie and another woman, Annie Warner, to switch boats. This was it Maggie and Annie moved slowly and carefully, their movements synchronized: hands grasp the boats legs shift over, hips swing down, "Full power...Hoooooo!" Another surge, then another switch back, and a final surge, Maggie didn't do well.

Back at the boat house, the women heaved the boats out of the water and carried them over their heads to stack them inside. It was after nine now, and people were milling around, making plans for breakfast, chatting with Parker, greeting Claudia Schneider--who had been condemned to the erg for the morning workout. Maggie was off in the shadows of the stacked boats, removing the gloves and gingerly taking off the bandages. Her hands hurt badly, they were killing her. But she couldn't tell anybody. No one could know.

The group started to drift off in twos and threes to Eliot House, which has been home, more or less, for the past month. Maggie made her way across the Anderson Bridge with Nancy Storrs--she knew Nancy probably better than any of the others, having rowed with her all spring in Cambridge at the Eastern Development Camp, a private rowing club. They paused in the Eliot House-courtyard, where a few people are almost always sitting and talking on the steps or the grass or the patio. But Maggie was quiet, and she soon left to take a shower before breakfast.

Nancy stayed for a few minutes to talk to Daig O'Connell, a red-haired, sunburnt crew coach from Berkeley who goes out in the launch with Parker every day, trying to soak up what he can from the master. At the same time, he serves as a link between the inscrutable Parker and the anxious oarswomen, who try to extract what information they can from Daig.

"Was I better today? I was trying not to lean forward so much. Could you see that?" Nancy was sitting dangling her legs from the stone railing of the patio, her open, friendly face looking a little worried. "Yeah, I think I could." Daig was being encouraging, but not enthusiastic.

Wiki Royden wandered out of an entry, still in her gym shorts, and sat on the steps at Nancy's feet. She had been a junior at Radcliffe last year, but dropped out in the fall and went home to California to just do nothing for the first time since she was 12--the first time she hadn't been in school or working out regularly or both. Then she came back in the spring to train at the Eastern Development Camp, where she met Maggie and Nancy, and in June she won the Nationals in a single scull. Now she was looking up at Daig with an anxious expression in her dark, moody eyes.

"Was I better today?" Daig gave her the same noncommittal encouragement he had given Nancy. "Did Harry mind that I was goofing off so much today?" (During a break on the river, Wiki had called over to the launch. "Hey Harry, does that H on your bullhorn stand for Harvard or Harry?" "They're synonymous," Harry had called back.) Daig said no, Harry didn't mind at all.