To help drop those extra pounds right before a race, all the lightweights will actually cut out water for a whole nine hours before weigh in. Water weight can add up fast and may just be the difference that swings the scale in the right direction.

But more important than diet are the changes that these rowers have to make in their exercise regimen. Rowers don’t do that much weight training anyway but they still tend to build up a fair amount of muscle. If they spend all winter riding the ergometer—a rowing machine designed to increase endurance—they are going to develop some pretty huge shoulders.

And while building up your arm strength is important, having huge shoulders is not entirely necessary. All that extra muscle just adds unwanted weight to the lightweights’ lean bodies.

So most lightweights tend to shy away from the weight training aspects as much as possible and try to load up their workouts with an increased amount of cardio and higher fat-burning exercises. The best cardio to melt away the pounds, though, is running.

“Running is a magic trick,” Reid said.

Reid ended up adding a lot of running to his daily regimen, while Todd-Geddes didn’t really have to make any adjustment at all.

“I didn’t have trouble keeping [the weight] off since I couldn’t even keep it on in high school [in order to row heavyweight]” Todd-Geddes said.

Now that they’ve made the transition, both rowers said that they wouldn’t go back to rowing heavyweight at Harvard.

“I [feel] that I [get] along with the [lightweight] team very well and I really [like] the guys,” Reid said.

While they do love their new team Reid and Todd-Geddes do miss the tradition that comes with the Harvard heavyweight division.

Every year for the week before the Harvard-Yale regatta the heavyweight team makes its way to a special training camp, Red Top, in New London, Conn., where all the rowers do for a week is eat, sleep and row. The lightweights, who race against the Bulldogs and Princeton earlier in the year, don’t get to be a part of that bonding, and sometimes feel a bit left out of the festivities.

But for Reid and Todd-Geddes, that beats actually being left out of a boat that has a chance at bringing home a win, and making their presence felt. Even if it’s a smaller, slightly more lanky presence.