Portrait of Resilience

WITHIN MINUTES AFTER Derek Byrnes was announced as the new head coach for the Stanford women’s rowing team, he received a text from one of his new athletes.

Byrnes knew of Devin Norder from her days as a top junior rower, and while Byrnes coached the Stanford lightweight team the year before, he was aware of an injury history that prevented Norder from rowing in a single race her previous two years on the Cardinal varsity squad.

Norder wanted to talk to him and, moments later, was in his office. Byrnes sensed where this conversation was going to go.

“Are you quitting?” he asked.

Norder looked at Byrnes as if she’d been insulted.

“Why would you think I’d be quitting?” she said.

Before the ink was even dry on Byrnes contract, Norder came asking for a training plan. She was eager to get to work. Norder, despite eight surgeries, never has strayed from the determination she conveyed at that first meeting. Even with Norder undergoing heart surgery this year, Byrnes learned his lesson. He never doubted her desire to come back.

“For two years, she’d had no forward traction,” he said. “I remember thinking, Does she have a breaking point? You just don’t find kids like this, and she’s been that way ever since.”

At the recent gathering of GameFACES, where Stanford student-athletes publicly describe personal challenges that go beyond the playing fields, two of Norder’s teammates shared their own intense and powerful personal stories.

Norder sees what her teammates have endured and is humbled in comparison. She claims to have no such story that would deserve the telling. But that’s not true. Norder’s may not be greater by her definition, but illustrates why perseverance can overpower disappointment.

“Not everyone has an easy path to get to the same goal,” Byrnes said. “Her path has never been easy, but she’s never lost sight of her goal.”

THERE ARE NO shortcuts in rowing. Success is tied to the amount of work you put in. It’s not based on skill, or hand-eye coordination, or quickness necessarily. It’s about doing the same repetitive motion thousands of times each day, in tandem with your teammates, to get a little bit faster.

“You can be really fit,” Byrnes said. “You can do a lot of physiology testing on land. You can do all that really well and it still could just come down to how you hold an oar and the way you’re able to place it in the water when you’re under duress.”

In some circles, rowers call this “cardiac chaos,” when coordination plummets, and fatigue conspires against you.

“You have to put in so much work to get just a little bit faster,” Byrnes said. “So much of the season is spent just putting in the work. Then, you get to the racing season and find that you’re outworked by so many other people. That’s the brutal nature of the sport.”

Growing up as the only girl with four brothers, Devin was competitive by default. And coming from Sarasota, Florida, where Nathan Benderson Park hosts world-class rowing facilities, particularly in sculls – small boats usually raced by singles and doubles – her passion was pulled toward the sport.

She finished fifth in the lightweight double sculls at the 2014 World Rowing Under 23 Championships and was among the best in the country for her age.

Her bio on the USRowing Web site described how she “loves rowing because of how competitive it is … Her goals include constantly trying to better herself off and on the water.”

Sometimes, that can be too much of a good thing.

“I like to push boundaries a little bit,” Norder said. “That’s where I’ve had a lot of my success. But it’s also been my downfall, because sometimes I have to be told when to stop.”

It’s served her well at times. After two lost seasons at Stanford, Norder recovered as a junior and rowed on the seventh seat of the varsity eight that placed second at the NCAA Championships. She also spent time in the sixth seat of the team’s top boat.

She rows from the starboard side, with her oar blade placed into the water on her left as she faces backward.

There may be no greater illustration of teamwork and synchronicity in any sport than in rowing, with eight individuals gliding across the water as one. The boat skims the surface, with only a touch of eight oars barely rippling the water. It may be the closest feeling there is in sport to flying.

“There are little moments that keep me going,” Norder said. “There’s something about just being in a boat … When it really clicks and really moves, there’s nothing like it.

“I rowed a lot of small boats in high school, but there’s something about being connected to eight other people who are working toward the same thing and are really on that day. There is precision in it, and there is a lot of heart.”

The gliding and artistry of a boat in motion belies the strength and power of the rowers themselves. Each is tasked with a challenge: How hard can you go for how long?

That’s where Norder excels. She cannot be stopped.

“I’m comfortable being uncomfortable,” she said. “If there’s one thing that I do better than the average person is that I’m fine being at a 180 heart rate or being in pain for a certain amount of time. The entire sport is based on who’s best at being in pain and who’s willing to be uncomfortable for longer.”

But, as Norder admits, “I might be a little bit too comfortable being in pain.”

NORDER WORKS SO hard that her body fights back. Rowing has rejected her, because the harder she works, the more damage she does.

Ankle surgery, a fractured rib, and a broken toe that never healed. “The broken toe, that was not a big deal,” she said. “My freshman year, my foot exploded one morning. That sounds completely weird. Even if you talk to doctors they have no idea what happened or why, but my foot just swelled to three times its size.”

Her effort and passion are her greatest gifts and her greatest enemies. She's injured herself in one instance midrace and soldiered on, continuing for another two weeks through the NCAA Championships, despite an injury that offered no relief.

Last June, Norder earned her degree in management science and engineering and now is co-terming on a master’s in communication. For the past two years, Norder was an undergraduate housing coordinator, one of two students who matched roommates for first-year students for Stanford Residential & Dining Enterprises.

Norder spent much of the summers learning everything she could about Stanford’s more than 1,700 first-year students and pairing them in their dorms.

For Norder, it was an interesting observation into the imagination. Students developed conspiracy theories on why certain people were paired with others. How, indeed, could four men with names like John, James, Jacob and Joshua -- a “biblical quadrangle” -- be matched together in Roble Hall? Some theories were based on information the housing coordinators didn’t even have.

“People would come up with crazy ideas,“ Norder said.

With her two-year obligation behind her, Norder entered this academic year with fewer distractions and more opportunity to focus on rowing for her fifth and final season.

However, instead of feeling revitalized, she felt sluggish and tired, all the time. At a big early season race, the Head of the Charles in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Oct. 21, she was part of the Cardinal's varsity eight that placed second in the Women's Championship Eights, first among collegiate crews, and even beat one of the national-team boats.

“We were riding a high, but I was exhausted,” Norder said. “We were supposed to do a hard workout the next week and I was in tears. I came to Derek’s office and told him, ‘I’m so tired. I slept 14 hours yesterday and I don’t know what’s wrong.’”

By Thanksgiving, Norder was having heart palpitations. Later were fainting spells. She passed out so often that she taught herself how to fall, by moving away from countertops and tables and lowering her body slowly to the ground.

“I was falsely confident that I was OK, because I felt I could control it,” Norder said. “I was more worried that by passing out, I would traumatize the people around me. Waking up is a little startling, but it’s not really that bad. But for the people around you, that’s really traumatic. Especially if it’s your coach or your teammates.”

Even when resting, her heart rate soared to as high as 250 beats a minute. And still she thought the problem was in her head.

As her heart raced one night, she took a video of her heart rate monitor and showed it to her brother, who is in medical school. He urged her to seek help.

With an injury, Norder drew comfort in knowing it wouldn’t kill her. She’d continue to train through it if she could. But this was different. If she passed out on the boat, she was afraid her coaches would be afraid to put her back on the water. What if she collapsed into the water?

She arrived at the office alone, convinced it probably was nothing. Instead, an electrophysiologist diagnosed atrial flutter, an abnormal heart rhythm that starts in the atrial chambers of the heart. It’s common with the elderly, but rare for someone so young. This time, she was scared.

She could take medications for the rest of her life to control her heart rate and blood pressure. But maintaining a low heart-rate would end her rowing career, where the point of training is to redline your heart, not coddle it.

Norder elected surgery. Cardiac ablation. They would thread catheters – five in her case – through blood vessels from her groin into her heart and map electrical signals in the heart that were misfiring, by burning them. The scarring would prevent the electricity to create bad signals.

“How long is it going to take to get me back?” she asked.

Devin was awake during the January surgery, at least until the burning caused too much pain. The doctors put her under, though she remembers little of that.

For two days, Norder remained in discomfort while her heart remained irritated, causing chest pain. Eventually it subsided, and Norder began to ease back as best she could. Rowing just didn’t feel right at first, especially with her heart still experiencing irritation.

“Maxing out doing a 2-kilometer race is one of most irritating things you can do to your heart already,” she said. “And my heart was slightly swollen, with some scar tissue.”

After three months, Norder was given the green light for full training. The Pac-12 and NCAA championships were ahead and Norder was determined to make it into those boats. This, after all, is her last shot.

NORDER NEVER HAS been blind to quitting, but always left it to herself. If she found herself content with being on the sideline, she would know it was time. But she never got to that point.

“Every time I sit out,” she said. “I realize that I miss it. I want to get back and do what I love again.”

Rowing is a “blue-collar sport,” Byrnes said. It relies on hours of constant work for every ounce of success for the healthiest of rowers. Trying to make up ground is even tougher. Is it worth it?

“Rowing … it’s taken a lot from me,” Norder said. “Lots of time, lots of pain … all of these things. But it’s given me a lot more. I’ve never felt like I’ve been diminished by rowing. I don’t think I would be the same person if I didn’t go through some of these things. If anything, I’ve just drawn the short straw.”

Byrnes no longer doubts Norder.

“I stopped having those thoughts,” Byrnes said. “I worry about her more than anything. Sometimes, you see people go through so much and you worry about them, not just physically, but emotionally. That ends up being the concern.

“We can contend for a national championship. If you’re going to have that as a goal, there’s a lot of work and a lot of intensity that has to go into it. I worry that, during that process, it may be too intense for her. Who knows if she can hold up. She’s so passionate about it. You don’t want her breaking down before she gets to that point.”

When Norder is given a task, she is fully committed. She will not ease into a 90-minute workout. She will go hard from the first second and continue until the time is up. Even while sidelined, she was the first to arrive and the last to leave.

“She doesn’t have a light switch,” Byrnes said. “There’s no dimmer. She just flips it on and she’s there.”

Other than directions from the coxswains, rowing can be a quiet sport on the water. But not with Norder. She talks, she chatters, she inspires. She’s a mentor to young rowers, she helps injured teammates navigate the Stanford sports medicine world. She’s sharp, she’s witty.

Why does Norder remain so dedicated?

“She’s just a people person,” Byrnes said. “There’s so much about rowing that’s a team dynamic and the way you interact with other people. Van rides here, lunches there, coffees. She just talks. She loves people. She loves giving advice. If some kid’s struggling, I try to push them toward Devin. Whatever she’s going to say is pretty spot on.

“She’s been through so much. People adore her. She’s fun to have around. It could be freezing out, it could be raining on us, it could be windy, and she just has a smile on her face. She has a way of making it light, and laughing.”

Norder has a different reason on why she won’t give up.

“I’m addicted,” she said. “I don’t know what else I would do.”

So, Norder still puts her blade in the water, and tries to do it better. She’ll try to row more than anyone else, because that will make her go faster. And that’s what she loves about it … she knows what it takes.

It’s the grind that draws Norder. She values it more than ever.

“Eventually, I’ll have to figure it out, and that’s daunting and scary,” Norder said. “It’s true, I can’t do this forever and I can’t be an athlete forever. But for right now, I can keep going. So, I’m going to keep going.”