“I was never a really athletic child.”
It’s not what you would expect Penn sophomore heavyweight rower RJ Sylak — a licensed pilot, record-breaking sprinter, and collegiate rower — to say. His coach Al Monte, however, would disagree.
“I think RJ is just a good athlete,” Monte said.
What Sylak meant was that he was the kid in tee-ball games standing far outfield, twiddling with grass as the game went on, not the star pitcher or batter hitting home runs.
“You don't necessarily have to be the best ball sport athlete to be a good rower,” Monte said. “But you have to have some physical characteristics.”
These “physical characteristics,” according to Monte, include height, physical power, and “big lungs.” But it’s also about mentality, and about “grit and a lot of determination that will allow you to push yourself to a place where others are unwilling to go.”
That mindset was clearly something Sylak had. It was the mindset with which he committed to Penn, even when other schools like Washington University in St. Louis were recruiting him for track.
“Let me take the path uncharted, take a little bit of a bet on myself,” Sylak thought.
It started when he was 13 years old. When he stumbled upon the Minnesota Soaring Club as a middle-schooler interested in aviation — thanks to his dad, a professional pilot — he decided to take lessons, flying up in a glider first with an instructor and later by himself.
Even for the small rural town of Zumbrota, Minnesota, it was surprising for teenagers to take up gliding and get a private pilot’s license for gliders, which Sylak got on his 16th birthday, a week before he got his driver’s license.
But it was the “path uncharted” that Sylak was seeking, and he found it.
Depending on rising air called thermals to keep himself up, he circled around the sky. Out there in the Minnesota wild, he could see cornfields and beanfields, lakes, and the changing colors of the fall trees. He glided with bald eagles and hawks, saying, “You feel like one of them.”
In high school, he was soon brought back down to reality on the ground. A long distance runner in middle school, his coach made Sylak a sprinter after he put up times the coach couldn’t believe in the 4x100 relays. He soon began personal training with a coach in his junior year of high school, taking back a sheet of paper every week with workouts listed for every day.
Running wasn’t a breeze to Sylak – he had to work for it. But once he did, Sylak became one of the fastest runners in Minnesota, setting records and winning state for the 200 and 400 meter races. According to a local Minnesota television station that covered Sylak’s impressive runs, he “stumbled into sprinting.”
“Everything I do, I kind of fall into, and then I love it,” Sylak said. "That's what keeps me trying new things.”
It happened all over again when he got to Penn. He saw heavyweight rowing on a preceptorial information list his freshman year and decided to try it out. Just like he did for flying.
Sylak soon discovered that rowing was quite different from flying and sprinting.
“You're using your body in different ways and that took a really long period of adjustment,” Sylak said.
In sprinting, he would have to swallow the pain and pump his legs for 50 seconds. For rowing, he has to use his whole body in sync with that of his teammates for as long as 20 minutes straight.
Daniel James Brown wrote in his famous book The Boys in the Boat, “Physiologists, in fact, have calculated that rowing a two-thousand-meter race — the Olympic standard — takes the same physiological toll as playing two basketball games back-to-back. And it exacts that toll in about six minutes.”
“Pain,” Brown continued to write, “is part and parcel of the deal.”
Sylak is no stranger to pain. He’s had to beat his body into shape and puked multiple times training for his track meets.
But beyond the pure physical aspect of it, rowing is different from track and flying in that he has to work now with a team. He can’t row faster simply because he feels like it. Rowing requires every ounce of concentration to stay in line with the person in front of you, but you also make sure to “[work] the boat to make each other better,” wrote Brown.
Monte echoed this statement, saying that the “job” of each man in the boat is to push the person in front of him, for what he calls “bottom up pressure.”
“He does his job really well,” Monte said on Sylak as a rower.
Monte also described Sylak's work ethic, noting how he often comes to practice early, always has a smile on his face, and asks if there’s anything he can do to help.
“These guys work their tails off, and sometimes it can become kind of a grind,” Monte said. “RJ is a guy that helps not only find joy, but bring joy.”
Even though Sylak has spread his wings far past Minnesota and into Wharton and business, landing summer internships in aerospace consulting this year and private credit the next, Sylak never forgot his roots.
Every now and then, Sylak’s Minnesota accent slips out. He says “pop” instead of “soda,” and recalls a moment in a marketing recitation when he used the term.
“Everyone just had this look on their face, like, ‘What did this guy just say?’” Sylak recalls.
Still, he refuses to change.
“I’m too far gone,” Sylak said with a grin.
Family is also close to Sylak's heart, as he calls his grandma Connie for an hour and a half every week – longer than he calls his own parents — and tells her everything.
“She has more friends than I do,” Sylak said. “She’s my inspiration.”
Even while he's a long way from family and his hometown in Minnesota, Sylak is still gliding, running, rowing forward.
“When I love it, I can’t stop," Sylak said.
He won’t be stopping anytime soon.
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