There’s something quietly revolutionary about a sports romance that understands the difference between training hard and training smart. Racing Hearts by Ann Adams doesn’t just skim the surface of elite athletics—it dives deep into the psychological warfare that athletes wage against themselves, all while delivering a romance that feels as inevitable as the sunrise over calm water.
Ann Adams, who brings her own experience as a junior national champion and Olympic Training Center resident to the page, crafts a debut that pulses with authenticity. This isn’t a story where rowing serves as mere window dressing for a love story. Instead, the sport becomes the crucible through which protagonist Katherine Parker must confront everything she thought she knew about success, control, and what it means to truly live.
The Setup: When Everything Falls Apart
Katherine Parker has her life mapped out with the precision of a championship regatta plan. Single sculling. Olympic Training Center residency. A carefully calibrated diet, training schedule, and absolutely zero room for error. She’s the embodiment of discipline, the kind of athlete who tracks her power-walking pace to a pasticceria in Italy because even leisure must be optimized.
Then her boyfriend dumps her at the starting line of a World Cup final, she bombs the race, and suddenly her entire carefully constructed world crumbles. Kicked off the national team and out of the training center, Kath has one summer to prove herself worthy of a second chance. The catch? She must train with a new coach in her hometown—a coach who seems determined to dismantle every rigid structure she’s built her life around.
The novel’s strength lies in how Adams handles this familiar setup. Rather than rushing toward redemption, she takes time to excavate the psychological toll of perfectionism. Kath isn’t just struggling with technique or fitness; she’s grappling with an identity so fused with achievement that failure feels like erasure. Adams writes Kath’s internal monologue with such sharp, self-aware humor that even her spiraling thoughts become darkly entertaining.
Coach Adrian and the Chemistry Question
Enter Coach Adrian, and here’s where Racing Hearts by Ann Adams navigates potentially troubled waters. The coach-athlete romance carries inherent power dynamics that lesser novels might gloss over, but Adams establishes their relationship’s foundation before Adrian becomes Kath’s coach. Their first meeting—a chance encounter at an Italian nightclub where both are drowning their respective disappointments—creates space for genuine connection between equals.
Adrian is not the gruff, demanding coach of sports movie clichés. He’s thoughtful, encouraging, and frustratingly insistent that Kath needs to find joy in rowing again rather than treating it as an endless optimization problem. Where Kath tracks every metric and superstition, Adrian wants her to feel the water, trust her instincts, and occasionally eat a corn dog at the state fair without calculating its macronutrient profile.
The tension between them simmers beautifully across the summer training montage. Adams has a gift for writing scenes that vibrate with unspoken attraction:
- The loaded silences during Skee-Ball competitions
- The careful distance maintained during technique corrections on the dock
- The moment Kath realizes she’s been overthinking everything, including her feelings
Their relationship development feels organic rather than forced, built on mutual respect and the kind of deep understanding that develops when two people share both vulnerability and ambition.
The Rowing Gets Technical (In the Best Way)
For readers who love sports romance but worry about either dumbed-down athletics or impenetrable jargon, Racing Hearts by Ann Adams strikes an impressive balance. Adams clearly knows her sport—the novel is peppered with authentic details about splits, rating, catch angles, and the peculiar torture of three-by-three-thousand-meter pieces. Yet she translates this technical knowledge into prose that serves the story rather than overwhelming it.
The training sequences pulse with visceral detail. You feel Kath’s quads burning during erg pieces, the bite of cold water spray during early morning practices, the meditative rhythm of a perfect stroke. Adams understands that rowing, particularly single sculling, is as much mental as physical. The sport becomes a metaphor for Kath’s broader journey: learning to balance preparation with presence, control with trust, rigidity with flow.
Some standout moments include:
- Kath’s panic attack while rowing in choppy water, where Adrian coaches her through a grounding exercise that becomes a pivotal character moment
- The benchmark workout that shows her progress, written on her forearm in blue ink
- A beach scene that combines athletic triumph with romantic intimacy in a way that feels earned rather than gratuitous
Where the Narrative Occasionally Loses Steam
While Racing Hearts by Ann Adams excels in many areas, it’s not without its predictable rhythms. Romance readers will likely anticipate most major plot points: the initial resistance, the gradual warming, the misunderstanding that creates temporary distance, the triumphant resolution. The novel follows a well-worn path, and while Adams navigates it with skill, she doesn’t radically reinvent the genre’s architecture.
The supporting cast, while likable, sometimes feels sketched rather than fully rendered. Kath’s best friend Sofi brings welcome levity and serves as a grounding presence, but we see her primarily through her function in Kath’s story. Similarly, Kath’s mother—a former competitive rower herself who now runs a yoga studio—offers intriguing parallels but remains somewhat peripheral to the main narrative thrust.
The novel’s resolution, while emotionally satisfying, wraps up perhaps a touch too neatly. Real athletic comebacks are messier, more uncertain, more littered with setbacks than what we see here. The competitive aspects of the story occasionally give way to the romantic ones at moments where maintaining that tension might have elevated the stakes.
The Bigger Picture: Control, Joy, and What Makes Life Worth Living
What elevates this debut beyond standard sports romance is Adams’s willingness to interrogate larger questions about achievement culture and what we sacrifice in pursuit of excellence. Through Kath, we see someone who has organized her entire existence around future success—so much so that she’s forgotten how to experience the present moment. Her superstitions, her rigid routines, her inability to deviate from her training plan even for a single afternoon all point to someone trying to control the fundamentally uncontrollable.
Adrian’s role, then, isn’t to fix Kath or to convince her to abandon her ambitions. Instead, he challenges her to consider whether her methods actually serve her goals. Can you row your best when you’re trapped in your head, anxiously monitoring every variable? Or does peak performance require trust—in your training, your body, your instincts, and yes, the people around you?
The novel suggests that true strength lies not in rigid adherence to plans but in the flexibility to adapt, the courage to be vulnerable, and the wisdom to recognize that life’s richness comes from experiences we can’t quantify or control. It’s a message particularly relevant in our achievement-obsessed culture where optimization has become its own form of tyranny.
The Verdict
Racing Hearts by Ann Adams is an accomplished debut that will satisfy readers looking for both authentic sports drama and genuine romantic heat. Adams writes with the confidence of someone who has lived in this world, bringing insider knowledge to every practice, every race, every moment of athletic doubt. Her prose sparkles with wit and self-awareness, making even Kath’s most neurotic moments endearing rather than exhausting.
While the narrative occasionally follows predictable patterns and the supporting characters could use more development, the central relationship and character arc more than compensate. This is a novel that understands perfectionism’s seductive appeal and its corrosive costs. It’s about learning to row—and live—with both power and grace.
For fans of sports romance seeking substance alongside chemistry, for athletes who’ve struggled with the tyranny of their own expectations, for anyone who’s needed permission to find joy in the doing rather than just the achieving, this summer training session is worth every sweaty, sexy moment.
If You Loved This, Try These
Readers who enjoyed Racing Hearts by Ann Adams will likely appreciate:
- The Prospect of This City by Hannah Pittard – explores ambition and identity through running
- Net Gains by Kate Meader (Chicago Rebels series) – hockey romance with authentic sports detail
- The Queen’s Rising by Rebecca Ross – features a competitive, driven heroine finding her strength
- Kulti by Mariana Zapata – slow-burn sports romance with an age gap and mentorship dynamic
- Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall – witty contemporary romance about finding balance between control and chaos
Adams has crafted a debut that announces her as a voice to watch in sports romance. For a genre sometimes criticized for treating athletics as backdrop rather than lived experience, this novel offers welcome authenticity alongside its undeniable romantic appeal.