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You feel like you and the boats are one, you feel that no obstacle will put up any more resistance than the water does to your oars, you feel that hard work and grit and mental toughness will always win it for you in the end.

Barry S. Strauss

When you are rowing well and hard, the rhythm of the stroke takes over. It drives your days and restores your nights. It imparts cadence and direction.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Hard Night Stroke Winning Work
In college, I was an editor on the student daily… To the extent that I noticed the existence of crew at all, I saw only what appeared to be big-boned acolytes who rose at dawn.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Appear College Editors Rose
The romantic craved seeing if the quirkiness of the sport – there is after all, little practical value to oarsmanship in the postindustrial age – stirred his blood.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Blood Little Postindustrial Practical Rowing Simple
When you are on the erg your mind is too busy to pay attention to the sounds of the machine; you notice only that they are indeed loud.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Attention Mind Sound
The feel of a good row stays with you hours afterward. Your muscles glow, your mind wanders from the papers on you desk and goes back, again and again, to that terrific power piece at the end of the workout when it felt as if you and the boat were flying.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Baseball Wings Workout
You feel like you and the boats are one, you feel that no obstacle will put up any more resistance than the water does to your oars, you feel that hard work and grit and mental toughness will always win it for you in the end.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Boat Feel Grit Mental Obstacle Toughness
Rowing was not simple for me. I nodded whenever the instructor made a point, as if I understood, but I could as easily have assembled the space shuttle as have repeated the moves she was explaining.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Moving Simple Space
Think of aerobics plus weight lifting minus the music or camaraderie. Combine unalloyed endurance with straightforward strength and demand poise, timing, and practiced form as well. Think of pure pain: that’s the ergometer.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Lifting Pain Thinking Weight
The Greek in me wanted to know what it felt like to pull an oar. The intellectual wondered about how to get eight individuals to move to the same beat. The athlete wanted to check what has been described as the ultimate workout.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Eight Individual Moving Sports Workout
If rowing is a trial then the ergometer is the courtroom, the meter is the jury. And an honest jury at that, because the numbers do not lie.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Lying Numbers Trials
Yet what it takes to win races is the ability to reach inside and pull out something to keep you going – no, to go faster – when you have nothing left to give.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Ability Faster Inside Nothing Take
The oars game me power but also taught me humility.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Games Humility Taught
A boat is the hardest think I know of to put into perspective. It is so much like a human figure, there is something alive about it.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Alive Figure Hardest Perspective Thinking
So to the lyre of Orpheus they struck with their oars, The furious water of the sea, and the surge broke into waves.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Dark Men Sea
The single sculler, alone on the river at dawn, or spotlighted in his lane during a race, is th emost romantic, the most quixotic figure in all rowing.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Dawn Race Rivers
Eakins rejected gentlemen athletics as his theme. Instead, he took a subject that had been the stuff of illustrated weeklies and the penny press and turned it into fine art. Eakins celebrates not fire from heaven but honest sweat, not genius but hard work.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Art Fire Hard Work

You feel like you and the boats are one, you feel that no obstacle will put up any more resistance than the water does to your oars, you feel that hard work and grit and mental toughness will always win it for you in the end.

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You feel like you and the boats are one, you feel that no obstacle will put up any more resistance than the water does to your oars, you feel that hard work and grit and mental toughness will always win it for you in the end.

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Popular Authors

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