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. STRAUSSThere is a place where cerebral an corporeal meet: they call it rowing
More Barry S. Strauss Quotes
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There is a place where cerebral an corporeal meet: they call it rowing
BARRY S. STRAUSS -
Ergometer is Greek for ‘work meter’
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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 -
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.
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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.
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The greatest poet who ever wrote about rowing is Virgil, the greatest historian is Thucydides, but the greatest imagination ever to turn its attention to the sport is that of painter, Thomas Eakins.
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The rower need to know technique and has to be in shape. He won’t wrong by using strategy.
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Here and there the dark brine gushed with foam, Roaring terribly through the strength of the mighty men.
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There’s a word for what that takes and the word is not magic, the word is guts.
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So to the lyre of Orpheus they struck with their oars, The furious water of the sea, and the surge broke into waves.
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Rowing it was pointed out, was a sport that risked few injuries. So it was, I ould discover, but only if you did it right.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It’s the quintessential Greek sport: harmonious, competitive, agonizing, nautical, and above all, intelligent. It combines Odysseus’s brains and brawn and love of the sea with the tactical precision of the Spartan pikeman.
BARRY S. STRAUSS






