The oars game me power but also taught me humility.
BARRY S. STRAUSSThe 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.
More Barry S. Strauss Quotes
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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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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.
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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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There is a place where cerebral an corporeal meet: they call it rowing
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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.
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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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The rower need to know technique and has to be in shape. He won’t wrong by using strategy.
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As if you legs were two cannons and your arms were two oars and the great lateral muscles of your back were pterodactyl wings and the brim of your baseball cap was a harpoon.
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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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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 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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Here and there the dark brine gushed with foam, Roaring terribly through the strength of the mighty men.
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Ergometer is Greek for ‘work meter’
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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.
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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.
BARRY S. STRAUSS