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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

Ergometer is Greek for ‘work meter’
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Greek Meter Rowing
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
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
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
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
There’s a word for what that takes and the word is not magic, the word is guts.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Guts Magic Take Word
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
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.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Injury Rowing Sports
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
Here and there the dark brine gushed with foam, Roaring terribly through the strength of the mighty men.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Brine Dark Foam Gushed Men Mighty Terribly
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
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
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
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
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

Intelligent Sea Sports
The oars game me power but also taught me humility.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Games Humility Taught

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.

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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.

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