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. STRAUSSThe 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.
More Barry S. Strauss Quotes
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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 -
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 -
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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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 -
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 -
Ergometer is Greek for ‘work meter’
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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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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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The rower need to know technique and has to be in shape. He won’t wrong by using strategy.
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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 -
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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Here and there the dark brine gushed with foam, Roaring terribly through the strength of the mighty men.
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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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There’s a word for what that takes and the word is not magic, the word is guts.
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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.
BARRY S. STRAUSS