black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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

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
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

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

Greek Meter Rowing
The oars game me power but also taught me humility.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Games Humility Taught
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
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
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
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.
BARRY S. STRAUSS

Aerobic Baseball Combine Endurance Pterodactyl Weight
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
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
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

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barry S. Strauss Quotes