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. STRAUSSYet 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.
More Barry S. Strauss Quotes
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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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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.
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Ergometer is Greek for ‘work meter’
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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.
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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.
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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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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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There is a place where cerebral an corporeal meet: they call it rowing
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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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There’s a word for what that takes and the word is not magic, the word is guts.
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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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Here and there the dark brine gushed with foam, Roaring terribly through the strength of the mighty men.
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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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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