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. STRAUSSThe 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.
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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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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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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Here and there the dark brine gushed with foam, Roaring terribly through the strength of the mighty men.
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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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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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The oars game me power but also taught me humility.
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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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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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There is a place where cerebral an corporeal meet: they call it rowing
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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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There’s a word for what that takes and the word is not magic, the word is guts.
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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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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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The rower need to know technique and has to be in shape. He won’t wrong by using strategy.
BARRY S. STRAUSS