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.
BARRY S. STRAUSSIn 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.
More Barry S. Strauss Quotes
-
-
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Here and there the dark brine gushed with foam, Roaring terribly through the strength of the mighty men.
BARRY S. STRAUSS -
The oars game me power but also taught me humility.
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 -
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 -
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 -
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 -
There is a place where cerebral an corporeal meet: they call it rowing
BARRY S. STRAUSS -
There’s a word for what that takes and the word is not magic, the word is guts.
BARRY S. STRAUSS -
Ergometer is Greek for ‘work meter’
BARRY S. STRAUSS