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, 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.

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. 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.

So to the lyre of Orpheus they struck with their oars, The furious water of the sea, and the surge broke into waves. Here and there the dark brine gushed with foam, Roaring terribly through the strength of the mighty men.

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.

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.

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.

There is a place where cerebral an corporeal meet: they call it rowing