For oarsmen, the sensation is different. While running, swimming, or even participating in team sports one performs to his own limits, limits set by the individual conditioning and determination. When exhausted, the individual decides to endure, change pace, walk or collapse. As part of an eight, however, one performs at the level of the crew. When every part of each body says stop, inexplicably the boat still continues. Individual limitations reassert themselves only when the race is over; only then is the body released from the tyranny of the shell and allowed to vomit, lose consciousness, or gracefully expire.

There are days when you hate it but when it comes down to it, nothing beats making a boat go fast and the feeling you get from training hard. That's what satisfying.

Christine Collins 2000 USA Women's Lightweight 2x

It's my own space, my own time, when I'm just out there letting my thoughts go. It's a part of my day just like eating and it's one of my favorite parts.

Louise Kent

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Theodore Roosevelt