THE SPORT OF ROWING

Taranaki Daily News, 14 October 1933, Page 4

THE SPORT OF ROWING

WHAT IS PURPOSE OF IT? AN ANSWER TO EVERY QUESTION. CONSIDERATION OF ALL ASPECTS. ’ (By “Best and Best.”) Why try at an oar for an hour or two every day? Why submit to being scolded and bullied by a coach? When you have rowed your boat so many miles in so many minutes what have you accomplished? Ruskin asked these or similar questions as Oxford, and induced a few, young men to go out in flannels armed with pick and shovel, instead of an oar, to a neighbouring village, there to make and mend roads for exercise. The roads they made were very bad roads, and it was doubted by the peasants, who stared and wondered, if the roads they mended were not really marred. ■ Let us endeavour to answer these questions, says a writer on the sport. To the first two I would reply, young men who work hard at the desk for eight hours of the day need some hard outdoor exercise to develop their frames and constitution and make them virile speciments of vigorous manhood, and I believe no form of exercise has been found more perfect than rowing when properly done. All who have tried it know that it opens the chest in a way that nothing else does, making you feel you could take a deeper breath than before; it makes you walk with a more springy step, and gives your arms that delicious tight feeling, which all rowing men know so well. Then again, why be coached? Why make a toil > of the thing? Why not row for pleasure? The real answer to this lies in the fact that there is no exercise more perfect than rowing when it js properly done. For the row to have its full exhilarating effect, it must be a comfortable row, and no one can row with comfort who rows badly, and very few can row well by the light of nature. We all have to submit to the stern discipline of the coach otherwise we see bent arms, cramped chests, round back, one side of the body used and not the other, the legs undeveloped, and so on. ' Lastly, wha< is the use of excelling in rowing? Apart from the fact that it is good to excel in anything we try to do, there is this to be said about rowing. To have excelled; to have won a championship four-oared race, for example, means a good deal; it means that four men composing the crew have for many weeks held themselves bound in honour to one another to do .all in their power to bring themselves into the best possible condition; that they have abstained from everything that could possibly be hurtful; that at any inconvenience they have come down to the boat house wet or fine, fair or foul weather, every day for perhaps six weeks; that they have, rowed conscientiously and honestly with ail their might every day, and each one striving not to lighten his own but his companions’ share of the toil. Many a team after a football match, many an eleven after gaining a victory, must say: “Well, that was more luck than anything; if so and so had not potted that goal, or that man had not slipped and run himself out, things would have been very different.” But with rowing luck has hardly anything ever to do. In al-

most every case; - all things being equal, success will come ■ to the crew that. has worked. hardest in practice and trained the imbst conscientiously.

Therefore, I would say to the young men, row. because it is the finest exercise there is, and row well because good rowing is an infinitely better form of exercise than bad rowing, and remember that whereas there is no pleasure more keen, no sensation-more • equisite, than that to be obtained in a smoothly travelling racing boat in which the crew swing and work as one man, so there is no torture more cruel, no sensation more intolerable than that of rowing in a rolling boat, with the crew out of time, and the swing uneven, > the boat dragging heavily on every man’s arms, as with laboured breath and aching limb, you slowly approach the all too distant goal.