THE PRACTICE

Reach for it, and you'll miss;
let it loose, and it'll follow.
--Zen proverb

At six o'clock on a June morning I push off from the dock. Three short strokes with the lefthand oar, a quick turn of the head to check over my shoulder, and the way is clear all along the jetty to the lighthouse. The world and the water are full of promise.

That first moment is always fresh. It eclipses the prosaic reality ahead, five-and-a-half miles of hard work, of sweat and lactic acid and blisters. As you set out, you don't think about how, at a raw hour of the not-quite-day, you are sitting alone in a small racing boat -- a scull to be precise -- with seemingly no more solidity than one of those balsa-wood airplanes you used to fly as a kid. You could topple the boat simply by letting go of one of the oars you are holding in either hand. You don't think about the absurdity of traveling for an hour seated backward, continually twisting your head over your shoulder for a look ahead on the water, trying not to notice scenery except as a fixed point for navigation. You don't think about the primitiveness of the scull's motive technology: the oars pivot on twin outriggers, a tiny seat mounted on rollers slides from bow to stern, where the feet sit in running shoes affixed to two rectangular pieces of wood dignified with the name of footstretchers. You don't think about the mathematics: how five-and-a-half miles at, on average, an easy pace -- that is, a pace of short bursts of speed interspersed with easy paddling and with technique drills -- comes to about eight-hundred strokes. On each of these eight-hundred-odd strokes what happens is this.

First the sculler creeps up on the sliding seat into the stern of the boat, then he drives back rapidly into the bow. First the sculler coils the body up and then he uncoils it. It is, says Burnell, like contracting and releasing a spring. The point is to propel the boat, which the sculler accomplishes on the drive by hanging his weight from two five-pound fiberglass oars, thereby transferring muscle-power from body to oar. The legs lead, the big muscles of the thigh powering the drive at first. Then the back swings toward the bow, contributing the momentum of its muscles. Finally the arms too are drawn back into the bow. As the blades of the oar accelerate toward the stern, the bow of the boat drives forward. The boat glides and the sculler relaxes, if that is what you can call it as he compresses his body and readies his oars for the next drive.

It is a movement at once simple and yet as complicated as any ballet, at once natural and yet to be cultivated only through study and sweat. It has its own grammar and language. We speak of "pulling an oar" but rowing (whether sculling or sweep rowing) is as much if not more a matter of pushing. Most of the work is done by the legs and the upper back; the arms do not so much pull as let themselves be "reeled in" by the shoulders, as Cunningham says. The back must be kept straight from the shoulders all the way down not merely to the waist but to the hips, which requires both powerful concentration and strong hip and abdominal muscles. Bending at the hips leverages greater power than does bending at the waist, and that power is transferred to the oars; it protects, moreover, the lower back from injury. Slouching is to be avoided at all costs; the sculler should sit up regally at the finish like a prince on a throne.

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