Among this, is the most complete narrative of what it's like to row that I've ever read. To say the least, the author nailed it.
"Competitive rowing is an undertaking of extraordinary beauty preceded by brutal punishment. Unlike most sports, which draw primarily on particular muscle groups, rowing makes heavy and repeated use of virtually every muscle in the body...
On one occasion, after watching the Washington freshmen practice, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Royal Brougham marveled at the relentlessness of the sport: 'Nobody ever took time out in a boat race,' he noted. 'There's no place to stop and get a satisfying drink of water or a lungful of cool, invigorating air. You just keep your eyes glued on the red, perspiring neck of the fellow ahead of you and row until they tell you it's all over... Neighbor, it's no game for a softy.'
When you row, the major muscles in your arms, legs, and back-- particularly the quadriceps, triceps, biceps, deltoids, latissimus dorsi, abdominals, hamstrings, and gluteal muscles-- do most of the grunt work, propelling the boat forward against the unrelenting resistance of water and wind. At the same time, scores of smaller muscles in the neck, wrists, hands, and even feet continually fine-tune your efforts, holding the body in constant equipoise in order to maintain the exquisite balance necessary to keep a twenty-four-inch-wide vessel... on an even keel. The result of all this muscular effort, on both the larger scale and the smaller, is that your body burns calories and consumes oxygen at a rate that is unmatched in almost any other human endeavor. Physiologists, in fact, have calculated that rowing a 2000m race-- the Olympic standard-- takes the same physiological toll as playing two basketball games back-to-back. And it exacts that toll in about six minutes.
...While 75-80 percent of the energy a rower produces in a 2000m race is aerobic energy fueled by oxygen, races always begin, and usually end, with hard sprints. These springs require levels of energy production that far exceed the body's capacity to produce aerobic energy, regardless of oxygen intake. Instead the body must immediately produce anaerobic energy. This, in turn, produces large quantities of lactic acid, and that acid rapidly builds up in the tissue of the muscles. The consequence is that the muscles often begin to scream in agony almost from the outset of a race and continue screaming until the very end.
...The common denominator in all these conditions-- whether in the lungs, the muscles, or the bones-- is overwhelming pain. And that is perhaps the first and most fundamental thing that all novice oarsmen must learn about competitive rowing in the upper echelons of the sport: that pain is part and parcel of the deal. It's not a question of whether you will hurt, or of how much you will hurt; it's a question of what you will do, and how well you will do it, while pain has her wanton way with you."
--Daniel James Brown, The Boys in the Boat
That last line there is something that I loved about the sport of rowing. Someday when I have kids going off to college, I hope they choose rowing, because it imparts a level of toughness and teaches lessons, particularly selflessness, that I never found in traditional team sports.
