Free The Amateurs by David Halberstam

burns out its normal supplies of oxygen and then demands more. But less and less oxygen is available. That means the body is still producing high levels of energy, but it is making the sculler pay for it by producing a great deal of lactic acid as well. With the lactic acid comes greater and greater pain. In addition, the scullers are unable to pace themselves, as long-distance runners can. They might try to hold back a little bit of energy so they will not burn out at the end, but in truth they go all out from the very beginning. It is an advantage to lead in a sculling race; the leader can see the other boats behind him and does not get caught in their wash.
    When a race was over and Tiff Wood had rowed at his peak, it took almost five days before his body was physically replenished. When he thought of rowing, the first thing that came to mind was pain. After the first twenty-five strokes of a race, his body ached. His lungs and his legs seemed to scream at him to stop. On occasion the temptation was almost irresistible. The ability to resist the impulse, to keep going in spite of it, to reach through it and summon extra resources of power while others, stronger and smoother of technique, were fading, made him a champion. But he could not think of racing without thinking of the pain. It was hard for him in advance of a race to sit and plan out what he intended to do because the very thought of racing filled him with dread of the pain.
    But he was also aware that his ability to absorb that pain had made him an exceptional competitor. He had rationalized all of it very carefully, going over and over in his mind the pluses and minuses of what he was doing. The race itself was a terrible ordeal. The pain bordered, he thought, on a kind of torture. The worst part of the torture was that it was self-imposed. There was no need to go through with it. But he had willed himself to deal with it; he wanted to measure himself against the best, and the only way to do that was to bear the pain.
    In truth, deep down, he liked this aspect of the sport because it permitted ordinary and not particularly talented young men and women to reach beyond themselves. "I think," he once said, "that what I like about it is the chance to be a hero. Every day in what seems like a very ordinary setting there are heroes in every boat, people reaching down to come up with that much more energy to make it work. I like that, I honor it and I think that is special in this world." In the end, rowing made him feel good about himself.
    Parker, his coach and a former Olympic sculler himself, thought that Tiff Wood was particularly good at calibrating exactly how much energy he had left and giving every single bit. Part of his strength, Parker thought, was in coming across a finish line on the surge of his last possible stroke, absolutely depleted. This was true even in practice, and Parker recently had a graphic illustration of it. He had, near the end of a long and punishing workout, asked Wood for a final twenty power strokes, and Wood had given them. But Parker had not been paying attention, and he had asked Wood for ten more, ten more strokes from a body that was finished; and Wood, the most modest and proper young man imaginable, had screamed at Parker in a kind of elemental rage, "Fuck you!"
    Early in Wood's college career Parker had decided that any attempt to make him row with greater finesse would be counterproductive. He was impatient with technique. The best way to coach him, Parker decided, was not to coach him but to leave him to his furies. What set Wood apart was will, the power of the mind to bend the body to its uses. There was a certain madness to that, Wood knew, but there was also a purpose. He had, after all, been raised in a tradition in which sacrifice, if not pain, was an essential ingredient. He believed, he said, in the Puritan ethic, not the leisure society. A world where people sought only leisure seemed empty to him. The best thing