Rowing Against the Current: On Learning to Scull at Forty

In the midst of the standard, dreary midlife crisis — complete with wine-tasting courses, yoga classes, and a failed attempt at a first novel — forty-year-old Barry Strauss falls unexpectedly and passionately in love with rowing, a sport in which a twenty-seven-year-old is a has-been.
Strauss, a professor of classics and history, writes about the unanticipated delights of an affair that, like so many others, begins as a casual dalliance and develops into a full-blown obsession. Drawn to th...