Embrace Mid-Life as a Time for Change: Rowing serves as an empowering platform to challenge yourself, elevate your fitness, and connect with a supportive community that understands your journey.
Remember your first strokes when learning to row? The challenge of handling the oar and the joy of feeling the boat start to move under you were intoxicating.
Now you’re way beyond that and you can see the future where you can be more skilful, more fit and make the boat move the way you want.
And of course you also know about the complexity of refining technique and increasing precision making every stroke the same. You’ve already come so far – and yet you can see how far you’ve still got to go in mastering rowing and sculling.
Along the way you’ve figured out that brute strength doesn’t work – we aren’t getting stronger as we age! You can see that the solution is based around teamwork, in persisting to try, committing to turning up regularly. and taking on small challenges. Each challenge completed builds on your base skill and fitness to make you into a better rower.
Your rowing future
What you didn’t expect was how challenging and rewarding rowing feels as you move beyond the basics. As a beginner, every workout had a new challenge. Now, it’s about refining precision, being aware of fine details and the reward is feeling that subtle shift as the boat surges forward. It’s exhilarating; the game has changed. Each stroke requires more precision, patience, and focus.
You can see rowing is a lifetime endeavour.
Yet it’s not just about fitness or strength – the mindful pursuit of the perfect stroke taken in unison with your crew mates is so satisfying. You realise the importance of every person in the boat and their contribution to a unified pursuit of a common goal.
Progress is measured in miles, kilometers, 500m splits and the laughs in the cafe after practice.
The beauty of our sport is that it’s less about reaching a final goal and more about finding fulfilment in the journey. Rowing has shifted from something to try into a sport to understand fully. It’s no longer just about the next big achievement; it’s about seeing how each workout fits into a big picture of lifelong learning and fitness.
Sharing the journey with others deepens the enjoyment. We celebrate small achievements together, we can see the rewards from our focus and commitment as our challenges are overcome. And we love it – because what we’ve learned on the water flows over into the rest of our lives.
We would love to be with you on your rowing journey. It’s enjoyable to learn and see your own advancement. Rowing will both test you and reward you. It brings resilience, teamwork, and strength into your life. And others will notice the change in you too.
Advocates for masters
We often get asked this question why are you doing all this work for masters?
We passionately believe that masters are an important part of rowing. We work to change agist attitudes and enable more people to try rowing.
Masters rowing is important for the sport.
Our vision is that rowing is a “sport for life”. As long as clubs, federations and coaches know how to work with older athletes, masters can row with “adaptations” for as long as we choose.
Showcasing adaptations is part of our innovation; finding solutions to challenges is part of our thinking; overcoming structural impediments is part of our lobbying. It’s all in service to improving masters rowing.
Stay in touch
We share regular updates with news, articles, technique and products aligned to the needs of masters rowers. You can get our weekly newsletter (sign up here) and see for yourself the community within Faster Masters Rowing.
