Capitol Hill retiree Susan Driano relaxes after rowing on the Anacostia River. She and other local rowers say the full-body, low-impact sport has a meditative quality. Photo by Barbara Heck

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It’s 5:45 a.m. on a cold, dark morning. Stars twinkle overhead, and only the faintest light of dawn appears in the eastern sky. Instead of being in my cozy bed, I am helping three other people carry a long, heavy boat upside down, its gunwale balanced on my shoulder.

Together, we flip the boat right-side up onto the water and get in. Under the direction of our coach, Cindy Cole, we push away from the dock and begin rowing toward a stretch of the Anacostia River that is so picturesque that locals have dubbed it “Narnia.”

The founder and head coach of Washington Rowing School (WRS), which operates out of the Bladensburg Waterfront Park boathouse in Maryland, Cole gently corrects our technique as she rides alongside us in a motorized launch.

“Square your blade sooner,” she said to me, meaning turn my oar vertically so it can slice into the water more effectively.

One notable thing about our boat is that three out of the four rowers, along with the coxswain, are all over 50 years old.

As it turns out, this is not unusual. Unlike other sports, rowing is an activity that people can learn — and continue doing — at any stage of life. In fact, many first-time rowers begin in middle age.

In the greater Washington, D.C., metro area, rowing is a popular pastime across generations. With the area’s many high school crews to master’s rowing teams to devotees of single sculling, it is rare to drive past the Potomac or Anacostia rivers and not glimpse a rowing shell whose oars are moving in perfect synchronization.

Full-body workout

Rowing differs from better-known water sports like kayaking and canoeing in that athletes use longer oars and sit on sliding seats to power the blades through the water. Indoor rowing machines — called ergometers, or ergs — mimic this back-and-forth motion.

The sport features two primary disciplines: sweeping and sculling. Sweep rowers use just one oar on opposite sides of the boat, while scullers use two oars at once.

Although the exertion can be intense, rowers of all ages value the sport for being a full-body, low-impact seated workout that is relatively easier on the knees and ankles.

Older rowers come to the sport in a variety of ways: Often they or their children rowed in high school or college, or they are looking to try something new yet accessible as empty-nesters or retirees.

This was what drew me to WRS. I’d fallen in love with the sport because my son rowed for his high school crew in Arlington, Virginia, and I wanted to try it for myself. I took a novice sweep class with Alexandria Community Rowing and then switched to WRS to continue developing my skills.

Kathleen Prentice of Takoma Park, Maryland, had a similar trajectory. Her daughter was a coxswain for her high school team, which practices at the same Bladensburg boathouse as WRS. Now in her early 50s, Prentice learned to row with Cole when she was in her late 40s.

“As I was getting older, it occurred to me that I needed to diversify my exercise types, so I took a sculling class,” Prentice said. “I loved being out in the middle of a river in the morning. It was sometimes so beautiful.”

Antidote to pain and stress

Rowing is particularly well-suited to older adults because it is low-impact, highly aerobic and builds strength and balance.

Barbara Brocker of Chevy Chase, Maryland, was 57 when a friend encouraged her to take a Learn to Row class at Capital Rowing Club at the Anacostia Community Boathouse in D.C. Before that, she had never considered herself an athlete and assumed she was too old to start.

Over the past five years, however, she has progressed from novice-level rowing to earning a spot on Capital’s competitive rowing team.

Since she began the sport, Brocker has experienced improvements in her chronic hip and back problems, reducing her reliance on cortisone injections.

“Rowing correctly — the caveat being correctly — has made all that [pain] go away,” Brocker said. As for her pain levels, she added, “I feel like I’m almost at zero now.”

A fellow Capital rower, Susan Driano of Washington, D.C., came to the sport at age 61 as a lifelong athlete, having pursued other sports, including figure skating, mountain biking and trail running.

Years later, Driano races competitively, serves as Capital’s sculling representative and even owns her own boat, a single shell.

She appreciates how rowing requires mindfulness. Coaches commonly instruct people to “keep your heads in the boat,” meaning they should focus on synchronizing their strokes with their boatmates. This level of concentration forces athletes to put aside their worldly cares, at least for a while.

“It can be very meditative,” Driano said. “There’s a rhythm to it.”

Gregg Hutson agrees. A former high school and college rower and rowing coach, Hutson, now 51, returned to the sport a couple years ago and now rows with the Gray Knights club at Thompson Boat Center on the Georgetown waterfront in D.C.

“It’s a great activity for body and mind,” Hutson said. “When you’re on the water, you don’t have to think; you just row. There are also a lot of great people to get to know and spend time with.”

How rowing can heal

In 2002, when Doris Parker was undergoing breast cancer treatment at Walter Reed Medical Center in D.C., she frequently noticed rowers on the Potomac as she drove to appointments from her home in Alexandria. When she got the all-clear from her medical team, she was inspired to try the sport herself.

After finding it deeply helpful, both physically and mentally, Parker co-founded the D.C. chapter of WeCanRow, a national program that introduces breast cancer survivors to the sport.

WeCanRow DC includes a Learn-to-Row weekend and summer-long novice program before participants decide whether to continue as regular members rowing out of Potomac Boat Club in Georgetown.

“The big message that they all come away with at the end of the Learn-to-Row weekend,” said Parker, who still coaches newcomers, “is that they can do hard things.”

Coach Cole says that, while the sport has a learning curve, patience and persistence are rewarded. “That is what keeps us all coming back,” Cole says. “It just gets better all the time.”

As Parker and others have learned, it’s never too late to learn how to row. Her message for newbies is that, with patience and practice, they can do it — and they might find it as fun, healing and meditative as she did.

“You don’t start where everybody else starts,” she said. “You don’t start where a teenager would start, but you start where you can, and you just keep going.”