Female, senior citizen in her '60s, overweight, bad back trouble, but persevering anyway.
A couple years ago, I started having a LOT of knee pain. So I went to my doctor, he said "Lose weight." And I said "but I lost 20 pounds this past year and my knee pain is WORSE!" He consulted my record, realized I was right and sent me to an orthopedist. Who found my knee joints are OK, but I had a kneecap tracking problem. She sent me to physical therapy. At as the end of that, my therapist was setting me up in the gym for various exercises for me to continue on my own and I noticed that the gym had a Concept 2 rower!
So I asked my PT about whether it might be a good form of exercise for me.
He wasn't keen.
I then asked my orthopedist about rowing.
She wasn't keen.
But I was supposed to exercise, and preferably NOT putting weight on my knees. I didn't know thing one about rowing, so I started watching YouTube videos. I found the Dark Horse Rowing channel, which was really helpful. I started using the C2 at the gym. I found I liked it and wanted my own and was about to order, when I fell and broke both wrists and badly sprained both thumbs. Oops! That was a bit of a setback... Once healed, I was back in physical therapy again.
After getting through that, I ordered my rower! It arrived last April. And two months after owning it, I found I was able to TAKE OFF MY KNEE BRACES! So much for what the knee PT and orthopedist thought....
But then, this past summer, I started having leg pain. And I went to the doctor who said it might be a back problem and sent me for spine x-rays and physical therapy. Unfortunately, got a visiting PT, and she pushed me hard doing this one Mackenzie exercise and suddenly I had pain in BOTH legs. My doctor sent me to get an MRI and the news wasn't good. Spinal stenosis, degenerative disc disease, multiple pinched nerves and a bulging disk. Disc space virtually obliterated between two lumbar joints. The only good news was he said my spine is stable and I probably would not wake up paralyzed some morning. And it's age related and not caused whatsoever by the light rowing I had done.
So I asked my spine physical therapist about rowing.
She wasn't keen. (Y'all sense a theme here?)
But I asked her to watch me on the gym C2 and see if she thought I could row a little, because I couldn't bear the thought of finally finding an exercise I liked and having to give it up. And she watched and agreed it would be OK, but she suggested rowing for shorter periods, starting with no more than 5 minutes.
So I did and have worked up to 10-15 minutes at a time. So you are not looking at a marathon rowing team member here....
But I completed my first Concept 2 challenge, I rowed 20 days in January! And most days I did more than the required 500m. So I hope it's OK that I joined.
I think we have to assume you did everything right. You could use a foto hosting/ posting site (imgur.com) to upload a screen shot of the Erg Data row report but not really necessary. Power (78+ watts) is very good. 76-80 watts is my wife’s typical power/pace ceiling for these CTC gaspers. Although not an adaptive rower, spinal stenosis, disc deterioration, and restricted ROM makes her a legs & arms rower at best. She routinely does most of the monthly CTCs.