Moving Again: An Exploration of Rowing as Leisure Among Injured Veterans

This study explores how injured South Korean veterans experience bodily, emotional, and social recovery through rowing. Drawing on mobility theory, this study investigates how veterans’ leisure behavior is reshaped as they navigate disrupted rhythms of movement and identity following injuries. Based on in-depth interviews and photo elicitation with ten male veterans, reflexive thematic analysis was used to identify three interconnected themes that illuminate leisure-based coping processes: sensory reconnection, affective realignment, and relational rhythm. Rather than framing recovery as a return to pre-injury normalcy, these findings suggest that recovery involves processes of reorientation through new bodily practices and relational engagement. Rowing emerges not merely as rehabilitation but as a dynamic space of reconstitution, where veterans come to feel again, move differently, and reconnect with others. This study contributes to leisure studies by linking the mobility paradigm with injury recovery and highlighting how leisure practices function as therapeutic and coping resources, becoming active sites for embodied healing and social reintegration.