I think the most valuable lesson that I have learnt and lived, is that it is impossible to know what you can do until you've tried to do it, either succeeding, or failing and learning from it. When I started out at Viking Kayak Club in the early 90s, I truly, and naively, believed that it was just a matter of time and some training before I would be a multiple Olympic and World Champion! Looking back at my young self, I think all I would have seen was naked ambition and probably a willingness to work hard. In the end, I got to become an Olympic champion just once, but I now know the true efforts required. When I dislocated my shoulder six months before the 2011 Worlds I thought that there was a chance to go on from there, and not only go to the Olympics, but win them! Looking back now, what would I have seen? Someone with an almost impossible task ahead of them, but with a plan in his back pocket. Amazingly, I went on to win the Olympics with a reconstructed shoulder, so it was clearly possible, but it probably wasn't realistic. At the 2015 Worlds, when I tore a muscle in my side a few days before racing started, I thought that it would be an impossible and pointless exercise to race. From here, I see a guy who was terrified of failing to rise to the challenge, when he knew he was expected to, and knew that if he didn't, he wouldn't be able to look at himself in the same way again. But I went on to race and we came 6th. I know that I considered something like that to be impossible at the time, yet it happened.
From all these experiences, I shamelessly extrapolate upwards and outwards, beyond myself and to people in general. It isn't hard at all to find examples of people doing things that are deemed extraordinary in some way or another, normally because something about the person involved doesn't quite match the size of their accomplishment. Often, we would perceive these people as normal, or maybe even disadvantaged in some ways. Their achievement is out of proportion to this perceived starting point. I so fundamentally believe that we are all capable of more than we credit ourselves with that it fills me with a faith and a buzz for the future that I can scarcely contain!
I also learned that no matter what we start out with, it is our desire and action towards building on that quantity which I believe is the determinant to success. Put another way, it is less important how big or small we feel our pile of any given quality is; it is what we choose to do to add to that pile that gives us a unique power. I do not believe that I had any real talent for canoeing. I'd go so far as to say that I was clumsy, uncoordinated and un-athletic. I got flustered and frustrated, I didn't know my left from my right and I was a poor team player. It seems outrageous to me that I became an Olympic champion in a technical, physically demanding team sport!!! (And I still get frustrated and flustered.)
I have realised that my journey in elite canoe slalom has in fact been a journey in self-understanding, and if I am being really brave, a journey in self-acceptance. People tell me that understanding and acceptance is a never-ending journey, but I am further along the way than I could be. I have been privileged to have been supported to look into the darkest areas of myself, the areas that I feel ashamed of and scared to look into, for fear of discovering a worrying truth. I believe competing under pressure, and working day-to-day in an intense competitive environment have driven me to learn about my flaws, my cracks. These cracks were exposed and widened when I was trying to do something that I wasn't sure if I could do. This pressure, coming from myself and how I saw the world, consistently and repeatedly revealed my weaknesses, so that I could get to see them clearly. Once I could see them clearly, I could try to understand them and from there either work with them, or try to get change them.
I am grateful for this, because I think I might have been able to conveniently skirt around them doing something else. For me, learning skills, ideas and strategies that I can use in situation where I feel the pressure has been so useful, and it has been rewarding. But learning that I can learn skills to compensate for, or even change, areas where I feel I want to be better has been even more useful and rewarding. I also believe that anyone can do this if they want to go through the process of understanding their 'weaknesses', which can be difficult and challenging. Because I don't think I had huge amounts going for me when I set out on this journey, and I managed to learn these things, why can't anyone else? Again, that fills me with a great buzz, because what if we were all a bit better at dealing with pressure, however that squeezes us? Perhaps things would be calmer, more gentle and more productive.
It might seem an odd thing to say, but one of the most important things that I have learned is that I have learned to be me. Certainly, being in a competitive environment can be quite intense and I am certain that I have had to wear some parts of myself more outwardly than others (some people call it a 'front', or an 'armour'). But over the years, as I have learned about myself, I feel that two things have happened: first, I have come to see competition as less threatening than before. It didn't have to be as personal as I imagine, it's just that sometimes others want what I want. In that case, you might not need as much armour; second, I realised that being me wasn't that bad, there are lots of people who are a bit strange out there. Everyone is probably spending some effort on being normal when in fact if we could just de-escalate that situation a bit, things would be easier all round. A bit like when the US and the USSR decided to get rid of an equal amount of nuclear weapons - it didn't really effect the status quo, it just took less effort on their parts to maintain this arsenal.
As I have been able to save some energy by not having to choose and maintain what I thought was the right me in some situations, I have been able to use that energy to do things that I wanted to do. Like getting better at canoeing, or being a better teammate, or making jokes. I don't want to pretend that I have been 100% me all the time in the past and I know it wouldn't be sensible to suggest that I will be able to do this all the time in the future, but I now the benefits of trying. So I am going to try.
The above ideas are probably the biggest and most important things that I have found out so far. Canoeing gave me them, or more accurately, they were revealed to be by the practise of canoeing and racing. That buzz, that knowledge, is a gift that I hope to draw on for all my days. And they are things that I hope people might enjoy reading about, or gain something by thinking about them in relation to themselves. I believe that we all have to struggle to unearth and refine our own truths. But I am hoping that someone, somewhere might get a bit of a leg up to figuring out something about themselves by reading this.
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