Aim High
Page 2
I learnt that if someone is successful it is important to look at what they are doing and how they are doing it, and learn from it, but not to copy it exactly. Training programmes, for example, set for one person, cannot always be followed by another. You have to take into account everything else the athlete has done to get to the point they are at. One young athlete I knew talked to a much older experienced athlete about the training sessions they did. These were about four times as strenuous as the young athlete was doing, and because the older athlete had been successful, the younger one started to mirror the sessions. There was a big jump in improvement in the short term, but after a few months the younger athlete started to suffer. He became tired, and picked up a few injuries. Because he wasn’t used to the training load, and hadn’t built it up gradually, his body couldn’t cope. It resulted in injury and a long lay-off from the sport. So the moral is: always learn from other people, but then adapt and improve on it.
Two of the other coaches that I’ve worked with in my career are Dave Williams and Jenni Banks. They acted in very different capacities.
Dave Williams worked through Cardiff Athletics Club. I joined the club when I graduated from Loughborough University and he acted as a training advisor for a number of years. He had never coached a wheelchair athlete before we worked together, but his help with planning saw me in good stead for many years.
Then, after a number of years coaching myself, I decided that I needed to hand over some of that responsibility to someone else for a while. I was finding that there was more pressure on my time due to work commitments and training, and I was enjoying less and less the planning and writing of programmes.
Jenni Banks is Australian and in the early 1990s was working with some of the best athletes in the world. She had taken them from being young and developmental and helped them become world beaters. This was part of the reason that I chose her, but it was also because she listened. She listened to what I said I wanted to achieve, and she would tell me straight if she thought I wasn’t pulling my weight. That honesty was sometimes hard to hear, but it made me a better athlete. She helped me structure not only my athletics life, but also my personal life too.
Jenni had been a hockey player, and an injury early on in her career had stopped her reaching her goal of playing for the Australian Olympic team. The transition had been tough for her. She had been through an emotional and traumatic time. Her dream had been ripped away from her. One of the most valuable things she taught me was that while wheelchair racing was important, life was important too. You always had to have other things in your life. Not things that would distract you from competing, but that could complement it. Things that would help in life after sport. Very few people make enough money from sport not to have to work again. And most people want to do something with their lives after sport, whether they need the money or not.
Jenni helped me think about working, about putting something back into sport. I have always been keen to understand how the business of sport worked, and the time I spent with Jenni made me think about playing a role in sports administration. She pointed out that if I cared about my sport, then I should also care about what happened to it. (Though sometimes, these days, I think I care too much, and that there are some things that I should just step away from!)
As I get older my physio and my masseur become more and more important. I remember visiting my physio one day and telling her that when I held my arm at a particular angle and moved it up and down, it hurt. She looked at me, and asked two questions. She asked whether I needed to do that for daily life. I said no. She then asked me if I needed to use that action for anything to do with training or competing. Again I said no. She looked at me for a moment, and then told me she had the answer to my discomfort. She told me to just stop moving it that way!
At my stage of an athletics career, injury is part of the deal. You have to minimize it, but you can sometimes over-analyse and worry about things that aren’t significant. I still monitor what my body can do. I check that problems I have now aren’t getting worse, because they could affect me later on in life. But if they aren’t, I leave them alone.
I’m glad to have the chance to publicly acknowledge and thank these people who have been so important to me, and whose contributions have been so significant. When I hear sportspeople saying that they have achieved things on their own I laugh – this is rarely true.
CHAPTER THREE
Aim High – Motivation and Inspiration
‘Aim High’ is part of a saying that my grandfather taught my mother, and she in turn taught me. The full saying is a bit daft, and doesn’t mean a lot until you explain it fully, but it has kept me going throughout my athletics career and personal life. It is ‘Aim high, even if you hit a cabbage’. In essence it is about having a goal and a dream, and seeing what you can achieve. If you don’t try, you will never do anything. In today’s world we seem obsessed with non-achievement, and seem to want to protect every young person from the difficulties that failure brings. I can honestly say that in all the years that I have been competing there are only a few races that I have ‘failed’ at. There are plenty of races that I haven’t won, but that to me is something completely different.
You need to be on the start line to have a chance of winning. You cannot win a medal if the furthest step you have taken is going to a few training sessions or sitting in the stands. To me, the worst type of failure is someone saying, ‘I could have been…’ You can add any ending you like to the rest of the sentence. I knew lots of talented young people in school, but not all got up off their backsides and did something to capitalise on it. And then there are lots of athletes who train hard – but what you also have to do is train smart, and this is not the same thing.
Many businesses have mottos, or mission statements. In my case I had my motto before I had my ‘business’, and before I really understood what it meant, but as I grew up in my sport, and developed a sense of what I was trying to achieve, I realised that it was the best motto that I could possibly have.
I write ‘Aim high, even if you hit a cabbage’ in the front of every one of my training diaries. It is the first page that I see when I open it, and it is there to inspire me in everything I do. I no longer need to write it down anywhere else, because it is with me all the time, but every time I write it in a new book it re-affirms what I think about the way I train.
In fact, the way that I plan my athletics life is little different from how people plan their business lives. I always compare my training plan to a personal development plan. And my end-of-season analysis is a bit like a business personal review, with my head coach, who is in effect my boss.
The difference is that we are measured not by how many reports we write, whether we hit our sales targets or not, or even by the input of our training, but by the medals that we win at major Games. There are lesser targets – I might work on a particular weakness in the way that I handle my chair, or design new gloves that will help me climb hills better – but there are major Games almost every year, culminating in the Paralympics every four years, and this is where we really have to deliver. So our ‘personal review’ is, unfortunately, more public than many others!
And the public can be harsh critics. If they think I haven’t done a good enough job there are plenty who will stop me in the street and tell me!
Success can mean a lot of different things. In wheelchair racing it is about winning medals. But there is no guarantee of success and sometimes you can have the best race of your life and come sixth. Sometimes you can perform averagely and win! And there is every combination in between. It is important to learn to differentiate between bad winning and good losing.
The media might not understand how coming sixth can be a good performance, the team might not, but what is important is that you and your coach understand what your performance means at all times. This is one way of learning about what you have done, and moving on for the future.
Some people think I have an obs
ession with athletics, though I like to think that I am merely ‘focused’. I don’t really remember when my interesting sport went from being just fun, to serious work. It happened a long time ago. But I haven’t felt any loss, because the fun element has never disappeared.
The fact is, though, that just about every major decision in my life has been affected by me being a competitor: from the man who I married, and when the wedding would be, to where we went on honeymoon, to the timing of having our daughter.
I believe that if you are serious about something, you need to treat it seriously. And I haven’t had to sacrifice anything on the way – truthfully, all my decisions have been what I have wanted to do.
But of course I do have a personal life, and I try hard to balance my family and racing career. I look at newspaper stories about women who work in the City, get paid a squillion pounds a year, yet have lots of kids, go to yoga, make organic yoghurt and still have time to get their eyebrows waxed. I feel a kind of awe. Most of the time in our house, I feel that we just about get by.
I went through a brief phase where I felt I wasn’t being a good enough mother because I wasn’t doing all of the above. But the guilt didn’t last long. I realised that being a good mother wasn’t all about mashing carrots that I had grown myself – there were plenty of reputable companies out there mashing up baby food for me! And does it matter if Carys very occasionally has crisps for breakfast? I don’t think so. Just as I prioritize my working life, the same is true in my personal life.
There are no wholly right or wrong answers. We all have to compromise. But a good work-life balance is essential, and we need to work at it and not take it for granted.
Whatever you do in life, and whatever decisions you make, there may be a price to be paid. You have to decide at all points if that price is worth paying.
Lots of journalists have asked me what I have had to sacrifice in my life in order to do sport. But, for me, the answer is really easy. It is nothing. My family have given up a lot of things in order to allow me to be an athlete, but I have been privileged.
It has always been what I have wanted to do, more than anything else.
PART TWO
CHAPTER FOUR
My Sporting Life
When I am asked to try and describe what my life has been like as an athlete, it is hard to put it into words.
Throughout my wheelchair racing career, my goals have constantly changed. In the early years, when I was moving out of the junior ranks and into the senior group, my goals were just about making the national team. It was touch and go whether I would make Seoul, and I think that I only just scraped in. By the time I got to Barcelona in 1992 I had broken the world records for the four distances that I compete in, but still had people to beat. Atlanta was about not losing, and Sydney was about just being the best that I could be. Athens was a whole other event. I went through huge ups and downs in those Games which made me realise that, although wheelchair racing was really important to me, it wasn’t everything in my life. More about that later.
Competing for the national team can be amazing. I still remember when my first selection letter came through for a major Games. I didn’t know if I was going to make it into the team or not until I got the letter, and was so excited when I knew I was going to Seoul. This was in 1988.
Being a member of the national team was a dream come true. And indeed it is a wonderful, exhilarating experience. It is also challenging and sometimes scary, but I wouldn’t change a moment of it.
One of the most successful events in my life as an athlete was competing in 1992 at the Barcelona Paralympics Games. I won a total of five medals – four gold and one silver – and became the first woman to break the one minute barrier in the 400 metres. For these Games there was a dramatic increase in the coverage of the Paralympic Games, and also a sea change in the way that the Games were covered. For the first time there was lots of mainstream coverage, and it was covered as sport, not as poor disabled people being brave and marvellous.
I remember returning home to the UK to meet my family, and, while watching some of the coverage on TV, my mother told me that I looked like someone she had previously seen on the telly. I reacted like any young woman would – I was flattered that she thought I looked like someone who was famous! My mum then told me that she thought I looked like the character called Olive from On the Buses! Olive was a lot older than I was, and about three times my body weight! But she had a similar bob and glasses to mine. I decided that this was Mum’s way of telling me to get my hair cut! (In fact, throughout my career I have probably had far too many bad hairstyles, which at the time I always thought were trendy!)
My family has always been an integral part of what I have done, and helped me learn about my sport. Whatever I have done, and whatever I have achieved in my life, my family has always been there to support me.
Planning is so important. My experience at the Sydney Games illustrates this. There were people in the team who thought I should only enter three races and work really hard to win them. They didn’t want me to try for four. But it was what I had been training for over a long period of time, and although it was hard, I persuaded them.
My first final was the 800 metres. I remember sitting on the warm-up track and feeling quite calm. But then, talking with a couple of the coaches, I started to feel nervous. I heard that the stadium was full. My sister was in the stadium – she had been there for several hours making sure that she got the best seats near the finish line. I got a message to her and told her what my race tactics were going to be. The plan was that I would sit in lane two on the edge of pack and wait for a sprint finish. I had used the same tactics a couple of times that year against the USA girls, and had done well. But once the gun went off, I changed my mind. I knew that I had a really strong finish and over the final 400 metres I could pull ahead and do well, but I decided that I would go to the front straight away, and pull the speed out of the pack. I was lucky, because indecision can be fatal. But, as it happened, it worked. I was so relieved. However, when I went to meet my sister after the race, the first thing she said was, ‘you didn’t race the way you told me’.
Winning the 800 metres gave me confidence, and the 100 metres was next, probably my weakest event at these Games. The main competitor to beat was an American athlete called Cheri Blauwet. She had been ill during the run up to the Games and had had a tough time competing, but was still a threat. However, I won, and after that – though there was a lot of pressure – the 200 metres went OK.
For the final of the 400 metres, I knew I had a chance of doing really well, but also knew that I had to push a really smart race. The night before the final we got the lane allocations and I found that I had drawn lane seven. I was number one in the world, was the world record holder and hadn’t been beaten that season over 400 metres, but I was used to racing this distance in middle lanes. I would be unable to see where any of my fellow competitors were until the last 90 metres. I sat and talked it through with my husband Ian, but knew that there was only one way that I could race it – the same way that I raced every other race that season.
I split the 400 metres into four sections. I have a specific tactic for each section which I’ve always used whatever level I’ve competed at. So in the final I just did what I’ve always done and ran to the race plan that I’d worked on over the years. At about 250 metres into the race, I did take a very quick glance at the score board to see where my competitors were – probably only about half a second behind – but I could sense that I was OK.
I did indeed win, and in a good time, and the point is that it was a good race. I stuck to the plan that I had worked on over the years, and it worked. I couldn’t change the fact that I had drawn lane seven, but what I could do was race the way I knew how.
Everyone experiences challenges that get in the way of what we are trying to do. Sometimes these challenges are much larger than everyday problems, and they can grow until they seem almost too big to deal with.
However, solutions usually exist. They may not be what we would ideally like to do, and they may be daunting. But they are there. We have to learn to step back, and see them.
When I was training for the Atlanta Games in 1996, I had many problems. It was a tough training year, and there were many other calls on my time. By the time I got to compete at the Games, I knew that it was going to be difficult for me to do well. I had qualified for the Olympic Games demonstration race, coming fourth overall, but the Paralympics were going to be different.
As it happens I raced well, broke several of my personal best records, and came away with one gold medal and three silvers. But there were members of the team who were disappointed, and felt that I had let them down. I hadn’t won the four gold medals that I won in Barcelona. How the team is perceived is based on the number of gold medals won – that is how countries are compared with each other. Looking back now, I doubt I could have done better but, even so, it was hard for me, coming back from the Games, and having people tell me that they thought I had failed.
One of the options put to me was that I should retire. One of the team coaches even offered to write a press release for me, to announce it to the media. The temptation was there. At the time, it almost felt that this was the only choice open to me.
But my father had always told me that the best thing to do with a problem was to sleep on it, and I do believe that, if no instant decision needs to be taken, it is always worth taking time to consider one’s options.
So I told the coaches that there was no need for me to make a decision there and then. I would wait and think about it when I got home, back to my home environment, with people I knew around me. Waiting was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. By the time I got home I realised that retiring wasn’t the right thing for me at all. I might not get selected again, I might never improve, but there was one thing I was sure of – I loved the sport of wheelchair racing. I still wanted to be the best I could be, and I could still do that, regardless of whether or not I was doing it in a GB vest. I carried on training for another eight years, and won six more Paralympic Gold medals.