In this team are people I trust implicitly because I know they not only care about me as an athlete, but they care about me as a person, on and off the track. I don’t always do everything they think I should do, but their advice is always valuable. They provide me with a fresh perspective on what I am trying to achieve, and the way that I am trying to achieve it.
The group around me includes my family and friends, coaches, training partners, physiotherapists, masseurs, sports scientists, dieticians and sports psychologists. I joke that I don’t yet have a psychiatrist, but I am always open to offers!
My family are, of course, very much a part of this. They have always been there for me, encouraging me to try new things, and be the best that I can be. I don’t remember a time when they explicitly said this, but the support was always there. Even now they will give me very honest answers to anything I ask: about the quality of the race I have just done, about my answers in an interview, or on the colour of the suit that I was wearing! That is what families are for – and if your family can’t tell you things like that, then who can? I don’t always react well to all their advice, but I try to accept it in the spirit it is given. Perhaps we should all spend more time thinking about how we interact with people. It is easy to get annoyed when someone tells you something that you don’t want to hear, but in fact how you react is important to your development. I think that we are conditioned not to like people who don’t agree with the things that we believe in, or have an opposing view. I know that in the past this has been true of me. However, I know that my family, and the people around me that I trust, give criticism with the best of intentions.
Planning is essential to make things happen. It isn’t enough simply to know what you want to do. I learnt from my father than unless you understand your sport, and plan for it, you are just wandering around in the dark. I learnt to talk to other athletes about how the structure of the sport worked. I spoke to local and national coaches to understand the system. I sometimes talk about athletics being a ‘game’, but that is to put down the sport I love. It is vital that all athletes properly understand their sports. It is not enough simply to train in a vacuum, even if you are training to your maximum capability. To have any chance of fulfilling your ultimate wish – being selected for the team – to happen, you have to know the qualifying dates for selection, the method of selection, even who is going to be on the panel and how they want the information they require to be presented to them.
It comes back to that crucial rule: you have to be on the start line as an absolute minimum if you want a chance of winning a race. You can be the fastest person in the world, but unless you fulfil the selection criteria, you won’t be there. And winning a string of races won’t matter, unless you win the major championships. As I was told many years ago by a coach, no one remembers who comes second, and it doesn’t matter what you win before or after, it is the big events that count.
Finding out how it all worked made me realise that most of my success would be down to me. What I did every single day in training would impact on what I could achieve. Unless I trained hard, unless I tried to live as an athlete, I wouldn’t get into a position to be selected.
But, of course, you need to know what to train at. And the hard part of planning is learning what is best to do, and acting on it, so you can make your dream happen.
Sometimes, if an athlete has a poor race, it is possible to blame other people. You say ‘she blocked me in’, ‘she pushed me out’, ‘those two girls worked together against me’. Or ‘my chair wasn’t set up right’ or ‘my gloves didn’t work’. Sometimes, indeed, these things happen. I was at a race last summer when the glove of one of the athletes fell apart. He stopped, grabbed another athlete who had finished racing, and took one of his. An athlete I coach, Brian Alldis, while in a short sprint, lost his glove about 40 metres from the line. It flew off in an arc, nearly hitting several other athletes. I know plenty of competitors who would have just coasted the last 40 metres to the finish line. It was only one race – what would it matter in the scheme of things? But of course it could matter. What if that race had been the last opportunity for the athlete to qualify for the Paralympics? What if it had been the qualifying round for the Paralympic final, and the athlete was in the position to make it through?
The athlete must react instantly. There is no time to think about what to do. This athlete knew he had to get to the finish line. He carried on pushing, probably adding minor scratches to his hands. If he hadn’t carried on he might not have made the start line in future competitions. In fact the race was a high level international, and if he hadn’t finished it wouldn’t have counted against him. The event wasn’t his strongest distance, he had already qualified for the World Championships, and he had other events that week where he could prove his fitness.
But for me it was important that he carried on and finished. Afterwards he went and retrieved his glove, and made sure it was OK. And, crucially, he learnt a lesson. He learnt that if the same was ever to happen in a bigger race – his Paralympic final, say – it wouldn’t be the end of the world. He could carry on and he could finish. And that is what being an athlete is all about.
Equipment can fail, of course, but when you are planning and training you work to minimise the risks. We don’t often travel with a mechanic in tow and over the years I have learned to fix things myself. I always check my equipment is all there, and working correctly, and try to cover all the bases.
Worrying is sometimes seen as a negative emotion, but it does help you prepare for things that might happen. Worrying is what pushes you to anticipate what might go wrong, and plan accordingly.
It is important to train as hard as you are going to race. You cannot train at one level and then expect to step up to a higher level in a competition. Any athlete can have a blast of a day and perform way above the level that they are expected to, but this doesn’t guarantee long term success.
Consistency in training and racing is also very important, but there is a difference between having a sensible routine and using irrational routine as a crutch to lean on. I knew an athlete who, before a race, always had to eat a certain sort of food. I knew another who was convinced that he couldn’t perform unless he listened to a certain piece of music before he went on to the track. The day that he got to the track and the batteries died in his CD player was a disaster. He had nobody to run around and find batteries for him and he was too stressed-out to do it himself. He didn’t get to hear his music and he fell apart.
I have never believed in using such routines, because I know how bad I am at temporarily losing things! I do have a routine that I use for warming up, but it’s adaptable. Sometimes we don’t have a track to warm up on which is separate from the competing track, so you have to be flexible.
On the other hand, I do mind who I share rooms with when I travel, and I have never felt guilty about this. When you have spent perhaps two years training specifically for an event, the choice of person who is with you for the final moments is important. At something like a Paralympic Games, you are away from all the normal things in your life. Family have limited access, you may be sharing an apartment with seven other people, some of whom you don’t know very well, and the food may be exotic or just bad and not what you are used to. The last thing you want is to have to spend lots of time in a room with a person you don’t get on with. Having said that, sometimes you do have to share with a person you don’t know very well, and then you just have to make the best of it, and not let little things upset you.
Since I started competing I have kept a training diary. When times are tough it is useful to be able to look back and see what I have done. To the younger athletes that I coach, I also suggest that they shouldn’t only keep a training diary, but also a diary of the people that they race against. I ask them to keep notes (however short) on the way that they perform. It is amazing how many athletes will race the same way, and it helps to learn their patterns for when they meet up competitively a
gain.
CHAPTER SIX
What I’ve Learned Along The Way
I meet lots of young people every year, both with and without impairments. I remember when I was a teenager being asked by adults what I wanted to do when I grew up; now I am one of those adults, and ask the same thing.
It amazes me how many young people just look and shrug and say ‘I don’t know’. And it scares me when young people who do know what they want to do have no clue, or have taken no action, to enable them to achieve it.
I met a young girl about two years ago who, when I asked her what she wanted to be, looked at me and said ‘a pop star’. I asked her if she was in a band. She said no. I asked if she played a musical instrument. Again she said no. When I asked if she was in a choir, sang with her family, or did anything musical at all, she said no each time. When I asked her how she was going to achieve her ambition, she smiled broadly and said, ‘I’m going to win Pop Idol.’ It is sometimes hard not to despair that so many feel that the way to achieve anything is through the media, or by taking short cuts. Of course miracles can happen, but even when they do, most people find that they have to work extremely hard afterwards.
There was a tiny part of me that smiled at her ambition (because it is important to have a dream) but mostly I was sad, because the chances of her achieving her ambition, without doing anything herself to increase that chance, were so remote.
When you see media reports about stars being ‘discovered’ overnight, you only have to delve a little beneath the surface to reveal the hard work that has been involved. Years of acting classes, performing schools and competitions, make the ‘overnight discovery’ tag amusing. It simply makes a better story for the media, if they can claim a Cinderella moment. And it feeds that small part of everyone which hopes that we will have our lives changed or fulfilled by a chance discovery, or that we will one day win the lottery and our lives will be changed for ever…
You need to have a goal, or dream. You need to be able to plan how to get there. (Or get someone else to do it effectively – this is why so many athletes have coaches who help them deliver their goals.)
You need discipline that enables you to go out and do not just the nice, easy things, but also the things that are a challenge.
You need self-belief. Although this may be challenged from time to time, really successful people are those who are able to deal with failure. Anyone can be successful once, but coming back from failure is a huge challenge, and one that not everyone wants to do, or can do. It means building on the hard days, when times are tough, and coming out the other side. You also of course have to learn to deal with success and not get carried away by it, believing that you are invincible.
You need to develop good relationships – and having a group of people you can trust around you is very important. These may be people who don’t have exactly the same goals as you, but they can still help you on your way.
You need to take time to balance your professional goals with your family and friends and the people that you care about.
And you need to treat the people around you with respect – the way that you yourself would like to be treated. It is truer in sport than in any other field that you meet the same people on the way up as you meet on the way down. Early on, while you are developing, arrogance can be a big strength, but humility is good to have too.
There are four aspects to achievement. You have to know what you want to achieve, where you are now, how you plan to get where you want to go, and what work you need to do to get there.
You should begin with the end in mind – and work back from there. Don’t start by just knowing where you are now, and assume you will get to your goal somehow. You need to write a plan of all the steps that are needed along the way, and you need to anticipate the ups and downs you might encounter. Without a plan, while you might indeed move in a certain direction, you could find out that this is the wrong direction.
You may feel that there are lots of things that you want to achieve. I have many goals for my sport, and many goals for my personal life too. What is vital is working out which are the important ones, and which the realistic ones, and how they affect each other.
Some goals may appear to be more urgent than others, simply because there are time lines associated with them. Or they may be goals that other people want you to achieve. It really helps if you write those goals down and think about how they fit into your larger plan, so you can prioritise what you want to do. You may not be able to achieve everything that you want – so make sure you pick the right goals!
Some time-management organisers say that writing lists is not constructive, because it doesn’t help you prioritise. But I like writing lists, and I often use post-it notes, because I can move them around. Once I have my collection of notes, and have put them roughly into the order that I want to do things, then I can move on to the next step. As you write the plan you may find that the order changes, but this is all part of the process of working through the steps.
Once you have listed your goals, you have to ask yourself: where am I now? To be able to plan anything, you have to know where the starting point is. You wouldn’t decide to go on a family day out to the local park with no clue as to where it was. You wouldn’t take your family out to wander around randomly until you happened to find it.
Planning to be an athlete (or other achiever) you need the same fore-knowledge. You need to know your starting point, and there are many ways to achieve this. You may talk to your coach (or boss), or your friends, you may look at your personal (all-time) and season-best performances. You could also look at how you competed against other people, scoring points for victories and taking them away for losses.
However, this can only give you a small part of the overall picture. Some of the information will be subjective. The objective stuff can be harder to obtain.
You have to know what you are good at, and not so good at, and where you could improve. But that can be tough. If you ask your boss, say, he might not want to tell you about things that you are bad at, because you might get upset, and that would bring a different set of problems to deal with. Your friends and family, on the other hand, may be a little too open. Because of their closeness to you, and because you asked the question, they may feel that they can let rip with everything critical they feel about you.
The answer is to lay ground rules. You should explain what you are hoping to get from them, and that you are looking for responses that that will affect you positively, rather than make you defensive. (If all you want to hear is that you are brilliant, then only ask your mum. But if you want to hear what you can do to improve yourself, you must ask other people.)
Give them a list of key areas that you would like to talk about, and govern the time that you spend with them. You don’t want to turn it into a three hour meeting from which, at the end, you get nothing.
Something that we have used from time to time is a SWAT analysis, which anyone can do. You look at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and name your goals. Then, at a carefully guided meeting, outlining what you can and cannot say, we share that information with other people. This can be done with several people at a time, in the context of what everyone is trying to achieve.
Once you know what you want to achieve, and you have got other people’s input on it, you are really in a position to work out where you are now. From this you can work out honestly what skills you already have, and which you need to work on.
If you know accurately where you are, you can measure improvement. You now know your start and end point, and can sit down and plan the steps that you need to take. This can be a detailed list, or a time line, or any way that works well for you. I write my winter training programme in quite general terms first, looking at what I need to achieve each month, and then I fill in the details below that. So by the start of winter training I know pretty much all the sessions that I need to do for the following year. This may change, when I either reach or d
on’t reach my targets (sometimes illness can get in the way or you can progress quicker than expected). But it is easier to change a plan than try to write it as you go along.
Once you have completed the first two steps of planning – knowing your goals, and where exactly you are starting from – you have to write down your plan. This is the step that may take the longest, and for many is the least interesting. It will be a personal training plan, as in the business world it would be a personal development plan. Whatever format the plan takes, you need to be able to mark your progress against it to see that things are moving in the right direction. It is better to find out three months ahead of major Games that some things haven’t worked in training, rather than finding out the night before an event.
Then, the fourth step: you have to follow your plan. Anyone can train hard, and some people find it easy, but others find this the biggest challenge. I have met many athletes who are talented, but who lack the ability to push themselves really hard in training.
Often the things that you are not so good at are the things you least like doing, and you are tempted to ignore them. At work, people will often ignore things in their inbox in favour of tasks that seem more appealing, or that will take less time. Anything that is challenging seems difficult. This is why planning ahead is important, so that you can be sure you have put aside time specifically to complete these tasks.
The world of athletics is not unique – it is about building on success in the same way as you build a house with bricks. You have to get the foundations right, and then you can practise and improve and reach your peak.
Even when you know yourself, and have your plan, you will, as an athlete, have to make some tough decisions. Are you going to work on the things that you are weakest at, where you can possibly make a big improvement, or is it best to work on the things that you are better at, to make the most of your natural talents? For me, my top speed is one of my huge strengths. I can push very fast over short to medium distances. What I am not good at is starting. Some years I work more on my starts than on my top speed, but the pattern can change. Coming up to major Games I may be working on both things at the same time. What is important is that whatever decision you make, it must be an informed one. In wheelchair racing, for instance, it is highly unlikely that if you never practise a start you will ever be really good at them!
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