How Far Can You Go

by John Maclean

  Not long after Kathryn and I qualified the boat, the governing body, Rowing Australia, reclassified another Paralympic rower into the Trunk and Arms category. He had been rowing in the Legs, Trunk and Arms category, and his reclassification now placed him in a position to challenge to be Kathryn’s partner. The difference is this: Legs, Trunk and Arms includes rowers with a vision impairment or physical impairment, including cerebral palsy or acquired brain injury, limb loss or deficiency, nerve damage, or other similar impairment. Rowers are able to use a sliding seat and use their legs, trunk and arms to perform the stroke. Trunk and Arms rowers have no or limited use of their legs and therefore do not use a sliding seat to perform their stroke. Gavin, the reclassified rower, had reasonable use of his legs, which is why he was in the former category. However, the governing body determined his use was now limited enough that he should be moved into our class. All of this meant that suddenly my spot in the boat was no longer a sure thing. I had to win it over the course of the upcoming season.

  You might wonder why the powers that be didn’t put together a second mixed team and create a more competitive training environment. That simply was not an option, because there were no female candidates for a second team. Paralympics draw from a small pool of athletes, and there are generally several categories in each sport to allow for differences in individual athletes’ mobility. In spite of its large landmass, Australia is a relatively small country population-wise. In practical terms, this meant that Gavin and I split time in the boat with Kathryn. Gavin also moved to Canberra full-time, while I continued going home to my family as often as I could get away.

  None of this worried me. I never for a moment doubted that Kathryn and I would represent Australia in London in 2012. Unlike previous athletic quests, I wasn’t doing this for John Maclean. This was a family effort. This was for all three of us, and that’s how I approached it. We all made the sacrifices, and I refused to let those sacrifices be for nothing. Even Gavin’s emergence as a rival did not deter me. Competition is healthy. With him pushing me, my best would surely come out.

  However, life doesn’t always follow our best-laid plans. Chad had replaced Pedro as our coach. Even though he was the one who pulled me out of retirement, he made no guarantees as London drew close. Right before the final qualifying competition for London, he came to me and said, “The committee will make a decision on who is in the boat based on performances in the last race in Italy.”

  “Okay,” I said, undeterred. All of my friends and family had already started making plans to travel to London. Some had booked their flights and secured hotel rooms. Not making the team was a consideration I never let reach my conscious thought.

  “The committee is going to give the first opportunity to race to Gavin,” Chad added. The upcoming regatta included both singles and doubles competitions, each taking place over the course of the weekend. Our boat was scheduled to run on back-to-back days. This meant Gavin would row with Kathryn on the first day, when both were fresh. I would row the second day.

  “Why?” I asked. “Kathryn and I won silver in Beijing. We qualified the boat for London. We’ve been a successful team for some time now. Shouldn’t I have the first crack at keeping my place in the boat?”

  “You rowed first in the last race,” Chad replied.

  “Well, at least you will have the Biomec data in the boat to compare our stroke rates and the force of each,” I countered. Biomec is a piece of equipment that goes on the gate of the boat where the oar attaches. It measures the output of each stroke.

  “We didn’t bring it this time,” Chad said. “We will just go by the race results.”

  “But Kathryn will obviously be more fatigued on the second day. How can you compare the results between the two days?”

  “That’s the criteria the committee decided on,” Chad replied, ending the conversation.

  As one might expect, the boat went faster on the first day than the second. Halfway through the course I felt the boat get heavy, which means I felt Kathryn’s strength start to give from the fatigue of rowing hard on back-to-back days. Even so, both Gavin and I competed in the individual events, where I had the better time by fifteen seconds.

  Soon after returning to Australia, my phone rang. It was the head selection coach. “We’ve decided to go with Gavin.”

  “What? Why?” I couldn’t believe my ears. “What is the justification for making a change on a winning team?”

  He answered my question but not in a way that made any sense to me. I countered every argument he gave. All he could say in return was, “You can take it up with the appeals committee.”

  When we hung up, I took a deep breath, tried to steady myself, and made another call. Amanda answered. “Hey,” she said, anxious. She knew why I was calling.

  “No,” was all I could say.

  Amanda let out a long sigh. Finally she said, “What’s the story?”

  No was the only word I could muster up. I didn’t know what else to say. All the months and months of sacrifice—for what? I had missed my son’s first steps because I was away in Canberra. His first steps! I could not put into words what I felt in that moment. I wished Kathryn had let me be. I wished I had never run into Chad and let him plant the idea of coming back in my head. Everything happens for a reason, I’ve always told myself. Nothing happens by chance. But I could not see the reason in this.

  Normally I would have spent a few days or a few weeks stewing over the disappointment; then I would lift myself up and move on. Since my days in the hospital after my accident, I have refused to wallow in self-pity. After my disappointment and embarrassment in the Sydney Games, it took spending time with Maurie to get me back up and going again, but eventually I got there. I wanted to do the same thing now. I wanted to put this behind me as far and as fast as possible.

  There was only one problem. I had to call my friends and family who had already booked their flights to London. I had to personally tell them that they could still go to the Paralympic Games, but I would not be there. The calls were never short. Every conversation turned into me recounting the story in much greater detail than I did in this chapter. Everyone had the same reaction: “This isn’t right, John . . . You’ve been robbed . . . Can’t you do something?” All were outraged, and their anger just pulled me right back to the moment when I first got the call telling me I had lost my place in the boat.

  Even after all the phone calls were made, I could not get away from the disappointment. People came up to me in Penrith and said, “I heard you came out of retirement. When do you leave for London?” I tried to give a brief answer, but it always elicited more questions and always led to the same reaction: “This isn’t right, John . . . You’ve been robbed . . . Can’t you do something?”

  Amanda was eager for us to get on with life. In the months after we finished the remodel on my house in Penrith, the two of us began discussing moving closer to the city. Her hour-long commute had long since grown wearisome. Increasingly, my speaking engagements took me back into the city. Living so far away didn’t make a great deal of practical sense. On top of that, the Penrith house had been my house. I bought it with money I received as part of the settlement with the trucking company after my accident. Both of us thought it would be advantageous to find a house that could be ours. Now that I wasn’t going to London, there seemed to be no reason to delay moving forward with these plans. However, every time Amanda tried to bring up the subject, I simply wasn’t ready. I could not get over the disappointment of being dropped from the London team. Every time I tried, another conversation sucked me right back into it.

  Finally, Amanda reached the end of her patience. She had given me as much time as she could to get over this on my own, but now the aftermath of not making London was even more intrusive than the original training schedule had been. Thankfully, she didn’t just tell me to suck it up and get over it. Instead, she gave me a gift of a week away to a health retreat for my birthday. �
�Go. Clear your mind,” she said. “And when you come back, come back. I need you here with me—all of you: body, mind and spirit.”

  I went away for five days. By the end of those five days I could clearly see that all that had just transpired was not wasted time. I returned home with a new goal, one I would not rest until I reached: I was going to walk again.

  10

  Where is the Door Marked “Walking”?

  * * *

  All my life I have lived by the simple philosophy that when one door closes, another will open. Finding it is simply a matter of stilling oneself and becoming open to the possibilities the new door presents. Then, when the new possibility opens up, you must pursue it with all you have. I always hearken back to my father’s words when I was just a boy. “John,” he told me, “it doesn’t matter if you win or lose, just as long as you give it one hundred per cent.” I have always tried to do just that, whether it was running about the football fields as a young man or pushing myself through the punishing lava fields of Kona in the Ironman or coming up 0.89 seconds short of a gold medal in Beijing. In everything I have done I have given my all, holding nothing back.

  When I went away to the health retreat following the disappointment of London, I discovered the next challenge to which I would give my 100 per cent. I should say “rediscovered”, for finding this challenge was really nothing more than coming to the realisation that the dream I had harboured since the day the truck hit me on the M4 had never really gone away. All my athletic pursuits, from my first triathlon in a wheelchair to trying to make the 2012 London Paralympic team, were really attempts to fill the void the disappointment of never reaching this dream created. But the desire never went away. All along I freely admitted that I would trade everything to be able one day to walk and run again. Twenty-five years earlier I thought I had settled the issue, and perhaps I had. But no more. I wanted to walk, and during my week at the health retreat I made up my mind that that was exactly what I was going to do.

  I didn’t know that’s where the week at the retreat was going to lead when I wheeled through the front door. I arrived there determined to get back to a good place where I could once again fully engage with my family. As I did after returning from Beijing, I planned on finding a way to build my speaking business when I got home. My motivational speaking engagements had slowed even before I threw myself back into training for the 2012 games. I expected them to pick up once again when I came back from London with a gold medal. Obviously, that was not going to happen now. But I thought I could improve as a speaker and build this into a viable business. To motivate others, I had to get myself out of this funk I was in, and that was why I went off to the health retreat.

  On my next-to-last day at the retreat centre, I made an appointment with a hypnotherapist named Sonja. I went into her office with feelings of anxiety and tension. Constantly reliving the experience of being dropped from the boat for London through having to tell the story time after time after time had taken its toll. With the games only a few weeks away, I feared the worst was in front of me. That’s why I was here to see Sonja. I needed a way to cut through the stress and start moving forward again.

  Sonja quickly put me at ease. “This isn’t like some carnival sideshow, John. You will not be completely under in our session. You’ll always stay aware of where you are and in control of yourself.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I want you to sit back and relax completely. I need you to concentrate on your breathing. Turn loose of any thoughts you’re holding on to. You are in a safe place. Relax and just be.”

  Surprisingly, I found I was able to follow Sonja’s instructions very easily. A few weeks earlier I had begun experimenting with deep meditation, which involved many of the same techniques. My body relaxed, my mind emptied of all the thoughts thrashing about, and I was able to be fully in the moment with her and nowhere else.

  With me in this completely relaxed state, Sonja asked a few guided questions directed to my higher self. The question that I remember most vividly was simply, “John, what do you want to do?”

  “I want to walk and I want to run,” I answered. The words sort of surprised me as they came out.

  “How do you see that happening?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  More conversation followed until Sonja said, “Now I want to go back, back before the accident, back to when you were a young man. Think about what you were doing then.” She paused to let me travel there in my mind. After a few questions to this part of myself, she asked, “What is it that you aspire to?”

  “I want to walk and I want to run.”

  She followed that up with a few more questions before taking me even further back in my mind to my fourteen-year-old self. Again, she asked the same question, and again, I gave the same answer. But, as always, I did not know how I could make this happen. I only knew it was what I most wanted out of life now.

  As our session came to a close, Sonja said, “To me, it seems your life is focused on one purpose: walking again. However, reaching this purpose is going to be very different from everything you’ve done before. In sport, you decided on an event and you knew when it would take place. You had some control over it as well as control over how you prepared and pushed yourself to get there. This is very different. You are not in control. This will unfold when it is meant to unfold. You need to step away, because you cannot control what reaching this goal is going to look like. You don’t know how to get there, so you need to relax and let it happen as it happens.”

  I immediately bought into the idea of focusing on the singular purpose of walking again. However, Sonja’s words to relax and let it happen as it happens left me perplexed. With every sport challenge, I always tried to control the controllable as I worked toward my goal. Now she was telling me my entire goal fell into the realm of the uncontrollable. How, then, was I supposed to get there?

  I ran into Sonja the next morning before leaving for home. “I had a dream about you last night, John,” she said, very excited. “In my dream you were standing onstage and were so full of life and energy. I’ve never had that experience before.”

  “That’s lovely,” I said, but in the back of my mind I was thinking, Let’s try to see how far we can go with this whole idea of walking. I then wheeled out the door and towards my car, just as I had wheeled in five days earlier.

  Letting things happen as they happen is not how I’ve ever done anything. When I returned home to Penrith, I told Amanda what had happened. “So what does this mean?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I replied, “but I am going to find out.”

  “What about the house? Are you ready to make a decision on selling the house and moving closer to Sydney?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, which probably was not the best answer. Honestly, I had not given the house a thought while I was away. Now I guess I had no choice. We talked further about moving. Over the next several weeks we reached a decision to put the house on the market. Again, that’s not really where my head was. I wanted to walk, and I had a hard time thinking about anything else.

  Over the next few months I applied what I had learned about meditation to my quest. The friend who opened my eyes to meditation explained that we can actually create things for ourselves through first visualising them. To me, this sounded very much like my approach to sports: See it. Believe it. Achieve it. I meditated every day, often twice a day, for forty-five minutes at a time. It was amazing. As I went deeper into a meditative state, I not only saw myself running, but I felt the ground beneath my feet and the wind blowing through my hair. With time, I found I could so relax my body that an outside observer might call triple zero in fear that I had slipped into a coma. I focused on creating the reality I hoped to achieve. See it. Believe it. Achieve it. I could see it. I believed it. Achieving it was only a matter of time.

  I told Amanda about my sessions when she returned home from work. Ever practical, she didn’t get caught up i
n my enthusiasm. “I think it’s great; I think the visualisation and mental agility you’re developing is awesome,” Amanda said more than once, “but I think there are limits to how far it can take you. I don’t think you will just get up from a session one day and take off walking. I just don’t. I’m sorry. Do you?”

  I didn’t know. I had no idea how I would walk again, but I was convinced I would. I simply had to get my mind in a state where it could perceive the signs that it was time to take that first step. Over the last several months of 2012 I became very in tune with my body. Every muscle twitch in my legs caused me to wonder, Could this be the start?

  “I’m not sure how it will happen,” I replied to Amanda, “but I do believe I can have a part in creating the reality I hope to see happen.”

  Ever the pragmatist, Amanda said, “Sure, I just think there are limits to what you can do on your own, John. I think you may walk again, but I think it will come through some new medical breakthrough—maybe something like stem cells, or the next breakthrough to come.”

  The two of us had variations of this same conversation for months. In the midst of all this I went to see my regular physiotherapist, Rob. Over the years Rob had pushed and pulled and stretched my muscles and limbs back into working shape time and time again. Since 1995 I’d had chronic shoulder problems that Rob regularly took care of. I went to see him not long after my session with Sonja, the hypnotherapist, but not for my shoulder. Cutting right to the chase I said to him, “Rob, I want to walk again. Can you help me?” My voice cracked as the last sentence came out.