For anyone who doesn’t know me, I’ve been around paddling for a while now. My mother was a national team kayaker, and my father coached at the Olympics. I was as close to “born into the sport” as you could get. Some of my earliest memories are paddling related. Whether it was a long day at the club in Georgia or being babysat by athletes in Florida, I was always as immersed in the paddling lifestyle as a three-year-old could be. As soon as I could hold a paddle, as soon as I could fit into a tiny life jacket, I was on the water.
Sport, for me, is one of life’s greatest pleasures. I am and always will be eternally grateful to my parents for getting and keeping me involved. The people I’ve met, experiences I’ve had and lessons I’ve learned over the last eighteen or so years have shaped me into the person I am today. Looking back, I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Sport is a great way to learn how to face challenges and immerse yourself in something important to you.
That being said, the same type of long term commitment and intensity required in our sport can be draining. Paddling is a never-ending cycle. Accepting this is accepting a lifetime of cold fall morning paddles, stressful trials weeks, and continuous peaks and valleys of emotion. If you let it be, it’s an incredibly stressful lifestyle. If you ask me what the absolute hardest part of paddling is, my answer will differ. If you ask me right before trials, I’d tell you it’s controlling your nerves before a big race. If you ask me on a long training day, I’d probably tell you it’s remembering to charge your GPS the night before. And while anyone who knows me knows that I struggle with both of those things equally, neither are the most difficult.
For me, as for many athletes, the hardest part of paddling is separating your identity from your accomplishments. Immersing yourself so completely in a sport tends to fuse your self-worth to your athletic achievements. Paddling is truly a large part of my identity and it’s good to be emotionally invested in the things you care about, but deriving your sense of self-worth from whether or not you managed to win a time control ends up being damaging. Being proud about your identity as an athlete is a good thing. The difficulty starts when that pride comes solely from results.
Sport is cyclical. Nothing lasts forever, and no one can win every race. Realistically, only a very small percentage of people will win any races at all. I’ve known these things for a long time. Unfortunately, that doesn’t make the sting of a disappointing result hurt any less. When you train twice a day, travel for months on end and compete week after week to achieve a result, its easy to end up letting that result define you. When you’re not racing well, you become riddled with self-doubt. You start believing that second place means second best person. This mindset is very easy to fall into, and incredibly difficult to escape. Race day stress becomes almost insurmountable.
How could you not be intensely nervous before a competition when you know the emotional distress that accompanies a poor result?
A conversation with a close friend helped me start to change my perspective. We were at different points in our athletic careers, which gave us very different views on sport. After he revealed that he was contemplating ending his career, I began grilling him with questions. In a thinly veiled attempt to figure out if other athletes go through the same things that I do, I asked him one question in a million different ways.
“What will you do with all your free time? Won’t you miss racing? Will you stay involved with the sport?”
What I was really trying to ask was “Who will you be without paddling?” To him, the questions seemed silly. As we got deeper into conversation, he started to understand what I was really asking. He also understood that I wasn’t really asking about him, as usual, I had made the conversation about myself. What he said to me has always stuck with me, but has really begun to really resonate with me recently.
“People won’t like you less when you’re not winning races. I know that because people don’t like you more when you’re winning them.”
Put that way, it seems really simple. Since then, that’s what I always try to tell myself when things don’t go well. It has helped, but it’s not always enough. Recently though, I’ve had an experience that’s helped me truly believe in the concept. For anyone who doesn’t keep up to date with my Instagram (tomhall_canoe), I went to Europe this summer. After a disappointing season in 2016 where I found myself missing out on the U23 World championships, I rebounded and created one half of a C2 that was worthy of international competition. I headed to Romania to compete for my country.
Arriving in a country I had never visited before, I was ready to experience the best the paddling world had to offer. Unfortunately, the world class competition was not accompanied by world class food, and I ended up spending the days I should have been racing in a Romanian hospital with food poisoning. Too many Iv drips, unnamed pills and unwanted tetanus shots later, I emerged from the hospital having missed my chances to race. I could write a whole post about my experiences in Romania and how they made me feel, but I’ll save those for my memoir. The true learning experience in it for me came from when I came home.
No one cared at all.
I mean this in the very best way. Other than the occasional worrying about me spreading some deadly Romanian disease, no one treated me any differently. After asking me if I was feeling better, people went on like I hadn’t been away all summer, like I hadn’t missed my (long) shot at an international medal. Parents were still parents, friends were still friends. People weren’t disappointed in me, no one had become disinterested in me because I hadn’t performed. Contrary to what I had told myself for years, my perception of self being linked to my results had not spread to those close to me.
It’s easy to get lost in the stress of competition. It’s hard to separate helpful pressures that stem from the desire to win from the harmful ones like the fear of failure. In the end though, that’s what you must do. Some of the best people I’ve met in my life have been awful paddlers. (Have you guys met my brother?) Some of the best athletes in the world aren’t people you would want to spend time with.
The point of this all is to say that a result in a sport is a result in sport. Nothing more, nothing less. I’ve spent so much of my career worrying about how my results would affect people’s perceptions of me that I never stopped to think about how much they would affect how I saw myself.
From this point on, I’m treating my career like a motivational poster.
“It’s about the journey, not the destination.”
Tom Hall, Canadian National Team Canoer.
Anyone in sports and fitness who would like to share their voice, please submit to hank@hankfittraining.com.