1st What interested you in the bobsled?
My career in bobsled started quite
differently from the traditional childhood dream becomes reality story!
I
grew up loving adrenaline sports and fast machines. In high school I was
introduced to football and fell in love with the team dynamics, the explosive
nature of the sport and the dedication to training that it required. My
football career continued at the University of Ottawa, where I dreamed of
playing professional football one day.
Everything was on track to make a run at
the CFL as I was playing well, and was in excellent physical condition, until a
conversation I had with Bill (my best friend, high school teammate, home town
training partner, and rival- he played at McMaster University). He had
watched the movie "Cool Runnings" which sparked the conversation of
how odd of a sport bobsled was. We began to question how anyone,
especially people from Jamaica get involved in such an obscure sport.
This led to subsequent conversations after
researching the sport a bit, of: "Man, they have open try outs across
Canada, we should go out just to tell our kids one day that we tried out for
the Canadian Bobsled team" to "Hey, I looked up the testing criteria,
and we actually might be really good at this". That's when things
became a little more serious.
We were both in excellent physical
condition as we took our training extremely serious, and pushed one another to
the limit in our workouts.
We
decided we'd give this a real shot, and changed our training programs to peak
for the ID camp that was being held in July at York University.
After showing the coaches what we had in terms
of speed and power, we were flown out to Calgary to see if we could actually
push, and I guess the coaches were not disappointed, as the direction of both
of our lives changed drastically.
Next thing we knew, my best friend
and I are appointed to the Canadian Bobsleigh team and are going to be
competing internationally!
Our
next goal was to compete on the same sled at the 2014 Winter Olympics, but
those dreams grinded to a halt in January when Bill was involved in the worst
crash bobsleigh had witnessed in over 30 years. He was hospitalized for
several weeks with severe head and back injuries, and was unable to recover
enough to return to the sport.
I
was pretty freaked out after having my best friend nearly die but decided that
I would not let our dreams die, and used that accident to motivate me when
training got hard and competition got tough, and it helped me make it to
Sochi.
Talk about a curve ball in my life!
I had unknowingly been training for
this sport all along, and ended up representing our country at the biggest
sporting event in the world 3 years after discovering the sport!
2nd What lesson can you share from journey to the Olympics in Sochi
The best lesson I can share from my journey to the Sochi Olympics is that hard
work pays off. I had a lot of work to do to be ready to compete at the Olympics
3 years after discovering the sport!
This
meant I had to give up a lot in order to get up to speed, meaning, no more
cottage weekends, no more parties, no more junk food, just train, eat, train,
sleep, train!
Looking back, I have zero regrets for making
those sacrifices, and the only memories I have of those hard years of training
are the spoils of all of that work!
3rd Can you share a strategy or lesson that entrepreneurs can share
in their business.
Don't worry about the end result, focus on the
journey! This motto is what guides me through life, and I can say for
certain that I owe all of my achievements to it!
In the 3 years leading up to the Olympics,
I was named an alternate every single year. My family and friends were
always questioning why I wasn't named to a team right away, and I even received
some advice along the lines of "You don't honestly think you'll make the
Olympics do you? Maybe you should just give it up and get a real
job.".
As in life, nothing is just handed to you,
and instead of worrying about how I wasn't named to a team, or how I had lost
in a sprint to the guy who was gunning for my spot on the sled, I worried about
what I could control at the moment, and that was, how I could improve to get on
a team, or to beat that guy in a sprint. I needed to always be moving
forward and couldn't afford to waste my time worrying about things that were
out of my control.
If I
did that, I knew the results would come, and sure enough, they did! I
wasn't much of an "individual tester" meaning I didn't perform as
well on my own as I did with my team, however, teams are chosen based on
individual testing results. Each season, after being named an alternate,
I was able to beat out my competition within the first couple of weeks of the
season, and was always a member of the team for World Championships and the big
one, the Olympics!
Had
I let the end result guide journey, I would have seen each obstacle I faced as
a major failure, and I can tell you for certain that I would not have made it
to the Olympics!
Focusing all of my energy on the journey,
helped me address the little things that you very easily overlook when you are
only thinking about the end result.
My
best advice for any entrepreneur is to slow it down, take things day by day,
and know that if you are giving something your all, you will end up exactly
where you want to be!
