Saying Goodbye to an Olympic Dream: The Final Chapter

The Final Chapter

Below is a peek into the last several months and the journey leading up to this decision. I would love your feedback, questions, comments and conversation.

It’s hard to admit you can read the writing on the wall.

When your mind is capable of overcoming mountains but your body is slowly, painfully, self-destructing.

When the acknowledgement that belief, discipline, and sacrifice and sheer will power are simply not enough.

For the last 3 months, I have wrestled with these questions. Today, I have finally found the answer.

In January, I made a decision supported to go “All In” on my pursuit to becoming the very best Discus thrower I could be and aim to qualify for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. In the 3 year period leading up to this “All In” decision I had fought tooth and nail alongside my coach, Garrett Collier, for my progress in this sport. Juggling 25 hours of training a week, my full time career duties in senior leadership positions and raising our two young daughter (both of which were born during this time), with my wife Natasha.

Read More: My Tribe told me to go “All In” after I had quit.

The logistical and operational challenges of these first 3 years were nearly insurmountable. From having to commute 110 kilometers every day to train, work and make it back home at night through to only seeing my daughters on Wednesdays and Fridays of many weeks due to when I had to leave in the morning and return in the evening.

This may seem crazy, it certainly did to me at first, but what I’ve come to realize is that if you’re not one of the 60-80 Track and Field athletes in our entire Country being supported by the government – you’re on your own to figure it out.

Despite this, I earned two podium appearances at the Canadian National Championships, climbed to the #2 National Ranking and increased my personal best performance from 43 meters to 57 meters in those first 3 years.

Going “All In” represented my opportunity to see what I could really do in this sport if it was my sole focus. I am fortunate to have had the support of my parents who helped me build a small “investor Tribe” who would help me financially leave my full-time career to focus solely on training.

Thank You: Guardian Angel Consultants, Fitness Town, DSL, Janzen Insurance, GLC Solutions, Advance Flooring, Recreation Excellence, M&L Painting, Lloyds Travel.

Unfortunately my “All In” plan didn’t get off to a great start. Coming off a successful fall training block designed by Coach Garrett Collier, I had quickly returned to throwing in the 54-55m range. In January, we decided to move to 4 training sessions a day to increase technical reps and speed and power work.

I did everything I could to get my body ready for the demands of training upwards of 6 hours a day. I had daily bio-mechanic and physio tuning & support from MVMT Lab, Thomas Tran, Stretch Space. I was wearing head to toe compression gear between sessions. I was able to rest and recover between practices, I had a devout mindfulness recovery practice as well as real-time Heart Rate Variability visualization practices.

But out of the gates my results were sluggish and sub-par. Moreover after 3-4 weeks into the cycle I could feel I wasn’t adapting to the programming, my body and Central Nervous System simply didn’t have the capacity to recover effectively through the cycle. Despite pouring all of my energy into performance, I was sliding backwards. Worse, I was starting to experience a throbbing pain in my left hip after the long days were over.

The damage of this trajectory fully manifested during a training camp at the University of Arizona in the middle of February. I mentally and emotionally set out to have a great week of training and see some forward progress in my marks. By this point the throbbing pain in my left hip-socket had intensified significantly.

Through the week at Arizona, my hip continued to get worse and my training matched course. I managed to throw 52 meters in our best training day halfway through the trip.

At this point one of my personal weaknesses begin shining through, the myth of “more work is always better”, as I decided to push through the pain through the rest of the week to maximize the 1:1 time I had with my Coach and the facilities at U of A.

By the time I returned from U of A, I was an absolute wreck. I couldn’t sit for longer than a few minutes without excruciating pain shooting down my leg. I was depressed, alone and unhappy.

At the same time my coach had been taking an objective view of where we were at in our journey and what the right thing to do for my performance and potential would be. My Coach, in a brave and selfless act, connected me with Canadian Olympic Shotput Medalist Dylan Armstrong as well as his former coach, one of the world’s best throws coaches of all time, Dr.Bonderchuck (Dr.B), who both live and coach out of Kamloops, BC.

Dylan welcomed me with open arms and our plan was to get me on the Bonderchuck system ASAP to get a baseline on my peak performance potential. I was excited and motivated to get to work with the upcoming summer holding both the Canadian National Championships which I believed I could win, and the qualifying standard for the Pan Am Games well within reach.

I spent one week in an all out attempt to get my body as close to 100% as possible before heading up for my first week of training in Kamloops.

Nothing about this journey has come easy, and training in Kamloops was no different. Tash knew if I wanted to continue on this journey I had to be in Kamloops, but that didn’t mean she was looking forward to it – it would be yet another chapter where I would leave her for days on end, raising our two young daughters on her own – a single parent, sacrificing her life for my selfish pursuit. We settled on a schedule where I would travel to Kamloops every Sunday, train with Dylan Monday through Wednesday and travel back home Wednesday evening and complete the rest of my training close to home Thursday-Saturday.

Over the next several weeks I became well acquainted with Dylan and Dr.B’s philosophy and came to deeply appreciate the knowledge, facilities and community they have built in Kamloops for Canadian throwers (*read more about Dr.B who may have one of the most fascinating sports coaching stories in the history of Track and Field at the very end of this post). There were glimpses of my training that showed promise – I managed to throw a 2 meter personal best with the 1.5kg discus just shy of 66 meters. Unfortunately by the end of our first training cycle together (approximately 3 weeks) my hip and leg had regressed to its worst state of pain. There was no question it was affecting my ability in the circle, Dylan didn’t hold back:

“If you can’t stay healthy through a full cycle the system will never be able to have it’s full effect and we will not be able to maximize your progress.”

The writing was on the wall, but given the positive glimpses with the 1.5kg we decided to start the next cycle, this time throwing a competition weight 2kg to get a true reading of where I was.

A note on the nature of the injury… When I had started throwing the discus one area of my technique that was overlooked was the “front of the circle”, or where I am preparing to release the Disc to take flight. There are a dozen different schools of thought on discus technique but one principle that has stood the test of time is that the longer you maintain double support – both feet on the ground – the more time you can spend applying force (and therefore speed) to the disc. Unfortunately, due to my years as a basketball athlete I had a strong neural and motor association between the concept of power and jumping. Therefore in the discus ring I subconsciously associated throwing far with jumping – effectively separating my contact with the ground well early of the release of the discus. By the time we started to address this as a core area of technical improvement – I had already thrown 25,000-30,000 reps the wrong way. My body didn’t know how to load and ground my left leg to become the “blocker” of all that centripetal force. As we forced my mind and body to learn this new movement, I simply could not achieve the right biomechanics to effectively load my left leg – the result was my hip and surrounding muscles bearing the brunt of all that force and torque. 

Again, I took 4 days off to get as healthy as I could. I was now working with two additional “body mechanics”, Matthew and Dave from Coast Performance Rehab who did an incredible job putting my broken body back together on a daily and weekly basis. Then I was back up to Kamloops.

I knew it was crunch time and as I drove back up to Kamloops in mid-April Sunday. There would be one of two likely outcomes: I would pick up the 2kg disc, throw it extremely well and feel relatively healthy (making a few tweaks to my technique to try and mitigate the aggravation) which would be a clear indication to keep going forward. The second entirely possible outcome would be struggling to throw well and experiencing excruciating pain – an easy data point to make the hard decision to end this journey.

It turns out that I would split the difference, throwing a promising 54-55m every session from Monday to Wednesday (seeing the first positive effects of Dr.B’s method) but still experiencing a significant amount of pain. No clear path forward. We stayed the course. It was only over the next 5 training sessions that the writing finally became crystal clear. My hip continued to limit my physical, mental and emotional performance, this became evident in my performance over the next few days and by the time I was back up in Kamloops the following Monday, I was not in a good state. But as you learn to do at this level of athletics, I put on my mask and “steeled my psyche”. I convinced myself that this would be the best practice of my life and that I was capable of throwing 57-58 meters.

My body had other plans. I only made it 6 throws into practice before Dylan and I both made the call to shut it down, for good. I could barely walk out of the circle.

I sat in silence for a long time. Grasping the weight of this moment that had finally come. I wasn’t devastated or distraught – there were too many competing emotions to get a reading. But deep down I knew that while my dream of being an Olympic Discus athlete had finally died on that lonely, dusty mountaintop in Kamloops – the journey had achieved its intended effect. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that I was sitting on that mountaintop as a more capable, knowledgable and fulfilled human being that when I set out three and a half years earlier.

Appendix: On Dr.B, Dylan & the Kamloops Throwing Center

What’s in Kamloops, you ask? As I have come to learn only over the last couple of years, Kamloops is home to the Canadian National Throws Center which is run by Dylan Armstrong (Olympic bronze medal shotputter), and a man infamously known in the global throwing community as “Dr.B“. Dr.B, now in his 80s, is one of the most recognized throws coaches in the world over the last century. Dylan was about to quit his throwing career when Dr.B moved to Kamloops and took him on – propelling him over a very short period to one of the best throwers in the world.

I continue to be astonished by how the track and field system works (or doesn’t), both globally and in our Canadian back yard. The way Dr.B got Dylan to a bronze medal was based on a “scientifically significant methodology” he single-handedly created in the 1960/70s as the head coach of the Soviet Union. This is the only time in history a group of coaches (more than 1,000) came together collectively to align on programming and methodology – every year the USSR would hold massive congregations where all of these coaches would come in person. Dr.B saw this as an opportunity to collect data on what type of programming was most effective for which disciplines. Over the course of these years, he assigned hundreds of variations of programs to the different coaches, splitting them into small test cohorts. Then, every year, he collected the data from these tens of thousands of world level athletes coached by these 1,000 coaches and made causal connections between training programs and what he and Dylan call “Peak Conditions”. As I begin to work under the tutelage of Dylan, I am realizing it is freakishly scientific. A father of an athlete I am throwing alongside up here (currently the #1 ranked 13-year-old hammer thrower in the world) eerily described to me the accuracy of the programming… “We know down to the hour, in every single program – ranging from 2 weeks to 6 weeks, when the thrower is going to hit their peak. This is repeated cycle after cycle, for a year and a half now”.

In chatting with Dylan I have come to understand that this size of a data set and standardized testing has never and will likely never exist again as there is simply not a large enough cooperative federation that exists.

Fascinating.

All of this knowledge, for the most part, is trapped inside of Dr.B, and now Dylan’s head up in this tiny town of Kamloops.