I think it's about time I wrote about last weekend, because it felt like a bit of a milestone for me despite the result being similar to the ones I've had in previous years.

Senior Selection was held at Lee Valley whitewater centre last weekend. Training at Lee Valley has been extremely challenging over the last year and a half, and without the Scottish booked sessions there would have been almost no chance at all. So I feel extremely grateful for the people that made training there possible during rafting slots, and also grateful for the Scottish program for booking water that made proper training available. 

With no races over the last two years, I wasn't sure what to expect. I've had a couple of amazing training "phases" - I felt in peak physical form at the start of 2020, and had a great summer of race simulation and adapting to the situations that came up due to COVID. This turned around a little in 2021, and I'm not sure if I was just tired of tapering and peaking for races that got cancelled over and over again. I just felt super flat, and like I couldn't paddle to my normal standard. 

One of the things I've been working on with Oscar is race technique - which sounds kind of obvious. But a trend in my racing has consistently been letting myself get into a state of "safety". Which is relative, of course - but quite often in racing I will allow myself to start taking wider lines, to avoid poles and "not fuck up" - which doesn't really work in slalom. So often this way of racing leads to more mistakes, and slalom athletes know that you're actually less likely to hit gates the closer you are to them. So my goal for this selection series was to race without boundaries - to take risks that I normally would in training. 

Selection this year was over two days, and made up of four individual race runs. Your best three runs count, and they have to be within senior percentage (which is a percentage taken from the fastest boat in your category), in order to demonstrate speed as well as relative placing. My first run of the weekend put me in 3rd, and was a bit of a wake up back to racing. I didn't play safe, but I did lose concentration significantly and ALMOST went back into some old, safe techniques. Second runs I was able to reengage with my plan to take risks in a calm, controlled manner - and finished 2nd. 

The second day of racing is always a bit bizarre, and for me completely about energy management. Especially after a good first day of racing, it feels like the competition is almost over; when it's only half begun. It's super easy to get into a mindset of "just get it finished" and to let feeling from the previous day guide your movements in the next runs. I was so proud to race like myself on run 3 during day 2 - I took risks and raced without fear, though I did have a mistake at the bottom (spearing the bollards on the last drop) which we think cost me between 10 and 14 seconds. But that's slalom, and it gave me a kick to race hard in the last run. 

In previous years I would have held onto the mistake from the morning, and it took a huge amount of mental energy to avoid the "play it safe" feeling. But my promise to myself at the start of the weekend had been that I would regret going slow and clean, over fast with a penalty. My last run was fast enough to put me in third, and with that, qualify for the World Cup final in Pau d'Pyrenees. It's also my cleanest ever racing weekend, with only one touch (which adds two seconds to your final time) over the whole race. 

The amount of support and encouragement I've had over the last few weeks has been insane. I feel more than ever that slalom is turning into one of the most inclusive and supportive communities in the world, and it felt like everyone really stepped up to the demands of sportsmanship, as well as the demands of racing. I'm so excited that my best years of racing are coming from working together with my partner and my coach Oscar; sometimes it takes an entirely different perspective to break out of what used to feel "safe" and satisfactory, into a racing mindset that allows you to race without fear, and everything to gain. 

Thank you everyone who's come with me for this. It means the world to me, and I hope I can bring value to our beautiful sport for the years to come. 

Without travel, or even very many training camps over the last year, there has been time for a vast amount of training. Normally our year is broken up by periods of travel, recovery after races and time off to regenerate. With uninterrupted isolation with just a boat, paddle and gates to use, it feels like it's been the longest winter training block of all time.

COVID has affected everyone in different ways. Some people have thrived, some people have suffered horribly with mental health and declining physical health in isolation. It's shaped the story for everyone, in some way. The first lockdown felt productive, like we got a huge amount done. After the second one, I had so many expectations; that it would feel like the first time again, that I'd have improved the same amount, that I'd find it easy to transition back into having more people around me. I was completely wrong!

Having a continuous block of training without any reprise has been hard going mentally. There have been several points at which we thought we were going to race, and prepared accordingly. Which is a huge amount of building up, and then flopping. I found it completely exhausting, and in May crashed a little. As senior selection had finally been confirmed to go ahead in August, I had time to take a week completely off, and start a new block. I think beginning again and starting an extremely difficult physical block gave me the mental reset I needed. It felt great to finally get back into heavy sessions where I could feel the fitness coming back, and actually feel the effect recovery was having on me. It's weird because you never really realise you're losing something, until you take a break and come back to it.

I think this year has been a bit like a tech session. Sometimes you'll do a single move for the entire time. You might get it really nice once or twice at the start. Then for some reason, you can only get it ugly, or not at all, no matter how many times you paddle it. You can try switching off your brain, adding speed, taking off speed, for some reason it doesn't work. But then it comes up in a race, and you sail through the move like it was never difficult in the first place. I think what happens here, is coding. Your brain is learning every scenario, every change of water. That's the only explanation I have for periods when your paddling might be below the standard you usually expect, then you come back to it and it's like the way has opened up again. Stuff that seemed difficult when you were in a slump doesn't just feel easy, it feels like you can add speed. 

I think the key thing to remember in these moments of coming back to a fresh brain, is that trying to hold onto them doesn't work. In my opinion, you can't force yourself out of a slump. Some people's slumps look very different to others. For one person it might be capsizing more often than they thought, and for another person it might be making the final but not the podium. The thing is, the faster you can accept your moment and relax, the faster it will go away. 

I really believe that to master that element of athlete life is one of the hardest. I refused to accept that I was just mentally tired after the second lockdown. The first one had been productive and I'd felt good. Why couldn't I just be like that again? My issue is often that I just want to train through phases like this. I enjoy the pain of hard sessions, and I love the science of recovery. The first coffee after an extremely difficult session is one of my favourite moments in life. But sometimes, like with anything good, you have to do something you don't want to do. In this case, it was to back off, take some time, and live without judging myself for having a slump.

I like to compare it to turning off customer service. At the end of a full run, we're all about the same relative fitness at an international level. It's how easily you let the lactic acid affect your technique, and therefore the bottom of your run, that defines people who make finals and medal. My brain wants to complain to the customer service desk, and change something. The change might be to make it easier, which is simple - you don't go as fast. You take wider lines around the gates. But if you can find a way to turn off customer service, and save the complaints for later - you might just get the result, or get out of the slump, much faster than you think. 

Or more specifically, periods. I should stress at this point that I'm not qualified in any way to hand out medical advice, but I wanted to talk about periods because even after 20 years of getting them every single month, I've only just started really learning about what they mean and why they continue to surprise me. I'm going to be as open as I possibly can, and hope that this finds someone who might just find something helpful or reassuring in what I've got to say. 

What is super cool, is that this is turning into a conversation athletes can have with their coaches. I mean, it's about fucking time. After recently learning in a bit more depth about how your menstrual cycle can physically and psychologically affect you, it seems completely insane that this was a topic only select coaches would be willing to have a conversation about. I'm gonna go ahead and shift the blame though - I don't believe this is coaches fault, but absolutely society's fault for not making it a normal/comfortable/completely essential conversation to have.

Now the ranty bit is done (sorry) I want to sort of go through what I've learnt just over the last couple of years. Again, this experience is mine - every single female who menstruates will have an entirely different "normal". And that's the main point, really. I've been really put off reading scientific literature about menstruating by the words - which might sound bizarre as I'm quite happy to throw big words around here. But with long drawn out scientific explanations, I often lose the "how does this apply to me" part while I'm trying to understand what's going on. I actually only started tracking my cycle since I began wearing a Garmin fitness tracker - it seemed like a fun bit of information to add at the time. But I started noticing patterns. As an athlete with access to the Scottish Institute of Sport support network, I log my training and perceived load. Combined with also tracking my cycle, I discovered some pretty interesting things.

So a menstrual cycle is something that women live with, all the time - not just during our periods. The first day of a cycle is the first day you start bleeding, and the last day of your cycle is the last day you didn't bleed, before you bleed again. They can be anywhere between 20 and 40 days long. It is normal for that length to change through your life. Different kinds of contraception may alter the frequency and experience of your bleeding. Some women bleed a bit, and some women bleed a LOT. The symptoms that women experience during their menstrual cycle (which again, is all the time) change through their lives, and even vary from cycle to cycle. 

So during a cycle (every day for most of our lives) our hormones change. It's not a bad thing, it gives us the ability to create life. It is literally the reason we all exist (close one but not going to start, stay with me!). The three main hormones that are pretty key to the changes we experience are progesterone, testosterone, and oestrogen.

The part of our cycle that society is most interested in (and loves to gaslight us about) is the week prior to bleeding. That's the end of our cycle, so I'm going to start from day 1 (the first day we bleed). On day 1, the start of the first week of our cycle, our oestrogen levels are really low. As we all know from the week prior to the start of our cycle, this can mean (for a lot of women but not always) that we feel fatigued, our concentration levels can be low, and often don't want to be in unfamiliar environments. But in week 1 of our cycle, as our oestrogen levels start to rise, our concentration and energy can flood (excuse the pun) back, and we start to feel more social again. Obviously, combined with mild to severe blood loss, this changes from person to person. You might feel like shit during bleeding, and that is also normal. I never knew this, but if you have any chronic issues such as tendon pain, bowel problems, asthma or insomnia these can manifest themselves with stronger symptoms right before we bleed. But oestrogen is a great hormone, and towards the end of the first week, we should be starting to feel a bit better. Another awesome thing about oestrogen - it helps us build muscle, and during the "rising" phase, it's a good time to consider that resisted exercises with weight and power can progress particularly well at this time. 

Part two of constantly being in a cycle is a nice one. Our oestrogen is still rising, and our testosterone too (yes, we have it). On paper, everything during the second week (ish, again, this really depends on how long your cycle is and how much blood you end up losing) is great. Our concentration, reaction speed, memory, patience, and endorphins, are loving life in phase two. The cool thing about endorphins is that for some women, they function as a pain-masking mechanism. For athletes this isn't always great - we rely on being able to listen to our bodies for when we've gone too hard, but our chance of injuring ourselves is also less right now, because testosterone and oestrogen. It's normal to feel more confident, more attractive, and more competitive. One small downside of magical week two, is that because we're sharper, more alert and able to concentrate, is that it can be hard to get your brain to switch off. We're on high alert, looking for a mate, solving every problem that comes to us and also (for me) enjoying going flat out, because we can. 

Now, part three. This part is supposed to start on the first day after you ovulate. But who knows when they ovulate? I have literally no idea. There are some subtle symptoms you can look out for, but it's actually really hard to tell without a scan whether or not an egg has travelled from your ovaries to your uterus. We can't feel it. So based on not having access to an ultrasound, I'm going to call it week three, and week three can just be stage three, depending on how long your cycle is. Something else I had no idea about - every cycle, we actually get two dips in oestrogen. The one that most people know about is the week before our period. But the less commonly understood one, is right at the start of phase three. So you might feel a bit shit for a couple of days. 

In phase three, our progesterone levels start to rise. Because our body is awesome, it's preparing for the possibility that we may have gotten pregnant during phase two. So as our progesterone rises, we might start to slow down a bit. I get quieter, less interested in being social, and start eating a lot more in this phase. I do keep it clean as much as possible - my mood shifts even more dramatically if I eat a lot of sugar or too much in one go. But I've learnt that if you crave something intensely, it's a good bet that your body needs something of that craving. You can also get a bit constipated during this phase - your body has shifted it's focus from your brain and social productivity to digestion, and absorbing as much as it can from the food you eat. Having both progesterone and oestrogen peaking (because a couple of days after the dip, your oestrogen comes back) means that you burn fat more efficiently. So don't give yourself a hard time for eating a bit more. 

Now phase four, the one society really likes to tell us is "a bad week" or "your angry pre bleeding time" or "is it your period soon?" is simply when both your oestrogen and progesterone drop. It is normal to experience no bad mood or symptoms during this week. It is also normal for real, valid things that normally you'd be able to cope with, make you feel more sad or frustrated than you would be in an earlier phase. I personally either want to kill everything I see, eat everything that sits still long enough, or feel cynical and pessimistic with almost no connection to what is happening externally. We had an amazing work week last week; everything went smoothly, we were productive, training was great. And I just felt like shit. There's not a lot you can do about it, other than not guilt-trip yourself for feeling like that. I've found with tracking my cycle, that when I'm prepared it's easier to just feel sad or angry, and know that it's going to go away eventually. It can be really hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel of low oestrogen, but when you have a rough idea of how long it's going to take, it really does make it easier.

​I've had cycles where I bleed a lot, and cycles where I experience almost no symptoms. Sometimes our flat is like a walk-in hunger games, and other times the week before my period I get extremely clingy and reluctant to leave familiarity. It's been incredibly valuable to me, to have an external "check" that I can look at, before I react externally to things. I mean, having low oestrogen doesn't mean that problems you have are only "because of hormones". Your own judgement is yours, and if you want to react then I will be the first to stick my hand up and vote for you to go right ahead. But it's been really cool to be able to plan my training around when is going to be the least risky, best possible time for me to be lifting heavy, or going as hard as I can in the boat. At the end of the day, we can't control it - sometimes we have to race when we feel pessimistic, sad and our whole body hurts. But this is the best part - we know very well that we can be our best despite all that. Our muscles don't really change, our ability to concentrate is trained and therefore we can't lose it. So females who made it this far (nice one, thank you) don't worry about it. You know you can do amazing things despite feeling shit. But give yourself a break, and if anyone asks you if you're being moody because of your period, don't waste another cycle minute by dignifying them with a response. 

"Balance" is, in my opinion, far too often a word thrown into captions in order to carry the meaning of "balance" onto whatever picture/story/idealism that the author wants to depict. The last year has accelerated the age of digital so unbelievably fast, that people are learning very quickly how to adapt language to fit their ideal image. For this post to have "balance", I wanted to talk about a few different things that have either engaged me or are part of my life. 

Senior Selection 2021

I'd better get the big one over and done with. Senior selection in 2020 was cancelled the day we arrived at the race venue - sensibly, obviously. This year, again, we've now heard from the International Panel that the race will be at least delayed, and possibly cancelled altogether. It's been a year of winding up for a race that might happen, then deflating again when it appears that once again it will be cancelled. I honestly don't believe it's anyones fault, and I definitely advocate caution when it comes to running events that, at the end of the day, are predominantly run by volunteers who come into the vulnerable category. Whatever it takes to keep everyone safe should be our priority as a sport.

But where is slalom going? It's so easy to feel lost at the moment. From a personal point of view, it's exhausting to stay motivated when your expectations are continuously raised and shut down in succession, and there's no real way of gauging your improvement. In Scotland we're at least allowed to train on whitewater. Other groups of paddlers in the country don't even have access to gates, which is a position I really can't imagine, 12 weeks out from (hopefully) the first race of the season. 

Whatever happens with racing this year, it's going to be a game changer for slalom. There is such a wide variety of positions for athletes all over the world - some are able to travel for warm weather training camps, some have full time access to race venues. Others, like I said earlier, are completely unable to train at all. Maybe it's an opportunity? The money saved by the vast majority of paddlers who haven't had to fund an entire (and possibly another) season, could mean greater investment in the coming seasons. The more places people go to race, the more equipment and cameras and bigger events and more time spent, is better for the sport.

But it's offset by the paddlers who have suffered financially during the crisis, or who simply don't have the energy to carry on through another year of uncertainty. This year will be crippled by rules that are different for everyone, which could easily mean a bigger disparity between those athletes on full support programs, and those who aren't. It's impossible to predict at this stage, but for any paddlers reading - I just hope you're ok. It's hard to admit you're having a shit time, when sport is so far away from "essential" that it feels ridiculous to complain about it. I want to say that if everyone seizes the opportunity to start from scratch - make this sport the one you want it to be, when you train in whatever way you can, and demonstrate resilience through every part of your life - then we could come out the other side of this with a much better sport than we had before the pandemic.

​Make something real

One of the things I've been focusing on over the last year, as (if you've gotten this far, thank you!) I've demonstrated through some of my more recent blog posts, is separating real from fiction. We're a digital generation now, more so than we would have been without COVID. This is great in a lot of ways; we can communicate with our friends and family, share experiences that we probably wouldn't have been through outside of lockdown. But it does engender an environment on social media that I think is REALLY important to reality check. All the time. I'm completely guilty of this, but it's so easy to show the bits of life that are photogenic and pretty, easygoing and carefree. I worked a 10 hour office shift yesterday, but the two parts of my day that I shared on social media were my full runs in the morning, and the photoshoot I did with my partners company (286 West) on a SUP in the evening.

That's not a realistic picture of how my day actually went. But it's hard - I rely on my platforms for sponsorship, coverage and creating trust. I need to think more about how to nurture the trust people already put on these platforms (again, if you're reading this - that's you!). I've decided that now whenever I post a photo of myself that has good lighting, that makes me look lean and smooth - I'll always attach a photo next to it that shows what the reality of that picture is. I am quite lean - I train a LOT - but those beautiful photos are not how I look every day. I don't want to contribute to the impossible standards that are placed on human beings now, who are attached to the internet not out of choice, but a need for human interaction. 

Also I should probably add as a side note - if you follow my social media accounts, you've probably noticed that I do occasionally "attack" certain brands for their marketing. Specifically gym companies who unnecessarily distinguish between men's and women's equipment in order of "weight lifted" or aesthetic priority. This isn't spontaneous or flippant. I ALWAYS email the point of contact for the brand first, to give them an opportunity to explain themselves. But I've been an athlete for too long, promoting both women and men in sport, to have an excuse to sit on the side line and not say anything. It goes to social media to pressure companies to rethink their branding if they can't give me an explanation, and when at least a few other athletes have expressed that they feel the same way as me about the message. It's not good to attack brands, but it is good when they change their message - which I'm proud to say, all of them have so far. 

​

I recently read a post on instagram shared by a friend. Charlie Guest is an Olympic GBR ski racer, and over the last year we've had a couple of stories together that involved deconstructing assumed "norms" about gender in sport, and I've been thoroughly inspired. A few months ago, we addressed a weightlifting brand on instagram, who had published a new line of equipment that was divided into "male" and "female" categories. The men's line of equipment added up to 160kg of weight and the women's to 120kg. Charlie and I have both done a lot of weightlifting, so we understand that in competition, women have the OPTION to use a narrower grip bar which is 5kg less than the standard size. These lines were published for public consumption; there was literally no need to label them based on gender. Men who want to lift less are obliged by the marketing to buy the "male" pack, and vice versa for women who want to put more weight on the bar. After a bit of to-and-fro, the brand graciously acknowledged how important it is to remove labels like that at an essential stage of sport such as equipment purchase, and changed the name of their new line. (See the below pictures for the full conversation!)

The post Charlie shared recently was from one of her ski racing colleagues, who has suffered with an eating disorder. 

Unfortunately this is a story that almost every female athlete I know has gone through. It's not to say I don't know men who have suffered through eating disorders, but in my experience as an athlete it's simply not the same volume - I'm talking about every. single. girl. It's horrifying. So I wanted to write a post about how this kind of thing started for me, and how it links to the fact that from day one of existence, girls are given a set of rules they have to comply with. It's essentially linked to societal view of "normal" that in sport, women are trying to deconstruct to make the pathway more equal.  I thought I'd share part of the book I'm writing below; it's extremely personal, but unfortunately I think it's a terribly common story for girls who start sports in high school. Certainly in my generation of athletes it is.

The next ten years of my life began. I’d developed arm muscles. I didn’t really wear makeup or jewellery. I liked ‘girly’ stuff; I just didn’t really wear any or behave ‘feminine’. What was super confusing, was that while I didn’t really care if people asked me if I was a boy or a girl - I just found it odd - was that now things like “man” and “tranny” and “do you have a penis” were being thrown at me. I can't even imagine how much more complex that experience can be for young people discovering things about themselves like how they'd like society to see them based on how they feel on the inside.

The names didn't matter to me, but the viciousness with which it was thrown at me was bewildering. I’d not done anything wrong. I actually thought of myself as a nice, enthusiastic kind of person. But every single day, I was being attacked in school. It was even physical. One time after P.E. I was feeling super stoked that I’d helped win a hockey match. I got on fine with all the girls - bar one or two, like any high school relationships. But I got ambushed behind the changing rooms by three boys. They tore off my shirt, to ‘see if I was a girl’. It was incredibly aggressive, and traumatising. I think this kind of thing happens a lot in high school. I was by no means the most bullied or downtrodden in the school, and horrifyingly, my experience probably wouldn’t have even made the top 5% of worst experiences of what assholes kids can be. It’s an aggressive, abusive, tribal reaction to someone who doesn’t immediately fit into a box. I still don’t, so I’ve kept that part of my personality which is hard to categorise, which I’m happy about. What happened next was truly horrifying though, and while I think it shaped my attitude to authority in later years, I think this kind of management must have damaged countless kids.

I wasn’t a snitch or a grass, but I was pretty traumatised by being attacked. I went to my next class in a jumper, because my shirt had been torn, and when I was asked to take it off, refused. I got sent to the office of my head of year. She asked what the problem was, and I burst into tears and told her everything. About how violated I felt, about the name calling and intense hatred thrown at me in hallways. About how groups of boys intimidated me enough to make ridiculous detours around the school. How I hated beyond anything walking to a table in the lunch hall, because it was like a walk of shame. I ignored most of it, but it’s hard when it’s every single day. She responded:

“Why don’t you wear a dress?” 

I think that in the UK, in 2020 at least, this attitude has changed quite a lot. But what really gets my blood boiling is the idea that "things are improving, so we don't need to shout quite as loudly". There is an overwhelming sense that I'm doing something wrong by telling my personal story here. It is extremely uncomfortable to think about people reading it, but at the moment, women have to measure what they say SO CAREFULLY in order to not come across as (delete as appropriate):

Attention seeking
Dramatic
Man hating
Self absorbed
Manly (I know)
Not caring about any other issues (for example, I am discussing young women's experiences in high school. I am not discussing young men's experiences in high school, but I feel the need to acknowledge that I give a giant shit about that set of issues too).

In 2020, I have still sat down and listened to someone use "gay" as a derogatory term. I couldn't believe it. Now I have to acknowledge that I'm not trying to take away anyone's right to free speech. But are we really so low on creativity, us, the most linguistically diverse animal ON THE PLANET, that we can't find a way to say we don't like something that doesn't aggressively alienate a HUGE amount of the population? Also (sorry, Bember is on a rampage) how is it that CALLING THIS OUT is more frowned upon than actually doing it in the first place?!

So the next post I do, I promise, will be canoe slalom themed. But these issues are too important to me and my experience in sport to ignore. These experiences have shaped who I am, and I believe as an athlete it's my responsibility to address them as modern issues. I'm inspired by the other women I know in sport. I'm inspired ALL the time by people who don't feel that they fit in anywhere in society, but try as hard as they can anyway. It's normal for men to sit and commentate at women's sporting events and evaluate their feelings and life situation in a way they wouldn't for male athletes, so I'm going to bloody well talk about them. What we need to do, is try and imagine how we'd feel about it if all the language used for women in sport, was applied to men in sport. Then ask ourselves, truthfully, how does it feel? Does it feel weird? And then try and understand why it feels weird.

I still don’t really fit into boxes. I love dresses, and makeup. I just don’t put a massively high value on them. I love my sport, and I think I’m thought of as ‘tough’ in terms of training, effort and resilience. I also love reading and poetry and art. I don’t feel the need to change to fit better in my ‘box’. I’m trying to use imagery and stories to illustrate things that make my life now incredibly valuable to me. One of those things, that makes life a little more valuable, is how many men I also know that are without hesitation, picking up these issues and wearing them proudly too. Thank you.

Don’t be sorry.

I had a strength coach for a while who set the most insane core sessions. They’d burn and make you feel ill with effort. But the special part was that for the exercise to be truly disgusting, you had to force yourself to finish it. A core session is as hard as you make it, and my coach always said ‘stay honest’ when all you want to do is tell yourself that you can’t do it anymore. That it’s alright to stop now. To take some of the weight off your core, or slow the movements down a bit. Or speed them up to make it easier. You’d be amazed what your brain does in moments like that, and astounded at how much longer you can bear something unbearable.

I always feel like slalom is special from a self-evaluation perspective. We’re required to adapt, be flexible, be rigid and also have strict discipline. You need to learn to relax, and know when to wind yourself up. Letting go of hard things is a skill. Letting go of nice things is even harder. One of the most difficult things to overcome for me is quite hard to talk about, because it’s not a heroic story of struggle and success. It’s a characteristic that’s ugly, and quite hard to train yourself out of.

A few blog posts ago, I mentioned that society sort of trains us to see the failure of others as a personal success. For you to enjoy something fully, it has to be something that someone else can’t have. It breeds this feeling of satisfaction when someone misses out, or fails at something they tried extremely hard at. It makes you feel superior. Nothing is more likely to develop a character based on arrogance, when you feel your personal value lies in something unique to you. We’re all unique, of course. But we’re also all human, and sharing the qualities that we have in common is so much more important than contrasting, and by default, comparing them to others.  

For example, in a training environment, it can be highly valuable to observe what others are doing. How often they train, the sort of fatigue cycles they demonstrate as a result. There’s also nothing wrong with taking inspiration from things they do that you might not have thought of. Having role models is incredibly powerful. But the problem comes from comparing your own situation to someone else's. Because we are almost never completely educated about a person’s exact situation. To assume you can see the whole picture of someone’s life when really all you’ve seen is the finishing touches, is a problem. It makes it easy to award value, or remove the value of that person on an incredibly superficial level. 

Slalom can be a hard sport for this. An old coach said, “you’re only as good as your last performance.” Which I guess, from a spectators perspective, is true. If slalom was a highly spectated event, then maybe that would have some kind of value from a TV or sponsorship point of view. It also wouldn’t be an athlete’s responsibility to manage that. What I’m trying hard to illustrate with this blog is that the true value of a person really isn’t in their sporting achievements. I used to think it was; my identifying characteristic was WATER. I’m that ‘water girl’ or the ‘crazy girl who likes to be cold all the time’. A crazy sport. I guess what I’m trying to say is that where one person may identify themselves by their sport, another might find more value in just identifying with the sport. Use it as a model, a system to better yourself. But don’t place your personal value on the outcomes, the tangible results,  that take up about 1% of your total on-water time. 

An exercise that's brought a lot of value to my experience of slalom is watching out for moments where others find immense value in the doing of something, rather than the outcome of something. Watching expedition videos, where the final performance is actually a tiny fraction of a trip that might be months of harrowing travel, is strangely relatable. I think true athletes are the ones that gain value from every part of what they’re doing, and I guess expedition kayaking is a great illustration of that. Nouria Newman recently posted about a trip to find whitewater in Quebec, where she has completed some of the most insane first descents I have ever seen. Ever. Like, to see another woman for whom ‘first female to…’ really, clearly isn’t enough. On this particular trip they didn’t find any whitewater, but spent weeks in rural Quebec enduring some truly horrifying conditions (people who follow Nouria have probably seen the haunting photos of mosquito bites). I didn’t for even a second feel that Nouria regretted the trip. Which is kinda cool. 

I talked a bit earlier about recognising that part of yourself that is gratified by or gets satisfaction from other's failure. Having a position that is dominant, or something that somebody else can’t have, can be reinforced by someone else’s misfortune. It’s pretty typical; I think it’s why ‘gossip’ is so powerful. People don’t actually want the information. They are chasing the feeling of being more fortunate, or more superior than someone else. I guess it can be dressed up in a lot of ways. Concern, interest, especially ‘analysis’. I might be totally wrong, but I really feel like most of those are to do with having a feeling of deep enjoyment at someone else’s situation. There’s nothing wrong with it I suppose. It’s just distressing to think that we’ve become so far removed from compassion and support in chasing our personal addiction of feeling slightly nicer, in a world where everyone is qualified to complain in some way. 

This brings me on to the next thing I’ve learnt about myself that’s not easy to talk about, but is much easier to cope with now it’s obvious. I'll analyse it in more detail in my next post, because I think I've dissected society enough for one reading! Basically, if I compare my situation now to my first year of university, my financial, mental, physical and emotional wellbeing is so much better. I have everything now that I desperately wanted when I was 18. I’ve raced at world cups, I can afford rent, I get to travel. But the problems have shifted. There are still things that keep me up at night, to worry about. My wants and needs have shifted, and so on. I’m pretty sure once I’ve achieved my current goals, I’ll have accumulated another set of ‘worries’. It sounds so obvious once you identify it, but having problems never stops. They just shift and become relative. The reason I added this to the end of the blog post is that I've found it adds to the moment, the enjoyment of doing rather than outcomes. So often, we allow worries to take away from what we're doing right now. I'm just saying they will always be relative; so they don't need to take anything at all.

I live, and spend most of my time training, in Scotland. I guess saying most of my time is a little inaccurate, because I do spend a lot of time away. Probably between 6 and 12 weeks every summer, and about the same in winter. Which can end up being six months a year away from home training. But the rest of the time, I’m in Scotland. Which is a little controversial for someone of my level in canoe slalom in the UK, because most people end up moving to Nottingham or London to be near one of the larger performance centres. The idea is that if you train on whitewater every single day, your skills on whitewater will improve and be more consistent in racing environments. As a general rule, I’d probably agree. 

However, for me slalom is a game of balancing physical and mental fatigue. I've found that one of the best ‘remedies’ for mental fatigue is change of environment. I love going on training camps, especially long ones. It’s about getting to change pace, change routine, whilst not really losing that sense of ‘home base’ which for me, is Scotland. 

Last year when I started writing this, I’d begun working with Oscar on a new training method. I’ll try and outline it technically later on, but basically it’s an adaptation of “classic” British slalom training, to accommodate some pretty worn down tendons, a tired brain and a drive to “hurt” that hasn’t gone away since I was sixteen. Slalom is pretty special (I’m excited to see in the editing phase how many times I’ve said that) because there are so, so many different ways of training. Some nations choose to cross-train for the winter, entirely out of their boats. Other nations train all year round on whitewater. The German team spends a lot of time on flat water, and have produced some of the best paddlers in the world. There are literally hundreds of different, proven-to-work methods. I truly believe it’s about being confident that your way of doing it is the best. It leads to so many heated, awesome, “revolutionary” discussions on the best way to do something. Slovakia has produced three of the best C1 men in the history of slalom. It’s easy to ask why their other categories don’t have the same depth of field. It’s down to the individual athletes, and their approach.

So our method is adapted from the concept of USRPT. That’s Ultra Short Race Pace Training. It takes the full length of a race, so in slalom a full run comprised of around 20 gates and 100 second course, and divides it into four. We do ten repetitions of a quarter, so around 4-6 gates at between 20-30 second efforts. These efforts have to be performed at race pace or slightly above, so about 180-190bpm for me. I get 15 seconds rest between efforts. Then I try and do that for three sets. It’s brutal training, and very different to the long winter loops I’ve done in previous years. 

The point of USRPT, is short bursts with relatively low rest times. It makes you super lactic, for a start. In slalom we love lactic training, because a full run is anywhere between 80 and 120 seconds long, so not long enough to get aerobic but definitely a really great length to build some horrible levels of lactate in your forearms. The more lactic tolerance training you do, the better you are at coping with it (disclaimer: you can definitely do too much). It doesn’t get less unpleasant - but your relative recovery time and speed endurance go up. 

The other point, and the more significant one for me, is what Peter Andrews describes as “neurological failures”. Now in swimming, this means when you have two or more efforts where you fail to meet the pace time, so you have to stop the set. Obviously, in swimming this is easier to measure than in slalom, because you probably already know what your race pace is. So Oscar and I developed a set of rules, that indicate whether I’ve had a “neurological failure” or not. I think for other slalom athletes attempting this session it’s pretty important to have someone on the bank, who knows what your own personal neuro-failure looks like. 

So when I’ve had a neurological failure, it’s when the messages from my input (feeling, vision, spacial awareness, fatigue) start affecting my output (speed, precision, presentation/attitude). Visually (for me), that manifests itself as:

1. My core “bending” instead of rotating. Slalom paddlers will know what that looks like, but for everyone else it means basically instead of turning my body around with a straight spine, I’ll start leaning backwards and forwards with my neck at strange angles to get to a certain position.
2. Touches (in slalom if you touch a gate you incur a two-second penalty). These are kind of a tough one because they can happen when you’re perfectly fine physically, so they’re not a reason to stop the set. So when I’m touching, sometimes it’s just a spacial awareness thing, and that can come from concentration, which isn’t entirely dependent on being fatigued. When it’s a fatigue thing, it’s usually when my paddle isn’t upright, or if I’m cutting lines with less speed. Again, important to have someone on the bank for that one.
3. The times I get on each section getting slower than a second behind the initial race pace. This can be a really cool way to get through the session. Oscar shouts the time from each section to me as I complete it, so during the 15 seconds rest at the end of the effort, my brain literally only has time to process whether it was slightly slower or faster. Which is great for me, because I’m extremely reactive. Again, it’s dependent on the individual because that could be horribly distracting for someone else. 

In our current block of training (which so far is like an extended summer "winter" block, as there are no races in the UK this year and our governing body has chosen to withdraw from the last two world cups and European Championships - which I might add, I agree with) we do two USRPT sessions per week. The rest of the sessions I do are tech-focused, with one "race simulation" per week and of course gym. 

The reason I'm sharing this session is not because I think it's entirely new - I know that various methods of training flux in and out of being popular/effective. It's because when you're sitting in the middle of what was meant to be a long summer season, potentially repeating the same sessions over and over, it can be pretty cool to change things up a bit and try something new. USRPT or "intervals" is a difficult session, but it's not something you just grind away at. You have an opportunity to be super aware of your own body and brain, which is what I think slalom's all about.

I was super resistant to changing my week structure when I started this, but it's probably the fittest and most consistent I've ever been (again, hard to measure without a race - but it seemed to work last year!). I'm glad I stepped out of this particular comfort zone, because no matter what block you're in, it's a chance to start fresh again and again.

When I was a teenager, someone told me this:

 “What we dislike most in other people is almost always a mirror of what we dislike most about ourselves.”

I don’t need to tell you what a hard pill THAT was to swallow. I’ve said it once or twice to other people, and they react in much the same way I did; denial, brushing it off, rejection. But if you really think about it, it’s true. (Obviously not including things that would come under the category of ‘hate’ because that becomes an issue for racism, sexism, homophobia etc which are perfectly fine to have a problem with). I dislike when people behave as though I know less than them about my sport. That is self-assessment red flag number one; I’ve already said that the more I learn about my sport, the more I realise the volume of things I have yet to learn. So I should be open to conversations where I know less.. I am also very, very guilty of often assuming I have more knowledge in a conversation. I’m not sure where that comes from or if it’s improving, but I try really hard to be aware of it. It’s truly not easy to recognise something like that in yourself, but you can do it for sure. It just takes a bit of time to adjust. 

Some basic rules I like to follow when I’m struggling to find a balanced way to have a conversation with someone because I feel disrespected, threatened or belittled:
​

• I'm not necessarily being disrespected because I'm a girl. (I’m going to leave out ‘you might not be being disrespected at all’ because unfortunately, society is still conditioned for women to have a smaller part in professional conversations in Britain. The important part here is that the person may not even realise they are doing it, therefore are not doing anything consciously wrong.) The other person may, like me, have a bold tone in conversation and be particularly enthusiastic about the topic, causing them to bulldoze over what anyone else has to say (much like myself). 
• We often don’t know all our own anxieties and problems and causes of emotion. Which makes it absolutely inconceivable that after a few minutes of knowing someone, we are qualified to make any kind of assumption about theirs. 
• Don’t be unforgiving. Remember that a long time ago, I was so committed to what one coach said, I truly believed that women had less of a place in sport than men. I wasn’t stupid or naive. I just really, really wanted to live to that person’s rules. People change a lot and it would be incredibly hypocritical to not allow room for that. 
• True professionals don’t have to say they’re good at something, or need anyone else to tell them that. Their focus is on what they’re doing, and as we train for in slalom, what other people think literally doesn’t matter at all.
• Don’t change. Your emotions and personality are your own, and you should never let someone make you feel small for that. If you’re explosive, be explosive. Just don’t take anyone else with you, because that’s not fair. If you’re mild, be mild. Don’t feel as though you have to speak in uncomfortable situations because someone is trying to make you.  “Just do you”. 

​The reason I've developed these rules for myself is complicated. I'm lucky enough to be an athlete during a radical time for women in sport. As an athlete, I do feel as thought my justification for pursuit of sport is to be part of the voice that speaks up. Especially as I've been part of training situations where the female position in sport has been abused or degraded.

I’ve been coached by loads of different people. I’ve been lucky enough for a couple of those coaches to have been consistently there for me for a number of years; Lukas Giertl firstly, then a Polish ex-senior team paddler called Wojciech Sekula. They both had very different personalities, and with both of them I felt as though my opinion wasn’t discarded and my feelings were taken into consideration. I’ve also experienced the exact opposite, from people I have NEVER met, who seem to think that without introducing themselves or even asking anything about myself, they are entitled to give me authoritative advice. 

“Have you considered pacing during a full run?”
“I think if you try harder off the start line, your run would be faster.”
“You’re too nervous in your style, you have failed before you have even started.”
“I saw your first run, that was a beginner mistake.”
“Is your paddle the right size for you?”
"You have a man's style, that's good."
"You look much smaller in person than on Facebook."

 I am absolutely not against being given advice in any situation; a race, a session, off the water, in the gym. I have enough experience that I value input, even from strangers. It's the more you know, the more you realise how little you actually know scenario. But I find it utterly bizarre to consider approaching another human in a professional capacity, perhaps having seen them only once before, and begin suggesting changes to their training program without even a basic "hello, I am...". I don't think it's people being "bad", but I do think it's a normalised assumption where the rules are different for women.

My immediate, personal reaction to writing all this is that maybe I'm over-reacting to innocent scenarios. Slalom is a community, and athletes and coaches alike love to share conversations and knowledge around this beautiful sport. I never, ever want to discourage that. But I think the feeling that has made me write all this in the first place, is that far too often I don't feel like a participant in a conversation. Maybe that's on me. Maybe it's from my own background, where a Scottish coach would quite unironically sit down with the team at dinner, and say that being a woman in the K1 category is easier than being a man in the K1 category. That would make anyone sensitive, I think. From my own experience it takes years of work to unpick self-deprecating ideas that your experience is somehow just a bit less. 

Slalom has athletes from a million different backgrounds. Like any big group of people, that comes with prejudices, cultural differences, outdated ideas and minority communities. The slalom community is also incredibly supportive when someone is having a rough time. But there are still so, so many situations where the semantic rules change somehow for no better reason than because the subject is a woman. I feel lucky, not just to be a woman in sport but also because I've actually been able to experience the shift, and have had an opportunity to reevaluate my own worth. I know way too many women who haven't had that opportunity, and even more who probably wouldn't want to talk about it. So that's why I'm writing some difficult stuff here; even if nobody reads it, it's MY history of being part of that shift. I feel lucky, and empowered, and strong. I think athletes owe it to their sport to try and make that accessible to everyone.

In conclusion, it's alright to be pissed off about the way someone spoke to you. They might not have meant anything derogatory, in fact they may have meant to be encouraging. But you do have the right, and the opportunity, to feel your own emotions about it. If you're interested in understanding exactly what they meant, ask them. I'm naturally an explosive person, and I know I can waste a lot of my own energy being angry at something that was never intended to harm. So I always ask, to start the conversation, and fully understand. Sometimes it produces a change that makes the next conversation completely balanced.