Aim High

AIM HIGH

TANNI GREY THOMPSON

ACCENT PRESS LTD

Published by Accent Press Ltd – 2012
ISBN 9781908917720

Copyright © Tanni Grey Thompson 2007

The right of Tanni Grey Thompson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers: Accent Press Ltd, The Old School, Upper High St, Bedlinog, Mid-Glamorgan, CF46 6SA.

The Quick Reads project in Wales is a joint venture between the Basic Skills Agency and the Welsh Books Council. Titles are funded through the Basic Skills Agency as part of the National Basic Skills Strategy for Wales on behalf of the Welsh Assembly Government.

Introduction

I'm glad to be able to share my experiences with you and I sincerely hope that they will be useful in helping you to Aim High, in your own life.

Aiming High has been one of my own personal mottos throughout not only my sporting life, but my personal life as well. In simple terms it is all about trying to be the best that you can.

This book is divided into two parts, firstly my early life, how I got started in sport, and what inspired me (and still inspires me!). Secondly how my sporting life has developed, the secrets behind my success and the lessons I have learned along the way. If these lessons help you, this book will have achieved its purpose.

Sport is one of the biggest loves of my life, but I am also passionate about reading – my husband laughs at me because I really will read anything! I hope you enjoy reading
Aim High.
It was a challenge to work on it, but one of my beliefs, linked to Aiming High, is that if you don't try you never know what you can do… finishing this book is proof of that!

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Growing Up

We have a picture in our family album of me sitting in my first little red wheelchair wearing a Brownie uniform, with little knobbly knees and wearing some dodgy trainers. The picture was taken not long after I started using a wheelchair and we were on a Brownie ‘pack holiday' in Swansea.

The strange thing about this picture is that I am trying to skip. It looks funny, as all the other Brownies are behind me (all non-disabled), skipping away with different levels of ability.

The reason that this picture is really important to me is that it shows that no one ever told me that I shouldn't skip, and no one ever told me that I shouldn't try. It confirms that, as I was growing up, my parents never told me there were things I couldn't do solely because I was a wheelchair user. There were plenty of times that I was told off for doing something (possibly naughty), but I was never told off simply for trying.

If my parents had been different, if they had had low expectations for me, I could have grown up thinking very differently. But for me it was about having the chance to try, and seeing what I might achieve. If someone had told me that I couldn't skip I might have found this out a little sooner than I did, but then I might have spent the next five years thinking ‘what if'. My parents were both only children, and had quite restricted upbringings, and I think this is part of the reason why they always encouraged us to go out and try things.

The reason that I became a wheelchair user has never been particularly important to me. I was born with a condition called Spina Bifida, and to begin with my disablement wasn't obvious. I had a tiny lump on my back. After spending a short time in an incubator I was sent home and everything seemed OK. My elder sister Sian, who is eighteen months older than me, hadn't had an easy time of it. She was born with a heart condition that was fixed with some fairly major surgery (these days it is through a key-hole procedure near the groin). It was then found that she had been born with dislocated hips, which resulted in eighteen months in a frog plaster, and after only a couple of days out of that, she fell and broke her leg. My parents certainly had their hands full for a couple of years!

I could walk till about the age of five or six (I don't remember exactly). But as I grew, my legs couldn't support the increase in my body weight, because of my condition, and I slowly became paralysed. So I didn't, unlike others, have to suffer some dramatic accident, or spend months on end in a spinal unit. For me, becoming a wheelchair user wasn't an awful experience. Although I had stopped walking I didn't feel that something had been taken away. Having said this, the last few months when I
was
walking were pretty tough – this was the only time in my life that I have felt really disabled. I couldn't do the things that I wanted to do – like run away from my mum!

Having a wheelchair gave me a renewed sense of freedom. Because many people think that the life of a wheelchair user is pretty miserable, they make judgements about it. But the wheelchair allowed me once again to do the things that I wanted to do, such as trying to run away from my mother, chasing after my older sister, and being with my friends.

I was born on 26th July 1969, and had the good fortune to be born in Cardiff, the capital of Wales. My sister Sian and I were brought up in the house my dad grew up in. Mum is also a Cardiff girl and Cardiff, a great city, is very much my home town. I'm very proud of being Welsh and that I've been voted Welsh Sports Personality of the Year on three occasions.

Dad is an architect; he's a very organized person, who likes to know what he is doing and when. I hope some of this has rubbed off on me, but in temperament I'm more like Mum – if we decide that we want to do something, then we want to do it right now! I have a tendency to think quickly about what I want to do, sometimes making rash decisions as a result.

Sian was a great sister to grow up with; she wasn't that interested in taking part in sport when she was young, although she watched a lot, and has always been incredibly supportive, often travelling with me to events and helping to pay for stuff (as did my parents).

She's not as competitive as me, but then very few people are! I always knew that I wanted to do sport, and that I had to compete as hard as I could.

Unfortunately, I didn't really get to know my grandparents, also all from Cardiff, who died before I was old enough to remember them well. My dad's father was a very good motorbike rider, who competed in the TT races. He was unable to turn professional, though, and had to get a real job.

My primary school was really inclusive in terms of letting me take part in PE lessons. It was different in secondary school because the rules were different. There were a number of disabled children in the school and it was felt that we should do our PE at the special school next door. It wasn't that I didn't really want to go to the special school, but I didn't know anyone there. I had some good PE teachers who let me join in with my friends as much as possible.

To be honest, I didn't really know what Spina Bifida was until I was about ten years old. I didn't actively try to find out because it didn't matter to me what had stopped me walking. I just knew that I couldn't walk, and that there was nothing I could do to change that, so I just had to get on with it. This wasn't a conscious decision. There were simply lots of things that I wanted to do, and I wanted to spend my time doing them, not sitting around thinking about what I
couldn't
do.

Many people who become wheelchair users don't feel this way, and I know that some of them find my attitude challenging. For many young people, a tragic accident – which is sometimes their fault, sometimes someone else's – means that they can no longer do things the way that they used to. For them, it means learning everything again from scratch, from dressing themselves to driving. But my rehab all took place while I was slowly losing the use of my legs, so it never really felt like ‘rehab'. It felt normal.

Spina Bifida isn't anyone's fault, although over the years I have learnt that it can have many causes – previous family illnesses, poor diet, living near coal mines, for instance. These days it is accepted that folic acid does make a difference (and lack of it could have caused my condition), so every pregnant women or a woman thinking of having a baby is advised to take it. But the cause never really bothered me. It could have been the man on the moon who caused my impairment, and this would certainly have made a more exciting story!

Some people find it hard to believe that I have honestly never spent any time thinking about what I didn't have. But the last couple of years when I was trying to walk were hard, and I don't really remember a time when walking was easy. So I didn't have a great deal to compare my situation with. All I knew at the time was that occasionally I had to go for hospital checkups, where I was prodded and poked around, and then I came home.

My parents had a lot more to cope with than I did, because they had more idea what was going on. They had to make decisions about my mobility, what treatment I would or wouldn't have, and they had more knowledge than I did about what my long-term expectations might be. In fact, they kept me blissfully unaware of these expectations until I was in my thirties.

But if I was unconcerned about my impairment, how did – or do – other people deal with it?

My mother always said that she had too many things to worry about and that she didn't have time to feel sorry for anyone, let alone herself – life was just too busy.

Some people, however, seem to think that wheelchair users are somehow different from ordinary people, and that we don't deserve privacy in the same way. These people think they have an automatic right to ask wheelchair users any question they like. If I had a pound for every person who has stopped me in the street and said ‘So, what's wrong with you, then?' I would be a rich woman! Another favourite is, ‘So, are you confined to your wheelchair, then', to which I have replied, ‘Yes, I usually sleep in it!' My humour is not always appreciated. But what most people want to know is how I came to be a wheelchair user. Most tend to assume that something a lot more dramatic than a congenital birth defect must have caused it. It almost feels as if they would like the cause to be something more romantic.

Some of these people are just plain nosey, but there are others who seem to think that a disabled person doesn't have any feelings, and is obliged to answer questions from complete strangers. These encounters have never made me feel particularly uncomfortable, but I haven't always answered the questions.

If I had had a different upbringing – if I had not had positive people around me, not fought to go into mainstream school – I don't think I would have been able to deal with my situation so well.

If people have low expectations for disabled people – in fact, if they have low expectations for
any
young people – this has an effect on what the young people are able to do later on in life. Some youngsters manage to rise above it, but too many young people with disabilities grow up believing that they cannot achieve, because the people around them don't believe it.

I remember at school one careers teacher told me that I should go to secretarial college and learn to type, because people in wheelchairs became receptionists! I didn't listen to that – when I told him that I wanted to go to university he told me that I was probably wasting my time as it wouldn't help me get a job!

If there was one thing that I could change, then it would be for young disabled people to naturally assume that they have a right to do everything their non-disabled counterparts are doing. Not, as is so often the case now, to assume that there is a whole pile of things that they will never do.

In the UK we like to attach labels to people, and more often than not we define and judge people by the job that they do, or the level they reach within that job. Because of this, disabled people lose out. Many people look at impairment and the first thing they think of is what
cannot
be achieved. If we consider that a person with a disability has no status, because they are limited in what they can do, this can set the tone for the relationship.

As an athlete I have spent the best part of the last twenty years trying to be the best that I can. Being an athlete has been what I have wanted to do for almost as long as I can remember, but there are many other labels that people could attach to me. I could be a mother, an athlete, a woman, a graduate – many things. But there was one thing that I was sure about when I was growing up – I didn't want to be labelled as disabled.

CHAPTER TWO

Getting Started in Sport

Competing for Britain had always been my ambition but, in the early years, I actually wanted to play basketball. I didn't think athletics was very exciting. It didn't help that disability sport had a very limited profile in the mid-1980s. To my mind there were two people, both Welsh, who did an incredible amount of work to change this. They were John Harris and Chris Hallam, and they were something of a double act. Chris came across as brash, while John was quietly humorous. I remember watching a documentary on them and their sporting careers (I was only just embarking on mine) and John was asked what he missed most now that he was in a wheelchair. He looked towards the camera and smiled, and said that it was his mam warming his socks in the oven in the morning. When asked what he would most like to do, he said ‘have a heart attack running for a bus'. There was no self-pity, only a little self-mockery, and I thought that this was a cool way to handle being in a wheelchair. Meanwhile Chris, from Cwmbran, with his bleached-blond hair, and tiger-print racing suits, was competing in, and winning, the London marathon, where I saw him race in 1985. Between them they stirred up the world of disability sport!

I knew after playing just a few games of basketball that it wasn't for me. There weren't many teams around, which made training hard, and I knew that I didn't want to play only every couple of months. I wanted much more than that. Then I played at a junior basketball weekend at Stoke Mandeville, and there was an unfortunate incident on the court where I slapped someone! I knew I had to look for something else. If I couldn't control my temper, it wasn't the right thing for me.

From the moment I started doing athletics, I knew I'd found my sport. My first race was at about the age of 12 and I knew from the first moment I did it that this was what I wanted to do. It wasn't easy to find somewhere to train, but I persisted. It took a couple of years to find a coach and a club, and longer to find the right way to train, but I think the early difficulties taught me a lot about how, if you really want something, you have to work at it.

I needed a lot of support from my family too, because of the places that they had to take me to train, and because of the time that I was away from home.

Some people have stacks of natural talent, and from the outside it can seem as if everything just appears to work out for them. This can feel a little unfair – you are slogging your way through mundane tasks while they appear to float through to achievement without a care in the world.

But the saying ‘appearances can be deceptive' is true. Usually we can't see the grind that people go through. We don't see what is happening in their personal life, and people rarely admit that things are harder than they appear. We all like to make out that achievement is ‘easy', and that everything has happened exactly as we planned it.

I have worked with different coaches over the years. The relationship between a coach and an athlete is a unique thing. Finding the right person to work with is not always easy, as the coach has to be a cross between a mentor, mother, chief whip, guidance counsellor and numerous other things! They also have to have experience of the sport, and have great communication skills.

I have worked with four coaches so far (if you count my husband Ian) and I have also spent a fair chunk of my athletic career being self-coached. In the early years this was because there weren't too many people volunteering to coach wheelchair racers, and, in the latter years, it was because I liked having control over my own destiny.

The first coach I worked with was Roy Anthony; he was based with Bridgend Athletics Club in south Wales. He worked with me in my early years, before I went to university. He had a great sense of humour, understood the group mentality of teenage girls, and could get the best out of most people that he worked with. When winter training was hard, he would use a mixture of encouragement and cajoling, and sessions were always fun. I used to love some of the winter sessions when we would be sprinting up and down the local multi-storey car park. Of course, in this day and age, child protection and health and safety regulations wouldn't let us do that, but we had a terrific time. Everyone I knew who worked with Roy gave him 110% because that was what he expected and we wanted to show him that we could do it.

As I developed as an athlete (and moved further away from home), I found that I enjoyed playing a bigger part in what I was doing. I enjoyed writing training programmes and working out what I needed to do. I also enjoyed learning about how the sport worked, the real practicalities of who did what, within the team. I always wanted to understand how the system worked, because I knew that understanding this was important if you were ambitious (which I was). I needed to know not only what it would take in performance terms to qualify (i.e. what times I had to achieve), but also what other skills I needed to be selected.

I learnt never to be afraid to ask questions. I have learnt so much from other athletes. Many of the best athletes in the world – such as Jeff Adams from Canada, and Heinz Frei from Switzerland – were happy to share information about how they had achieved what they had. I always thought that this was amazingly generous, and also kind. They didn't need to spend time doing it, but they did, because they were confident in their own ability and they cared about the development of the sport.

I learnt that if someone is successful it is important to look at what they are doing and how they are doing it, and learn from it, but not to copy it exactly. Training programmes, for example, set for one person, cannot always be followed by another. You have to take into account everything else the athlete has done to get to the point they are at. One young athlete I knew talked to a much older experienced athlete about the training sessions they did. These were about four times as strenuous as the young athlete was doing, and because the older athlete had been successful, the younger one started to mirror the sessions. There was a big jump in improvement in the short term, but after a few months the younger athlete started to suffer. He became tired, and picked up a few injuries. Because he wasn't used to the training load, and hadn't built it up gradually, his body couldn't cope. It resulted in injury and a long lay-off from the sport. So the moral is: always learn from other people, but then adapt and improve on it.

Two of the other coaches that I've worked with in my career are Dave Williams and Jenni Banks. They acted in very different capacities.

Dave Williams worked through Cardiff Athletics Club. I joined the club when I graduated from Loughborough University and he acted as a training advisor for a number of years. He had never coached a wheelchair athlete before we worked together, but his help with planning saw me in good stead for many years.

Then, after a number of years coaching myself, I decided that I needed to hand over some of that responsibility to someone else for a while. I was finding that there was more pressure on my time due to work commitments and training, and I was enjoying less and less the planning and writing of programmes.

Jenni Banks is Australian and in the early 1990s was working with some of the best athletes in the world. She had taken them from being young and developmental and helped them become world beaters. This was part of the reason that I chose her, but it was also because she listened. She listened to what I said I wanted to achieve, and she would tell me straight if she thought I wasn't pulling my weight. That honesty was sometimes hard to hear, but it made me a better athlete. She helped me structure not only my athletics life, but also my personal life too.

Jenni had been a hockey player, and an injury early on in her career had stopped her reaching her goal of playing for the Australian Olympic team. The transition had been tough for her. She had been through an emotional and traumatic time. Her dream had been ripped away from her. One of the most valuable things she taught me was that while wheelchair racing was important, life was important too. You always had to have other things in your life. Not things that would distract you from competing, but that could complement it. Things that would help in life after sport. Very few people make enough money from sport not to have to work again. And most people want to do something with their lives after sport, whether they need the money or not.

Jenni helped me think about working, about putting something back into sport. I have always been keen to understand how the business of sport worked, and the time I spent with Jenni made me think about playing a role in sports administration. She pointed out that if I cared about my sport, then I should also care about what happened to it. (Though sometimes, these days, I think I care too much, and that there are some things that I should just step away from!)

As I get older my physio and my masseur become more and more important. I remember visiting my physio one day and telling her that when I held my arm at a particular angle and moved it up and down, it hurt. She looked at me, and asked two questions. She asked whether I needed to do that for daily life. I said no. She then asked me if I needed to use that action for anything to do with training or competing. Again I said no. She looked at me for a moment, and then told me she had the answer to my discomfort. She told me to just stop moving it that way!

At my stage of an athletics career, injury is part of the deal. You have to minimize it, but you can sometimes over-analyse and worry about things that aren't significant. I still monitor what my body can do. I check that problems I have now aren't getting worse, because they could affect me later on in life. But if they aren't, I leave them alone.

I'm glad to have the chance to publicly acknowledge and thank these people who have been so important to me, and whose contributions have been so significant. When I hear sportspeople saying that they have achieved things on their own I laugh – this is rarely true.