Book Exceprts

This is an athlete story with a twist. A great big twist. This isn't simply a memoir, not a tell-all just for the sake of telling all, although that would be fun, too. We want to tell a story with wholeness to it, the story of an examined life, an examined marriage, and an examined career. There's a lot of life that happens at the same time as the athlete goes here and does that and meets whomever and wins medals. It's been a difficult road for us, in every way, yet we have succeeded and survived and thrived in a setting where very few do.

We want to show how we managed to do that, how we managed to make our way through a minefield and not just stay married, but have a successful marriage along with successful careers. Our marriage went to the brink and the skeleton career bottomed out, and we discovered some things about ourselves, our ways of perceiving and our ways of being, that were sabotaging us, limiting us, almost defeating us. We know that there are many people who are standing in that same minefield, and we want to help those people find their way through. There is a way to have an effective relationship in elite performance, and that applies to any career, be it in sports, business, politics, medicine, entertainment, anything.

If we were just to set out a ten-step plan, telling people to do what we say, without offering any personal background and showing our own investment, we wouldn't be credible. That's why we decided that the solution is to tell an honest story, of a marriage that almost went down for the count, and of an Olympic athlete, who went from the podium to nowhere and back.

Part of our honest story will dispel assumptions and broaden the limited public knowledge about high-performance athletes' lives. We have some surprises, about the personal financial load, for those with the idea that an Olympic medal automatically means the money worries are over. We're telling both sides of the story-the athlete away and the family at home. We're also telling our story from the beginning, from meeting as teenagers, and maturing through education, travel, employment, all the time making our way through our evolving relationship. It's important to show how we got here, and like the title says, this is a relationships' journey.

The combined purpose of this book is to tell our story-and it's a pretty interesting one-and to propose another way based on what we've come to understand. We've organized the book the way we wish we'd organized our lives, if only we'd known. And we wish we'd known the fundamental truth that marriage is business. That's going to shock some people, and we can be as smoochy smoochy as the next couple, but we've realized that there's a big gap between the hearts-and-flowers notions about marriage and the fact that marriage is a contract. The good news is that these models can co-exist and complement each other in satisfying ways. The problem is in the gap, when there needs to be an intersection.

For thousands of years, and in some cultures still, marriage had nothing to do with love or feelings, and everything to do with property and alliances, sometimes involving dowry and bride-price. Sometimes it solidified influential positions and guaranteed inheritances. From its origins, these functions of marriage were a matter of concern for larger more communal groups than today's small nuclear family living apart from the relatives.

And let's face it-when a marriage ends today, nothing can be done about how people feel, but great care is taken over who gets what. In more and more cases, that special care is taken before the marriage begins, in the form of a pre-nuptial agreement. Deep down, we know marriage is business. We just try to pretend it's not. The fairy tale is more fun. But, the fairy tale doesn't cover the day-to-day lives of Cinderella and Prince Charming, and they had a kingdom to run.

It's only been for a few hundred years that people have been adding love to the marriage equation, in greater and greater measure, but along the way, we started ignoring the basic fact that we were working with a contract, a legal agreement to meet specific requirements. That's where the methodology for this book comes in. It's the marriage of the business model with the personal story.

We changed our perception of how to conduct our marriage, seeing it as a partnership, and that made all the difference. It was one of the key pieces to our puzzle. Love is grand. But, there's so much more to marriage than emotions. There's so much more to business than the bottom line. Possibilities open up when we learn to see things in different ways. There's relationship in the office, and there's business in the home.

We took that as the framework for our story, realizing that the same skills and tools are vital to success for any team or company or family. If we can help one couple or one company to avoid some of the struggles we have faced, we'll be gratified. But we believe this journey will touch far more lives than that. And, because this is the story of a partnership, we relate our story in our own words, conversationally, offering both points of view, being frank and straightforward about courtship, education, travel, money, communication, expectations, parenthood, competition, selfishness, conflict, anger, love, winning-everything.

It's a big fat lie, but it's a big fat lie that women won't even talk about amongst each other. Being a mother is a role, not who a person is at the core. When we allow roles to define us, anywhere in our world, that's when some of the most toxic relationships, with ourselves and with others, begin to manifest. When someone becomes a secretary, does that mean the person is completely fulfilled as a secretary? Would we say that to a secretary the way we say it to a new mother? Live to type. Live to file. Roles have never been who we are. Roles are not our essence. They are not our entire contribution. They are a thing that we do. We may find fulfillment from those roles, but they do not define us. Mother and father both are more complicated because in addition to the doing, there is emotional involvement.

I came out of that corner, still on the wall, about three feet above the ice and flew sideways, on edge, and landed on my left shoulder, got squished at 120, got back on and made it to the bottom. My teammates Mellisa and Lindsay had watched it. I joked about what a good crash that was, and Mellisa said she couldn't believe I was alive. She said they thought I was coming off the track and was going to die. I terrified my teammates, but it didn't feel that bad. I didn't see it. A couple of days later, I'd sort of figured out how to get out of corner eleven and corner twelve, but thirteen is a 180° corner with oscillation that doesn't quite work, which means the exit is a little too high, especially if it's done wrong, and the next corner goes the other way, with only one meter of straightaway between them, so it's an S-curve. I did corner thirteen wrong and came out two feet off the track, and the next corner was right there. I got splatted against the wall, and my sled hit me in the ribs, right under my armpit. Excruciatingly painful. I was pretty sure I'd cracked some ribs, but I didn't say that because I knew they wouldn't let me race with cracked ribs, so I said I thought it was bruised cartilage to get around it. I had brought some foam and demo plastic for sled repairs, so I built a pad to fit over the area and lived on Advil.

My tent-mate and I were up the road a little bit. I heard a rustling, like a mouse, but we searched with flashlights and there was nothing in the tent. But, I heard it again and started thinking my tent-mate was playing a joke. We turned the flashlights on again, but nothing. The third time, I started to get cranky, and she was insisting she wasn't doing anything. Less than a minute later, the horn on the truck went, the lights came on, the engine started, and there was screaming, "Everybody get out, get out, get out!" People were running to the truck, and we saw guys with turbans and loincloths and machetes. Some of our group was ex-army, and they were fending them off, so we could all get in the truck. One of our guides got cut, and we had a nurse in the group, so she had the medical box out to help him. One of the guides always slept in the cab, to make sure the truck didn't get stolen, so the guide who got cut made it to the cab and told him to get on the horn and turn on the lights. We thought the intruders had a gun, so we were all huddled on the floor under tables, I gripped the blue-stone cross around my neck and prayed for dear life because I knew the sides of the truck were not going to stop a bullet.

Half the time, during the monologue arguments, I'd say nothing, and half the time I'd fire back, usually defensively: I am trying to earn money. I am trying to support our family. Why not acknowledge me for what I am doing, because I am working really hard here? My general reaction was that I couldn't believe we were having this conversation. We're married and we're supposed to be supporting each other. There'll be times when it's more my stuff, and there'll be times when it's more Aly's stuff. In my mind, that's the way marriage works. Why are we having this conversation? She knew the deal. I believed she had agreed to it because we were in a relationship. We had a plan, lived the plan, achieved the plan-remember the plan?-but I knew if I said that, it would make it ten times worse, and that's why I rarely said anything. I felt she didn't support me. It seemed to me that this isn't what a wife is supposed to do.

We went back to our sickly lime green room with a ceiling fan that barely moved the air, and it was unbearably hot, made worse by the anger that was coming off us. We lay on the bed as far apart as possible from each other, with just a sheet over us in the heat, both of us stiff as boards, not daring to move, and almost totally silent and awake all night, followed by a nearly speechless twenty-two hour flight home. We were so clear on who was wrong and who was wronged. Jeff had a three-hour turnaround between Sydney and Calgary to change clothes, change bags, shower, and leave for four weeks in Germany. That was the true crash of the fairy tale. His thing came first. I sat there thinking, "I hate you so much."

Green light, twenty-nine seconds, twenty-two seconds, here I go. It was the best push of my life. My trainers did a great job. The plan was to peak on the day, and I was exactly where I needed to be. Usually, I was 10 to 15/100ths behind Duff at the push, and that time it was only 2/100ths. From the moment of the push to the exit of corner eleven, it was absolutely as good a run as I could have. It was perfect. Unfortunately, my brain registered that, and as I came out of corner eleven, in a nanosecond, I had the conscious thought, "That was perfect. You've got a chance. Let the fucker fly." And in that moment, I lost the race.

We said right at the start of this book that if we could do things over again, we would be more methodical; we would put into practice the lessons of our lives, instead of guessing our way and spending fifteen years trying to catch up with ourselves. Obviously, there's no going back and having a smoother, easier time. But, where we struggled through before, clinging to our independence, we now have a robust interdependence.

In this chapter, we can show ourselves implementing our own model to organize the next stage of our lives. It is a practical application of our theoretical organization--a chance to put our plan into action and have it work for ourselves. It's a chance to get started doing what we say and to experience a methodical rollover to our next chapter. Step one: the project. Oh, yeah. We've got the project-the next ten years. Check.
We're ready to start, and our partnership is more solid than ever. Our wedding had a very individualized glitch-during the ceremony, we didn't say the vows. All the legal stuff got said, but the personal stuff didn't. The friend performing the ceremony misunderstood a gesture and thought we'd changed our minds about using the vows we'd written.

Those lines were important to us, so we said them publicly during the reception. It was unconventional, but a lot of things we've done are unconventional. We renewed our vows on our tenth anniversary, and that time, we were in a church, in front of a minister. Finally, a church wedding. We were recommitting to the why of us, and even then, our ship was already starting to turn. The partnership was renewed, the contract extended. Steps two and three: check and check.
In this transitional time, we have sought advice and counsel from the various resources we presented in chapter four. We've been consulting the directors, the amigos, the church community, and drawing on the experience of Jeff's hero. Among other things, it was important to consider how to approach the book and how to time publication. Check.

We're committed to having a functioning plan on this cycle, and we've cast the net wide in terms of potential career directions, considering personal, economic, and community benefit. The research component began in earnest, once there were particular directions to pursue, but that went on hold once October came around and the sliding season was underway. While step six had to pause until after Vancouver, the preliminaries included closer looks at the logistics and investment required in some cases, the compatibility of already-established businesses. There's room for more than one of these plans to be implemented at a time, so we haven't closed any doors.

For us, as for most people, the first priority is to make sure we are able to provide the basic needs of our family. We need shelter and food, and we especially feel the need of our children for safety and security, so we took care to have budget contingencies covered. The mortgage payment will be made. There will be yogurt drinks in the fridge. Daddy will be home.

There was a long time when there was no sense of economic security in our home. Even though, somehow, we paid bills, we ate, we coped, there was no degree of comfort and confidence about the next month, sometimes not even the next week. That situation is not going to happen again. As the sponsorship and carding income concluded, InnerPiece Team Performance Coaching stepped in to take up budget maintenance.

We are entering a phase of renegotiated roles and responsibilities because a household has to be a flexible workplace. Of necessity, the first few months post-skeleton will be a time of trial-and-error, filled with adjustments and modifications, no unilateral decisions, but plenty of joint agreements. The old pattern of assumption and expectation has been replaced with intention and negotiation. We committed to that because this step is critical to the ongoing viability of our merger.

Heading into Vancouver, we were sitting at opposite ends of a roller coaster, one of us sitting in the first car, already over the top, seeing the future, and feeling the wind begin to pick up, sustaining a peak of emotion for sixty-eight days. The other one was in the last car, needing to stay in the now, focused on the task at hand, sticking to the plan. Whatever configuration we decide on as we manage the transition to our future, we both will be in that lead car, sharing the vision, the effort, the thrill.

As our new plans are shaped and implemented, we are mindful of our desire to continue as good corporate citizens, to contribute to our community, local and global. And, we also are mindful, as NBA Hornets' owner George Shinn, that "Growth means change and change involves risk, stepping from the known to the unknown." That's where we are now.