I found this article interesting, because I struggled with staying in competition and longing for a more physically calm life in which I was able to spend more energy with my family.
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Selina Steele
July 06, 2008 12:00am
VETERAN rower Duncan Free, dipping his oar in for his fourth Olympics, should know better.
It's a glorious Thursday morning on the Gold Coast, a light southwesterly wind caresses the waters outside the Australian Institute of Sport national canoe and kayak centre at Miami.
Most of us haven't yet started our working day, but Free has already completed a two-hour session on the water and, just for good measure, a 60km bike ride.
Back at home, wife Belinda is juggling the demands of their children Danica, 5, Zara, 3, and Luca, 2.
Free has spent tens of thousands of dollars financing his career and his 35-year-old body has battled tendinitis, a bulged disc in his back and arthroscopic surgery on his knee. But it is time away from family that wears on him the most.
"The biggest sacrifice is family time.
"I love training hard and I love putting hours in on the water, but you spend a lot of time away from home and even when you're at home, you're still training three times a day," Free said.
"You're up before they're up and by the time you come home, they've gone to bed. It's a choice to follow your Olympic dream but it's also a sacrifice."
Free won his first and only Olympic medal in 1996: a bronze in the quad scull. In Beijing, he will partner Drew Ginn in the coxless pairs. They have won the past two world titles.
Ginn has two children of his own, but because he lives in Melbourne and Free on the Gold Coast, school holidays have become a complicated affair.
"When it's school holidays in Victoria, Drew moves his family up here so we can train together, and when it's holidays up here I take the family down to Melbourne to train," Free said.
"It's a handful with all the kids, but a good handful.
"Eventually, I want to live a normal life and be able to hang out with my kids and come home from work and have a beer, but I love racing.
"There will be a time when I won't enjoy it any more, but I'm yet to row the perfect race.
"And in Beijing, if we make the final, I know it will be six minutes of hell, but it may also be the perfect race."
For our Olympians, their Beijing dream is about addiction. It is about living their sport to almost the complete exclusion of everything else.
It is also about the 10,000-hour rule.
To excel at something on an expert level, one needs a decade of committed practice. That's 10,000 hours.
Sam Simpson, Australia's only male gymnast representative at the Games, has been learning his craft for 21 years and admits the still rings could make or break his Olympic dream – that or the state's surging petrol prices.
The 24-year-old, who almost quit the sport two years ago, works two part-time jobs and still lives at home to help finance his standing as one of Australia's best gymnasts.
Xeno Muller, Olympic gold and silver medalist, indoor rowing, rowing technique.
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