#1770 What's Harder Than Being An Olympian? - Giaan Rooney OAM

spend too much time in the sun. But nonetheless, nonetheless, do you so you avoid the sun.

to reapply. You're also sweating water for the most part, so it's coming off and you get exposed to it whether you like it or not. So I've just got a really healthy respect for it. I'm like you. I've had a couple of cut out. I've had a couple of burnt off that have been nothing too sinister, but so, you know, just really notice that my skin doesn't like it, so I respect it.

every day same. I don't think most people have thought about this, but as a as a swimmer, I just some time I got to the end of my career and I just at training didn't feel like getting wet. I didn't, you know. I was like, I'm not lazy, I don't want to work hard. I'll go for a run, I'll go to the gym, I'll do I just don't want to get in the pool. And you know, there is no real cross training in the sport. There are little things you can do, but ultimately just got to

do laps. That's where it's at. And no one thought about this. You know, if you're a cyclist, you can change your scenery. If you're a runner, you can change your scenery and change your motivation. Let me tell you, a pool is a pool. No matter where you are in the world, the same feel There is nothing about it that feels any different. No matter where you are in the world, A pool is a pool. And so it's the monotony that probably got me more than anything

by the end of it. And what I wanted from my life after was to not have any of that monotony exist. And I've really got that. I've been really fortunate that no day has ever been the same two days had never been the same ever since I had walked away from the sport of swimming. And I absolutely love that component of it. But it wasn't until I'm a city girl, you know, grew up in Brisbane and the Gold Coast and then moved to Melbourne, lived in Melbourne and met my now husband, Sam, who is anything

but city boy. He was a mustering chop, a pilot when we met. When we first got married, we had a cattle farm in Euroa outside of Melbourne, and so he grew up on the land. He's a fifth generation cattle farmer and we were on the Gold Coast. We were looking for a weekend a slash holiday house that was a farm that could pay for itself. We couldn't afford it without that. It needed to be able to pay for itself, couldn't afford cattle country where we were looking.

Stumbled across a maca farm and thought, how hard can it be? And as it turns out, pretty bloody hard.

I didn't ask her. I don't know why I didn't ask her, but I didn't ask her for a long time. I said, by the way, when was the last time you went? You were in a pool? And it was literally like her last meet or whatever, the last like she'd never been. She goes, I fucking hate pools, she goes. If I never swim again, it'll be too soon. I'm like, really, and I'm sure she doesn't actually mean that, but she

was in no hurry to go for a swim. She goes, I would literally rather do any anything you want to give me anything, I would do over swimming.

and I loved it, but it was my job. And so I asked people to say, when you retire one day, will you go to the office and sit in front of your computer and swing on your chair just for the fun of it. And they're like no, And I'm like, that's how I felt about going and doing laps in the pool. The second thing for me is I loved racing. I loved racing. I needed racing. By the end of it, I hated training because all I wanted to do was the racing component. And I couldn't do one without the other.

And in a sport like swimming, you know, it's twice a year that you get to do the component that I loved. The rest of it is doing the hard yards. So I've always said that if I could have been like a football player or a basketballer, or you know, got to do the part that I loved every weekend, I'd probably still be forty years of age like I am now trying to make the ustrain swim team. But when that isn't that isn't an option on the table, then it's like right, you know, okay, move on. But

on top of it, I was really lucky. I actually got to leave my sport on my terms, when I was ready, with no regrets and ultimately feeling proud of my achievements and ready for the next challenge. So it's actually a really healthy place to be. As I said, I'm so grateful for it, but I don't miss it, and that's a really healthy place to be.

Because yeah, it's the and and also because your training is not it's part like the actual training itself is brutal, is brutal, and it's not social and it's stupidly fucking early in the day, come on, right, But when you're running around a basketball court with your mates, talking shit, having fun, you know you're training, it's social, it's it's yeah, you're training, your sweating, you're developing skill. But it's like it's it's not mind numbing, you know, it's not mine numbing.

Like there's socialization and I know the outside of the pool there's connection and all of that. But do you think that because swimming is such a brutal sport psychologically, emotionally, physiologically, sociologically, you can't have a fucking social life if you're elite swimmer. Yeah, good luck with that. And also financially, like there ain't many swimmers in their twenties. There are some, of course, but there ain't many that are making heaps of dough.

So you're putting off your career. You're putting all these things on hold to swim for glory. Unless you're a big deal like you are you fucking big deal, high watermark, big deal, shp your business card, said Jean Rooney, big deal. I went okay. So by the time you get to twenty four, like you, you're like, fuck it. I've been doing this for more way over half my life. I'm done.

get back to where you were before that week. So when you're talking about a sports that's won and lost by one hundredths of a second, in a lot of cases, that mentality of taking time away from the sport is terrifying because you catch up process is so difficult. And I knew that to be true for me, particularly because our last session of a week used to be in the water, used to be on a Saturday morning, and our first session of the week was a Monday morning.

So one day off a week, Sundays off, and every Monday morning of my life, my entire swimming career. I felt like I was starting again. I felt like I was a hot knife through butter. Is the analogy where I couldn't hold water, I didn't feel strong in the water. I felt like my body had almost forgotten how to swim after one day out. And that's why there's no cross training in sport of swimming. That's why we do

so many kilometers. That's why we do so much work just inside the pool is because we's humans aren't really meant to swim. We're land based creatures, and so we're doing something that isn't fundamentally natural for our bodies, and we've just got to put in the mileage. And so that not only plays into your physical psyche, that plays into of course your mental and your emotional psyche as well. So there is no off season, there's no time away,

there's no downtime, so to speak. And you know that every session that you're not giving your absolute one hundred percent best in at training is a training session that some one of your competitors somewhere around the world could be which could be the difference between you winning and losing by hundreds of second on race day.

I know you're not a physiologist, but you're we're an elite athlete and you're a smarty pants you know all about macadamias and swimming. What's your theory? Like, like, what other athlete you know? If I mean, I'm just an dodgy bloke who's been lifting weights for one hundred years, but if I have a day off or two days off, the third day I come back, I'm fucking superman, Like, what is that about?

and Grant Hackett for most of my career. Success stories speak for themselves. But in that time before that, we've also heard about you know, Laurie Lawrence. Lorie Lawrence had a stable pool full of superstars. But there was kind of a joke that which wasn't funny at all. But to succeed in Laurrie Lawrence's squad, you either were Olympic gold medalist by the age of twenty or you had two shoulder reacs behind you do you know, like it was one or the other. And for a lot of

those early swimming days. It really was survival of the toughest, not the fittest, the toughest. And I was lucky enough that I had a body that isn't very flexible at all. But I wasn't. I wasn't. I guess I have a lot of the overuse injuries or being hyper mobile that a lot of swimmers suffer from, and mentally I could deal with the work because that's that's also where I

got my confidence from. I got my confidence from getting up on race day and looking at the other seven girls lined up across from me across the pool and going, get the hell out of my way, bitches, I've done more work than you. I deserve this and could honestly believe that in that time, like you know, would wave to the crowd with a smile on my face, looking like a cheerleader when they announced my name on pool deck.

But mentally, I was telling myself and honestly one hundred percent believe it that I'd done more work than anyone else. Therefore I deserved it more, and that's where I got my confidence from. So I had to believe that whereas the great thing is now I was just speaking to Emma mckehon. You know our greatest Olympia the other day. Now, she had three months off, three months out of the pool.

When they delayed the Tokyo Olympic announcement by a year, three months away, coach Michael Bole said, go, don't think about swimming. It's too hard to be in that intense mindset for this long. Go go and do something else and take your mind off it. We'll come back to it now. That for me in my time would have been suicide. Like I could not have taken three months away that close to an Olympics and had the confidence to get up on race day. So that's where it's evolved.

And then Emma also took three months off after she was our most successful Olympian in Tokyo and came back, you know what I would consider completely unprepared, without much fitness or mileage behind her, to have an extraordinary Commonwealth

Games and swim brilliantly. And so it's very foreign to me, but it's also really exciting for me to see that the sport is evolving and that we're not only understanding what you're talking about now, but on top of it, we're keeping our athletes in the sports so much longer than we ever did before because they are having these breaks both mentally and physically and allowing them to recover properly before the next campaign. It's really exciting.

I couldn't have had three months off, I couldn't have coped, and and that's really a psychological reaction to a thought, you know, And and maybe you would have been better or worse. You probably would have been worse based on how you explained it. But it's really interesting to see the way that training and recovery and performance and the integration of coaching and progressive overload and periodization and psychology and nutrition all of it's like now everyone's starting to

work together. When I started working with for example, some killed a football club, which was when were you born eighty two? I started working with them in eighty in nine. Fuck, I don't know, I don't know. Yeah, no, no, about in the late eighties when you were like three, and it was so fundamental and rudimentary. H No, it was in the nineties. But even then, everything like nothing worked synergistically.

There was like the dietitian over there and the strength guy over there, and the fitness guy over there, and the coaching staff and there was no connection communication. And now at least we're starting to see like a holistic I hate that word, but it'll do for now approach to managing, and not just in sport, but outside of sport.

You know, I'm working with people where we talk about sleep, we talk about nutrition, we talk about movement, we talk about anxiety and stress, we talk about lifestyle, we talk about work life balance or impact like all of these things where we go this is this is you know project you or perhaps the you project we should call it, you know, and like things have really evolved though.

And I think theming is is or has been one of the more old schools sports historically, where you know, you joined a squad because you thought that their training program would be the most or the best suited to your strokes and or distance that you swam. So once you're in that squad, it's not like, oh, Ujian are going to have this program today, and U Craig, you're going to have this program over here today, and you know, you Tiffany are going to have this program like you're

all doing the same set. You're all doing the same program every single session. And so there was never in my day and individual training to and that for me at that time, really played into what I needed because I was quite often the only female in a squad full of boys, So there wasn't a female time cycle and a male time cycle. That's time cycle I had to keep up with the slowest guy. Otherwise I didn't keep up, So again that played into my psyche on race day of I can race you, I know how

to race you. I'm okay with this because I've trained with boys or I've done this amount of work, and that gave me the confidence. But it's also the reason why I walked away from the sport at twenty three. Using Emma again. Emma was twenty seven when she won seven Olympic medals in Tokyo, and he's going to Paris in twenty twenty four where she'll be what thirty Kay Campbell is trying to make her fifth Olympics, where she'll

be I think thirty two or thirty three. So we've always Summers have always physiologically been capable of being well into our late twenties early thirties, of reaching our physical peak performance, but historically, mentally, we've never made it, and that's because of the brutal, monotonous nature of the training for that sport.

on the event and all of that. But speaking of speaking of over training and brutality and ridiculously tough athletes, I trained, I tried trained a five time Olympian whose name's Jackie Cooper, and she's completely crazy. She's a lunatic. She had thirty six operations. She just had a full hip replacement six and a half months ago. I'm actually training her now. She comes and trains when I train,

and I just tell her what today. She's still absolutely But it's funny because some people like I don't even know what it is with her, but there's something in her and yet she would so I'm not being rude. She's been on the show a couple of times, so everyone knows her. But when I say, she's borderline crazy as in just out there, but she trains even now. She's fifty in a minute, I think she's fifty in a month or two. And even when she comes to the gym, she trains so hard it's ridiculous. I'm like

steady on Champ there's no event coming up. It's all good. Let's just wind it back a little bit. But there's something innate in some people where and it's not just that they have a high pain threshold, but there's something that you know, in exo science we call it rate of perceived exertion RPE. You know, where people kind of over the years, I would say there's someone, how hard are you working? Out of ten? And they'd say nine, and I know they're working at four, right, yep. Whereas

Jackie will be working in eleven and she'll tell you seven. Yep. You know, yep.

talent to get me through. But I also am very aware of the fact that I was an above average athlete in a superstar era that got tarnished with the same brush as my contemporaries. But that also sits really comfortably with me, because when I said to you, I left my sport with no regrets. I was the best athlete I could be. There is nothing more I could have done to be any better than what I was. Whereas there I think, again, that's a really healthy mindset

to have. Whereas the ultimate athletes, those hardcore athletes that we talk about, the Jackie Coopers of the world, the Grant Hackets of the world, the Lydia Lasslas of the world, there are so many of them that they actually when they finish their sport, they actually don't have that switch off button. They have to find something else that allows them to push their bodies and their minds all the time.

They never stop having that. Whereas for me, as I said, I was ultimate competitor, but I am, funnily enough, not competitive in any other aspect of my life. I do not feel the need to push myself physically. And maybe that ties into the fact that you know, everyone says, oh, don't you miss being fit, and I'm like no, because fit for me at that level meant physical, emotional, mental exhaustion every day of my life. I felt like I was eighty five getting out of bed every day of

my life. So now I am happier, arguably healthier, more positive, and a happier person now than I ever was when I was supposedly at my fittest. So I've got no idea, I've got no desire to revisit that in any way, shape or form. Whereas for so many hardcore athletes, they need that in their everyday life continuously to feel like they are worthy, to feel like they are, you know, healthy, if you like, to feel like they are still in that successful state of mind that they were when they

were a successful athlete. Whereas I'm really fortunate. I love my job, I love my life. I'm not competitive in any other shape or you know way, shape or form, and I'm pretty content where everything sits. How bloody lucky am I?

I never required sleeping tablets to switch off at night after a race, knowing that I had a heat the next morning. My brain was obviously incredibly adaptive in being able to say, Okay, you're tired, you've got something that you need to deal with. I need to switch you off, and then when you wake up in the morning, you'll be rational enough to deal with whatever you need to deal with. So almost the more stressed I was about something or had a decision to make or had something

hanging over my head. The more stressed I was, the better I slept. And never realized what an huge asset that was across my whole entire life until it was taken away from me when I had a baby. For the first time I ever felt like I was failing in life. I had two I've got two kids who I loved dearly, but I've never felt like I was failing properly before I was doing something that is meant

to be so fundamentally natural. So I went to sleep school with one child and two sleep consultants with another. And that's the thing out of everything I've done in my life that nearly broke me.

is way worse for your health than not exercising. You should exercise, but if you're working out and your diet's good, but you are consistently getting three hours of sleep a night for an extended even for a week, like your body just crashes. It's people don't understand, Like people go, yeah, yeah,

of course, stay hydrated and sleep. Yeah, we get all that. No, it's way more important than because your body can't reset, you know, or your nervous system, you're endo crime system, cardiovascular system, respiratory, it can't reboot, reset and wake up fresh, ready to go if it hasn't had enough time, you know.

we never have before. And you know, I said to you before we started, I feel like, you know, everyone I know, myself included, we're just limping towards the end of the year, we're like, just you know, we're on crutches, you know, we're limping towards the end of the year. And I just think sleep, as you said, is such an integral part of our life, and I don't think

we pay it enough attention. And it was why I went to sleep school with my son Xander, because giving your child for me, one of the most important things I could give my child was the gift of sleep, because I know insomniacts. My dad has always struggled to sleep since being a shift worker. I know plenty of people where it's their biggest downfall in their life is

their lack of quality sleep. And that's the one thing I wanted to give my children, was this gift of being able to sleep and sleep well and reset, reset your mind, and have that as an asset in your life.

but we don't even necessarily understand the link. But you think about like in the middle of COVID, some people thrived and some people capitulated or you know, really really struggled understandably, and then people go, oh, yeah, but those people had it harder or whatever, and the the truth is sometimes like sometimes, so there's this, there's this the stimulus, right, there's the thing that's happening, and then there's the physiological consequence,

which is I can't sleep, I'm producing adrenaline, cortisol, nouropin, efrom my sympathetic nervous systems elevated. There's all this shit going on in my body and now I'm in a stress state. But there's this space in the middle, which is the mind, and it's the mind's reaction to the thing. The mind creates the physiology, not the thing, because if COVID created a stress response, then everyone would have had a stress response and they didn't. Everybody would have endured

significant mental health issues and they didn't. Which is not to say people are good or bad, strong, all weak. It's just understanding because when people go, oh, you made me feel like this, I'm like, no, that isn't true, or COVID did this to me, and I understand. I'm not saying, by the way, anyone don't lose your shit. I'm not saying COVID wasn't fucking horrible. I get it. But in the middle of that, there's still this space where I get to self regulate and say, Okay, what

am I what story? Because if I'm telling myself a story of doom and gloom, even if there is no doom and gloom, but I tell myself that story and I believe that story, then that becomes an experience in my body. And we're just starting to understand now in a really correlated way where we understand the external stimulus, the cognitive processing, the story about the stimulus, and then the consequence of the story, which is all the shit in my body. And then when we start you love

this word, it's called metacognition. When we start to think about where that thinking comes from, that metacognitive process, then all of a sudden we realize, oh, that thing is stimulating me, but I am creating the stress response which makes it. It doesn't fix it, but just opening that door on that awareness is a really good starting point.

same boat. And I think that, again, is the response's to it. And as you mentioned, you know, the mental capacity of different people and also what they were dealing with outside of the pandemic itself. And you know, again, we moved to the farm one week before the queensli Knew South Wales border shut and all of a sudden, you know, my mum and dad are up there, don't know when we're going to see them. I missed commentating on the Tokyo Olympics because I couldn't get to Melbourne

because Victoria shut their borders with New South Wales. And you know, everyone was like, oh, you know, this is just terrible and this is awful, and I was like, look, you know, at the end of the day, I'm in a great position. I'm healthy, my family is healthy. Yes, I can't get to some of my family. Yes I can't do my job that I love, Yes I can't do this, that and the other. But there are people dealing with a lot worse and perspective is a great thing.

You know, at the end of the day, a shit can hit the fan as much as you walk around you. As you said, your response to that shit hitting the fan is what will either see you thrive or just merely survive a situation.

You have to just find a way. You're constantly working against resistance and you're putting yourself in uncomfortable, kind of crappy situations, which are a necessity of the skill development, fitness development, mindset development to perform at the highest level.

But once you've kind of built that capacity and that ability to do hard shit and to be comfortable in the middle of disc I feel like that life beyond whatever that was becomes or is more manageable because you know how to do hard things and survive and thrive.

the sleep deprivation. It was just far more challenging on the emotional and mental side because it was out of my control and I didn't know how to fix it. But I completely agree with you in the fact, and we've also got to separate, you know, be very very honest here. Talk about Jackie Cooper and Lydia Lascilla and even you know, jockeys and to an extent surface like my sport, you were never going to hurt yourself, Like there was never a component of I could not a

high risk event, not a high risk event. You know, the worst thing I could possibly do is probably run into the wall at full speed and you know, hurt myself in that sense, or have an asthma attack and drown in the pool, which would be ironic, but you know, you look at these hardcore athletes that when they are competing, they're actually putting their lives at risk. Like that's a whole new mindset, that's a whole new ball game. It's entirety.

And I don't possess that component. And I just think, you know, they are the next level of hardcore beings. But it's amazing how you take the sport component away and like what I'm talking about with motherhood or anything else like that, And you know, we all have the same We're all human. We all have things that we think we're going to excel at we actually don't. Or we all think we can apply what we've learned in our life to every scenario going forward and it will

always work. And I've always said there is I've very quickly come to learn that hard work doesn't always equal success, that equation doesn't always play out. But you have to find a way, also from your mental state of mind to know that or to be able to say that nine times out of ten it does work, that equation does work. And so I'm banking on the odds.

into their sport and their sporting ability. And so I've seen lots of especially athletes who had to retire or were sacked AFL players for example, and their career ended when they didn't think it was going to end and they had just lost, and many of them falling into a depression, like a real mental and emotional funk, and some of them, you know, are suicidal and like don't go well is that do you think that's because you are basically you are, Like what you do in your case,

swimming is who you are. It's like like when people would talk to you for a very long time, it would primarily only about be about swimming, training, performance, recovery. Wouldn't be like, oh, what do you think of labor or liberal law? What do you think about paleo ge'm you know, or you know, it's like that, so that's who who you are, and then you wake up one day and you're twenty four and you're like, nah, fuck this.

of it. I don't feel defined by it. I'm incredibly proud of that achievement, but I don't need it on myself to be reminded of it every day to feel proud of myself. It's a comfortable it's a comfortable feeling a pride that I exist with. I don't need to see it to be reminded of it, and I don't need anyone else else to ask me about it to feel proud of it. It just within me. Which again

I think is really healthy place to be. I also think one of the biggest problems with transitions from elite athletes is the fact that they don't get to leave, as you said, on their terms. I was very fortunate that I did so the feeling of regret of I could have done more or I wanted to do more

is ever prevalent there. I also think, and this might be a little bit controversial, that a lot of male athletes have more of a struggle with life after than female And my take on that is that male athletes, when they're in that elite world, are the most selfish

people on the planet. And that sounds really negative when you say it like that, but it's actually what allows them to be so good because they are they are almost able to exist in a world where everyone around them, their support team, their partner, their family, everyone around them exists too support them to achieve their dream, and they are very comfortable with them being the center of that world and everyone existing around them to help them achieve

that goal. I think why say male and not female. For the most part, female athletes or females have a natural maternal instinct where we have to also look after that team in the same way that they're looking after us. We have to return the favor if you like. But the problem is is that not only is that thought process encouraged as an elite athlete to be incredibly selfish and to focus only on your dream. It's taught from a very young age, so it becomes a habit, it

becomes who you are, it's how you exist. It's encouraged from a young age. So all of a sudden, you retire from your sport, and that is actually not a quality that is revered in any other phase in your life. Relationships don't survive selfishness. The employer is not going to be happy with selfishness. Your family and your team and your partner goes all right, well, I was happy to be that person or that team support for you while

you're an elite athlete, but you're not now. So now you're going to do the dishes after dinner, or now you're going to do your laundry, or now you're going to do X, Y and Z, and so all of a sudden, the very thing that made you successful is actually a negative in the next phase of your life. And I think a lot really struggle with that.