Hard Wired

Emma Carney, Jane E Hunt

Description

Fresh out of school and emerging as one of Australia's future distance running stars, Emma Carney discovered the sport of triathlon. The sport was never the same again. With an unmatched record, she devastated the international circuit. Defined by a relentless pursuit of sporting excellence, Emma was known to detest losing more than she loved to win.

At home in the cutthroat world of professional sport, Emma didn't expect a welcoming party waiting for her when she reached the pinnacle of triathlon. A fiercely independent athlete, fitting in and conforming was never her style. Rules annoyed her. Authority irritated her. And that complicated things…

Emma's is a life publicly defined by winning. But like sport, nothing is predictable. Success is fickle, life is fragile.

Emma's story reveals that international sporting success is about much more than winning. Courage is a constant. Hard work and dedication are vital, as are unwavering passion, belief, and desire. But there is more. Emma's story also raises questions: who is truly there when things go wrong, when the system fails? Who cares when you find yourself dying on the roadside, saving yourself only to then lose your sister, identity, self-belief and hope in everything you once believed in...?

Sujets

• Sport
• Autour du sport
• Histoire du sport
• Triathlon
• Recreation
• Sports

Informations

• Publié par: Ryan Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781876498146
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published 2020 by Ryan Publishing
PO Box 7680, Melbourne, 3004
Victoria, Australia
Ph: 61 3 9505 6820
Email: [e-mail]
Website: www.ryanpub.com

Title: Hard Wired: Life, Death and Triathlon
by Multiple World Champion Emma Carney
ISBN: 9781876498634 : Paperback ISBN: 9781876498146 : Ebook
Copyright © 2020. Emma Carney and Jane E. Hunt.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.
Internal and cover design by Luke Harris, Working Type Studio, Victoria, Australia. www.workingtype.com.au
For my wonderful son Jack, so you know .
CONTENTS
Preface
Prologue — One Good Bra
1. Igniting the Dream
2. My Dear Alma Mater
3. Adding the Swim and the Bike
4. Rookie World Champion
5. Racing to Win
6. World Domination
7. A Creep in the Camp
8. The Perfect Score
9. Everyone is a critic
10. Playing a Poor Hand Well
11. When No One Won
12. Lord of the Files — A Dream Thwarted: Emma Carney’s Non-Selection to the Sydney 2000 Triathlon Team — Dr Jane E. Hunt ‘It wouldn’t have passed the pub test’ – David Carney
13. Career Carnage
14. An Athlete’s Broken Heart
15. Losing Jane
16. Nothing to go Home To
17. My son Jack
18. My ‘Shit Cup’ Theory
19. Saving Clare
20. Reconnecting with the Mothership
Appendix A: Emma Carney Race Results, Athletics
Appendix B: Emma Carney Race Results, Triathlon and Cycling
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
Preface
A s a child, books intrigued me. It amazed me that you could simply read lines of words on a page and be taken away to the place that the author is describing. Because of this intrigue, I thought it would be a great thing to write a book, but it seemed all the good ideas had been used up.
As I grew older, I realised one story that hadn’t been taken yet was my life. No one had written on that, and I had some really good expectations on the ending …
Throughout my career, I diligently kept training diaries as most elite athletes do. I have a detailed record of every training session, personal training data, times, results: everything and anything that needed to be monitored.
What I also recorded, and what is not quite as common, were journals of my life as it unfolded. I detailed daily the training, personal commitments, lifestyle and intricacies of my experiences as an elite athlete. I recorded the good times and the disappointments, the lessons and the battles. These journals were the main source for this book.
The only time I stopped writing was through my Olympic Appeal. At that time, I could not put pen to paper. I have also never spoken publicly about it. I just didn’t have the strength to do either.
My Olympic appeal couldn’t be ignored though. It needed to be included in my autobiography. My Father was the key individual involved in the Olympic Appeals process, so he needed to provide his detailed account (much of it written at the time). Dad was always one for ensuring that the truth prevails.
I also needed someone to write about the Olympic Appeals, not as I saw it, or Dad saw it, but rather as a chronological order of the facts. I needed a historian, and someone who knew the Sport of Triathlon. The most appropriate person to do this was Assistant Professor Jane E. Hunt from Bond University. As the author of Multisport Dreaming: The Foundations of Triathlon in Australia , there is no one more qualified to provide my autobiography with this factual account.
At first, I wasn’t sure if I could write a book about my life. So, initially I asked Dr Jane E. Hunt to write it as a biography. She did background research and drafted the book up to and including the Olympic Selection chapter, for which she interrogated all my Dad’s papers on the Olympic Selection Appeals.
In the long run, Jane convinced me that I should tell my story in my own words, and I agreed. I finally did what I had always thought about doing. I re-wrote the draft chapters from my perspective and finished the book off. Jane smoothed it altogether when I finished.
I feel very fortunate for my life, I feel very fortunate I have been able to represent Australia at the highest level in Sport, and while my life may not have followed an expected path, it gives me a lot of pride.
This is my story so far …
Prologue — One Good Bra
I didn’t know where I was, I didn’t know where the Australian team hotel was, and I didn’t know what was wrong with me. It was around 2 p.m., 8 July 2004. I was standing weakly on the side of the road somewhere in Edmonton, Canada. It had just started to rain lightly, and I couldn’t work out why my heart was racing in my chest.
For the first time ever, I didn’t really want to be left alone. I felt vulnerable.
The Triathlon Australia (TA) Team was in Edmonton for an International Triathlon Union (ITU) race to be held that weekend (prior to 2020, World Triathlon was known as the International Triathlon Union). Today was Thursday, so we had just completed one of our pre-race group training sessions, an easy swim session. Whatever was happening to me had started in the pool. I managed to finish the set swim program, but not because I felt good training, only because I was too stubborn to stop.
Over the past six years I had suffered flushes of weakness while racing. What had started as a minor issue experienced in the swim discipline of triathlons from late 1996, unexplained feelings of fatigue and dizziness, had become far more of a problem and far more severe in 2002 and 2003. Recently, the problem had become serious and, at times, frightening. I was the dominant and most prolific triathlete in ITU triathlon until these problems arose and, despite them, I was still competitive internationally. Yet somehow, I had lost my edge. I was always sure I could recapture it, if I could just manage the feelings of weakness and fatigue. I wasn’t someone who gave up without a damn good reason.
I never did work out what was wrong. Until now. For the first time in my life, the weak feeling was followed by a very conscious awareness of my heart pounding in my chest. I thought maybe I was in a panic. That was initially. Now I was worried: surely you cannot panic for this long. I had been out of the pool almost an hour and boarded the bus back to the team hotel for lunch. The TA Team Manager told me that all I needed was a rest, ignoring my insistence that my heart was racing in my chest. The feeling made me uneasy.
As we sat in the traffic, my chest tightened further, with the back of the bus seat rolling my shoulders forward, forcing me to slump. My heart was banging away, seemingly pulling everything tighter still, and restricting my lungs. I couldn’t breathe properly. As we approached a set of traffic lights, I lunged out of the bus to stretch my chest open and see if I could breathe freely in the fresh air. I was trying to work out whether it helped when the lights changed from red to green, and everyone on board yelled at me to climb back into the bus.
I didn’t move. I was in a daze.
As the bus started to move away, I heard the Team Physio yell, ‘I’ll get out, you can’t just leave her,’ before jumping out onto the kerb.
He approached me, looking irritated, as the bus disappeared. By this time, I had found a park bench. It was raining lightly when we left the pool, but now it was increasing in intensity. So was my breathing. I was thankful someone got out, because I knew I was in trouble. Despite being the most independent member of the Australian team, I didn’t want to be left alone.
The Team Physio started complaining, half at me, half at everyone else. ‘What are we doing now Emma? I don’t even know where we are staying. I don’t have a phone. I don’t know how to contact anyone.’
I felt desperate. The thought crossed my mind that I might possibly die. I needed to sit down, because standing was taking too much energy. Hardly able to breathe I felt extremely lightheaded. Better than sit, I lay down on the footpath. Still unaware of the severity of my situation, he snapped, ‘What are you doing now?!’
Looking up from the footpath I decided I needed him to panic. I couldn’t afford to panic, because simply breathing was becoming difficult. I said urgently, ‘Shut up for a sec. There is something wrong with my heart, I think I’m going to die. You need to get help.’
That did it. Suddenly, he sprinted away. I didn’t know whether he was abandoning me or seeking help. Fortunately, he dropped his bag, so I assumed he was going to return. I hoped so. I honestly thought this was it. I had always proudly said to friends that I would rather die than lose a race, but I didn’t imagine that I might die while not even racing.
Trying to resist unconsciousness, I lay there. Strangely, it was peaceful when I shut my eyes. So peaceful in fact, it frightened me. I had never experienced this sort of peace, and wondered whether I was drifting off, never to return. I willed myself to remain awake.
Meanwhile, the Team Physio apparently ran around knocking on the doors of nearby houses, trying to find someone to phone for help. He finally returned with a cab. I looked at him, completely disheartened.
‘No!’ I called out, ‘I need an AMBULANCE!!’
The cab driver took one look at me and dialled the emergency number for Canada. I still remember the phone number was 911 and I remember thinking lucky for the cab driver. Being Australian, I would have dialled Triple Zero and got nowhere.
Thankfully it only took about two minutes for the ambulance to arrive. I obsessively told the paramedics I had a very low resting heart rate (about five or six times) as they moved me onto the stretcher. They told me to relax.
Inside the ambulance, they cut my T-Shirt, and then started to cut my bra. In a life and death situation, amazingly, cutting my bra horrified me. As an at