Home and Family

One of the tough things about moving away to pursue Olympic dreams is having to move away from your family and friends. This is something that everyone that is part of our team in Calgary knows. None of us are from Calgary. We all made the choice at some point (most of us after high school) to move away from all things familiar to train full time. Its something that is tough to do. For most of the year we don’t really notice how much we miss home. All of our friends are also away at school or spread around the country (or world!) doing their own thing, not unlike what we ourselves are doing. But at times like Christmas we really notice the things we miss about home. Around the middle to end of December, most of our friends from school start to trickle home for Christmas. They will get to attend various Christmas parties and go out and see people that they haven’t seen for months or even a year or more. For most of the group in Calgary though, we miss out on these activities. Training keeps us in Calgary until right before Christmas and has us racing back right after. The Europeans that train with us don’t even get to go home and see their families due to the sheer length and cost of travel halfway around the world. The funny thing is though, if you ask any of us if we regret the decision to miss out on stuff like this I’m willing to bet just about everyone will say “no way”! They almost certainly have some part saying they wish that they could go home for two weeks or more, but everyone realizes the sacrifices that must be made in order to become a world class athlete. Sure everyone misses their family and friends but thats where we have some luck with our team. We are a very close group and we are not unlike a family. We unite around what we have in common and by the time we all retire, we will have spent more time together than we will spend with our immediate family over the period of time we are in Calgary. So while it may be tough to be away from immediate family, how many people can say that they are able to go hang out with their other family the rest of time? Pretty cool I say.

Our Calgary "family"


Also, if you would like to check out an amazing piece of music, check out the video below. The artist is John Butler of the John Butler Trio playing the song Ocean. He rarely plays this piece the same way twice but it always sounds amazing.