Welcome to Dr. Warrick's podcast channel. Warrick is a practicing cardiologist and author with a passion for improving care by helping patients understand their heart health through education. Warrick believes educated patients get the best health care. Discover and understand the latest approaches and technology in heart care and how this might apply to you or someone you love. Hi, my name is Dr. Barak Bishop and I'd like to welcome you to my podcast and videocast station and today I have a special guest, Guy Leach, who you may know as an Australian and internationally ranked paddler and Ironman. Hi, Guy. Welcome. How are you? How are you, Doc? I'm good, thank you. Look, I was particularly interested and I think some of the listeners would be particularly interested in just having a bit of background and understanding for what it's like. the journey of being a professional sportsman. Where did you start? So I was probably a similar story to a lot of swimmers that have done well over the years. I know that Dawn Fraser has said the same thing, Susie O'Neill, a bunch of other famous swimmers, in that I was a kid that was basically, you know, if I got a cold, it would turn into bronchitis. We went off to the doctors and the doctor, this one doctor, when I was probably seven years of age, said to my mum, listen, let's get him in the pool and get him swimming and let's get his lungs a bit stronger and that may help this whole process of cold turning into bronchitis. So anyway, so I hadn't swum up until then. I jumped in the pool. I was probably close to eight years of age, I think. And look, I got lucky, funnily enough, with the whole swimming thing. More so than any other sport I've done because I went and had like a learn to swim lesson at the local beach in the harbour in Sydney and the instructor apparently said to my mum, you know, why have you got him here? He knows how to do all four strokes and this is a learn to swim class, not a training group. So, you know, so I was just lucky that I found something that I could do straight away. It was really weird. I just felt really comfortable. I just remember mum saying to me that you're not meant to do that. And I'm like, all right. So they threw me into the pool three days a week in a training group when I was eight. And I progressed so quickly in the pool that the swimming coach there said, let's get Guy to... enter the state titles, New South Wales state titles. And I had to go to a local carnival and I was good at breaststroke and I ended up winning the race, went off to the state titles and did the 100 breaststroke. And there's a few things in my life I remember and there's most that I don't, right? But this one day I do remember because I swam the two laps of the pool. I finished first, but all the other kids that were the best in New South Wales. And the time I did broke the record, the Australian record for the fastest time ever set by a nine-year-old or under nine-year-old for the two laps. And the feeling for me of winning and the feeling of, I suppose, doing the training and just that sort of weird feeling of being so good was something that I... I loved. And that was the start for me. So for me, progressing through the ranks of sport and getting better and better and better was based on that day. It was a discovery day. It was a day of, oh, if you do the training and you train hard and do what you do, you get a result. And unbeknownst to me, I was good at something. And that was the start. Was swimming in the family gone? Had you had parents? No, my mum was more tennis, that sort of ball sport. My dad was a good tennis player, squash player. He was an A-grade tennis and squash player. He was a mile running champion, so couldn't swim much at all. You'd say he was an average swimmer, funnily enough. And he did a year with St Kilda. So we were born in Melbourne. Parents split up when I was about four and my brother and I moved to Sydney with our mum and dad stayed in Melbourne. So that was the start and, you know, I was very fortunate that, you know, in some ways that we moved to Sydney because that sort of jump into the water and the fact I loved it and I just felt like it was home was something that I've enjoyed my whole life. So, you know, I sort of... I did the swimming thing until I was 17. I got really, life's funny, you know, in that you get opportunities given to you and I went into a swimming pool that I call like a place of excellence. And so the squad that I went into, the coach at the time ended up being the head. swimming coach for the Australian Olympic team. So he was like the number one swim coach in the country. And it was a six-lane indoor 25-metre pool. And you got invited into the senior squad. And at the age of 12, I got into this senior squad. And anyone that got to lane six and the coach decided whether you went from lane one to lane two and up, If you made lane six, anyone that was in lane six was getting on a plane, going to the Olympic Games as they qualified. They were going to the Commonwealth Games. They were going to the World Championships and everything else where you represented your country. So for me as a 12-year-old that rocked into this pool, it was very clear that if I could get to lane six, I was representing Australia and making an Australian swim team. my goal and my journey was very clear at that age. And so it wasn't muddled, it wasn't diluted, and all my energy went into that and it was a very powerful thing. And, you know, at the time you don't think a lot about it when you're that age and you're just doing what you're doing. But, you know, I was introduced at the age of 12 to, you know, logbooks, journals, The coach would say, write down what you did for the day in training, write down any observations. At the end of the week when you finished the eight sessions or whatever it was that we had to do at that age, you give yourself a mark out of 10 for the effort you thought you put in and any comments around that, and you gave the book back to the coach, Coach Gathercock. In that book, there were goals at the front. So of the six events you were going to compete at the Australian titles that year, you had to put down what your personal best time was in one column. In the next column, in six months' time, the time that you thought you could achieve, and then the next column was the time that you thought you could do in 12 months' time. You know, imagine a 12-year-old kid getting given this book and that was the assignment to start with was to come up with these times. Now, it wasn't just a case of writing the times down. The coach then, he would negotiate with you based on the times you put. If he felt the time was too easy for you to achieve, then it was a discussion with the head Olympic swim coach and a 12-year-old on why I thought that time was fair. The time that he gave that was two seconds harder was more appropriate. So once we signed off on these, I had to memorise them to the 10th of a second. And I'd get asked on pool deck, guy, hunter butterfly, in a year's time, what's the time that you said that we agreed on that you'd try to achieve? And I have to say 63 seconds 0.5 as an example. And if I didn't get it right, well, you got punished. And so at the end of the week, that logbook went back to coach and coach would look at the logbooks of the kids in the senior squad and come Monday morning, he'd give those back to you. Now, to give you an example of just this environment that I was in, you know, the first 12 weeks of this process that I was doing, I'd give myself 9 out of 10 because I was training hard, you know, and I was putting a good effort in. And my coach was coming in at sixes and sevens on the effort he thought I was putting in. But he'd say, why? You got a half-point deduction on Wednesday afternoon. In the kick set, your technique dropped off, half-a-point deduction. On Thursday afternoon when you did the hypoxic main set, you didn't do it properly, half-a-point deduction. On Saturday morning when you were meant to be a pool deck at 4.50 a.m. to stretch 10 minutes before we got in the water, you turned up at 4.53. one-point deduction. That went on for 12 weeks. And so by the 12th week, I've been battered down enough and I'd realised that maybe I'm not as good as I thought I was and I was coming in at sevens and it matched up to coach. So that's just a small example of the culture and just the type of environment that I was in that I took for granted. I went to school to rest. And I turned up to training to be the best in the world at what I did. And that was my mindset at the age of 12. And, you know, we'd see once a week someone would know in advance when they had to get up in front of the whole squad and swim their pet event on pool deck in training. So, you know, one of the guys from lane six had to get up and do the 100 breaststroke in front of the whole group and there'd be 50 of us on the side screaming. For that person, I saw people break world records in training, Commonwealth records. I saw personal best times Australian records. So I believed as a kid that if you're in that pool and you did what you were told to do and you did it right, then you'd be phenomenal. And that was my education. So, you know, when you say where did it all start and how did I become a professional athlete? you know, and why I could win world titles and do the things I did, that was because of that pool. And by the time I was 17, I'd spent five years in that pool. I remember the first time Coach got me out of the pool after about a year of being in lane one. And I'd been training the house down, doing everything right, and I thought, this is it, this is my moment, I'm going to lane two. I've seen other people go up the lanes, you know, you see it every month or two, someone would get put up a lane or someone would leave because the workload and the intensity of training was too much for kids that realise they couldn't hack it and they'd just pull up and leave. And I remember Coach said, you stay back, guy, I need to talk to you. And he... I thought, I'm going to lane two. And he looked at me and he could tell that and he said, oh, God, it's not about lane two. And straightaway I thought, I'm going to lane three. I'm the first person in the history of this pool that's bypassing a lane and because I'm going that well, I'm jumping up to lane three and it wasn't about that either. So that was what I lived through, you know. And so by the time I was 17, I made lane six. I represented Australia in the pool overseas. And then the Ironman bug hit me, and that was the swap over from being someone that was a swimmer to then being a surf Ironman competitor and a full-time athlete, yeah. That's almost a natural close of a chapter. We've actually been talking, and I've been listening, actually, with you sharing for over 10 minutes already. So what I might do is just... put a break in this, call this part one, and if you're happy, we'll regroup and do a part two. Of course. So for those listening, I hope you're enjoying this story. It sounds like an amazing discipline, the accountability. And the personal growth from those sort of journals is enormous for a 12-year-old. I'm looking forward to coming back and hearing more of your story, Guy. Thank you for that. For those listening, till next time, take care and bye for now. You have been listening to another podcast from Dr. Warrick. Visit his website at drWarrickbishop.com for the latest news on heart disease. If you love this podcast, feel free to leave us a review.
