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‘You can’t keep a toad under your bed, it wouldn’t be happy! Toads like living in the garden!’
A toad, by Jasper.
These could so easily have been my mum’s words echoing around our house as a seven-year-old me tried to smuggle a creature into my room. But in reality this was a snatch of conversation I heard in the upstairs of our home as my partner Emily tried to persuade our son Jasper to put the toad he’d brought into his bedroom, back outside into the front garden. Frogs and toads seem to be plentiful in the small garden of our rented cottage, and they’ve provided us with some exciting evening adventures. A few years ago, in our last house, it was hedgehogs – and before that, well, there’s always something to do outdoors …
There are five of us in the house – two adults and three children – but a whole host of other creatures seem to have joined our menagerie along the way. Emily is the one who keeps us all going. She feeds us all, looks after us and stops our lives from grinding to a screeching halt.
We first met at university many years ago. As I was going into our housing block from early rowing-training sessions on the river, she’d be returning home from a night out with friends, living a far more typical university lifestyle than me. We’d stop and chat, and soon discovered that we got on very well. We enjoyed each other’s company, and I found I wanted to spend more time with her than in a boat on the river. That was something new … and something that I couldn’t ignore. We happily started to spend the rare free time we had together getting to know each other, understanding each other, and sharing dreams and future aspirations. Emily was incredibly patient. I was pursuing a seemingly impossible dream, meaning my free time was limited to almost nothing. This meant that very quickly in our relationship we recognised the value of quality time. My days were spent out on rivers, lakes or in the gym, essentially working a full-time job while at university. I didn’t drink, I didn’t socialise that much, I made as many lectures as I possibly could, but my life was focused on one specific thing: the Olympics.
I tried and I failed. Year after year I spent seven days a week, three times a day training, only to fall at the last hurdle. For so many different reasons I wasn’t reaching my potential and was coming up well short of my goals. But I never gave up. When everyone disappeared off home for the university holidays, I remained, the only person in the block. Waking up that first morning was like a scene from a disaster movie in which everyone except me had disappeared. Emily had returned home to her family on the Isle of Wight, but I could never go back to my family home or go and visit hers because of training or racing. Thankfully, for me, Emily was prepared to stick with me as I pursued my sporting career on lakes and rivers in far-flung places around the world.
As time went by, we both graduated. Emily followed a career in teaching while I continued to battle it out for Olympic selection. We rented a tiny cottage in the centre of Henley-on-Thames and settled down, moving forward with our lives. Emily became an excellent primary-school teacher in a tough school on the outskirts of Reading, but things weren’t going so well for me and my sporting career was on the ropes. In a world in which performance is everything I was certainly falling short, so it was with a great deal of luck that I was selected to travel with the 2008 Olympic rowing team to Beijing as reserve.
It seemed to be a bittersweet ending to my career, because after this trip I had decided to walk away from the sport for ever, as I was obviously not cut out for life as a successful Olympic rower. But it was there, sitting on the sidelines in China, that everything changed for me as an athlete – and for us as a couple. I returned home from China with renewed motivation and vigour, and set myself new goals, new challenges. I wasn’t giving up just yet.
We weren’t quite expecting what life had in store for us, as a few brief months after my trip as Olympic reserve we discovered we were going to have our first child.
It was a shock – a big shock – and not exactly in my grand plan. I had just found myself on a new path, and for the first time I was starting to excel in the sport I’d so nearly given up. There was a great deal of pressure on me to perform and I was only just beginning to do that, moving up the ranks within the team and reaching the position I’d need to be in to start competing for medals on the world stage. Life had taken an unexpected turn, and although I felt incredibly unsure about what it might entail, Emily remained strong and positive, matter of fact and excited about the future.
It was always going to happen at some point. We had talked about having children and starting family life together, but I never imagined it would be this soon and at our age. I was really worried about other people’s reaction to our news, particularly my coach, Jürgen Gröbler, who demanded complete commitment and the very top level of performance on a consistent, daily basis. Would he think I was being unprofessional and not committed to my sport? My place in the GB rowing team felt under threat.
It took me six months to summon up the nerve to tell him, during which time I had further cemented my position as a valuable member of the squad and things had been going very well. I anxiously sat down and told him our news, shaking at the prospect of saying goodbye to nine years of commitment to rowing. To my utter surprise, astonishment and relief, Jürgen was happy and excited – even joyful – for us.
‘Oh, Alex, zat is fantastic news,’ he said in his strong German accent, eyes shining with genuine delight. ‘I am so happy for you as a young family.’
The weight of the world was lifted off my shoulders. Jürgen had no idea what that meeting was like for me and how much his support at that moment meant. A month after I became world champion for the first time, our first child was born.
It was during Jasper’s birth that I had to miss a day of training. I remember feeling terribly uncomfortable with this, despite having a fairly sound excuse. Emily was having a traumatic labour and the birth was far from easy. Seventy-two hours, a breakneck journey in an ambulance at 2 a.m., a whole load of screaming (mainly from me) and two hospitals later, Jasper was pulled out through emergency C-section.
Having been on a rollercoaster of emotion and not slept for days, I left my little family in the hospital and rocked up at the lake early in the morning acting as though everything was OK. I was an emotional wreck, relieved, happy, so tired but pumped full of adrenalin. My overriding wish, however, was to show that whatever was going on at home wasn’t affecting my performance on the water or in the gym. I was back into training as normal, falling asleep behind the oar but exerting myself like my life depended on it. Your place in the British rowing team is never secure, so I didn’t want to lose the position I was in after all those years of struggle. I spent the next eight months sleeping on our six-foot-long sofa (I’m six foot six) to try to limit the broken sleep while Emily dealt with the baby upstairs.
Daisy Delilah, our second child, came into the world four years later in 2013, when I was away racing at the World Championships in South Korea. There was, regretfully, no popping home for the birth, so I left Emily and went off to race for Great Britain with my teammates. In the middle of the night before our first race I was awoken by Emily’s mum on the phone, telling me we had a beautiful baby girl and that this time everything had gone very smoothly. I remember standing in my underpants in the hotel corridor, a tear in my eye, feeling so far away from my family.
The next morning, I wasn’t sure whether to tell my team mates, who were preparing to compete in the first race of the World Championships. It was a serious time for us, with twelve