Emma Wiggs Column - Agility

THE recent 2019 - and my seventh - Sprint and Paracanoe World Championships were at the spiritual home of canoeing, Szeged in Hungary.

The crowds were like nothing I’ve ever seen before at a canoeing event - loud, passionate and quite simply spectacular! Over 30,000 people cheered a record number of paddlers, over 1,000 athletes from over 200 nations, across five explosive days of racing.

These World Championships were what we had all been training for, working towards and focused on for the last three years, round one of the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Qualification. There are nine events in Paracanoe at next year’s Games, three more than in Rio, and as a squad we targeted one boat spot in each event so #Project9 was on!

I’ve previously written about my disrupted year with injury and as we landed in Budapest I had nervous butterflies, my mind flipping from a calm ‘phew! I’m just relieved and happy to be here’ to ‘this is a World Champs, I’ve always been at my competitive best when I line up…what if?’ It was like Jekyll and Hyde. I knew what I should be saying and feeling and I managed it some of the time but then doubt would creep in as I watched new paddlers emerging and well known faces smashing training sessions, looking honed and race ready.

There is usually about three training days before competition starts and these went well, meaning I spent more time in ‘Hyde’ mode. We relaxed as a team in scorching conditions and everyone seemed focused on the job.

Racing started for me with heats in both boats, va’a and kayak with six hours between the races. I won the va’a heat but wasn’t happy with the time. The delivery felt good but I obsessed about the time and how close the opposition were. My first mistake. Being outcome focused is never good, it led to using the hours between races to wonder about whether we had got our training wrong. How could the rest of the world be closer than they were in May when I was fitter than I was then etc, etc.

The Jekyll mind-set was back. So, as I left my coach and paddled off to warm up for my kayak I pretended to be relaxed and not worried while actually still analysing what on earth we had got wrong and dreading what would happen in the race ahead. Looking back now I firmly believe it was a chronic lack of confidence fuelled by the wrong mind-set that led to these basic errors.

In order to protect my wrist we’d only done two 200m runs in my kayak in the two months leading up to the worlds. I didn’t have my usual winter of hard work behind me to draw on, I didn’t feel like the athlete I was and I didn’t feel competitive or race ready. I know the psychology techniques and the huge part your mind can play in performance and I’ve never gone into a race knowing I would win but always knowing I’d done the hard work and if I deliver what I know I can, the results take care of themselves. Except I didn’t know - all I actually knew was I’d spent six hours telling myself I wasn’t able to deliver.

My heat was probably my worst delivery and certainly the worst start of my career. I did however manage to pull it back and win, so you would think ‘Hyde brain’ would say ‘job done, you see you can deliver even when it’s not your best, go and refocus’ but instead my ‘Jekyll’ brain exploded at my coach and support staff with all the worries and negativity I’d been feeling all day. It was going to be a sleepless night ahead if I was going to pull this back in time for the finals.

The va’a final was the next day with the kayak final the following morning. I knew I wasn’t being the athlete I wanted to be and I knew it was up to me to listen to the people trying to help me and get myself back on track and deliver two performances I was proud of. I worked with my coach to focus on what we could tweak in our delivery to make it better and I started to feel more confident that if I stuck to my plan I could deliver a competitive 200m.

It was about not pretending I was feeling a certain way but thanking my ‘Jekyll’ brain for highlighting their concerns before boxing them up with evidence and answers by listening to the advice, looking at the actual evidence and visualising how I wanted to paddle and focusing on me.

I reminded myself I was seven times world champion, I have the experience and technique to deliver and I’ve left no stone unturned in my pursuit of excellence. We did and we not only won the va’a final, qualifying a spot for GB in Tokyo 2020 and setting a new world record and 0.5sec PB! This performance felt like a weight had been lifted, I was more emotional than I’d ever been after the race. We had come back from probably my worst place in terms of mind-set and turned it around to deliver a run that we could be proud of. This freed me up to paddle without fear for the kayak final.

Knowing that despite my self-inflicted exhaustion I could deliver the best I had if I just focused on me, paddled without fear and believed. On the start line of the final I felt almost relaxed to have my team-mate and friend in the lane next to me and able to just focus on doing a better start then in the heat then paddle as hard as I could with a mind free from worry.

The result? A much better start, a delivery that felt competitive, at least for a bit, a season’s best time by 0.5sec, a silver medal behind my team-mate Charlotte, but most of all a performance that even my ‘Jekyll brain’ is unbelievably proud of.

So another world championships ticked off, a huge amount of personal learning and as a British Canoeing squad some incredible medal table-topping performances, PB’s, world records, amazing debuts and we grabbed seven of the nine boat spots for Tokyo.

I love the power of sport to change lives and I love the fact that even at my age I am learning more about myself, more about being an athlete and becoming a better person every time I expose myself to challenges and honestly reflect and review. Bring on the winter of hard work! •