As a teenager I was a competitive athlete, competing in flatwater canoe and kayak racing. I loved it. It was my passion. In the summers I would spend all day on the water training and in winters would go to Florida for a couple weeks to train. When I was 14 or 15 I had my best year ever, was breaking all my personal records and doing very well at regattas in both team and individual events, and then I got hurt.
I was able to get through practice but would spend the whole practice in tears because of how much pain I was in. It got to the point where I realized I had to see someone. I went to a physiotherapist who told me that I had to stop training, at very least take a 3-month break with no activity and then we could talk. I was devastated. That wasn’t an option for me. I was used to practicing 3 times a day. I felt like I had to reinvent myself, paddling and being an athlete was my whole identity. I didn’t know what to do with myself. In that moment I felt that there must be a better way than to do nothing and also a huge amount of frustration towards my injury and this person who was supposed to help me.
As I got older I realized that I had to turn this frustration into something positive. So I went to school to be come a physiotherapist and entered the work force. I soon realized that I wasn’t going to able to accomplish my goal to change how rehab was done while working for someone else because most clinics allowed me only 15-20 minutes per client. This time constraint didn’t allow me to help people the way I wanted to and felt I needed to. I could see the same frustration that I had felt years before on my client’s faces when they came in and it became a source of frustration for me as well.
I knew that I had to make a change and start my own business, where I didn’t have the same time constraints and I could figure out the root cause of was wrong and therefore what was needed for people to get better, and guess what? People started getting better faster. I was able to see people less frequently and they were having better results. It was at this point that I felt like I had found my place and achieved what I wanted to. Now my focus is to keep doing what I do better and faster so my clients can continue doing the activities they love to do.