On this week’s episode Lou and I speak to Olympian Jack Green. Jack competed in the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympics. Jack has learnt about mental health the hard way, super human on so many levels – able to endure more pain, train harder, run faster coming to a point where he accepted that he was not OK and eventually to an understanding that our mental states cannot be 'fixed'. Something society inadvertently teaches us made worse still when you're heralded as invincible.
In the UK "we look back on the 2012 Olympic Games through gold-tinted glasses, 'Super Saturday' and an inspiring celebration of British athletics uniting the country. For a then 20-year-old Green, the suffocation of 80,000 fans and personal expectations became the starter pistol to understanding and dealing with the mental health struggles he had always known were there.”
"If one thing got past my armour, I couldn't manage it because I'd say 'I'm not meant to feel this way because I'm meant to be a superstar, I'm meant to be this robot'. That's when I'd really struggle and when I'd break down.”
"As soon as I accepted that I'm a human being and human beings feel things, as soon as I said 'OK, I can feel this way, I'm going to sit with it, embrace and accept it', it kind of took the power away from them. A big part for me that probably saved my life was accepting and embracing vulnerability,"
We talk about the pressures put on athletes across all disciplines, how it can feel like you’re not seen or supported until you’re contender for a medal, and once you’re not you’re just as quickly forgotten. Jack now coaches athletes, including Tokyo-bound Italian sprinter Gloria Hooper. He explains how he uses a different approach with every person, working hard to understand not just their physical needs but how they interact with their psychological make-up. He also held the position of Head of Wellbeing at BBC Studios before joining Champion Health UK as head of Performance, taking and using his own learnings to help others.
“My purpose is to help as many people be the best version of themselves because that is truly what high performance is all about. My philosophy is a very simple one: a happy athlete is a fast athlete. And I use this philosophy in all of my well-being work.”
For more on Jack:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Green_(hurdler)
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