Athletes with jobs away from the track
After a hard session on the track or pumping iron in the gym for a couple of hours how does a world-class track and field athlete spend the rest of his day? Many will take the opportunity to rest, others may choose to surf the net but some head to work. We speak to a group of athletes who relish combining regular work with their athletics career.
Now while very few of us can entertain the thought the thought of combining regular work with the physical and mental demands of training as a world-class athlete for some it can come as a blessed relief.
Take, British 400m sprinter Tim Benjamin, for example. The Welsh athlete had finished fifth in the 2005 World Championship final as a full-time athlete and was one of the rising stars of one-lap running but a succession of injuries and debilitating illness had left him despondent and dejected with the sport.
A bright man - his father is a university professor and his mother head of science at a secondary school - Benjamin always enjoyed the extra intellectual stimulation away from the track and so in June – with his season over through illness – quit his status as a full-time athlete and took up a full-time position in specialist IT recruitment in an effort to keep busy and inject some enthusiasm back into his athletics.
“One thing I’ve been aware of is sometimes I was getting a really unhealthy balance in my life,” explains Benjamin of how track and field was becoming all-consuming as a full-time athlete. “I really wanted to have a break away from athletics, I couldn’t possibly sit and think about it [athletics] all day. If you have an afternoon off [from athletics] you think, maybe I could do an extra weights session or some stretching, you start to over-think things and I’ve certainly been guilty of doing that in the past. The work became a really healthy distraction. It is really tough but quite refreshing at the same time.”
Australia’s Commonwealth long jump champion Bronwyn Thompson, works 32-38 hours a week as a physiotherapist, and she, too, cannot imagine life as a full-time athlete.
“I don’t think that is my personality,” says Thompson, who rises at 5.15am every day and rarely goes to bed before 10pm. “I like to have something else in my life. I think if you just have athletics you can dramatise things but with my work I can re-focus.
"I have to admit the first time I went overseas I was based in London and I was bored out of my brain. That’s no disrespect to London but I didn’t know how to manage my time, I had too much time on my hands. It was only later when I was overseas for the European season that I learned some great strategies of how to do nothing and become a professional do-nothing person.”
At the Olympic Games in August, Stephanie Brown Trafton was a shock winner of the women’s discus title. But what few people realise is that the US athlete has worked full-time as a computer-assisted designer for an environmental consulting firm for the past three years.
The company, she explained, are extremely supportive of her training demands but she found huge advantages in regular work.
“This is a good balance from the activities of training,” she told spikesmag.com “I have to wear office attire and I enjoy dressing up a bit, so I don’t feel like a jock all of the time. I like the fact that I can build my career resume as well as my sports resume at the same time.”
Brown Trafton raises an interesting point. The career of most athletes will be over in there early to mid 30s. What are they going to do with the rest of their career?
Benjamin, who now works part-time, admits looking ahead to the future was also a motivation in why he took the decision to take up regular work. “People say, ‘Tim’s doing a bit of work now he’s not so serious about his athletics’ but that is not the case,” said Benjamin. “I’m just aware the work experience is crucial for when I’m aged 32 or whatever and retired [from athletics].”
Of course, the physical and mental demands of working and training are never easy. Days are long and with little downtime big sacrifices have to be made. Thompson says she is often so tired on a weekend she has little time for socialising and the long jumper, who finished fourth at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, also misses the opportunity to go rollerblading or jogging for fun because of hectic schedule.
Her Australian team-mate Kylie Wheeler works part-time as a development officer for Western Australia Athletics and also faces the pressures of juggling training for the multi-events with hours in the office.
However, Wheeler, the 2006 Commonwealth silver medallist in the heptathlon, said of working and training: “You do have to put your life on hold and you might not have as much time as you would like with your family and friends, but when you get to stand on the podium, all the sacrifices are worth it.”