Outward Bound

 http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=10724243

Alison Shanks was almost at breaking point.

She wasn’t in the last stages of a gruelling 3000m pursuit as you would expect – but confronting her fears on an Outward Bound course.

The cycling champion is accustomed to high-pressure situations but the recent course presented a series of intense physical and mental challenges.

Along with 13 other members of Bike NZ’s high performance programme, Shanks completed the eight day course in the Marlborough Sounds.

“At times it was brutal,” recalls Shanks. “Sometimes I thought, ‘what I am doing here? I just want to go home’.”

Shanks admits the group were pushed to the limit by the tough Outward Bound instructors.

“At times you think, ‘oh, my gosh, I just want to punch you’,” she says of her instructors. “But you come away from it realising that, while they put you in some testing situations, they try to find your breaking point. It was good to be tested in a new environment and in completely different ways to what we are used to. They tailored it so that every single person is pushed out of their comfort zone by the end of the course.”

Over the last month Bike NZ, Swimming NZ and Rowing NZ have sent high performance teams to Outward Bound as a critical training step towards the London Olympics. While each course consisted of typical activities like rock climbing, sailing, tramping and the overnight solo experience, the focus was less on physical endurance and more on team building, resilience training, mental toughness and personal challenge.

One of the biggest adjustments for Shanks was the constant uncertainty, never knowing what would happen next. Like many athletes, cyclists live extremely regimented lives. On their training camps they are given daily schedules-when to eat, when to sleep, when to ride-often weeks in advance.

“I like to know what I am doing and where I am heading,” Shanks says, “but all that went out the window. They would say to us, ‘right, you are going out in the bush for two nights and have 15 minutes to get ready’.”

There was also the challenge of spending every waking hour- literally-with her team-mates.

“At one point we were given a groundsheet, a fly and sleeping bags and told to set up camp in the bush. All 14 of us were packed in like sardines trying to keep warm. You can’t help but get to know your team-mates.”

At another stage the group spent a night at sea, all squeezed together on an old boat. Even back in camp, the mixed group shared a communal bunkroom.

“As a team-building exercise, it is pretty unique and you could say pretty extreme,” Shanks says.

The athletes had the added test of “terrible conditions”, one of the worst April’s the Outward Bound staff could remember, with almost constant rain and gale force winds.

For Shanks, one of the greatest challenges was the high ropes, where she had to walk on a thin wire 5m above ground.

“I definitely had some moments up there,” she admits. “Obviously you are harnessed on but the mind seems to play some funny tricks when you are way up high and told to jump across a 2mgap.”

      

The dreaded early morning swims in the chilly Marlborough Sounds was another memorable experience. Jumping into freezing water is difficult enough but is compounded when the air temperature is five degrees and you have a cold shower afterwards to ‘warmup’.

“If there are 13 others jumping off the wharf into the water, you can’t really say no because they are all going to be screaming at you to get in the bloody water,” laughs Shanks.

There were also plenty of light hearted moments during the course. Shanks describes the scene on the boat: “There was no wind so we had to row, using these old-style oars. They don’t really work and we were all completely sleep-deprived.”

A naked backflip by Eddie Dawkins off the top of a launch was “one of the funnier moments”.

“He decided to get naked, which was a big shock for us all.”

  

As well as team building, Outward Bound is also about finding yourself and identifying your values. The cyclists spent two nights in the bush in complete individual isolation.

“I really enjoyed it,” says Shanks. “We are always on the go and in constantly changing environments. But there we had no reading material, no cell phones or i-pods and no option but to sit in the bush and just think. It was a good time for me to take stock of where I had been and where I wanted to go.”

After a month’s break, which included the Outward Bound course, Shanks was back on the bike last week ready for the long haul through to the London Olympics. The female track team have a camp in Invercargill starting next week, before Shanks heads to the US in June for three months of riding and racing.   

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