Living Life Without Regrets

 

JM:  That’s the last thing you want to see.

DH: Yeah. And perhaps the most shocking thing about it was this is a guy that I saw on the bobsled track for four years. Never knew he was Russian military, so, interesting. So how did you get into skeleton anyway?

JM:  Just by chance. I was on a self-guided tour with my parents who didn’t live in Calgary. It was their first visit to see where I was now calling home in the….. we’re going to call it the late February of 2002. This was one week after the 2002 Winter Olympic Games that concluded in Salt Lake City and I was still on cloud nine revelling in our men’s and women’s hockey team gold medals, which is what I sort of identified with at the time, being a hockey player from past. And I had a gentleman from my hometown, a hometown hero. My community is 1600 people and one of the guys from my hometown was on that men’s hockey team. His name is Theoren Fleury and he is the smallest player ever to play in the NHL. And as the smallest kid on the ice my entire hockey career and also having the smallest guy in the NHL from my hometown of 1600 people I can’t begin to tell you what that meant to me in terms of goal setting, in terms of aspirations, in terms of building resolve that big things could happen to little guys from little towns. Theoren was this shining beacon of hope to me and he had won an Olympic gold medal the week before with the men’s hockey team and I’m still in this sort of a drunken stupor of love and admiration for sports and Canadiana and Olympism and my parents came to town and we were doing a self-guided tour of Canada Olympic Park, the C.O.P, which you’re of course familiar with and going on over at the bobsled track I could hear this commotion and it was building in amplitude as it goes. I didn’t hear, I didn’t see anything rather above the short wall. So I just assumed that it was a luge race and I was like, mom, dad, come on, we have to go watch this luge race. This is what I’m going to try next. After I had just tried speed skating, this is going to be it, maybe and they were like, Ooh my God, why, why, why did we ever have you sort of a thing? And these were the sorts of sports that spoke to my heart and as we approached the track, I saw this sled come past me at about 125 kilometers per hour. The athlete on their stomach, face first, toes pointed, head draped over the end of their sled, hands at their side at this breakneck speed going into kreisel. And I thought that I was witnessing a horrible luge accident. And then another sled comes past and another one and another one and another one and they’re all in the same fashion and that was my first introduction to skeleton racing. I found out what it was, how I could try it and a week later I was on that same track doing my very first of four descents that night and that would be my only four runs that winter, in winter of 2002, I’d have to wait until that next fall to get back involved. I got a phone call out of the blue to come and do an early driving school to get my license. And before November I was in my first real international competition for the America’s Cup and that was in the late year of 2002 and that began my journey.

DH: Wow. So you saw it and you, are you a speed junkie? Let me ask you that first.

JM:  I was, I had gifted myself a tandem skydiving experience on the day that I graduated from college. Nobody would come with me. So I went by myself and I came home with this video and showed all my friends what I had done that day. And I very much enjoyed speed but I am the type of individual that doesn’t have a really long attention span either. So the metrics that are skeleton would just naturally dovetail quite nicely with who I am as an individual and it was serendipitous, let’s just say.

DH: I can see that. So you enjoy speed. I read that so you grew up as an athlete looking for a sport to do and skeleton discovered you, you discovered skeleton, how would you describe that?

JM: You know what? It’s one of those things, you can play with the words. Sometimes something will discover you but you’ll never discover anything without an act of participation in things that are outside your comfort zone, I believe and I believe that skeleton found me, but I had my eyes open and I was looking and I was an active participant in that quest for something and I wasn’t looking for anything growing up. I had all that I needed in terms of the types of things that would allow me to fill my time, stay out of trouble, and appease my parents in terms of just well, not destroying the house. And that was sports in hockey, golf, baseball, and whatever else we could access modestly in our really small rural town of Manitoba. But I was on the hunt for something when I moved to Calgary. My hockey playing days were over. I had been in the gym essentially trying to look better in a t-shirt type training, bodybuilding with not much success, as I’m sure you can tell being an endo or ectomorph body type. That’s a hard road at home for a guy like me. So, I was looking for a sport, something to test my mettle against other people to challenge myself to compete. And when I saw skeleton and then when I tried it, I didn’t have to look any further. I knew that I had found something that I could sink my teeth into, so to speak, that I could call my own and that I could run with. And I knew that, that was part of the recipe. I had to have those elements. It didn’t matter what it was, but I had to love it and I had to have passion for it because undoubtedly any journey that’s worth embarking on where you’ve got lofty goals and especially if it’s, you know, trying to represent your nation at that big bad sporting event that they call the Olympic circus with the five rings there’s going to be trials and tribulations and the only thing that’s going to ever see you through that is love and passion.

DH: So, you mentioned some really salient points there. Let me try and go through some of them. You said that you have to be active in the discovery of whatever it is that you are trying to discover or discovers you. Is that the message you would give to say a young kid who’s leaving high school or a mother who’s looking to go back in the job field or someone looking to switch career perhaps? How do they go about their search?

JM:  14:15 There’s a number of ways of looking at it. And I’ve heard some people say that you have to fail faster…. that failure is inevitable, so fail faster. It’s about finding out all the things that you don’t want to do and when you’re active in an approach, when you’re active in a quest, in a designed effort to find something, it’s more about finding out along the way what it is that you don’t want because quite often you don’t necessarily know….. your vision isn’t 100% solidified. It’s a feeling more than anything, an impetus of hope in that direction. And if you can step into it without having a clear vision of where you’re going to end up, that’s the right process to be on. That’s the right thing to have. You don’t have to know where you’re going to end up. That’s not the point of the exercise. The point of the exercise is to do, to get out there, to practice, to fail faster, to try all the things that you maybe want to do and then learn what it is that you don’t want. Because through that approach, through that exercise and failing through trying things, through discovery, you will narrow it down quite dramatically and it will come into focus and it will become clearer through that active approach. And it’s really hard to do sometimes because of that fear. The fear of the unknown, the fear. Fear is basically the root cause of everything that is undesirable in our lives. But when we can embrace fear, when we can lean into it, when we can leverage it, that’s when I think the magic happens, man.

DH: Yeah, man. Cool. Yeah. Let’s jump back to Manitoba real quick. 1600 people, you said live in your town and from that small town, the two small guys, perhaps the two smallest guys in the town came back with two Olympic gold medals, huh?

JM:  Yep.

DH: What does that say, Jon, about conventional wisdom, about what the experts would say about what it is that we can or cannot do? Here it is that Theoren Fleury is a guy that many people deemed too small to play in the NHL but he did and went on to inspire you to become an Olympic champion yourself.

JM:  I’m glad you asked that. Just in the asking of the question. I’m getting goose bumps, for real. That’s not being contrived. The hairs on my arms are standing up on end because of what I know. And what I know is, is that belief. Belief is the underlying root cause of anything that is manifested. Anything that is realized and it’s belief. Why does a small, small island nation of Jamaica produce the best sprinters, the world over? It’s not necessarily because they’re intrinsically different than other small perhaps Island nations. It’s because they’ve been shown, they’ve been shown a pathway to success. They idolize, revere and hold up those who have embodied these traits of sprinting ideals. And then from that, you build a strong base of education and sprint coaches. And then you can imbibe students coming up through the ranks from all levels that this is a means to an end. This is a means by which we can celebrate our national identity on the world stage because we have identified something that we’re gifted at, we’re good at, and we can breathe life into individuals who never would have had a chance to do sprinting on the world stage if it weren’t for the fact that they were here in Jamaica. And it’s the same thing with Russell, Manitoba. We have a community of people that led us to believe that we were more than just the basic individuals that we could be more as the sum of our parts. And when we were playing team sports, growing up, hockey was the pathway forward for anybody that was looking for athletic success in these small towns because that’s where the vast majority of the resources and talents laid in coaching. And if you were a part of our hockey team, my hockey team growing up, you would have been proxy to eight provincial gold medals of varying degrees and a Western Canadian Bantam bronze medal and that’s from a town of 1600 people. And we were punching way above our weight because our parents gave us the opportunity because we believed and because there were examples before us, of success and we saw them. And when you’re the smallest kid in your class and you see the guy from your hometown playing against giants, you somehow say to yourself that, this is a possibility. It’s not a pie in the sky type thinking that it is rooted in reality and if it can happen to him, if he’s from my hometown, surely if I use some of the things that I know that he did like hard work, dedication, then I too can prevail and I can have some level of success. And I think that it’s telling of what the power of belief can do to a community and when a community believes in individuals the whole ship rises.

DH: Indeed. Belief, having a community believing in you, you believing in yourself. The word I tend to use as you referred to Jamaica and sprinting is the word “expectation”. And I think you do well and people tend to rise to the expectation that others have of them because you create that same level of expectation in yourself as well. And so, whether it’s sports or sales or whatever it is just having that belief and developing that high level of expectation that you’re going to do well and perhaps not just do well but dominate definitely will impact performance for sure. You mentioned the word fear and when I think of bobsledding one of the words that come to mind is fear because I’m not like you, a speed junkie. I’m actually scared of speed and height. So, I guess I’m either not that well-educated or that smart, I’m not sure which it is, but talk to us Jon a little bit about fear, the role it plays and you started alluding to it earlier, but the role it plays in our ability to succeed or not succeed.

JM:  I think our ability to embrace fear is a strong marker for our ability to achieve a level of success that we can be proud of. And if we can embrace the fear, there is no point in telling ourselves that we’re not afraid. There is no point in trying to deny something that is real and fear, wherever it’s coming from, whether it is rooted in reality or if you’re scared of say getting struck by lightning, which is pretty unrealistic and not a strong possibility, your body’s reaction to that fear is the same. You cannot deny it, but training your body to maybe ease into it, to embrace it, to leverage it and to not have it be debilitating. Maybe we can use the example of public speaking, for instance. When you get up on stage, Devon, do you ever get a sense of butterflies in your stomach? And I only ask that because I still do. After having done countless presentations, do you get that nervous?

JM:  It’s a little bit like bobsledding I get it before I go on stage.

JM:  Like almost immediately before when they start to read your bio, the nervous anticipation. When I was sliding, I used to get nervous pee’s and yawn a little bit because my breathing would get messed up. And your body yawning is a physiological response to improper breathing but the nervous pee’s, that sort of thing……none of this would cause me to dwell on the fact that I was nervous. I would embrace it. I would ease into that. It meant that I cared. And if I’m going on stage and I have nervous anticipation and I touch my palm with my fingertip and I can feel it slightly sweating, that isn’t debilitating for me. That is something that I almost expect now and I look for and I embrace because it means that I care. And when it stops happening, it means that I don’t give two hoots anymore.

DH: I get worried if I don’t feel nervous, yeah.

DH: Yeah, that’s just it. Like why aren’t I nervous? Do I not give a shit like what’s happening? I need to get my headspace right. Like I need to be nervous almost. And that sense of nervous anticipation, whether it’s talking to a stranger, asking for a promotion, asking for a job, going to an interview, embrace that sense of uneasiness, make it something that you’re familiar with. And then when it is familiar, familier,( I’m going to add some French in here)…..then it doesn’t have to be a stranger anymore. You can welcome this sense of uneasiness into your home like it’s a good buddy from across the street. You’re going to have a pint. You know that as soon as your lips start moving, buddy’s going to disappear. He’s out the door. He doesn’t want to listen to you talk at all. He’s heard this a thousand times. He’s just here to remind you that, yeah, you care. Yeah, this is important to you and yeah, you’ve got to do the work. You’ve got to continue to invest in yourself because expecting it to go away, I think is the wrong mindset, use fear.

DH: Indeed. Yeah. So we have to embrace it. We have to, as you say, invite it in acknowledge that it exists because doing otherwise, I guess makes us more fearful, disempowers us and then obviously it causes us not to achieve.

JM:  You can lie to your landlord, but you cannot lie to yourself. You always know you’re talking smack and your body will, it’ll shut you down. Whether it’s not acknowledging the fact that you’ve got life’s stresses that are weighing down upon you heavily. Whether it’s somebody else’s drama, trauma that you are taking on. If you don’t acknowledge it your body will, it’ll tell you in really profound ways and if you let it go too long, sometimes it gets too far.

DH: There you go. So we were talking about achievement earlier. So you started skeleton in 2002. You’re at the Olympics in 2010, eight years later. I’m assuming you didn’t find yourself a natural, so to speak when it came on to skeleton, was there a steep learning curve? What were some of the challenges you had there?

JM:  That has to be part and parcel of success, it’s really sucking in the beginning because I was honestly probably the worst of all the new recruits. In the year that I came in, there was a heavy push to find new athletes. It wasn’t for another year and a half that would mark Vancouver…. Whistler being awarded the 2010 Games. That happened on July the third of 2003. So it was about a year and a half after I discovered the sport for myself that I would get to set that “BHAG”, that Big Hairy Audacious Goal in seven years’ time being the 2010 games but getting involved and learning the sport it was I didn’t know where it was going to lead until the 3rd of July, 2003 and on that day I made that goal even though I was still really, really sucky and I had to battle. It took two seasons really, where I had my ass handed to me. I would get beat down. I didn’t get it. I was slower than a lot of all the new people, in the second season, I was slower than some of the people that had just started that year by the end of the year. And I was really frustrated and I lost my sled seven times at the last race of the season in Lake Placid, New York, my very first time there, I crashed six times out of, [unclear 00:26:40] shady two at 110 kilometers per hour hitting that short wall, coming out of that corner too early. And when you hit that short wall on a skeleton sled you get tipped up and over and so your backside hits the adjacent wall. And so I hit that adjacent wall on the left side seven times that week, losing my sled, not getting to finish that run. My entire left side of my body was bruised from the top of my shoulder to my ass cheek, which can sometimes take a month for a bruise to reveal itself was completely purple and black down my quad, my calf, and my ankle. And I was terrified, absolutely terrified to push off from the top because I knew that, I mean, it’s not a Nintendo game. You can’t press reset.

DH: This is true.

JM:  You can’t hit reset. It’s you are, and even more so defining and painful in a bobsled, but on a skeleton sled, you don’t get buried in it, but you do get your suit melted to your skin. You do have to use friction to come to a complete stop on your toes or side or backside, wherever you are. And I did battle attrition that week, finally, on the last race I did two complete runs, but on the first race, the first day I made it through that hard spot was celebrating almost in my helmet. Then corner 14 came before the chicane and smashed the corner into me, lost my sled. So I only did two safe runs at the very end of the week. My last two race runs. I retired that sled, gave it back to its owner and I went home. I bought some new equipment. I got a sled that summer of my own and a new helmet. I came out that next fall and I rounded a corner. I rounded a corner in terms of personal development and I began to realize progress at a rate that I could be happy with, that I could celebrate more small victories, that I could be imbibed with more confidence through some better progression because I was really struggling. But in that beginning, it was just the belief that I was never the worst athlete at anything in my life was all that kept me going. I had always at least been average and never the worst. And I didn’t believe that this was all the sport of skeleton held for me was to be the worst and I had to just get past that. And once I was not the worst anymore I began to celebrate those small victories, that nuanced development focused on the things that I wasn’t doing right, but imbibed myself with that confidence for the things that were going right and that built up like layers of an onion. Each layer, each experience, each victory, adding layers of confidence to me. And that’s what allowed me to continue to steadily develop for those next seven years and progress all the way through to 2010 which was where I had to be on point and execute to the best of my ability.

DH: Right. You said something really interesting, you just mentioned that you focused on and celebrated the things that you are doing well, but didn’t basically beat yourself up for the things that you weren’t doing so well, correct?

JM:  No, that’s where you have to focus. Your attention for improvement is on the areas where you’re deficient but if you don’t celebrate the small things that you’re doing right, and this is right out of one of my presentations. It’s not like I’m just talking about this for the first time. This is basically the core of my public presentations,  is developing self-efficacy or confidence but this is one of the pillars and the fact that if we don’t celebrate the small victories, then there’s nothing positive left and it becomes overwhelming. And if you’re looking at today’s world, for instance, the pervasiveness of technology, using Zoom, now that we’re on here right now, when I first got my first request for a podcast, it was almost overwhelming because I was like, I have to download stuff on my computer. Like I don’t know how to do this, man. But if I can celebrate the fact that I was able to turn my computer on, maybe I’ll be able to find the resolve to learn how to download zoom and sure enough, here we are. But if you don’t celebrate the small victories, the world becomes unscalable pretty quickly. It becomes overwhelming pretty quick because everything is so new. Everything is on hyper-speed with development and AI and whatever it is. Technology is pervasive in our lives now. So, celebrate what you do. Leverage now,  well,  what you do understand and know that you’ve got to understand your Hotmail account before you knew it. The rest of it will reveal itself in due time and if you just keep plugging away, you’ll figure it all out but the celebration of small victories keeps things scalable and manageable and I needed that, especially in the beginning when everything was so new in skeleton and everything was overwhelming.

DH: Yeah. I often speak a lot as well about the fact that we are so good at beating ourselves up for the things that we don’t do well and we neglect to acknowledge and celebrate our successes. And that’s the thing, our ability to celebrate those successes will make a huge difference in our ability to persist, to keep on pushing, as I like to say. I’m curious, of the people who started out with you in skeleton, how many of them not necessarily made the Olympic team but were still sliding come 2010?

JM:  A handful, a small handful. That had started exactly the same time I did…. maybe none. The year after there were two at those 2010 Games and one of those athletes would realize the dream of going to the Games in 2014 but from when I started in 2002, 2014 was the end of the line for all of those athletes. There was only one left and there were only three of us there in 2010.

DH: Imagine that. So I mean, it’s an important lesson I think for all of us, Jon because when you started out, as you said, you sucked and I point that out to people all the time, that you know what? Most of what we need to succeed in life is skill-based. And what do we know about skills? They are things you learn, you practice, you develop them, but initially, you suck but if you are able to kind of hang in there and keep on pushing your way, keep learning, keep celebrating the small successes and just embrace the failure. Embrace the fear, embrace the fact that, you know what, I’m not doing this thing so well now, but I can learn and get better. You can eventually become champion as you did. The other people you started out with, you spoke about turning the corner in terms of personal development. They obviously didn’t turn the corner in that way.

JM:  You know what? And here’s the funny thing, you can become a champion and not even be the best. I wasn’t the best.

DH: The champion is often the guy who is the best on that day though.

JM:  That’s right. And I wasn’t the best athlete in the world though. That is always will be Martins Dukurs of Latvia. He’s the best skeleton racer of all time and one of the most dominant athletes in any sport in the world. When you’re talking over the last decade, having individually won over 80 world cup medals or something like that and 60 race victories, he is the best, but you don’t have to be the best to beat the best. You just have to be the best version of yourself on the day that you deem to matter most and in my game, I was racing the clock, I was never racing Martins Dukurs and he made one small error in four runs, 64 corners, three minutes, 23.7 seconds of total sliding time and it came down to the very final corner on the very final run. And blink your eyes there, Devon.

DH: Yeah, seven-hundredths of a second.

JM:  A tenth and I won by less than the blink of an eye, seven-hundredths of a second separates you having this conversation with somebody else today on your podcast and me probably being on the showroom floor of the car dealership right now hustling and selling cars.

DH: There you go, absolutely. So talk to me about one, what it means to you to represent your nation at the Olympic Games and two, dude, winning on home soil.

JM:  The desire to represent Canada was first. That started way back when I probably realized that I wasn’t going to be an NHL hockey player and I was in Barrie, Ontario, which is where I had done three years of schooling from ‘97 to 2000. I was there for, the Games were on in Sydney, 2000 summer games. My sister was at those Games because she was in Australia on a teacher exchange and she was watching beach volleyball and I knew she was there and I was watching on my TV at graduation in Barrie, we’d flown up from Texas where I’d continued my schooling and it was then that I decided that I wanted to go to the Games. I had the tattoo of a maple leaf on my heart. I had Canada decorated above it. I had been to the unity rally that we held in our country in 1995 for the Quebec referendum that decided whether Quebec was going to secede from Confederation and tear apart our entire fabric of our country and change it into something less. I’ve been there as a 16 year old unchaperoned with two friends that we’d traveled from Manitoba on Air Canada to go to Montreal to show our support for the no for separation. And so to give you an idea of where my head was at as a patriotic Canadian, these were the types of things that I was invested in, that I was committed to in terms of my giving of myself and so representing Canada on the world stage was the be-all and end-all for me. I can’t think of now anything better to do a maybe standing up for your country during an invasion. Do you know what I mean? And I thankfully have never had to do that. So this was the ultimate for me, finding a vehicle like skeleton racing was the means to an end. And then that passion became an opportunity to represent my country on home soil that you can’t script that stuff, brother. That’s Hollywood screenwriter stuff right there and the fashion in which it happened, the whole playing out of the scenario, then the beer walk.

DH: Well before we get to the beer walk talk to me about the celebration because I know there was a part of you that felt embarrassed that you celebrated in that way as you wanted to be a gracious winner.

JM:  We can’t always control our reactions to things and nobody expected anything different of me, but as an individual that wants to make sure that A, my words are considerate and that I use them carefully because words mean things and I don’t like to have my words misconstrued in their meaning even when I’m being a herb and trying to make jokes but nobody expected much different of me but I did need to convey that message of apology, an apologetic statement to Martins quickly thereafter because when somebody else loses something like Martins had just done, he was in the gold medal leader position going into the final run. He made a small driving error and lost his lead to me by the finish line and I had a very exuberant reaction to it. I feel that that’s sometimes in bad taste to cheer overzealously for someone else’s loss. Had I been in the leader position, kept it, held it, and then pumped my fist wildly when I got to the finish line in victory. Nobody would have expected anything different of me, but I do expect something of myself and maybe if I had been an observer of that, I would have been inclined to think that yeah, that’s the kind of guy that I’d like to have a pint with somebody that will be self-effacing and own something. And that’s something that I learned growing up in Russell, Manitoba, that we have to own 110% of our actions and we have to take responsibility for them and have ownership even for when they’re not good. And I learned that growing up from my folks in small-town, Russell and I did own it and I did say sorry for that exuberant celebration but I will never say sorry for coming for you. I will never say sorry for wanting to win. And that was something that I think changed. Canadians, we always say sorry, that shit is in our DNA, we can’t stop it but it’s what we apologize for that I think is important. And I will never apologize for coming to win for realizing something that I am wanting desiring and I will be vocal about that in a typically Canadian way.

DH: So, I mean I think it’s very generous, very conservative of you to be thinking about the guy who just lost the gold to you, so to speak.

JM:  You don’t get to have a competition without other participants and if it’s just you and a clock and nobody to race against, boring.

DH: Yeah, it is boring. There’s no drive. The passion gets lessened. And so, yeah, I just see it as a very spontaneous celebration, excitement, which I think all of us do. If you just kind of ended up at the top of the sales leader board at the end of the year, you passed this guy by a buck, then because it’s spontaneous it’s not that you’re celebrating their loss, you’re celebrating your victory. So congrats on that. So, tell us about the beer walk, man.

JM:  All that stuff played out. In my mind’s eye, not the result, but the execution, the way that I pictured my game plan, I executed near perfectly and that’s what I needed to be and the rest of it was just reaction. I had been, I am perhaps a bit of a character and was lucky enough that I was at the ripe old age of 30. I was comfortable in my own skin and certainly comfortable enough behind a microphone from having done auctioneering and being in front of an audience selling cars to be myself and not really care or pull any punches in terms of my unbridled enthusiasm for celebrating what we had achieved…….. that together as a country with my fellow countrymen and you’re feeding off of everybody’s energy in an instance like that. And so I was just carrying on and I was thinking, nah, you know what’d be better than anything right now? I wasn’t saying this out loud, but it was manifest destiny. I was thinking, oh, I’d love a beer. And then all of a sudden this ginormous pitcher just materializes out of nowhere being held by this angelic figure that I refer to now as my “Beer Angel”. She almost knocked out an RCMP officer, one of our cops that we got here in Canada with this pitcher and thrust it into my hand and it was already on its way to my mouth before it even left her hand. And I drank at least a quarter of that pitcher because in Manitoba, the only way that you can say thank you for this free beer that you’ve just purchased for me is to take a good hardy swill of it and that says, thanks enough to the purveyor of the said pitcher. But that was a moment that my life was pretty linear.

DH: A very Canadian moment, I would say.

JM:  Very Canadian moment. That was the reaction or the result of a personal achievement. And what I think granted other Canadians access to that moment was me just being myself, being Jonny from Russell, Manitoba drinking half a pitcher of beer in one fell swoop. And everybody could see themselves in that moment. Whether it was a single mom, a firefighter, a fire person, a police officer, a teacher, a custodian. Everybody can see themselves celebrating a milestone, a goal achieved, some momentous moment in their lives in a typically Canadian way with a frosty pitcher of beer. Not everybody can see themselves at the Games. Not everybody can see themselves going headfirst down a frozen toilet shoot on a crazy carpet with rails at 146 kilometers per hour but everybody can see themselves in that moment. And I think it granted access perhaps to a moment or to me that people otherwise didn’t appreciate before and it took my life what would’ve been continuing onto the medal podium to getting the gold to saying thank you to something different. And when people saw that there was maybe something, some remnant of me left behind, that when opportunities presented themselves down the road to have a speaker come or to maybe consider somebody for a hosting position of this show, which is celebration of our country, our resources, our people, our places, the greatest things that our country has to offer maybe there we can get some simple herb that we can actually get to jump off this enormous precipice with a smile on his face and go you should try this! And they found them in me and, Devon, man, I couldn’t have found a sweeter gig, more tailor suited to me as an individual than to showcase Canada to Canadians in this role of host. And it’s my opportunity to be a part of a team now because I’m not an athlete anymore. I don’t have the crew to roll around with. So this is my connection and I treasure it.

DH: Really cool. Man, there’s so much more I want to  talk about but I think we need to be mindful of time. We’re probably going to have to do a part two, but let’s talk about failure a little bit because you win in 2010 and the expectation is that you’re going to be in Sochi to defend, but you didn’t even make the 2014 team.

JM: That’s right. You see the smile on my face, man. I wish we could have flashed forwarded in 2014 to this moment with a smile on my face. But I’ll say it to you like this, disappointment is fleeting. The disappointment here today is gone tomorrow. Regrets? Regrets….there are deep lacerations. That’s the stuff that you think about on your deathbed. That’s the stuff that haunts you, regrets. I have zero regrets about 2014. I didn’t do everything right. No, not by any stretch of the imagination. I did a lot of things really well, but ultimately I left myself in a position to fall short of that goal of representing our Olympic gold medal and defending our country’s position as Olympic champion. And I didn’t even get to do that because my quest for success in 2014 led me down a path to develop my own sled, my own equipment. And I said to one of my children yesterday, maybe my dog I said, I think it was Jackson and I said, you got to learn to collaborate with people to work together towards a goal. I said dad learned this the hard way. He didn’t work collectively with enough people in 2014. I tried to keep things for myself because I had laid out a large portion of sweat equity, time and investment. And when I found myself with the opportunity to collaborate, I said no, because I didn’t want to give everybody else all that I had worked hard for just carte blanche and that was the wrong mentality that I think potentially led to my disappointment, my not being able to realize that goal of representing Canada in 2014. And it was not for the wrong reasons. I was trying to do well by me and work diligently. Like in terms of physical preparations, Devon, I was pushing faster in 2014 realizing PB’s at the start than my whole career. I finished faster at the age of 34 than I had been pushing even at the age of 30. But where I was deficient was in my kit, my sled. And what hindsight has proven is that I should have focused on the runners underneath the sled the tube steel and left the sled itself alone but I focused on the sled, didn’t invest in the runners and sadly I wasn’t comfortable enough with my equipment to have it be like an extension of my body and that’s where you need to be with that sled. It needs to be a part of you, and I couldn’t get there with the time that I had. And so it’s unfinished business. I’ve still perhaps got to finish what I started and build a competitive sled but I didn’t and I was disappointed with not going to those games in 2014, but it taught me a lot. And I take those lessons with me today and I wear them on my sleeve and I have to own that stuff that I didn’t do right.

DH: Yeah. Dude, a really good place to end because when people see Olympians and especially Olympic champions, they tend sometimes to see these superhumans and what you are saying is that I’m as human as you are. I have goals and dreams and aspirations and I work hard to achieve them and sometimes I fall short. But as you just said, disappointment is fleeting and I say failure isn’t fatal. What you do is that you learn from it and you move on but in the process, you still inspired yourself to keep moving, keep on pushing, and you inspire others to do the same. So Jon, yeah, we’re going to have to have a part two at some stage.

JM: I look forward to round two, Devon.

DH: Yeah, man. So thank you so much for spending time with us, sharing your wisdom and your experiences on Keep On Pushing.

JM:  Well, I’ll tell you what, thank you very much from a Canadian kid that watched Cool Runnings as a kid, man.

DH: Now you’re making me sound old, what’s going on?

JM:  I didn’t even realize that I was being inspired by a story that wasn’t just something that maybe you had seen but you were a part of. I mean, it paved the way and having that story resonate with Canadians being in proximity to that track in Calgary and knowing that like, I knew more about you guys than I did the Canadian program and the Canadian bobsledders and so you really did do a lot for the sliding community, the sliding world and Olympism as a whole. Thank you.

DH: It’s all good, man. Thank you, it was our pleasure although we finished on our head that’s another story. It’s been great to have you on Jon. We want to wish you all the best of success in 2020. As I tell people, I’m wishing you plenty, plenty.

JM: Plenty, plenty in 2020 is the future brother. When you say that out loud, 2020, like, where’re our flying cars?

DH:  I know, I know. I know. Exactly, but until then, Keep On Pushing