Olympic champion Caitlin Regal has switched off her tracking devices, taking a break from the relentless numbers governing her canoeing career. And she's inspiring a new era of young women to follow her. Part five of LockerRoom's Out into the Open series.
Caitlin Regal, freshly minted Olympic gold medallist, stands on the sand at Red Beach on the Whangaparaoa Peninsula and watches her group of girls run off into the surf.
It’s the exact spot where it all began for her; the five-year-old nipper, becoming a lifeguard at 14, and then falling in love with surf ski paddling.
Regal is giving back to her old Red Beach club this summer as a surf lifesaving coach.
She sees a couple of the girls look down at their watches as they run, and feels a flicker of concern.
“I’m thinking ‘You don’t need to do that stuff’,” she says.
Regal wants these young women to simply enjoy themselves. Not to take sport “too seriously, too soon”. Not to be too caught up in the numbers bombarding them from their watch faces, phone screens and bathroom scales.
Regal readily admits she’s had to learn to practise what she preaches. Since returning from the Tokyo Olympics – her luggage that little heavier with a gold medal from the K2 500m with Lisa Carrington – she’s taken a break from paddling.
Nursing a recurring back injury that’s lingered for 15 years, Regal is easing herself back into exercise.
She’s been doing a bit of running from her North Shore home, sometimes with her beloved dog, Tahi. But usually without her watch – the gadget that’s been tracking her every movement for years.
“We’re in a system where everything is documented, and we’re taught what good numbers and bad numbers are. It’s part of performance, and how you get better,” says Regal, a self-confessed perfectionist. “It’s a way of affirming whether you’re good or bad - but it’s not always that plain and simple.
“Even recently, I felt I had to do a certain amount of training sessions during the week because that’s what I’d usually do. But now for me, with a back injury, it’s about waking up and deciding what’s best for me - without the pressure of ‘I need to train because it needs to be uploaded to Strava’, or ‘I need to train or else I will gain weight’.
“So, I’ve been running without my watch, without anything tracking me. Now I run for as long as my body wants to go.”
She challenges others to do the same - to take away 'external affirmations', even if for just one day, through her Mind Matters blog.
"Surely I am not the only one that has it programmed into me to track every bit of exercise and in turn give myself a sense of accomplishment or failure, when really it shouldn't be pass or fail. You are literally going outside to keep healthy. Is that not success in itself?"
Regal is in no hurry to either return to Lake Pupuke in her kayak, or to commit herself to another three years of training towards the Paris 2024 Olympics.
Instead, she’s turned her focus to completing her Master’s degree, with her thesis on wellbeing in sport. Her studies have opened her eyes to her own life - as an athlete, and more importantly, as a person.
It’s something her coach, Gordon Walker, is always impressing on New Zealand’s elite paddlers. “He doesn’t want us to do sport just to become good at sport,” Regal says. “He wants us to become great people.”
Bringing balance to her boat
Regal has found herself in this boat before. In 2017, she thought long and hard about quitting canoe sprinting.
“I had my own challenges in sport, and I considered my retirement. I was quite young, and I wasn’t having a good time,” says Regal, who back then was Caitlin Ryan (she married Nick Regal in January).
She was guilty of putting too much emphasis on the numbers – in this case, her results. She'd be overwhelmed with disappointment if she didn’t win. She struggled to manage her life off the water.
To stay in the sport, Regal had to find balance. “As athletes, we find it so hard to do everything – the social side, the family, the normal life stuff that’s really important,” she says. “Once I put my emphasis on that, I really found my love for sport again.”
Later that year, Regal joined Carrington in the K2, and they won the 500m world title in the Czech Republic. Four years later, at her second Games, she became an Olympic champion.
Of course, she wouldn’t have that gold medal if she’d retired at 25, she says. “And I also wouldn’t have the learnings that got me to Tokyo. That’s what’s really important. I was so lucky having great people around me who helped guide me; not everyone gets that.”
Two of those people are her parents, Helene and Tere. When Regal reached the end of high school and faced a career decision, her parents drew up a rule: if she wanted to pursue a professional sporting career, she had to have a degree. It applied to her siblings, too.
“We had to show them we were working towards something,” Regal says. “It was about the impact that this sporting lifestyle can have on wellbeing, particularly when you’re leaving it.
“I was 21 when I started kayaking, and I got to experience some awesome things as a teenager, because my parents never pushed me to be too involved in performing. They wanted me to have balance.”
So Regal went to the Auckland University of Technology, and studied for a bachelor of science, majoring in oral health. For five years, she worked part-time as a dental hygienist and therapist, helping kids with dental anxiety.
But then she found dentistry wasn’t something she wanted to do for the rest of her life. So she went back to study, doing her Master of Professional Practice through Otago Polytechnic.
“You don’t need to be a professional athlete at 16 or 17 to win an Olympic gold medal. "
Regal has always been intrigued by the wellbeing of athletes, particularly sportswomen.
“It’s quite unique. We have the same wellbeing challenges as most females, but sport creates a pressure cooker,” she says. “You have expectations in performance on a daily basis, and on top of that you’re in the public eye, you’re concerned with body image. The pressure is intensified for female athletes.”
Regal admits she’s learned a lot about herself during her studies.
“I really want to be much more than just a performance. I really want people to know me for who I am, not just as Caitlin Regal, the athlete who won gold in Tokyo,” she says.
She remembers feeling offended when her Master’s supervisor told her she had a 'strong athlete identity'.
“I thought she was saying I had nothing else,” Regal says. “We talked about it - athlete identity, self and perfectionism. And it made me think about how I wanted to do things and what was enough. That was huge learning, understanding that I wanted to have more than just an athlete identity.
“And that’s where I’ve taken steps to reconnect with friends. I have an amazing husband and an awesome dog, too. It was about taking time to make sure my whole identity wasn't wrapped around being an athlete, and being perfect at everything."
She's found studies that show those who have a high athlete identity are more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression, after an injury or when they leave sport.
No rush into the future
Regal is about to turn 30, and knows she has to think seriously about what happens next. Carrington has already announced she’ll be returning for her fourth Olympics in 2024, but Regal isn’t quite ready to join her yet.
“It’s not an easy decision for a female,” Regal says. “My sport is super supportive if we want to have a family as well as do sport. But I need to understand what’s right for me, and I don’t have to rush to get back into a boat straight away. I want to be sure of my decisions.
“People say it’s only three years, but it’s a huge three-year commitment for everyone around you – your family, your friends and for yourself.”
Usually she would rush back onto the water after a major campaign, but she knows that’s not the right move for this stage of her life.
She’s still keeping fit and even jumping on a surf ski again at the Red Beach club. “That’s feeding me right now, while I’m processing what just happened at the Olympics, and what is there for me now? That’s something only I can figure out,” she says.
Regal loves being involved in surf lifesaving again, a sport that’s played such a huge part in her life. She’s successfully encouraged old ‘clubbie’ mates to return too. “We were all like family growing up at the surf club, so getting some of the old girls and guys back has been really cool.”
Coaching her group of girls has also been special for Regal, who’s able to share all that she’s learned as a professional athlete.
“There are some things I did really well without knowing at a young age. That was not taking things too seriously, too soon. At a young age, especially for a female, you should turn up for your friends, turn up to enjoy sport with other people,” she says.
“You don’t need to be a professional athlete at 16 or 17 to win an Olympic gold medal.
“Humans want interaction, they want to be social, and you don’t want to miss out on those 10 years. They’re so important. When you get to the level where we’re at and it gets really hard to nurture the relationships as much as you’d like."
She has wisdom for their mums and dads, too. “We need to let parents know it’s okay for your kid not to be at every training every single day,” she says.
“So parents, give your kids space too, because it’s just as important.”
