Girl on the River
Girl on the River
Steven Dowd on spinal cord injury, challenge, resilience and the Endurow Challenge
Ep.10 Steven Dowd insists he's just an ordinary guy. But once you've listened to this episode, I think you'll agree that he has shown himself capable of extraordinary resilience in the face of monumental challenges. Hit by a spinal cord injury at the age of just 37, he has used it as an opportunity for growth and connection. Oh, and he also has the most incredibly soothing voice - I seriously think he should be the Headspace narrator!!!
In this episode we discuss:
- Steven's life before his injury
- The accident that left him paralysed and what followed
- The life-changing clinical trial he signed up for
- His 200 day vow to his wife - and how he achieved it
- His approach to getting through the dark times
- Why there's no hierarchy of challenges
- How the Endurow Challenge was born
- How you can get involved
- What he's learned from his remarkable podcast guests
Sign up for Endurow Challenge here
You can sponsor me here (even £1 would be SO MUCH appreciated)
Find Steven's excellent podcast here.
Learn more about Wings for Life here.
Read about the ISCoPE clinical trial that helped Steven here.
You can find out more about Steven and book him as a motivational speaker here.
This is Girl on the River, the Podcast. Whole crew, come forward to row. Hello, and welcome back to Girl on the River the Podcast where we have reached a landmark - we have reached the 10th episode. So thank you so much for continuing to tune in. I hope you're all doing okay and bearing up. For those of you whose clubs have been flooded, and I know some of them have for the first time ever, I really do feel your pain. My club is currently underwater, and there's a major clear up operation to come, hot on the heels of the last one. But if there's one thing I have learned from this week's guests, it's the importance of seeing the positives in any situation. So I'm making a point of being thankful that the boats are all safe, and there's no major damage done until 2016. Steven Dowd was a regular guy working in the city, occasionally meeting rowers as part of his work in recruitment, but otherwise having nothing to do with rowing. But one bright morning, everything changed for him. He is now a motivational speaker and an ambassador for the Wings for Life charity. And he's also the founder of the Endurow Challenge, which is the world's largest global indoor rowing charity challenge, which is taking place on the sixth of February this year, and is open to absolutely everybody. And here he is. Welcome to the podcast.
Steven Dowd:Hi, Patricia.
Patricia Carswell:It's really nice to have you on. And the first thing I need to know is how lockdown is going because I know that you're homeschooling, and I know that it's cold and dark, and everything's a bit miserable. So how are you bearing up?
Steven Dowd:Well, probably in a very similar way to most people, really. It is cold and dark, it is miserable. But you know what? We're spending time with the family, which we wouldn't have otherwise done. So taking a very Zen approach to long division, which apparently is a thing that they need to teach in four or five different ways these days. So I'm doing my homework before I teach the homework to our little one, my granddaughter who's 10, lives with us. So yeah, that's been fun on the homeschooling front. And other than that, just getting through it, really, but enjoying the time and having the ability to spend time with family is a bit of a godsend we weren't expecting.
Patricia Carswell:Yeah, I'm hearing this from a lot of people that alongside all the misery and the worry, there are some positives to take from it. I have a student son home from university who is climbing the walls, but it is actually nice to have some time together. Now we are here because of something that happened in 2016 that changed your life. But I'd like to start by talking about what your life was like before what you did, what sort of person you were, what your interests were.
Steven Dowd:Well, I suppose I'm just an everyday guy, right? So part of my story, which I think people find compelling, is I am them in many ways. I don't have superhuman DNA or whatever. I'm just a regular guy. But I used to work for a bank that a lot of people in rowing will know. It's the Bank of New York Mellon. So BNY Mellon who sponsor the Boat Race here in the UK, I was recruitment head for the EMEA region, which is Europe, Middle East and Africa, and also took on some of their APEC stuff. - so ex US effectively, and was running recruitment for investment management out of out of London. And so yeah, regular guy, good job in the city, enjoying my time, I was doing crazy, ridiculous 12, 13 hour days and introducing myself to my wife on weekends and all the things that working in financial services tend to demand of you. But other than that, it was normal guy, family, friends career, just kind of making my way in the world. Really.
Patricia Carswell:And were you a sporty kind of person?
Steven Dowd:No, massively, actually not at all. I am not and I wasn't unfit, but I wasn't like a gym bunny or anything. I'd work out a little bit here and there but it was almost cursory, really, just to say that I had a gym membership was almost enough. You know what it's like?
Patricia Carswell:Oh yeah, I have been there.
Steven Dowd:Yeah, absolutely. That's how gyms make their money. Actually, most people buy the membership about now and then totally don't use it for six months. But uh, so I was that guy. But I was talked into training for Ride London in 2016 by one of the guys on my team, so a guy called Dan - he's, he really is an Iron Man type. You know, he's, he's done everything. He's been everywhere. He's done it all quicker than everybody else and, and fair play to him because all those things are true. But he said to me, I really want to get involved in Ride London. You'd love it. Because we work for BNY Mellon we could be sponsored to get tickets, so we know we'll definitely get a place. So why don't we do that?
Patricia Carswell:And tell me tell me what Ride London is for anyone who hasn't come across it.
Steven Dowd:So Ride London is a charity bike ride. And it's 100 miles in in its total, you go around the London landmarks. They close all the roads down in London, you go around those landmarks up into the Surrey Hills and back again. And the whole, the whole loop is about 100 miles. They do different versions of it, but the one we were doing was 100 miles. So yeah, I was training for Ride London. So I did what self respecting boys do and went out and bought the most expensive carbon fibre bike I could find and colour coded my helmet, my shoes, all the important stuff, more lycra than is reasonable, but eventually ended up training for for this ridiculously long bike ride, which had - bearing in mind I'd never travelled more than about 5, 10 miles on a bike before. Yeah, I wasn't a cyclist in any way. But I had this new goal, and I was going to make myself that. So yeah, that's where it kind of began.
Patricia Carswell:So have lycra, will travel.
Steven Dowd:Yeah, pretty much - I was the archetypal MAMIL. Yeah, I was one of those guys that should have known better. Yeah, so I was that guy, and I was ready to take on a new challenge.
Patricia Carswell:And then life took an unexpected turn. So tell us what happened next.
Steven Dowd:You did it. It's a 2016. I was heading down to Dan's place. It was a summer morning it was - it was really, really bright, I actually remember, and we were just going to work. It's about 10 miles from my house in southeast London, just around the corner from Dan, into Blackfriars, where the HQ was for BNY Mellon in London. So I hopped on my bike and went down to Dan's place. And unfortunately, I didn't get there. I hit a barrier I didn't see...,
Patricia Carswell:What sort of barrier, just something out in the road was it?
Steven Dowd:It was one of those barriers that blocks off private roads. So normally, I think the keys are given out to emergency services like fire, ambulance, that kind of thing. But it's effectively a very thin black barrier against the black tarmac, which was perspectively camouflaged as well as the kerb went off into the distance. The reason I know this is I went back later to go, was I just an idiot? How did I hit a barrier I didn't see? - that's just ridiculous. But after many months in a story that probably follows this conversation, I went back just to see what it was like. And actually it was quite perspectively camouflaged. So as the pavement disappears off into the vanishing point, was the exact same angle as the crossbar. I now feel much better- I know I'm not just an idiot. But I did hit a barrier that was effectively camouflaged and and as I went over the top, I landed on my head. And immediately I broke my neck and sustained a spinal cord injury really high. You have seven bones in your neck and mine's between the third and fourth. Luckily, I didn't sustain a brain injury, I had a helmet on and that helmet took the brunt of the force, as I landed immediately. What happened to me was I snapped the ligament on the back of my neck effectively, that holds the structural support in place. And that was enough to dislocate my neck, which in turn crushed and stretched my spinal cord, which didn't cut it, importantly, so I have what's called an incomplete spinal cord injury. If I'd have cut it, it would have been called a complete spinal cord injury and the prognosis of complete injury is, is really bad. Yeah, it's not great at all. So the prognosis for mine was better, but still, it left me paralysed completely and instantly, below that point, there on the road.
Patricia Carswell:So you're there on the road, you've gone over the handlebars and landed on your head. When did you realise that this was more than just a regular situation of coming off your bike?
Steven Dowd:So what..to be fair, I'd never really come off my bike before. So this is all very new and shocking anyway, but as I hit the ground I remember thumping into the the tarmac with my cheek, my left cheek. And I was clipped into my bike. It's a racing bike. So I was clipped in by my shoes. I had my hands on the brake as well. And as they hit the barrier, they were pinned into the handlebars. So there's nothing I could do and I literally just flipped over as I slammed into the ground with my left cheek and immediately I had that moment - you know when you've been punched in the face or maybe in rowing maybe as you catch a crab and and an oar smacks you in the face or the chest or whatever. You got that shock moment. Yeah. You're not quite sure what's happened. You kind of a bit disorientated. So yeah, so that was me laying on the ground a bit sort of 'what was that?' But I knew my face hurt because I could feel it and it was throbbing and I thought, actually, I remember at the time thinking, I wonder if I've broken my cheek, because it had a real, like deep pain. And I went to reach up to my face to touch my cheek - it's the most natural thing in the world, isn't it. to rub the bit that hurts. But my hand never reached my face. So as I reached up to help myself, nothing happened. And that was that was the most scary thing, was that, not that it was painful. But that when I tried to move, and in my mind, I thought I had moved, but my hand didn't get there.
Patricia Carswell:And did you know instantly what that meant?
Steven Dowd:Well, my background before all of this was I was - my mum's an osteopath, and I trained as a sports injuries therapist. So I had a fairly decent understanding of the human body. I did a human biology degree at university so again, anatomy was a thing. So I knew about nerve tissue, and I knew about spinal cords and all that sort of stuff. I'd never really thought much about spinal cord injury. But I'd certainly knew about the anatomy of it. So as I was lying on the ground, and I went to reach out to my face again, and again, nothing happened at that moment, that was when I realised that I'd done something really serious, and I thought I might well have damaged my spinal cord here. If I have, then I don't know what the future will be. But I know it was going to be serious. And it was.
Patricia Carswell:So at that point, you were on your own in the road, you knew that you couldn't move your hand. You knew something had catastrophically gone wrong. What did you do?
Steven Dowd:Well, initially, I had that kind of rising panic, in that way that you might anticipate, right? So something really serious has happened, you're totally out of control, in the most out of control way you could be. I'm feeling that panic rising - I'm feeling it now actually talking about it - I feel that panic rising from my chest up into my throat. And it really feels like it's overwhelming. It's really overtaking me. And I could feel that panic rising in a way that I've never felt before. And that was in itself very scary. It was an incredibly lonely, scary moment. But something happened, that was a bit weird. And I still can't really explain it today. But something strange happened in as much as it's almost like a, I flicked a switch. I went from, this isn't going to help you. Or I went from panic to this isn't going to help you. So literally, I remember thinking to myself, you need to just get through this second, stop this. Park this feeling because that's not helpful. Now you need to manage this situation, you just need to get through this second. So I did that. I remember consciously living through one second and saying to myself, okay, you did that now just get through this second. And I did that. And I said, get through this second, and I literally did that and I lived my life second by second. And yeah, it was really interesting for me, certainly looking back, but at that moment, it was the only thing I could do. I don't think you realise how strong you can be until that's your only option. I hadn't lost consciousness all the way through this. I was conscious. So I never had any, any gaps other than the surgery that came later. But it was a really interesting time where I had to take control in a way that wasn't physical. But it was a mental and emotional control of that moment. Because that's all I could do.
Patricia Carswell:So presumably, at some point, somebody picked you up and took you to hospital. At what point did the doctor start talking to you about the prognosis and what what had happened to you.
Steven Dowd:So I was very lucky that there were a couple of runners that were nearby, I was down by the banks of the Thames, I was down by Woolwich Arsenal, if anyone knows it. And as I was lying on the ground - that part of the world is like it's a private road. So there's not a huge amount of foot traffic. But there were a couple of runners that were nearby. And they were a few 10s of metres away and heard the crash and they come running over. But they thought they'd found a dead body because I was completely sprawled - I wasn't moving in any way. So the first of the two ladies who came over was totally in tears. But as I was lying on the ground, my kind of bum in the air, as it were, my face on the left hand side squashed up against the ground and my arms out to the side, I had my helmet on and I had a backpack which had come over the top of me and was lying on the back of my neck in the back of my head as well. So as she came around, she could see my face. And all I could do was just look up, like flick my eyes up to her just to just catch her eye. And I could speak at this point - I couldn't earlier on but I could speak at this point. And I said to her, this is my name. This is what I think I've done to myself. You need to call an ambulance, tell them that I might have a spinal cord injury. And it was really interesting because that conversation was very lucid. I'd had enough moments to be able to take control of myself and manage that conversation to the point where I was very lucid. I was more in control than she was. It was it was an interesting dynamic. So she did she went off and found the ambulance and said the things that I asked her to say. And then the other lady I literally said to her, 'all right, you - this is my wife's name, this is her phone number. I need you to phone her and tell her what's happened. But I don't need you to tell her that anything is very serious. I need to tell her that I'm serious enough to go to hospital and I'll see her there. And so I kind of managed this woman as much as I was also managing my wife's response to what this woman was about to say to her. It was really, it was so controlled - far more controlling than I am in my own life in a normal way. But yeah, so it was a really, really dire situation that was interestingly managed through dissociation, really. But yeah, so I was I was taken off to hospital. And I went to initially to Kings and then... I was taken from there to King's College Hospital, and then initially, and then taken over to St. George's Hospital, in South London. And I had all the scans, the MRIs, x rays, all that good stuff, as you would expect. And very quickly, I was sat there with my consultant, and one of his assistants, who said to me, Steve, your injury is so devastating, we don't know what you're going to get back, effectively. So this is what you've done, you've dislocated your neck. And we spoke about the idea that I had some anatomical knowledge, and we had quite a detailed conversation, even at that early stage. And so this is what you've done, you haven't severed your cord, but you have damaged it severely. And if the bruising continues, we run the risk of it becoming a complete injury when the rest of the nerve cells die, if they die. So we don't know with any certainty and can't promise anything that you're going to get anything back. In reality, what we were describing was a future where I'd be driving around in a power chair with my mouth forever. And at 37 years old, I didn't really want that for me. So we had a conversation about - and we had a very honest conversation, my wife actually -about exactly what that would mean, if I was going to be driving around in a power chair, with my mouth forever. I will caveat and say, some people live very proud lives, full lives with spinal cord injury and with tetraplegia and worse injuries than I have, but it's also very unique, and it's very personal. And your response to it is yours. So I had a conversation with Helen and said, if that's going to be my future, I don't want that for me. And I don't want that for you. I don't want me to be wholly dependent on you for the rest of your life as much as mine. And if that is the case, then I'll book a one way ticket to Switzerland, we'll call it a day. And that was the, that was the agreement. That was the plan. But then the conversation with the consultant also led down another line that said, we are running an experiment. So all those things are true. But we are running an experimental clinical intervention, which is funded by a group called Wings for Life spinal cord injury foundation. I'd never heard of them, didn't know what they did, or or anything around them. They've funded us to have 50 people go through an experimental clinical research trial, which doesn't make any promises. But it might be able to give you some foundation to make some level of recovery. And if you wanted to be involved, you'd have to make a decision within the hour. And if you decided you wanted to be involved, then you'll be patient number 45.
Patricia Carswell:Wow, how long did it take you to make that decision?
Steven Dowd:About 10 minutes. So we went back to one another and said, Okay, this is significant. It's a huge ray of hope. No promises, and we're very, they were totally clear that there were no promises here. They didn't want to mismanage hope. But they did offer it and hope as a currency. You know, when you're in that situation, we decided - Helen and I decided together, because it was both of our decision - that you know what, Switzerland's always there. So this is an opportunity for us to maybe have a stab at getting something back and see where that goes. Yeah, if nothing comes of it, then what have you lost? It can't make it any worse, and I might be in a position to make it better. So yeah, we very quickly had a conversation with the consultant and said, right, I mean, let's get it signed, get... sign what we need to do, which is ridiculous, actually - I literally, physically had to sign a piece of paper, even though I had no hands. So someone had to put a biro between my fingers and then move my hand on a piece of paper, it was the most - it was the most farcical thing, it was like make your mark here kind of thing, you know what I mean, it was really odd. But yeah, so we did, so I signed away my, my whatever I signed away, I don't even know what I signed away, but yeah, we put myself into a position where I was going to be number 45 and became number 45 on a trial run by a guy called Professor Papadopoulos at St. George's Hospital. And that particular trial was called the ISCoPE trial, which is, as I say, was 50 people. And enough people got enough back from that or enough promising results to warrant another 50 people to be funded, which I believe they're still waiting on the results from to see whether or not that could become an actual, rolled out clinical treatment.
Patricia Carswell:Now as far as most people are concerned, and most people don't know very much about it, myself included, historically a spinal cord injury, there's been no coming back from it. It's not a curable condition because once the nerve fibres are damaged, they're damaged. But this research this trial was proving that wrong, by the sounds of things, so tell me about your progress on the trial.
Steven Dowd:Sure. So you're right in as much as there isn't currently a cure for spinal cord injury. However, it doesn't necessarily mean that if you have a spinal cord injury, you can't have some level of recovery. Some people do. Some people make incredible levels of recovery, myself included, actually, I mean, I was helped by a clinical intervention, obviously, but some people will make some level of recovery and nerve tissue can regrow. But there isn't a way to make it a treatment where everybody can have it and then you just need to rehab and you're back to normal again, right there - that doesn't exist today. It could exist. And it could exist in our lifetimes with the right amount of money and the right amount of focus and research, which is why I'm a big advocate for Wings for Life in the work that they do. And I had one particular type of trial, which was all based around reducing the bruising within the spinal cord. Because it's an incomplete injury, if the bruising wasn't taken under control and reduced significantly, very quickly, which is why I was only given an hour to make a decision, then actually, nerve tissue can die. And if it dies, it becomes a complete injury by effectively... it would affect, it would effectively be like a spinal cord would be. And then your prognosis from there is much, much worse. But there is a lot of research that's going into different ways to do it. Some of it, some of it is based around stem cell research, some of it is based around, there are hundreds of different ways to do it. As I say, mine was around bruising, and inflammation management and a whole bunch of different stuff. Transdermal stimulation is another one where they're they're, they're stimulating the spinal cord from top to bottom and almost bypassing the damaged area to kind of propagate the nerve that way. So there are lots of different things. And in fact, Wings for Life themselves have funded over 200 cutting edge products projects over the last few years. And what I love about Wings for Life is that they only fund really interesting projects, which are based around finding a cure for paralysis. Their job isn't to put people in better wheelchairs or adapt their houses or make life better for people with an injury. There are other charities that do that, and they do that really well. But Wings for Life is all about finding that cure. So you can say I had a spinal cord injury, we can't stop people getting them, you know, that will still happen. But I had my treatment, I had my rehab, and I'm better now, which people can't do at the moment.
Patricia Carswell:So how did your recovery progress because I'm, you know, sitting opposite you on on Zoom, and I can see you moving, certainly your upper body. So clearly, there's been some progress from that early position. Tell me what happened next.
Steven Dowd:So my recovery happened relatively swiftly. So I say that a lot of recovery happened for me very swiftly. They say with spinal cord injury that the first two years are almost like the golden window. And I think certainly that is true for a lot of people, although I think people do take that quite literally and almost find their way into two years and just assume that's what they're going to get back. And I disagree with that, I think you can still make gains thereafter. Even if they're far less, there's a lot less trajectory on them. However, I I made a promise to my wife on day two, that I was going to be back to normal within 200 days. And that was really important for me.
Patricia Carswell:That's quite a rash promise for someone in that situation isn't it?
Steven Dowd:It was - it was my bold, ambitious goal that I needed to make. It's interesting because I ... 200 days, I didn't even know where that came from. It was like, it's about six months, interesting things can happen in six months. I'd started to get a little bit - by day two, I'd started to get some sensation returning. And that sensation I can only describe as like being on fire. So from my waist to my chest and down both arms I had what's known as hypersensitivity and hypersensitivy is a nerve p in, which feels like the most i And the more I've spoken to people in rowing circles, it's tense pins and needles. It's i credibly painful. And people t at have had that will will k ow that that is an absolute, O my God, it's like a 10 out of 1. Yeah, and it's 24 hours a d y, right? There's nothing you c n do about it. And I had to be t rned regularly as well because o bed sores and things like t at. So I had nurses coming in w th their wonderful bedside m nner placing their hand on my arm going, Oh, Mr Dowd, I ho e you're okay this morning. An that was enough to send me th ough the roof because it was ju t the most delicate touch. Ye I still needed four people to anhandle me and turn me four tim s a day. So it was painful bey nd painful, but I started to get the sensation back, like I say, n day two. And that's when I ma e a promise to Helen that give e 200 days- Christmas Day - and I'll be back to normal w s my promise. And I closed my eyes and went back to my little world of pain. But I now had a purpose. And I had a promise to elen and a motivation that I di n't have before. There wasn't j st abou,t let's get through ever day - this was about, right, I' e got a goal over there, the ne north star that I need to et to. almost like the Olympians have gold medals and they have Olympics to focus on and in fact when I spoke to Steve Redgrave recently, Sir Steve Redgrave recently, and he underlined the very same thing, is that you just assume you've already done it or you assume you're there and you work backwards - what do I need now in order to take that step forwards? And I kind of, without the kind of formal education around that, that's naturally the process that I took. So I had a 200 day goal. And then I rolled it right back and went, right now I just need daily wins and hourly wins, I just need to be able to take tiny baby steps forward towards that goal. And the more I take, the more I'll build momentum, and the easier it will be to get there. So yeah, but the whistlestop tour of progress was intense pins and needles after day two, I was making a daily win in terms of a movement of some kind, or a patch of skin coming back online. Maybe - it all started with a twitch in my left thumb actually and went from there. So tiny movements, but we celebrated everything like it was a win, everything like it was a gold medal. And so it just meant that we could have a daily start and daily finish, where - I remember it now - I remember saying, what am I going to do today? 8pm? What did I do today? And if I was better than I was the day before, then it was a win. And I celebrated every day for 90 days and a win every day for 90 days. I know it was 90 days, because on day 91 nothing much happened. So I got to 8pm and went right, what did we do? Not a lot, really. Okay, well, let's celebrate the fact that we're at the end of three months of wins, that's a good reason to celebrate. And that was the sort of mindset that I had. And then the other people - as I say, hope is the currency, right, so you spread that to other people. And they're all celebrating, they don't have to be in the same room with you. But you make a phone call to say, this happened today. And they're super happy. And that energy comes back to you. Right? So it's a self fulfilling circle if you get it right. But yeah, I took those first steps, interestingly, or started to stand again, for the first time at three months which was crazy.
Patricia Carswell:So by day 200 what where had you reached?
Steven Dowd:Day 200, Christmas Day, my house, 2016. I fulfilled the promise to my wife by picking up our Christmas turkey and walking it - gingerly - but walking it from our kitchen to our Christmas table.
Patricia Carswell:Wow.
Steven Dowd:We had a lot of family over that year, you can imagine it was a - not just Christmas Day, it was a fulfilment of a promise. So it was a big day. And in fact, we have far too many people over there. They were cramming them into the corners. But yeah, I was able to walk our Christmas turkey to the table. So it was a huge win for me, to fulfil a promise to Helen, fulfil a promise to myself, and to give a lot of other people that were watching the story, the hope that these things will continue and these things are possible.
Patricia Carswell:Now, so far, it's all sounded amazing and positive. And clearly you mustered from somewhere an incredibly resilient and positive attitude, but I'm guessing there were some darker moments along the way during those 200 days.
Steven Dowd:Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've cried my fair share, that's for sure. Normally at 4am, because nothing good happens at 4am. But yeah, it's... huge amounts of dark times. But equally, I think I was given a great piece of advice by one of my Intensive Care nurses, he's a guy called Os, Osdeane Julian, who unfortunately has now left the NHS because of the nature of the stress that those guys get put under. However, he gave me a sage piece of advice, which I still use today and I talk about a lot. He said to me, Steve, you're an upbeat guy, you're positive guy, you're a resilient guy. Whenever I see you, you're full of smiles and you share that stuff around. And, and that's, that's important, you know, you'll need every ounce of that. But appreciate that you will have down times, they will come, you will be scared, you will be alone, you will be in pain, you won't be able to change it, there will be scenes where it's exactly what you don't want and you're going to have to endure it. So know that they're coming. And to know that they're coming gives you have an element of power, because you can prepare for them in the good times. So that when you do get to the bad times, you've already been there before, you've done the training. So what I started doing was building what became known as rope ladders. So I'd have past memories that I'd play out and feelings and emotions and scenes that I could close my eyes and go to, which would distract me from where I was. I'd also have what I call future memories, but they're effectively like projections into the 200 days of walking to the table. I knew I wanted to do that. So in my mind, I had played out some visualisation around me, actually doing it and feeling the feeling and smelling the smells and feeling the weight and hearing the family laughing and joking and all that stuff. Because your body doesn't know the difference between past and future memories anyway, so as far as it's concerned, it happened. So let's go back there. And then I was also building another scene if neither of those were helpful to me, where I could kind of just be in the moment, step outside of my body and either stand next to my bed, or actually, in this particular one, it was me floating over the top of my bed, watching myself with all the pipes and all the buzzers, beeping and monitors, flashing and stuff. But just being in the room with myself, and being true and honest and accepting that situation, not making it worse than it was, not pretending it was better than it was either, but not making it worse than it was, and just almost finding that Zen calm state. And by building these rope ladders, and practising them when it was good, you know, practising them at, like, noon, when I'm lying in bed, and not a lot is happening. And the sun's beaming in, and the birds are singing and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, good environments. I was practising what I'm doing the dark times. And it was, it was really interesting, because the times that those - and they did come, you know, Os was right, those times happened - but when they did, I knew how to get out of them, I had some resources, I had some skills, I had some tools that I could use. So as a result, what tended to happen is that if I did get into them, I could get out of them far quicker than if I didn't have them. Or I just didn't get into them as quickly or at all. In some times when I would have otherwise fallen into that, I was able to stop myself at the precipice and say, I know what that's gonna look like, I know how to get out of it. So let's just not get into it in the first place. So it gave me a huge amount of mental resilience, having the preparation done at the time.
Patricia Carswell:I really like that idea of using the good, the good moments to prepare for the bad ones. It's a real discipline to do that. But it sounds like it really bore fruit. Was this the first time in your life you'd really been put to the test? Obviously, I'm sure it was the most catastrophic thing that had happened to you, but it was it was it the first major major challenge you'd experienced? Or did you have others that you could draw on?
Steven Dowd:It wasn't. I've never had such a significant physical experience that was so global, you know, affected every element of my physical, mental, emotional wellbeing and that of the people around me, because spinal cord injury doesn't just happen to the person it happens to you happens to everyone around them. And my situation was no different. My wife, my family, my friends, my colleagues, everybody had a rock thrown thrown into their pond. And they had their own waves to deal with as much as dealing with mine. And me dealing with them, actually, to try and help them in many ways. But no, previously, a few years beforehand, I got involved quite naively, in a property deal with a major housing manufacturer, that I'm still not allowed to mention for the rest of my life. And I overleveraged on a property deal, which saw us put our life savings and equity from our house and, and everything into a new trade, just before the global crisis, the global financial crisis hit, we found ourselves out of pocket by six figures, significant amounts of money, and unfortunately, no way back from that. So we faced being sued... or, we were sued, along with a number of other people, we were taken to the Royal Courts of Justice and had to go through that sort of thing. But that wasn't just one housing deal and one family that were affected. This happened to everyone in the offline market, to the point where I bumped into... me just trying to work out what the hell was going on, I ended up going to the site where this stuff was being built. And I bumped into another family that had been through a similar thing. And that family and I and Helen, I became kind of friends off the back of it. And we said, Wow, if it's happening to you, and it's happening to me, it must be happening to other people as well. So I did what every self respecting recruiter should do and went out and started networking and finding who else might be in this boat. And by the time we'd finished collecting groups of people together that all suffered in a similar way, myself and this guy became the head of a 400 family strong unit, which ended up taking on like a class action, which we had to organise. And whilst going through our own hellish situation, I was on the phone every single night to another family in tears that had been through the same thing. Some people committed suicide over it. And that was just money. I say it was just money - there's a hell of a lot of sleepless nights and fear and anxiety and fear of the future and all those same things, actually, which are very correlating to paralysis. But yeah, I had been through it before. So I had built some of those muscles. I'd had some, some tools that I could use and draw upon. It wasn't the first time I'd been to the depths of despair, as it were, and then had to come back from it.
Patricia Carswell:There's something very interesting you said in one of your videos that I've watched recently, which is there's no... I think you said there's no hierarchy of of trauma or suffering or something like that. And I think that's a really interesting way of looking at it because it's that idea that whatever you're going through really matters to you at the time. And you can apply all those things that you've learned from your major problems to something that to someone else might seem quite minor, but to the person going through it is the biggest thing they've ever had to deal with in their lives. And I think detaching yourself from the idea of a hierarchy of suffering is a really interesting and useful idea.
Steven Dowd:Oh, absolutely. I'm a big fan of challenge. And I often talk about there being no hierarchy in challenge - your challenge is yours, your biggest challenge is yours. It's not relative to me or someone else, or, or even your idea of what your biggest challenge should be, which a lot of people get into. Giving a working example, the amount of times I talk to people about paralysis, about my story, and they say, Oh, nothing like yours, but I've got this terrible bad back. If the bad back is your biggest challenge it's the same as my biggest challenge, right? It's, it's not a direct competitor. And it doesn't have to be a physical thing. It could just be an emotional block or something. My, my son, you mentioned your son being home from uni, mine is as well. And he's going through a real emotional block on writing a particular essay, he just cannot get over this particular block. It's only writing an essay, it's a 2000 word essay. And actually, because it's year on it actually doesn't even mean anything. It's totally valueless, other than the skills and lessons you learn from it. But for him, it's the biggest thing in the world. And it's taken him weeks to write a four page essay, because it's his biggest challenge. And I'm not going to belittle it for him because it is his biggest challenge and the skills that he'll learn through overcoming that are the same skills that he may or may not be, he probably will have to use in later life when other things happen. And he can draw back on those skills that he's gonna say, Oh, actually, I remember being in that nine out of 10 problem. And this is how I came out of it. This is what worked, this is what didn't work. This is what I might be able to use moving forward. So yeah, nine out of 10 challenges are yours. And the skills and lessons you learn in those are absolutely transferable.
Patricia Carswell:So for people who are coping with all the traumas of life at the moment, the challenges of lockdown, worrying about other people in the family, not being able to see friends, money worries, all that kind of thing. What are the biggest lessons that you'd say you've learned from the last five years that could be useful to people who are facing whatever challenges they've got on at the moment?
Steven Dowd:Well, I mean, yeah, we're all facing massive challenges all of us and actually globally, because of COVID. Whether it be financial, whether it be work, whether it be medical, everyone everywhere is suffering with the same problems right now, which is quite unique time. And I look back on the reasons that I came through what I came through and why I responded in the way I did. I didn't know what the answers were at the time. But I thought if I boil it down, it might be helpful for other people to look at, which I suppose is, it's kind of the point of the question. So I developed a toolkit, which is the word challenge, and it's nine letters. And behind each one of those letters is a different tool. But I think the two that really stand out for me, that I think a lot of people will really benefit from almost immediately to see from challenge, is choose to respond effectively. So choice, C is for choice. You can't always control what's going to happen to you, but you can control your response to it. While I'm lying facedown on the ground, I can't move my arms and legs, I'm probably paralysed, although don't really know what's happening. There's nothing I can do beyond control my response to that situation, which is what I did at that time. Now, I'm not saying it's easy to do, it's not. But you can go through again, with the rope ladders, you can practise that stuff, you can practise to have a positive outlook on situation return negative whenever something bad happens, or whenever you're feeling bad about a particular thing. Notice it, accept that situation, that you're you're feeling that thing, and then just find the positive. Try and look at it from a positive angle and see what you can be positive about and just practising that positivity is a good thing . It doesn't necessarily mean that having a positive mental attitude is enough to get you through and to make impossible things possible. It's not, but it definitely puts you in the right mindset to be able to try things in a different way. And when you try things in a different way that's when you can be effective. So when I refer to choose to respond effectively, it's about finding the way to respond that gives you the benefit that you need. So really C for choice. And the other one I think I just touched on is the A from challenge, is accept the situation. I see some people that have been through spinal cord injury that stand out for me - people like Pete Reed, we mentioned earlier before this recording happened. Pete's spinal stroke changed his world utterly. And he was obviously a lovely guy before the injury and he's clearly a lovely guy now - spinal cord injury doesn't change that necessarily. So what stands out amongst performance athletes for me is their ability to accept the situation objectively. Rather than lament what they've lost or wish it were different, or any of those things, which are very normal, by the way, they're very, very normal, but they're not necessarily helpful. What I see a lot in professional athletes and performance, not just athletes, as I see this in big business, or when I've worked in corporate business, leaders that are able to accept the situation objectively, are empowered to then make the right decisions without carrying the baggage. They're lighter in their decision making. They're more nimble in the decision making. They're more effective often in their decision making. But it all stems from acceptance. The other person - we mentioned Pete Reed there - the other person that stands out for me of recent times is Kristina Vogel, the cyclist. Kristina, unfortunately, (was a massive medal winner, German cyclist) unfortunately came off her bike, slammed into a barrier and was made paraplegic so she's below the waist. But again, she's cried her fair share of tears. She's been honest about that. She didn't talk about it for a long time. But, but now she's open about it. But the one thing you see when you follow someone like Kristina is huge embracing- a huge amount of embracing of the new situation. I've accepted what I am. So now what what can I do? How can I move forward? So that my other my other tool would be the would be accept the situation objectively?
Patricia Carswell:There's another thing that you and Pete Reed have in common, which is you're both quick to emphasise that you're just normal guys, that there's nothing superior about you. Now, I know a lot of people will say, well, your actions are certainly far from normal. And that's the way you've responded to the situation you've been put in is remarkable. But how do you feel when, as I'm sure happens to a lot of the time people either say, Oh, you're so brave, or you're so inspiring.
Steven Dowd:Yeah, I mean, I'm really glad, I'm glad it is inspiring. I'm glad it helps people. I'm very lucky. And I feel the weight of that actually, in some ways. When I was going through my injury, I obviously had friends and family that I'd have very similar conversations with, although they'd also pull you up short, if you got a bit big for your boots, which is, which I love as well. But I'd often get emails or, or LinkedIn messages or whatever, from people saying, I followed your story. And I'm inspired to do this, or this is my son is going through this problem, or whatever - people I've never met before. And they're just the ones that I know about. Yeah, if there are other people out there that have been inspired quietly, and they're able to do things differently, and motivate themselves differently or achieve things differently because of my story, and because of what I've been through and me talking about it, then that's reason enough to carry on talking about it. You never know who you're inspiring. And that is absolutely the reason you should carry on just doing what you do. But I am quick to emphasise I am every day, you know, I'm a normal guy, I have a normal life in many ways. Much like Pete Reed, although I would argue Pete probably is a bit superhuman, right? But outside of that, I think there's it's almost like that scene where mums push cars off their babies and stuff, and they're in horrible wrecks and, and they suddenly go, Oh, my God, where did that come from? I think there's a lot of resilience in all of this. I'm a big believer actually, that you don't really learn resilience. I think you have resilience, and you just haven't unlocked it to the point where you need it. So I think a lot of the tools that I teach is about unlocking what you already have. It's not about going out and collecting resilience points. And I think that's the that's the bit that can be different. I've learned a lot in the time, from total paralysis to where I am now, which is still - don't get me wrong, I never came... I'm not 100% back to normal, I still have ... technically, I'm still quadriplegic, I'm still limb impaired in all four limbs, my trunk is not great. But over that period, I've learned a lot. So I like to share that. I feel an obligation though having gone through it and and had some experiences that I might be able to help other people with, I kind of do feel a deep obligation to share that.
Patricia Carswell:And you've gone a little further than just that because I know you do a lot of public speaking but you've got a major challenge coming up that we can all get involved in. So tell me all about the Endurow Challenge.
Steven Dowd:Oh my god, I am obsessed with indoor rowing right now.
Patricia Carswell:You're not a rower, right?
Steven Dowd:Right so this is why I can say that! I haven't been through the horrible hellish world of... I can honestly say, hand on heart right now, because I looked at my smart row earlier... I row... I've got a Water Rower with a smart row. And I've rowed 135,000 metres in total - that that's my rowing career. And that's been done over the last few months. So I'm now a rower. The only connection I had to rowingwas through BNY Mellon and the Boat Race, so I knew some of the guys at Oxford and Cambrid e, I'd been over to the Goldie boathouse and given the g ys the kind of "life after rowin" talk and trying to help them g t into financial services, ecause rowing is not forever, nd all that sort of stuff. And I ve got to say I didn't... I liked the people I met, but wasn't a massive fan of rowi g for the sheer fact that I th ught it's the most elite sp rt in the world. Two clubs, o ce a year, half an hour, a sin le stretch of water, not really elebrating the women, let's ace it, it was mostly a guy s thing. white middle aged, cr sty guys, and, and I went, you now what, it's kind of not for e. I'll do it because it's impor ant to get some great guys, a d they genuinely were nice pe ple in the boats, into the busin ss. But the rowing thing itself for me, I can take or leave. However, I was standing at the top of my stairs after doing one of my charity challenges, and I've done a few since my injury. This particular one was called Isolation Everest challenge. I managed, I managed to walk up the equivalent of Everest on my stairs over lockdown. So three and a half days of walking up and down the stairs to the equivalent of nine... well, it's 8,848 metres is the height of Everest. So that was the elevation I had to get to.
Patricia Carswell:And that would be a huge challenge for even someone who had full and complete use of all their limbs. So that must have been an incredible challenge.
Steven Dowd:It was it was hellish. And I'd never do it again. But it was absolutely amazing. I was doing it to support another guy actually with a spinal cord injury called Ed Jackson, aformer rugby professional, he'd played for Newport Gwent Dragons, dove into the shallow end of a swimming pool on holiday. Unfortunately, the rest is history. He also broke his neck. But he has also made an incredible recovery to the point where he's now climbing mountains and all sorts of stuff. I mean, he doesn't, he does, amazingly well, incredible guy. So he was doing his Everest climb and I said, I'll do it as well. I'll be your wingman, almost, like, for a day, I thought. I said I'll just give it a go for day, see how we get on. And me being a bit naive, I only had about six days notice. But me being a bit naive, I said, Well, I'll climb up to base camp in my head. Only I did no homework on what that meant - I just assumed base camp was the foot of Everest, I knew is a little bit of a walk to there. But base camp's like two thirds of the way up the bloody mountain! I didn't know that. Completely ridiculous it's about 5,500 metres or something crazy. So I started climbing and I kind of I did day one. And I felt okay, so I thought well, I'll carry on. So I carried on. And at that point, you know, it's like you've got your bold, ambitious goal. But much like the paralysis journey, I know I've got a North Star I know where Everest is, it's 3881 flights of my stairs, 46,500 individual stairs. And that's just the up - we didn't count the down. But you only get there one step at a time. So I just kept putting one foot in front of another. And I just kept going and the numbers stacked up a little bit like when you're on the erg and you watch those metres tickking up and ticking up and ticking up and before you know it, you know that 100 metres was a nightmare. But before you know it was another 2k that you've added to the tota,l right, so so I just did that. And then I just kept going really until eventually I got there. But I digress. So I end up at the top of the stairs having completed the Isolation Everest challenge and super proud of myself, by the way,
Patricia Carswell:Rightly so.
Steven Dowd:Yeah, absolutely. I have no problems in celebrating the wins at all, though. It was an amazing achievement. But it was great because it was I was able to show other people what what was possible. So putting my ego back in the box, I was able to say Actually, we raised a tonne of cash for charity for Wings for Life, which might help other people in the future. But also, it was it was motivating for people to see people go through these kind of extreme situations. And again, great training for the bad times - go through it in the good times and then when the bad times happen, you can go, Yeah, I remember getting through that horrible event when I was bleeding from the hips for three days. So yes, I'm standing at the top of the stairs and I was talking to a journalist. And she said to me, so what's next, which really annoys me - journalists always do that . You do these things and they go.,So forget that. What about the next one?
Patricia Carswell:I've done that! Guilty!
Steven Dowd:So this was no different - a lovely woman said to me, so what next? And kicking around in the back of my head, I've done a few erg related things, mostly on bikes, and watt bikes and whatnot, so turbo trainers. So I said, Well, I fancy an indoor rowing challenge. I don't know anything about rowing, really. But I know it's an erg. I know it's it's work done in a static way effectively. So maybe we can turn that into something interesting. And then a couple of things happened. I had a couple of conversations with ex military people, two of them... one was a guy who was in the Air Force and he was climbing up a mountain climbing wall. He was about five double decker buses high and he thought he was clipped in. As he hit the ground. He broke everything - arms, legs, back neck, the lot. Not only did he not die, though, but he went on to become a GB... well he went to the Invictus Games and then became a GB cyclist in the Paras, absolutely incredible, and then got into kayaking, so a water sports connection. And another guy who was on my podcast, actually, a guy called Mark Harding. And if you get a chance to listen to that incredible story, he was a sniper in Afghanistan in the British Army, was shot by an enemy sniper, and the bullet went through his neck and out the other side, taking the spinal cord with it. So he was turned into a tetraplegic instantly from a gunshot wound. However, Mark didn't die. 10 years later, he actually finds himself in the GB Dragon Boat team, and not the para team.
Patricia Carswell:Wow.
Steven Dowd:I couldn't believe it - it was like,this is an incredible story. And then as I'm, as I'm thinking about this guy over lockdown, I hear about him again. And he's on his erg. He's on his kayak Pro, I think they call it - kayak pros, like a kayak erg. And he's paddling in his back garden for 88 consecutive days until he paddled the virtual Atlantic Ocean.
Patricia Carswell:Oh wow.
Steven Dowd:3,100 odd miles,. I was like, this guy's just too epic not to know. So I pick up the phone to Mark and said, Tell me about your story. We had a whole conversation about it. So these connections, put two and two together for me. And I said, Okay, there's spinal cord injury, there's water sports, there's kayaking, there's all these people doing incredible things. I'm not believer in necessarily the universal or whatever. But it felt like something was being shouted at me to do something with this indoor rowing. So me being me, I sat down on my dining room table. And I said, right, let's build the world's biggest something to do with indoor rowing. I don't know what it looks like but let's build the biggest whatever it is. And so we did. So I sketched it out. And it was, ironically enough, it was about 200 days, between me sitting down with a piece of paper and the event which we created, which is happening on February the sixth, which is 17 days from time of recording today. So we designed - well, we... I designed the EndurowChallenge. So Endurow Challenge is best described as the world's biggest, fully inclusive indoor rowing charity event. And it will see everyone everywhere, pulling together, fundraising for spinal cord injury research. And what that looks like, is a global challenge. So it's everyone around the world. No matter who you are, where you are, this is the event for you. No matter what your ability, you can get involved and play. It's fully inclusive, because I wanted it to be for men, women and kids, able bodied and adapted. You know, we're all suffering with things like fear and anxiety and isolation through the COVID thing, I can't even have a coffee with my next door neighbour. So this indoor rowing event is a way for us to have a global community event that uses indoor rowing. So rather than rowing be the message, rowing is really the medium to allow global connectivity and global connection. And it's going to be live. So it's going to be held on February the sixth at 3pm UK time, no matter where you are in the world. So that's 10am in New York, it's 7am in San Francisco, it's 2am the next morning in Sydney, poor guys, nothing says good morning, like a four hour erg at two in the morning. And as I say it's gonna be a four hour event. So four hours is eye watering for anyone on an erg. I get it. I can't do four hours on an erg myself and nor would I even try. So you can do this as a solo rower where you're a beast and you want to knock out for hours on your own and we have got several of those. Naomi Riches is going to do it. Kingsley Ijomah is going to do it . We've got Damien Browne, the transatlantic adventurer, Michelle Lee, the first Ozzy to solo row any Atlantic, any ocean, there's a whole bunch of fouh our rowers in there, a whole bunch of military types, too. Or you can cut and dice that time with your friends, your family, your colleagues, etc, and create a crew that can take on four hours. So it's not about metres. This is the one thing that's quite different and my superpower in rowing is I know nothing about rowing. So I turned up and said, new kid on the block, I want to invent this great thing that uses indoor rowing, the indoor rower, but I don't know about things like 2k distances, or time tests or any of this stuff. This is all new language to me. So it's quite different in as much as it's not about metres. It's not about competition. It's about minutes on the erg. And it's about camaraderie in those minutes. It's about rowing, whatever you can row in the way in which you row I don't care if you're fast or slow or indifferent. You could be a one legged schoolboy or my nan or Bob the Olympian. And you can row on the same crew. If you cut and dice it, you can find your time. You know, if your best effort is 10 minutes, that's as good as someone else's three hours. If you want to get on and give your 100% effort. A little like we said earlier about challenge not being hierarchical. It's about your effort, and effort is yours. So that's the challenge and we're aiming to get... ideally the plan was to get 10,000 people on rowing machines at the same time around the world and to raise a million pounds in fundraising for Wings for Life spinal cord injury research. Are we going to hit those numbers? Well, we are behind target at the moment, I won't lie.COVID-19 has not helped us. We had planned or we have planned to have two types of venue. So one would be a macro picture like a boathouse, school, a club, a party atmosphere, everyone working together in the UK, that can't happen, but it can happen overseas. And the other one, which is far more popular, is the micro, where it's a man in his man cave, woman in her she shed, pulling together, maybe her and her husband or whatever it might be having a go together. So that's where most people are going to join us. And so yeah, so big, live indoor rowing event for four hours on February 6.
Patricia Carswell:Fantastic. Well count me in. I did, I did my steady state, I'm comfortable at an hour at this point. And I did my steady state earlier. And bearing you in mind, I did an extra 10 minutes. So I'm now up to an hour and 10 minutes, I've only got to add, oh, two hours and 50 minutes. But I think if... you know, if I do the whole thing, and that is my current plan, I'm not telling my GP about that, cos I don't think she'd be very happy. But the plan is to do it very, very, very gently. So that's that's all good.
Steven Dowd:Is yours a Concept2, maybe?
Patricia Carswell:Yes, it is. I'll cover the monitor.
Steven Dowd:Oh, that's the other thing is it doesn't matter what you row. I row a Waterrower, you could be RP3, you could be a 20 quid model out of Argos. If you can get on a rowing machine and have a go, then it's your event you be involved.
Patricia Carswell:And am I right in thinking - did I see on the Zoomergos site that they are doing a sort of accompanying event, that people can hop on and join in for a little bit of it if they want to support you and the other rowers?
Steven Dowd:Yeah, so I spoke to the gods at Zoomergos, which I love, by the way, absolute evangelist, our ethos is so similar it's ridiculous. And they basically said, community rowing, don't care how you row, just get involved and have a bit of fun doing it. And isn't it just the best thing that's ever happened to indoor rowing? I think it's just amazing.
Patricia Carswell:Do you know every single person I've interviewed in the last month has mentioned it? And that's without me prompting them? It's quite phenomenal.
Steven Dowd:I'm not surprised I- think it's absolutely wonderful. And if you've not done it, then why not get on it now? Zoomergos.com - book a session, you'll see why.
Patricia Carswell:And your site to register for this is endurow.com? I'll put all of this in the show notes. But just in case anyone doesn't know where those are. It's endurowchallenge.com. Okay. I will make sure that gets written everywhere.
Steven Dowd:Yeah, exactly. e-n-d-u-r-o-w, just for branding reasons. It's free. It was going to have ticket pricing. But you know what, coronavirus has made everything so difficult for everyone anyway, that I decided I would just pick up the ticket costs on everything. So it's free to row, I would love you to fundraise. There's no obligation to fundraise, I would expect people to want to. And as I say, there's no ticket price. So please plough your efforts into grabbing a few quid off of friends, family and colleagues. If you can raise that money, 100% of that money goes directly to Wings for Life. And 100% of their money goes directly into the research.
Patricia Carswell:So, every single penny you raise is going straight to research.
Steven Dowd:Absolutely. One pound of fundraising is one pound of research. The only reason they can do that is that Red Bull, the drinks company, very generously pay 100% of the operating costs.
Patricia Carswell:Oh Go Red Bull. That's fantastic.! Well, one of the things that I found really interesting was, I was looking on your website, and you've got some wonderful videos of support from people who are joining in with it. And one of them you've already mentioned, Kingsley Ijomah - I did one of his Zoomergo sessions last week. And it was brilliant. And he talked in that session about seeing an endurance challenge as a learning experience. And I know that you're kind of onboard psychologist has talked about this as well. So what kind of thing might someone expect to learn about themselves from an endurance challenge?
Steven Dowd:Wow, massive question, because it's so intensely personal. But what I would say is get over to Endurowchallenge.com. And in that very same section - pro tips - you can check out Dr. August Leming, who is the psychologist that you mentioned. He's a high performance compassion based high performance psychologist and he works a lot with boat crews in the US. He's been in and around rowing for 20, 30 years, so he knows what he's talking about. He's done some videos that will look at what you're coming into an endurance event, the kind of things that you need to be thinking about and preparing for. He talks about what you'll go through during that event as well. And a lot of those are being able to notice where you are, accept the situation again, similar to what you mentioned earlier, noticing what you're doing, and then also noticing that you're noticing what you're doing. And so being able to use those distractions as a way to bring yourself back to a moment where you can focus on making the work pure through that area rather than distracting yourself. And having almost like a poor runner's stance where they're flapping their arms or legs all over the place, a lot of people will go there, and it's totally normal. But if you can use the mental agility to put that into a calming state, then actually, you'll get so much more from an endurance ride. And then also, he will be doing some videos which haven't been released yet about what happens after the event, and how you reflect on what you've been through, and embed them into your life so that you can use those same skills in other areas outside of rowing as well. So yeah, some really interesting content that he's produced, I think a lot of it will be very intensely personal to you, some people will be open to those things, some people won't be, some people will go through very different experiences, there will be fear, there will be panic, there will be discomfort, you know, all of that stuff exists. And it's okay, that it's there. In fact, that's kind of the point of an endurance event. But when you get through, when you get to those areas, knowing how you can deal with them, and feeling stronger for doing so I think can be really rewarding.
Patricia Carswell:Yeah, I think for me, when I'm doing something like that, I've never done anything as long as a four hour challenge. But I've done a half marathon and the thing, the moment where I started to get a bit panicky was where I convinced myself that I was possibly doing myself a permanent injury. So you know, I started to get that glute burn that you get on the rower. And I suddenly thought, Oh, this is this is more than just discomfort. This is more than just hurting now, this is... I'm actually injuring myself. And then I started catastrophizing, I'll, you know, I'll have to stop rowing. And I'll never be able to row again and la-la-la, you know, on and on it went. So I shall watch his videos religiously over the next couple of weeks.
Steven Dowd:Well worth the watch. We'll, we probably will play them in the live stream, we're gonna try and live stream the whole thing. So we can have different interviews with people. And he may even make a live appearance on that as well, which would be amazing. And just to kind of tap you on the shoulder and just kind of be in your world for a bit while ... and be with you whilst you're rowing. I think it'd be a really nice touch. But yeah, those videos do have in them some great tips and tricks that you can use moving forwards. But you touched on a good point as well, because this is an endurance event, it isn't going to be comfortable. It will be... to a degree it's painful. But you health, you also have to exercise some grown up caution around the idea of not hurting yourself. Yeah, I mean, we don't want anyone to go through this and raise money come out with an injury. That's not the point of this. And in fact, it would be it would be remiss of me not to raise that to say, eat when you're hungry, drink, or eat before you're hungry, drink before you're thirsty. And if it hurts that much, then yeah, maybe take a break, or maybe even stop. But yeah, be be aware of where you are. Be aware of your body. Be aware of your mind. If it's just your mind playing tricks on you to want you to stop, which will happen, then that's a different story. But yeah, don't put yourself in a position where you hurt yourself.
Patricia Carswell:And one last thing before we finish, we must talk about your podcast. So this is on YouTube, and it's called Head to Head and you interview some of the most interesting and frankly inspiring people in the rowing world and beyond. And that's where I first came across Kingsley. And you have just released an episode in which you interview Steve Redgrave and I would really encourage anyone... I haven't worked my way through all of them. But I'm doing that lovely thing you know, when you discover a new podcast and you go through and you start sort of listening to episode after episode. Well, that's the stage I'm at. I'm like, oh, there's another one. And there's another one. But what I'm going to ask you is what is the greatest thing you have learned from your guests?
Steven Dowd:Oh, wow. That's a really interesting question. All of my guests in the build up to Endurow Challenge have been very rowing related with the exception of one guy called Roger Woodall, and Roger is a big events guy. So he set up the Bournemouth 7s Festival where they connect sport and music. And, and spent many years developing a incredible event, like a Glastonbury type event. 30,000 people I mean, big event, and it was doing really, really well. And then COVID happened. And one of the biggest events and what he'd been gearing up his entire world to do fell apart. Overnight, almost .Yeah, within the space of days, he had to make the call that he was going to pull an event. That's a huge, huge decision to face. Not only are you going to have massive fallout from it, but you've got to make it happen. You've actually got to push your own nuclear button on you and that is that is a tough call. But again, similar echoes to what we were saying earlier, there was an objectivity around it to say, Okay, what is the situation? Is it going to improve? Is it going to get better? Is it going to happen in time? The answer to those things was no, it was never going to not be no. So once you've spent some time kind of crying into the soup, then he was able to say, Okay, what do we do now? We need to move forward, and we need to move forward effectively. So he did, he pulled the button, pushed the button, sorry. And interestingly, enough of the 30,000 people or whatever that bought tickets, the majority said, keep our money, and we'll roll it over to when the event's available. And so I think what I learned from Roger was the objectivity allowed him to move forwards. And the belief that he built something really strong and really positive and was helping people that they enjoyed, that was wanted, was needed. It wasn't just a wasn't a flash in the pan or some sort of vanity project. It was something that was really wanted, is wanted, the belief in it will allow him to come back from that. He can't do it this year, it won't happen maybe even next year. But it will happen again. So there's an element of timing and belief that if you can harness can allow you to move forwards in a positive way. And as a result, he set up his own podcast, and he was he, like we said before we came on air, I don't really consider myself a podcaster. I've been very lucky that I've been able to talk few people into coming onto a podcast and sharing some fantastically interesting stories. I ... until I did this series of podcasts I'd never done a podcast before. And this is brand new. But I believe that there's a quality in the product. I believe that there's a there's an interesting story behind each of the people that we choose. I believe that the para rowing community has an unsung voice that could be a lot louder. And I have the ability and the stage, certainly before Endurow Challenge, to be able to do that. So when all those stars align, having a bit of belief in a product and having a belief that it can be acted upon at the right time, allows me to pick up the phone to the next guy and say, Hey, Steve, would you like to come on to a podcast? We haven't announced it yet. So why don't I announce it on your show? So here's an exclusive. Every week we do these podcasts and the person that is going to be coming on Monday or dropping on Monday is the supermodel Jodie Kidd.
Patricia Carswell:Oh my word.
Steven Dowd:And Jodie Kidd if you don't know most people know her from her days in super modelling. And then she went on to be hosts of all sorts of car shows and things like that. But she was also most recently on Don't Rock the Boat. And Don't Rock the Boat, for those that don't know, is an ITV show that went off for a week where she and a bunch of other celebrities, there were nine other celebs, five in each boat, took Rannoch ocean going craft and paddled up from Cornwall to Scotland over three and a half weeks, and they'd never met each other before. So what an incredible challenge over that period of time to sit in a boat with a whole bunch of people you've never met before. One of them particularly Craig Charles, was being sick at both ends, within two hours of getting on the boat. Everyone suffered terrible seasickness and there was like no holds barred in terms of the getting to know each other and the challenges that they faced and all my word, it sounds like an incredible event. So yeah, I was able to pick up the phone and say, I've got an opportunity and a product I believe in at a timing that's right, for this to work. And that just gives you the confidence to be able to push it forward. So so I think maybe the answer to your question, developing confidence from belief is probably the thing that I've learned most.
Patricia Carswell:Well, that's absolutely fantastic. And I really look forward to listening to that episode. That's really exciting. Now you say that you've been lucky to have those guests on your show I feel incredibly lucky to have had you on on this one. It's been a real pleasure talking to you. And it's been a real education as well. I feel inspired to sign up formally for the Endurow Challenge. And I really hope that people out there will do the same. And I think, you know, if you feel that it's a difficult time to go around asking for money for fundraising, just tell them a bit about Steven's story. And hopefully they will be inspired to donate and you can always self fund as well. I know a lot of people in in the cancer world who have felt a little reluctant about fundraising have have self funded their way through challenges as well. So that's always an option. But Steven, a huge thank you. It's been an absolute pleasure.
Steven Dowd:My pleasure. Patricia, thank you for having me on.
Patricia Carswell:Well, if that's not enough to prompt you to register for the Endurow Challenge, I don't know what it is. Since talking to Steven, I have gone ahead and registered. And if you have access to a rowing machine, I'd really encourage you to sign up to either by yourself or as part of a team. And I really hope I'll see you there. Alternatively, please, please would you consider sponsoring me even a tiny amount as I take on this challenge, and given my medical history, it will be a huge challenge for me to row for four hours, I worked out that if every single person listening sponsored me just a pound, I could reach my target within days or even less, so please consider even a tiny donation. My fundraising page is justgiving.com/fundraising/endurow- e-n-d-u-r-o-w. I'll put that link in the show notes. But here it is, again - justgiving.com/fundraising/endurow. So anyway, I haven't got time for any more because I need to go off and do some training on the erg! Next week's episode, which will be back to the usual Wednesday, is with an incredibly courageous young man talking about teenage suicide and mental health problems. And I'm pretty sure you'll be blown away by his bravery in coming on the show and by his wisdom - I certainly was. Until then, I hope you stay well. And next stroke, easy oar.