How Far Can You Go Read online

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Preface

  1 Only Possibilities

  2 Back from the Brink

  3 Starting Over

  4 More than Able

  5 More than Able, Part 2

  6 Some Dreams Don’t Need to Come True

  7 Amanda

  8 The Quest for Gold

  9 Tipping Point

  10 Where is the Door Marked “Walking”?

  11 Three Small Steps

  12 Impossible

  13 My Gold-Medal Moment

  14 Two Steps Back in Paradise

  15 “Which Do You Want More?”

  16 From Peter Parker to Spider-Man

  17 Too Big to Fail

  18 Race Day

  19 The Final Push

  20 Afterword

  Photographs

  Acknowledgements

  Tribute to Dad

  About John Maclean and Mark Tabb

  For my dad, Alexander Maclean, who loved and encouraged me to try my best and give everything 100%. You said to me, “Look how far you’ve come, now how far can you go?” What a great question.

  Nothing great is easy.

  —Captain Matthew Webb, the first person to swim the English Channel

  Preface

  I do not believe in coincidences. I do not believe things happen by chance. Everything happens for a reason, even if we do not understand what that reason may be—especially at the time.

  I have also found life to be filled with opportunities if we will open our eyes and see the possibilities. And opportunity is just that: a possibility. Life never just hands us anything. As the first man to swim the English Channel—Captain Matthew Webb—famously said, nothing great is easy. Given the fact that he uttered these words after swimming more than forty kilometres of open ocean in a place where the sea will lie flat one minute then throw six metre swells at you the next, Captain Webb’s words are a bit of an understatement. Pursuing possibilities means digging deep within ourselves to find the strength to never give up and never give in, to push through the pain that lasts for a moment to forge the memories that last a lifetime.

  Unfortunately, all the hard work and determination in the world do not guarantee success. Sometimes doors slam shut in our faces and no matter how hard we push, they will never open again. However, I have found that every time one door closes, another opens. It’s up to us to look for that opening.

  This, in a nutshell, is the story of my life. I grew up with big dreams in a working-class family in Western Sydney. I thought all those dreams had been taken from me when I was only twenty-two. But when I stopped feeling sorry for myself and opened my eyes, I found new possibilities awaiting me. The pursuit of those possibilities took me further than even my biggest dreams would have. The question was, How far could I go? Little did I know that my pursuits were merely the warm-up act.

  In May 2013, I stood up and did something that was, for all intents and purposes, impossible.

  Now I am in pursuit of a new set of dreams, again pushing the limits to see how far I can go. Even as I close in on my fiftieth birthday, I believe my story has only begun.

  Nothing great is easy. Nor is anything great accomplished alone. Every pursuit requires a team, even the pursuit of goals that appear to be individual accomplishments. In my life, the right people have always come along at just the right time. My closest friendships have been forged in the midst of my greatest challenges. These dear friends have not only pushed me along to reach my goals, but I have pushed them to reach theirs. This isn’t just my story; it is theirs as well.

  John Maclean

  Sydney

  1

  Only Possibilities

  * * *

  I don’t remember my mother. I have no memory of her face or her smell or her embrace. Nothing. Everything I know about her came secondhand from my brother Marc or my sister Marion or our father Alex.

  My mother’s name was Avril. She married my father when they both lived in a little village just outside of Glasgow, Scotland. My father had been married before. He had three children from his first marriage. A few years after he and my mother married, my father decided to move his new family to the other side of the world and settle in the southern suburbs of Sydney, Australia. Whatever the reason, he felt he needed a fresh start with his new family, and my mother went along with it. My older brother and sister were both born in Scotland. I came along soon after the move Down Under.

  I was still in nappies when my mother’s downward spiral began. Before she met my father, she had been diagnosed with and treated for a “severe character disorder of a psychopathic nature”. Twice she was admitted into psychiatric hospitals and once she contemplated suicide. My father didn’t know any of this when the two of them fell in love. Nor did Avril exhibit any symptoms or show any signs that something might not be quite right. Theirs was a perfectly normal marriage until the stress of a third small child weighed upon her. Unlike when my brother and sister were born, my mother did not have her mother and father to lean on for extra support with me. She was also facing the huge change involved in moving halfway around the world, and she had to deal with that largely alone as my father was away at work, trying to keep the family afloat financially.

  I was only ten months old the first time my siblings and I were placed in foster care. My mother had been admitted to the Parramatta Psychiatric Centre and my father had no other option to provide care for us while trying to help my mother heal and hold down his jobs. For my mother, fourteen rounds of electroconvulsive therapy followed, along with numerous medications. Three months later she was home and the family was back together, but it didn’t last. A few months after her release a friend found her wandering around The Gap at Watsons Bay, one of the most beautiful places on earth. But my mother wasn’t there for the view. The Gap consists of very high cliffs where Sydney Harbour meets the Pacific Ocean, which makes it a popular suicide spot. She didn’t jump, but she told her therapist that she wished she had because she was, in her words, “no good to her husband or children”.

  Over the next three years my mother was in and out of psychiatric hospitals, while my brother and sister and I went back and forth into foster care. At one point my father sent my mother back to Scotland in the hope that spending time with her family might do her some good. It didn’t. Not long after she returned to Australia, she was back at The Gap. Another trip to Parramatta Hospital followed. As soon as she was released she went back to The Gap. She never returned. Her body was found on the rocks below.

  I was four. I do not remember any of this. My big brother, Marc, filled me in on all the details years later.

  I suppose such childhood trauma should have sent me into the depths of self-pity. But it did not—not then or ever. Feeling sorry for myself, even at a young age, didn’t make much sense to me. I reflected on the loss of my mother, later in life, but I knew there was nothing I could have done to save her, nor could I ever bring her back. Instead, when my father remarried a woman named Anne, I was excited to be a family again. A new mum meant my siblings and I left foster care once and for all. From that point onward I dove into my young life with youthful abandon.

  Or should I say I ran into life. For me, life always involved running fast and jumping high. Going back to my days in foster care, I found that running faster than anyone else grabbed people’s attention, and attention had to be the next best thing to love. When our family got back together after Dad married Anne, the cul-de-sac where we lived in Tregear, in Greater Western Sydney, turned into a series of never-ending games depending on the season. From touch football to cricket to tennis, all the kids on the street always had some sort of game in play, and I was always in the
middle of them. When I had to go off to school, I spent most of my time staring out the window and daydreaming about getting back outside and back into the game.

  Beyond the street matches in the neighbourhood, my dad encouraged us as kids to play organised sports because he believed it was a good way to meet friends and burn off excess energy. My speed helped me succeed, and it kept the attention on me. Not only did I beat the other boys in sprints and middle-distance races, I was also asked to try long jumps and high jumps and even racewalking. I did even better with racewalking than running, especially the 1,500 metre. I made it all the way to the state championships in the under-ten-year-old 1,500-metre racewalk, only to be disqualified by a technicality. In racewalking, either your heel or toe must always have contact with the ground. The field marshals watch your feet like a hawk. If both the heel and toe are off the ground at the same time, you receive a warning. Two warnings and you are out. I got two warnings, so I was out of the state champs.

  Throughout the next year my coach, Kevin Stone, and I worked on my technique. Again, I made it all the way back to the state champs and picked up the bronze medal. The next year I took home the gold. This was very exciting because in the under-12 category in which I now competed, all state champions go on to the nationals. The best kids in Little Athletics around the country travelled to Bruce Stadium in Canberra. I remember my brother Marc running on the other side of the oval, cheering me on during the race. It felt amazing crossing the finish line in first place as I added a second gold medal to my collection. I’m sure Mum and Dad and Marc and my sister Marion were very proud. When I arrived back at school after the nationals, the headmaster asked me to join him at an assembly where I was honoured in front of the entire school. I liked attention, but not that much attention. The assembly didn’t sit very well with me.

  As I grew a little older my sports fantasies moved from racing to football, in this case rugby league, which is the toughest of the three footy codes played in Australia, and is generally regarded as the toughest team sport on the planet, so of course, that’s what I wanted to play. I loved the game.

  All the kids in the neighbourhood played footy for as far back as I can remember. I started playing organised games when I was nine and my dad signed me up on my first junior league team. From the moment I first stepped on the field, I knew I’d found my game. I remember once when I was perhaps seven, my father wouldn’t let me go out to play football one Saturday because it was raining. I was devastated. A Saturday without football might as well be a school day. I loved the game and I was good at it. For me, life was all about speed, and from the beginning I was faster than most of the guys I played against. I also had a few tricks up my sleeve. In a game when I was about ten, I had the ball, running down the field against one of the top teams in our division. Up ahead a boy lowered his head and got ready to tackle me. As he dove toward me, I jumped and hurdled over him. I didn’t stop running until I scored a try. After the game the referee came over to me. “That was some play you made,” he said, “and it’s all well and good that you scored, but you need to watch yourself. That’s the kind of move that’s going to get you hurt.” Later I discovered it was his son that I had leapt over.

  I kept coming up against this same player. His name was Colin Thomas. It turns out he was always one of the best, if not the best, player on his team, just like I was on mine. Before long the two of us ended up on the same travel team. His dad came by and picked me up in their family Volkswagen Beetle for the drive down from Faulconbridge in the Blue Mountains where we lived to the practice site. Colin and I got to know one another pretty well in those half-hour commutes. Both of us dreamed of playing professional football someday.

  After we both graduated from our respective high schools, we started training together to push one another toward our goal of playing the game we loved for actual money. I landed a spot on the under-23 minor league team of our closest rugby league team, the Penrith Panthers. Playing for the Panthers was the dream of many boys in the western suburbs of Sydney, so this was a big deal. Technically, that made me a rugby league athlete, although the salary was so low that the team had to help players land jobs with local businesses to keep us afloat. Thanks to the Panthers, I went to work as an assistant maintenance man at Tregear Public School. On the field I had a great first year with the Panthers. Another season or two like the first, I thought, and I might get to move up to the big league team. Unfortunately, I spent most of my second season sitting on the bench after a falling-out with the coach. At the end of the season I was informed that my services were no longer needed. Rather than give up my dream, I signed on with the Warragamba Wombats, a Group Six team.

  While I bounced between Penrith and Warragamba, Colin went to work for a fitness and aquatic centre. The two of us kept training with each other to keep our football dreams alive. With each other isn’t exactly the correct term. We really trained against one another. Everything we did turned into a no-holds-barred competition. If Colin bench-pressed ninety kilos, I had to do ninety-five kilos, which made him do one hundred kilos and me one hundred and five kilos, and on and on until neither one of us could lift our hands above our heads. The winner of our competitions always won a fabulous prize, something exotic like a roast chicken or a fresh fruit salad. We once raced on Culburra beach for a seafood dinner. I don’t know that I have ever enjoyed a seafood dinner more. That’s just how Colin and I were. Maybe it went back to the day we first met on the football field and I hurdled over him when he tried to tackle me. Although we were great friends, we couldn’t ride our bikes down the street without it turning into a race.

  One day Colin suggested a new competition. “I overheard some of the guys down at the club talking about doing this year’s Nepean Triathlon. I think we should enter.” At that moment everything I knew about triathlons came from watching the Hawaiian Ironman on television in Colin’s living room, but I still said, “Sure. Let’s give it a go. I will enjoy beating you in something new.”

  In the weeks leading up to my first Nepean Triathlon, I did a minimal amount of triathlon-specific training. Colin and I raced our bikes up and down the Blue Mountains near our homes. I also ran a little more than usual. It didn’t take much to get me to run. I loved running. Sprints. Distance. It didn’t matter. Back in 1986 the Nepean’s run segment was twelve kilometres, or just under seven and a half miles. I felt confident that even if Colin had a big lead on me going into the last segment, I could make up any deficit with my legs. I did not feel the same confidence about the swim. Growing up I never bothered much with swimming as running was my thing. I could do breaststroke well enough to keep from drowning but I didn’t see much point in learning anything new for this one race. I’d never tried doing breaststroke for a full kilometre, but I figured, how hard could it be?

  I soon learned it was extremely hard. My breaststroke turned out to be just a notch or two above dog paddle. I was one of the last ones out of the water. Colin actually knew how to swim properly. From the start he left me in his wake. He still had a lead after the forty-kilometre bike segment. But, just as I had predicted, I passed him in the twelve-kilometre run and never looked back. I never let him hear the end of how easily I beat him.

  Of course, Colin being Colin, he wanted a rematch. I had to give it to him. Now that I knew what it took to compete in a triathlon, I started training a little more seriously for the 1987 Nepean. I learned to swim properly, logging many laps in a local pool at St Marys with one of my mates from the Wombats, John Young. Johnno and I started spending quite a bit of time training together. I also put in more kilometres on my bike and ran just a little more than the year before. Unfortunately, when I woke up on the morning of the 1987 Nepean Triathlon, I knew this was not going to be my day. I’d come down with a bit of a bug, which not only slowed me down, but also took away my kick at the end. I didn’t have enough left in the run segment to catch Colin. He never let me hear the end of it. So, of course, me being me, I told him, “Okay, mate, next
year is the decider. We’ll see who wins!”

  I was still not a serious triathlete, at least not in my mind. I remained a football player with big league dreams. But with so much riding on the 1988 Nepean Triathlon, I started training months ahead of time. I went out and bought a new bike. I paid $800 for a Malvern Star, which was quite a bit of money for a bike back then. This was the finest bike I’d had since my father gave me a racing bike for my fourteenth birthday. Unfortunately, that story didn’t exactly have a happy ending. I rode that bike so much on the day my father gave it to me that I was too tired to put it away when I came home for dinner. Instead, I just dropped it on the lawn in front of our house. I planned on going out for another spin after I ate, but I went off to bed instead. The next morning my bike was gone. I never saw it again. I thought a lot about that bike when I bought my new one eight years later. No matter what, I wasn’t going to let anything happen to this bike.

  Colin and I spent a lot of time up in the Blue Mountains on training rides. Going up the mountains was gruelling, but coming back down was worth it. Once or twice I got up to over eighty kilometres per hour. I kept pushing, trying to hit one hundred, but I could never quite get there. “You know,” I told Colin one day, “I bet if we had a tandem racing bike, we could do it.”

  For me, this was more than just a crazy idea. I knew a guy in St Clair who customised bikes. I gave him a call and he went to work on our super bike. Around the same time, I moved out of my parents’ house and moved in to a place in Faulconbridge with a friend, Mike Winter. Football season had begun and my triathlon training started paying dividends on and off the field. I was having the best year of my life in rugby league. If I kept this up, I knew I would be able to move up a grade and get a little closer to my dream of playing football at the highest level. Just in case this didn’t work out, I applied for a position with the local fire station. I was twenty-two years old. Life felt like an open door to boundless possibilities.