Sacrifice

The Opportunity Cost of Chasing Your Dreams

“What do you actually do with your life?”

I’ve been asked this question enough times that I’ve stopped being offended by it. It’s a fair question, even if it implies I am living some sort of nomadic existence, trading the sensibility of a career ladder for a life of activity in nature, journaling, and occasionally travelling the world to represent my country. Most of the time, it is not asked out of malicious intent, but rather out of genuine curiosity about how I make life work as a full-time athlete. There’s even a phrase amongst my teammates for it:

“When my real life begins.”

As if we’ve discovered some parallel dimension. A place to pause whatever track we’re supposed to be on, and pick up again once we decide to leave sport. An idea that the unconventional path grants you an extension on maturing. A Neverland of sorts where you’re suspended between a fantasy existence and the reality of adult obligations.

The thing about Neverland is that you don’t simply stumble upon it. The journey itself requires you to genuinely believe you can fly, even if your feet have never left the ground. Flying is objectively absurd. It directly contradicts the rules of physics, common sense and the advice of reasonable adults. Once you weigh the aerodynamics of the decision, you’ve already lost. You have to decide that the rules of reality don’t apply to you before you have any evidence that they don’t.

Hook doesn’t entirely hate Peter because he can fly. He hates him because eternal youth and resistance to responsibility are direct antonyms for Hook’s persistent anxiety about the ticking clock. A destiny that he is reminded of each time the hungry crocodile approaches. The ticking clock’s crescendo intensifies his anxiety that the world is moving on and that the fun is finite. Peter, meanwhile, is completely unbothered. Fear doesn’t exist for him because he never acknowledges the clock. Their conflict is an ongoing tug-of-war between a preoccupation with reality and an obliviousness to it.

Within the island of sport, athletes balance competing perspectives, teetering between absorption in the present and apprehension for the future. The financial commitment can feel like digging a deep hole of debt, with walls that grow higher and the light above growing fainter with each passing day. The longer you dig, the more daunting the climb back out feels.

The costs are not only financial. Time is the other currency spent just as quickly to meet the high demands of chasing perfection. While peers accumulate experience and build families, athletes live in a productive suspension, fully occupied without tangible credentials to show for it. The ticking is the loudest in the comparison.

Corporate Lexie

The Neverland metaphor earns its keep when you consider that the national rowing training centre is, literally, on an island as far west as you can go while remaining in Canada. For many athletes, the significant geographical distance to home is only rivalled by the conceptual distance of being completely disconnected from it. Family, friends, or the comfort you might have known before the venture, are somewhere beyond the horizon. For some, the distance is smaller, and for others, the journey, the steep airline ticket prices, and limited opportunities to travel make any kind of visit unattainable. The Lost Boys didn’t earn their name because Neverland was hard to reach. They earned it because they were far from home.

“I can’t go skiing with my family because there is a risk that I could get injured, or it could impact my training”

- National Rowing Team Athlete

Another intangible cost is the unpaid overtime you can never clock out of. Each decision about our fuel, recovery, and free time is carefully considered to optimize our training benefits. This looming responsibility becomes an exhausting filter for judging every decision, before it eventually shapes your identity. There is a subtle grief in realizing that spontaneity others may take for granted is a luxury you’ve surrendered. A gradual accumulation of decisions that felt like discipline in the moment, yet on reflection look like absence in disguise.

"It was not really Saturday night, at least it may have been, for they had long lost count of the days; but always if they wanted to do anything special, they said this was Saturday night, and then they did it."

- Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

All this to say, the commitment isn’t really a sacrifice at all.

There is a particular satisfaction in waking up each day to apply your full self to the pursuit of a dream. There isn’t a vague aspiration, but a carefully curated, measurable plan to become the best version of yourself. There is something unreasonably fun within the challenge of setting ambitious goals and a particular joy in watching consistency translate to incremental progress.

It is a privilege to be exhausted by a pursuit of your own choosing. There is a particular motivation in immersing yourself in an area of interest, aware of the gap between true mastery and excited by the possibility of closing it. It is a gift to work in natural environments, developing an attuned awareness of the interaction between the brain and body. A stark contrast to many other professional paths, which may be confined to a desk chair under fluorescent lighting, occupied with the geopolitics of a passive-aggressive note on the shared office fridge. Different sacrifices, I suppose.

And then there’s experiencing places around the world that a travel agent would probably never recommend. Experiencing authentic cultures through budget nail salons, public transportation, or restaurants that don’t exist on Google Maps. A camaraderie built with celebratory pub nights after competition, between a diverse collection of people, all coming from different places, yet vying for the same destination. A niche understanding that yields a particular kind of belonging between strangers.

The surreal experience of representing your country in the highest level of sport is something that never quite loses its absurdity, no matter how many times it happens. There is something deeply fulfilling about lining up against the best in the world, and something more powerful in sharing that fight with your teammates.

For future employers, within the blankness of my resume are the soft skills the journey has instilled in me. I embrace resilience, get excited about the work ethic required to build something big, and have developed a grounded approach to handling pressure. Most significantly, I’ve developed the delusion that anything is, in fact, possible. All potentially excellent qualities for your organization… or a liability depending on the task. Either way, you’d have to hire me to find out.

Connecting back to the Neverland analogy, I never mentioned Wendy. Her journey reveals both the exhilaration of living fully in the present and a realization of its fleeting nature. The conflict between wonder and responsibility eventually deepens her understanding that meaning is the architect of our experience.

I am not quite ready to return to reality, but I know I’ll be better for it, having come from Neverland.

“Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough. You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.”

- Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie