If not for a strong faith and support from his wife, Lyndon Rush likely wouldn’t be piloting a bob sleigh for Canada down the run at the 2014 Sochi Olympics in February.
Rush, who calls Sylvan Lake home, says after missing the silver medal at the Vancouver games by 1/100th of a second he contemplated retirement so he could spend more time with his growing family.
“I didn’t think I was ready to commit to four more years and I thought I’d be done,” he said. “I hadn’t made up my mind totally but in my mind I was sort of done.”
Rush said after a look inward about his future he received a strong sign from his wife about what to do moving forward.
“She really felt like my work wasn’t done. She said those words ‘I feel that your work isn’t done here yet and I think you need to continue for another four year cycle’,” he said.
So it was back onto the circuit of traveling overseas and around North America for weeks on end, spending time with his team mates and getting prepped for the bob sleigh by working out at the Can Pro Training Centre in Red Deer.
Rush says for his sport the workouts are more centered around doing the exercise hard for a short period of time, recovering and then doing it all again, unlike so many other athletes who have those long, rigorous workouts.
“Mentally you need to be prepared for that effort but at least it’s not that ‘lactic acid I want to puke training’, so I kind of like the sport I do.”
The season is well underway with the Canadian team racing in three World Cup events in North America and Rush says they’ve had a mixed bag of results to this point.
“We haven’t really actually had a really good race but we’ve had a couple of okay races,” he said. “But we’ve had a couple of real awful ones where we made some bad mistakes, like my guys have fallen out of the sled already this year. That doesn’t happen very often.”
Rush says when a team comes up against some adversity it can be easy for them to turn on each other, start to point fingers and assign blame for their failures. He says it can really snowball into a very bad situation but in spite of the rocky start Rush says the feeling amongst the team remains upbeat as the countdown to Sochi continues.
“The guys are still really positive, they’re supporting each other, trying to make the other guy better. They’re helping each other,” he said. “I’ve got a good feeling that we’re going to be okay.”
Another good feeling rolling around inside of Rush is what the future holds for him after this season is done as he intends to make this the final chapter in his racing book even if he doesn’t have a plan set in stone.
Part of the unfinished plan doesn’t include remaining connected to the sport because Rush says it would require him traveling with the team, something he’s not prepared to do anymore with his three children growing and another one on the way.
“I want to do the very best I can this season; it’s my last season and I want to really nail it. I’m not concerned, I’m not anxious about it right now.”
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