Jonny Brownlee on Olympic Glory, Retirement & the Cost of Elite Sport | Jonny Brownlee | Ep 66

And with your parents, did they understand what it takes? Because obviously you're cycling to school, you're then running for like an hour or something on your lunch break and then you're swimming for a couple of hours in the evening or something and you're doing that every single day.

Like most parents will probably say, oh, you're doing a bit too much, Johnny.

Whereas did they kind of like push you on?

No, they never pushed us on.

There's only one time or a couple of times I can remember them encouraging me to go swimming.

I remember coming home and it was a time I wasn't sure if I wanted to do it.

Again, that kind of 14 years old just before I full on committed was like, do we want to do this? Can I play football at school with my mates? I remember hiding my swim bag and being like, mum, I can't find my swim bag.

And she was going, no, no, no, I've got a spare one.

Off you go.

But no, they never, I think our parents let us kind of learn and fail.

And, you know, fail is not the right word.

Learn from our mistakes.

And that involved with training.

And they never say to us, you're doing too much.

As long as we did our schoolwork, I think that was the most important thing.

then we could do what we wanted around that and they never said that's i can't believe you're psyching 100k today what you're doing that's crazy they would let me for example i remember doing my first actually 100 mile ride and i absolutely blew up about 30 40 miles from home um and my dad i stopped in a bakery and phoned my dad up and came and picked me up and and and took me home because, again, that was part of the learning process and maybe that was too far.

But they wanted us to just give it our best and learn from our mistakes.

I think I would have been very different if Alistair wasn't around.

I think he was the one who was kind of the groundbreaker, really.

He was the one who, as a young lad... from being very young basically look at a week and go okay what free time can i train in okay let's stop there i can ride to school there i can lunch time i can swim after school okay there's three sessions that day i can do that again the day after on a weekend i can do a four-hour bike ride and the british triathlon coaches would go what are you doing you know you can't train 25 hours a week as a 15 year old you're gonna burn out you're gonna blow up and he's like no no i can do it and i'll show you i would have been the one who listened to those coaches went okay maybe it's too much i'll back off And that gave us that massive fitness base that we kind of took for the rest of our career.

But Alistair was a really strong kind of groundbreaker.

And again, Alistair was a really strong one who he went to the Olympics in Beijing in 2008.

It was a bit of a shock when he qualified.

You know, he was only...

The qualification race was earlier in that year.