Second-year political science student Mike Tayler has been a member of the Junior National Team for slalom kayaking for the last three years.
He has been a paddler at the Ottawa River Runners Club for the last 11 years and at the Canadian National Championships last month, Tayler won the senior men’s K-1 slalom race.
The Charlatan’s Lana Peric caught up with Tayler to talk training, school, and his goal to make it to the Summer Olympics in 2012.
The Charlatan (TC): How did you get into kayaking?
Mike Tayler (MT): It was through a summer camp, actually about 11 years ago now. It was in August 2000, and basically I took a three-day summer camp. My parents needed somewhere to put me for the last couple days of the summer and I didn’t know anything about it.
I didn’t even really know what kayaking was. I just got in the boat, loved it, and it kind of went from there.
TC: Did it ever occur to you in the last several years that you could be training for the Olympics?
MT: The idea was always in the back of my mind that I wanted to compete. Probably since I was 13, I knew that I wanted to race for the national team.
I think it was when I was 16, I was counting the year and was thinking, “I’ll be 20 when London comes around.” But I also thought that 20 was still a really young age to go to the Olympics, especially in the slalom kayaking.
So it wasn’t really until last year that it got onto my actual radar that I could actually sort of compete. And it wasn’t really until June of this year, at our national team trials [NTTs], when I was fifth overall at the NTTs, and on the second day, I was second in both races.
I had these really good results and I thought, “Wow, this is actually a really good possibility.” It really motivated me to start training harder for the next year.
TC: What’s your training program like? How often do you train?
MT: During the summer, I’m paddling twice a day, so probably 10 to 12 times a week I’m training. In the winter, we switch to a little more gym stuff and cross country skiing. It’s still probably 10 to 12 times a week . . . just not as much paddling.
We do go on training camps in North Carolina. I’ll be going down there in November for probably a three or four-week training camp.
And then I will probably also be going to New Zealand and Australia in January and February.
TC: How do you balance this with school?
MT: It’s definitely tough. I really try to keep the three areas — my athletic, academic, and social life — balanced. I find that if you try to devote too much time to any one of them, it kind of gets crazy. I leave myself enough time for my schoolwork and just relaxation.
I know it can sometimes be tempting to train too much, but you definitely need to give yourself some time off.
2011 marked Tayler’s first year racing as a senior at the National Team Trials, where he was ranked fifth and then came second in both his races on the second day of trials. He also finished 13th at the Junior World Championships last year.
