INTRO: Do you know that feeling of having to leave something or someone behind because it's just the best decision. John Register, former track and field hurdler knows a thing or two about this from his own life story to a point that most of us cannot even begin to imagine. Stay tuned, this is Athlete Story, your show if you want to keep a connection to your athletic identity and to other athletes while pursuing your new mission in life after sports.

I'm your host Anja Bolbjerg, a former world top 10 skier in Moguls and freeride skiing now way into life after sports. I invite you to join other former athletes, send me here on Athlete Story for resources to help you put your former sports career to work for you in life after sports.

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In today's Athlete Story, we'll meet John F. Register. He's an All-American athlete running the 400-meter hurdles at US Olympic Trials when he had a bad accident. An accident that forced him to established a new normal, as he says. On this journey, his new normal, he discovered a parallel world of sports that he didn't even know about. He was soon all in and eventually qualify for the games with his new normal and won a silver medal in Paralympic long jump.

Now, I'll let him fill you in on that story. He's a professional speaker and today he shares his life lessons with other people. He's done two TEDx Talks, he teaches other athletes as well, how to extract that value and the lessons from their own stories to inspire others and make an impact. So let's welcome, John F. Register. Hi, John, welcome to the Athlete Story Podcast.

John: I'm so honored to be here. Thank you so much. I know the time zone is different but it's great to be on with an Olympian.

Anja: Yes, likewise, likewise. I wanted to have you on as an amazing athlete but also as a real champion when it comes to sharing your story and giving that inspiration when it comes to sharing the lessons that you've learned in your life or even I can say, in a life full of hurdles.

John: [laughs] Right.

Anja: If I want to keep staying that image, maybe I can say that the slight the hurdles in your lane have been just like those couple of inches taller than in the other lanes, maybe but let's dive into that and that's how you tell the story.

John: Sure, thank you. A lot of times, our lives can change with one wrong step. Our lives can also change in one right step as well. But the wrong step I took in life was I was training for the Olympic Games in the 400-meter hurdles. I had twice been to Olympic Trials, once in the high hurdles and then once in the 400-meter hurdles. Then on May 17th, 1994, when I was training for my third Olympic Trials and I was in the United States touted as the eighth fastest hurdler, on my way I was predicted to make the 1996 Olympic team,

At 5:29 in the afternoon, I was the eighth fastest hurdler, I was on my way to Officer Candidate School, the United States Army. I was really zipping around my first self 52nd hurdle race and at 5:30 PM in the afternoon, I would never run another hurdle in my life. I went across the hurdle, I snapped my leg in half, dislocated the knee which caused the severing of the artery behind the kneecap.

Seven days later because of poor circulation, my left leg was amputated right above the knee and so that was it, I was done and so how do you make that transition? What do you do next? A lot of it has to do I think with-- in this our context, is what have you put in for the outputs that you're going to get whenever you're going to make a life transition and are you ready for that transition when it happens?

In my case, I, fortunately, had a lot of things that were in my life besides track and field. I had to quickly pull those things into the forefront and begin to look at some of those areas of my life with more scrutiny.

Anja: You make it sound like it's just then this happened that happened and then you move on but I can't even begin to imagine the whole-- you see yourself as an athlete and all of a sudden you're lying there and you have to consider whether to get your leg amputee or stay in a wheelchair.

John: Yes. It is devastating. I don't mean to go over it so quickly but I can unpack it on what was going on in my mind. For the first part, we can make transitions really fast and quick depending upon what's been our life and then later on, you go back and when people ask me, "Well, how did you get over it? How did you handle that painful part of your life?" As I've gone back and re-looked at the entire process, I had high goals and high dreams of serving in our military and going on to Officer Candidate School and I had a whole career path that was laid out before me.

I had all of my transition was ready for when I made the transition after track and field to keep doing the military career. Then after that, it was to work for the military in a civilian capacity for another 20 years and do like almost a double retirement. My whole pathway was thought about and thought about in the forefront. When you look at the accolades that came behind before that day, having run for the University of Arkansas, being a 4-time all-American in the hurdles and my relay teams, I really was on this fast track and had seen and modeled other people who were on my team that were already Olympians.

I knew what it took to make the team and I was willing to do the work and the sacrifices to make it and build a support network around me. But on that day, when everything turned upside down and the leg is-- I'm looking at my leg and I know, I have to make a tough choice probably in the near future. On that day, I began going internal and a lot of my fears started coming out. I think we all have these fears.

Now the fears are in three parts, I believe. The first is the fear of myself. I am turning inward and to myself and saying, "Who's going to support me now? Will my wife still see me as her husband? Will she stay with me? Will my son who's five and a half years old, will he still value me and see me as his dad? Do I still have a job? Can I support my family in the United States Army?"

All these things were in my head because my Olympic dreams are over, I don't know if I could support my family. All those things were moving very quickly in my mind and I began to go down this downward spiral of despair. When the doctor said, "You have a choice to make", how do you make a choice like that where you are choosing to create something that is so permanent, that there's no going back from the amputated leg, you're not growing that leg back.

I think that's where we are in our lives when we, as athletes, are making a movement or transitioning, that part of our life is done, it's gone now and so what is our new identity that we have in this what I call the new normal? I think the second fear I had was fear of other people, how are other people going to view me or keep me in their box. Other people choosing to believe for me what I can or cannot do, which is based on what they believe they could or could not do if they were in my situation.

That's the second fear. How are my teammates going to look at me now? Can I be strong enough to be separated from them? Or am I going to be pulled back into that world? I'll just do one more Olympic Games. I'll do one more FIFA match. I'm going to do one more and we keep doing the one more because we're so afraid to make the transition on what the other side actually looks like. Then society. We have fears of society.

What do we listen to? What if we allowed into our mind and our brain to make us think that something is going to hold us back to our initial fears? Why do we believe those fears in the first place? For me, everybody's seen Walt Disney movie, they've seen Captain Hook, Captain Hook is an amputee in the Walt Disney movie, Peter Pan and he's an amputee and he's a villain of the movie so now, do I associate myself as a villain, as a dark, as a scary character because I see Captain Hook as a six-year-old and I'm terrified of him in this little cartoon movie? How many times do we listen to the language of other people that we don't have control over or society that dictates our initial fears? That all was going on in my mind during that initial time, but when I share that story as a keynote speaker and a professional speaker in a breakout session and during training sessions, I dive deep into what our initial fears actually are before we begin to build a process out of that.

Anja: I guess the buzzword for that is reframing. There's a lot of reframing that has to come both from the inside and from other people, and I know your wife played a role in that when you were still at the hospital.

John: Yes, absolutely. When I'm in the lowest moment, when I'm contemplating on all these things, I'm moving out in Wichita, Kansas at the time in the hospital and I'm wheeled out to an accessible playground. As I'm parked there in the wheelchair, I'm thinking about all these negative thoughts as she's playing with our son, John Jr, on the swing set. As she sees me struggling because I've just begun breaking down and started crying uncontrollably because my life is totally upside down, it's 180 degrees in a different direction and she sees that. She comes running over to me and she throws her arms around me, and she says, "What is going on?"

I begin to articulate it. I begin to speak to her all my fears. Then she says the words that really stop my downward spiral. She says, "You know what, John, we're going to get through this together. This is just our new normal. This is really just our new normal." When she said those words, she really baselined my entire existence because all these fears I had were really unfounded. They were only my fears, my thoughts, of what the future might look like. Who had put them in there? Who made me think these fears are going to be there? As I started going through my sobs and crying, my son, John Jr, he jumps off the swing set, he hits the ground and he comes running over with his little five and a half-year-old legs and says, "Hey, dad, did you see my big jump? Dad, did you look at my jump?"

He comes in between myself and Alice seeing that I'm struggling, and in those 20 meters, he's just validated me as his father and he's created his new normal and so really, they have moved on before I've moved on. Sometimes we need those individuals in our life that are so close to our inner circle that they believe for us what we cannot yet see for ourselves. That's critical to have that very small inner circle around us to help us with that initial movement in those redefining moments that we will have to go through.

Anja: Then from there on you put on your athletic mind settings and now it's rehab, you're going to get out, you jump in a pool and new things start to happen, new doors start to open. How did that all go?

John: I had a physical therapist. I was in with a lot of older citizens and they really didn't know what to do with me because I was this young kid who had this amputated leg, I'm a high performing athlete. Even though I lost a lot of weight, they saw the determination that I'm going to get back up, I'm going to beat this. That was flipping my hat back on to the athletic side because I know athletics is going to get me back in shape. My heart rate which had gone from 48 beats per minute and now it's over 100 because my body's in total shock, I've got to get that back down so I need to exercise again. The physical therapist told me to start swimming, and so I get in the water and really 25 meters, I can't even make it across the pool.

As we continue this kind of story, I get fast in the water, learn how to swim, and I get so fast in the water that somehow 22 months later, I make the Paralympic swim team. Now, I didn't know anything about Paralympics. There was no reason for me to know about Paralympics. When I first heard about it, I thought it was Special Olympics for cognitive disabilities. I thought everybody was lumped in one category, but the Paralympics are for those with physical disabilities and visual impairments, and they are the parallel games to the Olympic Games. I didn't know any of this. Who knew that there was a parallel track out there for athletes with disabilities?

I could take my training that I had done as an Olympic class athlete and it was the exact same training that I could do as a Paralympic athlete. There was no difference whatsoever. I had the mindset of that because I knew it was the training at the highest level before and so I just worked on it at the trials and I didn't think I was going to even make a Paralympic team after I knew about it. My goal was just to make it to the swim trials, because 22 months, no one's going to make a team in 22 months. I thought maybe the next squad I could do it if I dedicated myself, maybe I could make a team.

I went to the trials, and I get there, and I needed to swim like 1:06:00 to qualify to make the Paralympic standard in the 100-meter freestyle. I went and swam 1:06:01. I was just one hundredth second out of making it, but I was ecstatic. I had saved my time five seconds in 100-meter freestyle. I was like, "This is Awesome." I left before the team was announced. I went back to Virginia where I was living and the coach from Catholic University, Coach Calvin, of Catholic University, he winds up calling me and saying, "Why did you leave before the team was announced?" I said, "Well, I didn't make it. I really appreciate it. Good luck down in Atlanta, Georgia."

He says, "The time you needed in the 50-meter freestyle to make the team was 30.5 seconds and when you flip turned for the 100-meter freestyle, you were actually at 29.8 on the wall so you were under the time we needed. We picked you up for the relay team because half the distance is the only race that you can qualify for and have an official time at the flip turn in the 100 freestyle is at the 50." I didn't know that. Things that we don't know could actually be detrimental to us. That was crazy. I just almost dropped the phone and said, "You mean I'm going to Atlanta as a swimmer?" I was blown away by that.

It was then I saw athletes running with artificial limbs on the track and became my first experience with that. Then I said, "I have to have a leg made for running." The track and field bug bit me again, and I learned how to run on an artificial limb and four years later won the silver medal in Sydney, Australia in the long jump becoming, at that time, one of the only two individuals in the world to jump over 5.5 meters without a leg or a knee. [chuckles]

Anja: Wow, that's an amazing story and a nice turn of it. Are you still involved in sports?

John: In various capacities, so I am involved in sport. I just actually left the United States Olympic Committee one year ago in January after developing, I believe, a legacy in giving back to the community in a variety of capacities where we grew or planted and then gave back in that capacity, so plant seeds from how we have grown from our trees. One of those givebacks was to create the Paralympic Military Sports Program.

This program helped wounded, ill, and injured service members from, first, United States, then in Canada, then in England and then I think we did Italy too and Germany, growing those programs so that wounded, ill, injured, service members can do sports as a tool for their rehabilitation. It grew beyond my wildest dreams and my capacity. It grew very quickly. I went to Loughborough University in England and talked about how I grew the program in the United States. Prince Harry heard about it, started Invictus Games from it from our Warrior Games that we did in the United States.

It was great having a chance to talk with him and talk about how programs can grow because my big vision in the humanitarian vision of peace around the world, I believe that sports is the fastest way to have dialogue and talk. I do a lot with diplomacy now, but my big vision was to have one country that has fought with another country and vice versa and wounded those citizens and those soldiers to actually meet on the battlefield of sport and have friendly competition there to talk about how we will end the next conflict, the next wars.

The form is actually there and it does exist. It's called CISM, the World Military Games. It's in Brussels, Belgium. It was started in 1948, the same year as the Paralympic concept. I thought that was pretty interesting. We did get a CISM style of competition of track and field done in Germany. I think it was in 2008, 2009 where we had six or seven countries come in to compete. I still-- What allude me is the two countries that had fought wars against each other. I'm still trying to slowly continue to work on that and see if I can get that done.

Anja: That's a nice mission. [chuckles] I know you do work with athletes in helping them share their stories so that other people can find inspiration and value in the lessons that they've been through. How do you go about that? What does it take for an athlete's story to be valuable to others or inspirational?

John: That is a great question. I had to do a lot of discovery and so for the first time, you know, I'm a professional speaker now. One of my passions is to help athletes to tell their journey stories in such a way that it can actually earn the revenue and dollars and they can articulate their value in the marketplace because it is something. You're not just winning a medal but the entire process of becoming an Olympic athlete, a Paralympic athlete, the obstacles that we overcome, the challenges that we have we face, the dark days that we all go through and there is no guarantee of a medal on the other side of it. Most athletes that go to the Olympic or Paralympic Games, they don't win a medal. They all come back home without anything.

They represent their countries very well but most don't win medals. Only three will win medals. The stories that we have are generally not the stories about the medals that we won. They're really about the life experiences along the way that actually are tangible to other people, other audiences. I hope athletes unpack those stories as insights into where they can go.

Usually, the first question after an athlete or military service member says, "Yes, I want to tell my story. I know I got a great story." Usually, I say, "So what?" [laughs] Because everybody has one. Everybody has a story. Just because you have a great story doesn't mean it's going to sell in the marketplace where people want to hear it. People, when you tell a story they're interested only to the degree of how well your story actually impacts them in their life. We all listen like that.

What can I get from this that can help me in my life? If you just tell a great story and I have to infer everything you've told me then I'm doing a lot of work. I teach athletes how to tell a story in such a way as you are giving quality information and you are challenging the audience to actually take the information because they might not be an Olympic skier, they might not be a Paralympic athlete, they may not want to be an Olympian but how can we teach them to win the medals that are in their own lives.

That's how we get to it. That's a great transition piece because a lot of athletes will say, "Well, how much could I really make at this?" Well, there are some athletes that are making seven figures doing this. They're in the millions of dollars doing it on an annual basis. There are others that are making in the mid-six figures doing it and there are one or two there are actually eight-figure earners.

This could be a very great transition. Just in the frame of your story it helps with other areas of your life and articulating your value in the marketplace. That's really what I hope athletes get through and then I'm putting together now, hold a team of Paralympic athletes, a military service injured personnel and I have a couple of Olympians as well that have gone through some type of trauma usually mental trauma to help them share their stories into a market and then earn revenue from that for more conglomerate as I train athletes how to tell that story.

Anja: It's therapeutic to get in the same time digging into those stories. That's what I felt every time I tried- [crosstalk] To the people who say "what's so interesting about me" and then they compare themselves maybe to you or someone else say they've heard, what would you say? Does everybody have something of value to share do you think?

John: Absolutely everyone has something of value to share. I don't look at it as degrees of value because I hear a lot of athletes say, "Well, I never won a medal so therefore I can't be a speaker or I don't have anything to share."

That's the farthest thing from the truth because we do have the value and people want to know that experience and that journey. What I challenged folks on is there is a way-- I give one of my teaching moments is we try to think of things in our lives where we're coming up, I say, "Tell me a story." Most of us try to go to something that was positive and that we earn some type of success, we want to share that story. Well, stories have dissonance, they have discord, there is an antagonist and a protagonist and the farther you can get those two away from each other the greater the impact the story will actually have. Usually, l will say I want you to write me 10 stories of something that went wrong in your life and then from that, what did you learn from that. What was your lesson point that you learned from it?

That really is the beginning of amazing stories. One of my signature stories, yes, is my new normal going to cross the hurdle. I have other stories of how I met my wife. There is another story of John Junior walking me down at five-years-old, six-years-old to a creek that we used to race to, we used to run to. Now, I can't run anymore because it's artificial limb. He says, "Well, Dad can we just walk down there."

That story is powerful because he's seeing me in my new capacity and teaching me that it's not about the ru, it's about spending the quality time together. I can bridge that to the audience and say how many of you spend quality time with your family members and or the people that are most valuable in your life in work or in play or in family. That's a powerful lesson for all of us. It has nothing to do with a Paralympic silver medal.

It begins to connect the community together and can we find those nuggets of stories as we can embed them along the way and then have a dialogue and a conversation. I can say to you well, when was a time in your life that you had a challenge and then somebody else showed you that you were paying too much attention to this cell phone and you were not paying attention to the people that were right in front of you.

That brings us together and those become anchors and then couple with your Olympic story, your Paralympic story it moves the audience because they've seen you at the highest level of sporting competition.

Anja: All right. When you work with athletes doing this, where do you start? Do you start digging into those moments when something went wrong? Is that the beginning of it?

John: It's close to the beginning but it's really not. I want to get to know the individual and what's their style, how do they joke around, how they're playful when they have their moments of humor or what makes them sad and what makes them tick, what's their drive behind it because then we can find the stories that naturally fits their persona. The challenge is to be authentic and how can we show up in our most true as authentic voice because it's really hard to hear our voice. In our redefining moments that we're going through, going back on my chart, is the redefining moment that we have is where we hold into a lot of other people that want to fit us into their box. We're trying to figure out how we can stay in that box.

There are other people that have gotten out of the box and now they're on, they're so strong that we see where they are but maybe it's too big of a job for us to get there. In either case, we have to choose what it is in our life we're going to amputate to actually embrace our new normal mindset in this whole capacity of storytelling or in the capacity of who I want to show up to now in this redefining moment that I have. That's my own personal work.

I can't get that from anyone else. I can't get it from a book, I can't get it from talking to friends. They can help me on the way but I have to make the choice. I have to do the run, I'm at the top of the ski run, I got to push past the gate, I've got to do the gates and the runs. No one can do that for me. To go back to the original question of how I train athletes, it's to hear our voice first before we try to move out into something else that we don't even know quite what it is yet.

Anja: Yes, definitely. I think that groundwork or whatever you call it is essential to actually start to move in the right direction because we can all have this go, go, go mentality just to stay busy but heading not in the direction that we actually wanted.

John: Yes. It's amazing the paths that we take. It's not like I'm just going to jump over here to this other thing, it's really gradual and we can find ourselves off the path a little bit and justifying our existence. I think with athletes, you made a great point in that we don't recover well and we just jump right back into the next day. I'm going to think about my next run, my next race, whatever it might be and we don't take the time to process and recover and take that silent mode. Recovery is sometimes more important than the actual training itself, but support is really important. If we can't get back to that state, we can't train to the most optimum performance that we can do the next day in our next training session.

Anja: Exactly. Well, I think that's a great place to end it with this reminder about the recovery and sometimes taking that time out to get centered and figure out where we're heading next.

John: Absolutely.

Anja: I loved having you on here John. I would like for the audience to know, is there a way that they can get to work with you or how do you-

John: Yes. What I'm going to do is I'm going to set up a Zoom call just for people to jump on. I think it might get 100 people on and we'll just have an opening dialogue and we'll see what people want. I want to make it what the most value for other people are because I might see it one way and somebody else might see it in a different way. Getting a consensus of athletes on board to say, "Yes, I would like to be a speaker, here is what I do, here is how I like to be coached" and then I can draw and make a program for all of us and then we can put it on Zoom and we can make it a living document.

That means that we can do a Zoom call, several Zoom calls together and then we can make it on record so that somebody else coming later could actually see it. I think we'll just do the first one for no cost, free and then for just a time we'll make it very nominal for people so they can actually get it. It's for those who choose to do it. I do believe, like I do, investing in your performance for the next thing because if you don't invest in it, then we don't take it seriously enough, so we need to do some investment.

I do it every year, I always invest in my speaking career and it's elevated me every single time, so I think that's a thing. I think the first one is just to get people speed web would be good. Maybe we'll just come back on and go through your channel to share with them on when we will do that. I think other countries have the Global Speakers Federation and so that will be some resources for people to get a hold of right away if they want to choose this career path.

Anja: International speakers federation, is that what--

John: Yes, Global Speakers Federation, GSF. If you look in your country, you should see, I don't know how many are around, but it is rolling all the time. I know that Europe does have several and some in the African nations as well. South Africa I know has one, Australia has a pretty robust one, Canada has a robust one, so they're around and I think South America has one as well and the United States. We know that Olympism and Paralympism is global, so we want to make sure that anybody who wants to reach out just works anywhere. The models for compensation are different with each country but the model works and I've seen people do it from all over the world.

Anja: Excellent. If you want to see John in action, I can recommend this to TEDx Talks. Remind me again, where were they done?

John: Both were done in Colorado. I'll give you the backstory at once. One was done in Colorado Springs, it came out of my new normal talk and I talk about tolerance from the standpoint that tolerance is hierarchical and we only accept people on our terms and our conditions. It's a different flip on the word tolerance and how we do that. The first one was done in Broomfield, Colorado and that's on this new normal.

When I first started this new normal story, it's more CISM and I have a lot more outcomes from it now that actually relate to the audience, but it's a good kind of understanding if you want to see me at the early part of a development of the new normal story. I probably should post another one to see where it is now and you can see and compare and contrast.

I'll probably just let that out only for the people that come on that website and we'll do that Zoom call and I'll get a private link and you can actually see the morphing of a story. I think that will be really great to see. I would love to do that and we can compare and contrast. I'd love to go first and show my flops and mistakes and everything. It's just how this is all learned.

Anja: Yes, excellent. Well, thank you so much for that. I'm going to make sure to let everybody know when we're doing this. Yes, I look forward to it.

John: Awesome, thank you.

Anja: Thank you, John. It's been so much fun having you on. Before we say goodbye here, what is a good place to reach you personally?

John: Wonderful, thank you for that. I am all over social media, so Instagram is John F Register, John F Register on the IG and then I have a YouTube channel, I'm relaunching my YouTube channel and we're going to make it really robust on a lot of speaker community tips and things I see out in the community. Then I have a Facebook which is @J F Register, that's also on Twitter as well, @JFRegister and those are my social channels. My website is johnregister.com if you want to go there and check that out as well. I really appreciate the time today. Our motto is, "Go forth and inspire your world."

Anja: Awesome. Thank you so much, John and I look forward to connecting again soon.

John: Yes ma'am, thank you.

Anja: You have been listening to Athlete Story Podcast. Tune in again next time. If you have any fellow athletes or people who you think could benefit from listening to this, of course, I'd be very grateful if you share this podcast with them.

OUTRO: Thank you for listening to Athlete Story. You are awesome. If you are yourself a world-class athlete or former, don't hesitate to come over on athletestory.com and check out more free stuff and resources to help you thrive in and benefit from your sports career. Dare to prepare then get yourself out there. Stay in touch.

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