Apolo Ohno - Making It Happen Despite the Odds

What can we do to achieve our utmost in all we do? Well, first of all, we might ask ourselves: Is it even possible to always accomplish all we set out to achieve? Can we hope to be our best all the time and in all we do? As unreasonable as it may sound, most of us deep down do actually strive for such lofty and consistent achievement from ourselves in our daily lives and in the life goals we are aiming at. The sense of over-achievement is part of American culture, and is pretty common in Europe, too, as well as in Asian countries like South Korea and Japan. We identify with our achievement, and so does our family and friends. 

Be that as it may, there is one person who seems to represent a rarity in this world, someone who has reached what seemed be his maximum potential time and again only to discover there was always something new to conquer, to learn, to tackle, and in a variety of fields of endeavor. This person is Apolo Ohno, former Winter Olympic champion with a record-setting eight medals to his name, and countless world championships to boot, all in the sport of speed skating. So, at this point we might as well as the question: What does it really take to be a world champion? Perhaps only someone like Apolo Ohno knows the answer to this query. 

Ohno began life with a certain handicap. His mother was not present for the entirety of his childhood and he was therefore raised and reared by his father, a Japanese immigrant to Canada who started his own hair salon business. In fact, when you see images of Apolo Ohno in news footage or elsewhere, you will notice that his hair is always styled with the utmost taste and sensibility. 

Despite the challenges he faced as a child, very early on Apolo Ohno showed a budding and clearly remarkable talent for sports, and with a specific penchant for skating, speed skating. His father found for him the best coach available and immediately young Apolo began training. By the age of 14, he was already competing and winning championships. Even as a young teen, Ohno made it to the Winter Olympics and began his stellar career. He retired at 33 and is now a pioneering entrepreneur.

Apolo Ohno - The Making of a Team

Having seen the level of competition you get at the Winter Olympics one would imagine that a winner like Apolo Ohno is something of a solo player. The eight time medalist that was at one point the youngest to succeed in short track racing competitions has in fact shown inclinations to the opposite despite his background in highly competitive sports. His training during preparation for the Olympics taught him a valuable lesson that he prides more than the medals he has received for his efforts – that real success has to have support from around you. With this in mind Apolo Ohno has turned to the people that allowed him to succeed and created a new venture, Allysian Sciences.

It is important to remember that Apolo Ohno could not have made it without the help of several important figures and mentors in his life. The trainer who gave him the advice he needed to get the right body for skating is often on his list of thank yous, as is his father that encouraged him to enter sports and compete from an early age. Through his life he has had support to push him onwards to success and now Apolo Ohno is taking this message practically to form his own teams and support others in turn. This is where Allysian Sciences finally comes into focus.

Allysian Sciences is dedicated to creating the best and most efficient nutraceutical supplements out there, and to do so required more than just a single vision. Apolo Ohno stepped in to make sure that the company had a strong network of team players who are all professionals in their own fields. The scientists, analysts and researchers that he helped to hire are now part of a world class team that have created some of the best selling supplements in the industry. By doing this Apolo Ohno has made sure that Allysian covers all its bases through the simple message of cooperation and professionality. Looking at the facts it seems that building a team comes from building your own successes, and that the link between personal achievement and the rest of the world’s is closer than we might think.

Apolo Ohno – How To Be An Ironman

 Many of us find inspiration from Apolo Ohno because of his determination, hard-work, and endurance that set him above the rest. His competitive speed skating career started when he was only 14 years old and he competed in World Cup and Olympic games for many years. He was able to earn 8 Olympics medals; two golds, two silvers, and four bronze medals. He now holds the most medals in the Winter Games for an American. Even after retirement Apolo continues to inspire us, he continues to engage in his athleticism in other races and competitions such as the New York City Marathon and the Ironman competition. The Ironman competition is the hardest 1-day competition in the entire world, covering a whole 140 miles via swimming, biking, and running. It pushes you to your limits and then even further. 

The five key components of training to be an Ironman competitor are: balance, consistency, endurance, adaptability, and recovery. First of all you need to understand that a triathlon is not just simply a combination of three different sports, it is in fact a sport itself and should be approached in this holistic manner while training in order to succeed when it is race time. The second component is consistency, triathletes live regular lives too, they have work and families, but you have to be consistent with your training and work out routines if you want to be able to compete on the highest level. The next component is endurance, which is obviously huge; when you are training you need to put your endurance to the test like you would on competition day. Having endurance is what will push you and ultimately get you to the finish line, but it is something you have to train and teach. Another tenet is adaptability. This is key you have to be able to adapt to any changes that you might be faced with and to be flexible. As well as knowing your body, maybe you planned to sprint the last half of a mile but you know that if you do you will sustain an injury, it is knowing your limits and being able to adapt to them. Finally the last part is recovery, you have to rest in between workouts in order to let you body recover and replenish.

Apolo Ohno – Olympic Games

Apolo Ohno is a well-known for being an eight time Olympic Medal winner. He has won two golds, two silvers, and four bronze medals. He started out only at the age of 14 years old, because his father thought that keeping him involved in sports would keep him out of trouble. He quickly became the U.S. National Champion in 1997, and kept that title from 2001-2009. In 2008 he won the overall world title at the short-track world championships in South Korea. In 2010 he competed in the Olympic Games in Vancouver where he finally surpassed Bonnie Blair who had until then held the title of having won the most Olympic medals during the winter games for an American. Apolo Ohno truly kept his fans invested in watching the Olympic winter games.
 

This fascination with the Olympic games has a very long history, dating back as far as 776 B.C. in Ancient Greece. Initially the games were a religious festival, which celebrated Zeus, the Greek god. It wasn’t until 1894 that a French man turned this Ancient Greece event into what is now the Olympic Summer Games. During these summer games the Greeks took home the most medals.

The Scandanavian countries had there own sort of winter games called the Nordic Games but they were only open to fellow Scandanavian countries. These Nordic Games would take place every four years, but always in Sweden. It wasn’t until 1908 that other countries started to show interest in the idea of a winter Olympics, due to a figure skating event that took place during the Summer Games in London. The International Olympic Committee in 1911 tried to propose an official staging of the winter games, but Sweden did not want anything to do with that. Germany then responded with planning their own Winter Olympics but it was cancelled due to World War I. At the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, ice hockey now joined figure skating as an Olympic event during the Summer Olympics. Finally after this the Scandanavians decided it would be okay for the International Olympic Committee to sanction the at the time, International Winter Sports Week. This event was held in 1924 in Chamonix, France and due to the popularity and enthusiasm of all the 16 nations that competed, a year later the International Olympic Committee marked the 1924 event in France as the Winter Olympics.