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It was a great privilege for me and my teammates to follow in the footsteps of sporting greats like Roger Federer and Tiger Woods.

Until 2005, I still thought of my surf lifesaving career as fulltime and kayaking as a pastime. I watched the 2004 Athens Olympics and saw people racing that I knew I could beat, and that was probably the turning point: I decided I should either do it properly or stop wasting time kayaking and concentrate fully on Ironman.

As a youngster, I enjoyed sport and my ambition was to be a great sportsman.

I come from a very sporting family and played many sports as a lad.

Even though arguably I could have done much better at school, I'd decided at a young age that I was going to be a professional sportsman at some sport. And at that stage, there was a bit of luck: I was fortunate to meet the right people at the right time to get me to where I am now.

I felt I could play in maybe a dozen tournaments a year as an amateur.

I was fully immersed in the now as an athlete.

I've always played sport. I played rugby, I was involved in athletics, I played cricket... I'm an outdoors kind of guy.

All I ever wanted to do was play competitive golf against the best players in the world.

Soccer and cricket were my main sports growing up. I had trials as a soccer player with a few clubs interested, Crystal Palace being one, but it was cricket which became my chosen profession.