More Than Our Story

Barrie Shepley

Legendary coach, commentator, and voice of triathlon Barrie Shepley discusses his love for the sport and how he got started. He also discusses his passion for coaching, running the C3 Canadian Cross Training Club, and his unwavering love for his late wife, Caron Shepley.

Highlights

I initially wanted to be a goaltender. I wanted to go to the NHL and play hockey.

I was in a small town called Harrow, Ontario, down near Windsor, 2000 people... I had just seen the IRONMAN on television and decided that I wanted to do a triathlon even though I couldn't swim 50 meters and didn't own a bike... But, I made it through my first race... The uncertainty of something that you weren't good at, brought me back, and within less than a year, I had a group of about 75 people in this town of 2000.

I started hosting races by the time I was 16 years of age, and by the time I got to university, I knew I wanted to be a coach. Triathlon was just taking off. So my my good fortune was there were no coaches, there were virtually no race announcers. There were only a handful of races, period.

I was taking an admin course (at McMaster) with an amazing man named Dr. Frank Hayden, who started the Special Olympics, and he challenged me that he would give me the credit for my course if I wrote a paper on how to start a triathlon association. So I did... We went to the Burlington Cultural Arts Building and called every person in Ontario who remotely was interested in triathlon and said, come to this meeting. And when the meeting ended, we had formed the Ontario Triathlon Association. I was its first president.

We were blessed that we were in, growing province, a guy named Graham Fraser who started what's now the Subaru series... He was this incredible force and had the best races in all of Ontario... He needed a race announcer. And because I knew who every athlete was, I stood next to the DJ and fed him the information, and then the guy doesn't show up about the fourth week, and Graham says, "you've got to do this". That started my commentating career.

While I was doing my graduate research... Les McDonald was just formulating the ITU, the International Triathlon Union, and I happened to be lucky enough, or stupid enough to be standing when he said: "we need an announcer and I'm going to take this sport to the Olympics." And so my international announcing career began because of this man.

My passion was coaching and as President of Triathlon Ontario, my concern was if you look at the sport still today... it's a lot of older people, not a lot of kids... So I came up with the idea (Kids of Steel), got into a boardroom, convinced, the president of the company to fund it. And within a year, we had 35 races across Canada, from Newfoundland to Whistler to Calgary to downtown Toronto.

In that very first summer, this little 12-year-old kid who lived in Kingston went up to his friend's cottage in Sharbot Lake to do his first ever Kids of Steel triathlon and that 12 year old kid was Simon Whitfield, who spent the next 13 years on-and-off in my life. And in September of 2000, triathlon made its debut at the (Sydney) Olympic Games. We were roommates and insanity to the utmost proportion occurred when a kid who had never won a big race internationally crossed the line to win the first ever gold medal in triathlon.

45 years later, I've been to seven Olympics and multiple world champions. I've coached and worked with Hawaii Ironman champions. You know, like, what a cool way to spend your life. Not necessarily lucrative, but that was never the purpose at the beginning, and dating way back to the McMaster days when I was in grad school, I met my wife and my business partner, and for 34 years, we did the most crazy magic of putting on camps, running events, supporting each other.

Although my wife has passed from her battle with cancer, I know she's with me on a daily basis, because I can feel when I'm making a bad decision, some little jab in the back of my neck says, think about this another time or moves me into a different direction.

The Paralympics now exist, you know to see an 80-year-old, to see people who are blind, and to see a Simon Whitfield, or a Lori Bowden, or somebody like that who's gone on to win the biggest races, and they've been your training partners and your friends, and at training camps, like, so I'm blessed to have lived that life.

Each time I go (to the Olympics) I am the luckiest dude in the world... There's a story around the Sydney Olympics... We can't get any tickets for the men's triathlon... And literally 90 minutes before the race started, a woman comes up to me and said, "I have an envelope with a ticket for the event, the delegate never showed up and it's going to get wasted. Could you use it?"...I open the envelope and there are four VIP tickets sitting 20 feet from the finishing line. When they sit down in the stands, my wife is sitting right next to Simon Whitfield's mother, who two hours later, is losing her bird because her son just won the gold medal.

[On Bob Knuckey] Now he’s 76. In the last 21 years, he's won five Ironman world titles... One of the few men in the world to ever go under 12 hours in Hawaii at 70 years of age. He did it. The only man who finished the niece Ironman two years ago was so hard that no 75-year-olds finished. He was the only one, well under the cutoff time. He would have been on the podium in the age category below him, still battling cancer, still inspiring people. I mean, those are the kinds of people that I get to wake up every morning, you know, and spend my life with. Bob and I spent three months in Arizona, as we have for the last decade, as I have a training base there in Tucson.

[On Lionel Sandders] Lionel Sanders is an athlete that I literally coached in high school. He was a runner. We come from the same town, that little town of 2000. Amazingly, Lionel Sanders went to my same high school, and his running coach called me and said, "Look, there's a kid that I don't know how to coach. Can you help me?"... Now he's a full-time professional, he's got a YouTube channel, a boatload of sponsors, thousands of people who follow him weekly... So, you know, (it's great) to watch those journeys and to know that sport can be a healing thing for some people.

I just happened to be lucky that I struck maybe the greatest era of the sport. Simon Whitfield was blending into Spaniard Javier Gómez, who became an eight time world champion, who was blending in to the Brownlee brothers, Alistair and Jonny, who both have now five medals, two golds at the Olympic Games. To be able to announce that dozen years of like these incredibly special athletes, who respected each other with the utmost respect, but would literally cut off the other guy's arm to beat them. I mean, they were warriors. Some of the great battles.

How cool is that? You're sitting six feet away watching these warriors and you got paid to go and do something you would have done for absolutely free.

When you looked into the eyes of the person who crashed and their sadness, or you look into the eyes of the person who just won the gold medal after five years of pressure on Alistair Brownlee, supposed to do it, had to do it, then did it at home. I mean, you can't ever forget those memories and just see the pure emotion in their face.

If I go back 25 years ago... there was this cool buzz to be able to be the guy in the office who did one. You went in and you, "Oh, you did a triathlon?" Immediately when you said triathlon, nine out of 10 people all thought IRONMAN... After 45 years, we're now at the more mature part of the sport. What's happening, is this unique opportunity of with very short, fast Super League type races, the whole process to get to the Olympics, and the Standard and Sprint (distance) triathlons, the growth of PTO and this kind of 3.5 hour type racing, live, with million dollar prize purses.

I'm being inducted into the Hall of Fame on Wednesday night with the great Lisa Bentley, 11 time IRONMAN champion, Lisa Bentley... and she was my wife's training partner, you know, how cool is that? That you can kind of sit down for a beer in December with the girl that just won Hawaii and she's coming over with baked cookies to your house.

[On his late wife Caron Shepley] The most blessed day of my life was September 1986. She came walking into, McMaster University campus, and although it took her four years to come to her senses for the first date, it was the greatest thing I ever got from my years at McMaster... We had a an incredible journey. She was an athlete herself. She did ten IRONMAN races, won a silver medal in Nice at the World Championships one year. Her real passion however, she was an incredible yoga teacher. She brought yoga to many, many of my athletes in a way that was not intimidating; and she created things around yoga for athletes... She was one of the first people that did videos and DVDs. And so I'm blessed that I can still do her classes even though she's passed, and I still do them.

Her greatest passion was animals. She raised over $1 million for animal charities. I'm going to continue to keep her dream alive of helping. These are animals that might get injured, or some old person can no longer afford to keep their dog or cat because they don't have very much money in their retirement. We're going to pay that, we'll pay the food bill or pay the vet bills so that lady or guy can keep their dog or keep their cat.

As she got cancer, I mean it was incredible. (She) vever complained. Never once, "I don't smoke. I'm a vegetarian. I'm a yoga teacher. I've done ten IRONMAN races. Why me?" Never once.

One of her last projects was me... Two border collies, that were 12 years old that were going to get put down and needed a home... She called me on a day that I was expecting to hear from the hospital on how the CAT scans had gone, and and I'd hated waiting for those days... She called, and her spirits were good, her energy was good... And she said, can we get a dog?.. She said dog, not dogs. But she learned my foot in the door routine... So we we got two beautiful dogs. They are truly my life at this point... I know that she wanted some life in the house for myself, so my routine is pretty much dictated by 6 a.m. first walk of the day, and these guys come with me in the car.

I miss her dearly... Every day you heal a little, but, you know there's a hole that you'll never fill... Her fundraising for her charity, me continuing to help athletes, you know, and taking care of my two dogs have have given me a purpose each morning.

In 1994 when I was at the World Championships in New Zealand, I saw all these little tiny, surf huts up and down the ocean... Well, these little hubs of people would throw some money into a pot and support a couple of kids with a new board or a new bicycle or whatever the sport may be. And when I came back in 94, I decided I was going to use that model, and I created C3 the next year, 1995, with a dozen great friends at McMaster.

The club kind of followed Caron and I wherever we moved, from Hamilton initially, and eventually to Caledon, where one of the big problems was we had great pools, great roads, trails to run on, but there was no place to open water swim... One of my athletes, his dad was golfing with the President of James Dick and said, "my son's coach is looking for a place for the kids to swim. So he said, why don't you come out and look at one of my quarries that are retired on highway ten, just north of Brampton in Caledon." And so I went.. four kilometers of literally drinking water... It's 25ft deep because they took all the gravel and stuff out. It's clean, there's no weeds, it's spring fed. It was amazing.

For the first 2 or 3 years, eight hours a week, I would open the gate, my athletes would come in and we would swim, close the gate, (we had a) big sign, "do not enter, trespassing". And over time parents would say, you know, I have a young son or daughter. I'd like to learn how to swim. I have a paddleboard.... Now we're 6:00 am in the morning till late at night. We're staffed. We have 25 paddle boards. We have three beach volleyball courts. We have a BMX track for kids. We have a weight room. We have a 500-meter-long beach. We have now the Caron Shepley Dog Park, where they have their own actual sand, water, trees, grass... I call it a poor man's tennis club. You know, you buy a little membership and you and your family can come and swim and paddle.

In the old days, it was a 90% high performance, 10% you know, mom and her two kids, and now it's 80/20, where 80% is families who come in, paddle and swim and have no desire to be world class anything other than world class fun. And the other 20% are, you know, pros and age groupers who who come in and train there.

Last weekend we had Winterfest. We had hockey games going on on the frozen ice. We had cross-country skiing and snowshoeing, the world's greatest toboggan hill. We even dug a very, very, polar bear dip.

So, it's now far, far, far from being an Olympic triathlon training venue.

I had a different vision of what my life would be like in the next decade, and when you lose your best friend and partner, that all changes. What I do know is that because of my passion for sport and my wife's charity, I will never be bored. I will never run out of tasks. I'll never run out of fundraising. I need to help another kid get a bicycle or access some to a coach... So I continue now to really just want to be a small assistance to the process of people going after their dreams.

Literally like an hour ago I was on the phone with one of my athletes who I worked with for the last 25 years, and a great friend, Mark Herbst. His wife passed of cancer about six months before Caron did, and he wanted to do something to honor his wife. He's a brilliant rider, and so we're setting a Guinness World Records: He's riding 30,000km to 30 countries over ten months to raise money for cancer. He's on the road right now... It's called Mark's EPIC RIDE.

Every couple of years we get a project like that, and people now seem to have like a magnetic force towards our club and me, because they know we're too stupid to say no, and that we've done big projects and haven't been afraid of them.

[On what Caron would say to people fighting cancer] Don't feel sorry for yourself... Listen to your intuition... Keep yourself around people that are going to help you.

She knew she had cancer before she had it. Unfortunately, if she'd been able to get proper treatment early enough it probably wouldn't have gotten there.

I loved her more the last 30s of her life than I did at any other point. I mean, we were so lucky to have had each other, and so I use that energy, on a daily basis. When I'm feeling sorry for myself, I realize she would love to be here helping fundraise or taking care of a fundraiser or athletes or whatever. So get your ass out of bed and go do something productive, you know? So I think she would say, "Don't waste your time. Don't be angry. Life is short and make a difference when you can".

C3 Canadian Cross Training Club

Home of one of the original triathlon clubs in Canada. C3 is a non-profit club connecting people of all ages with a healthy multi sport lifestyle and achievable athletic goals, while providing a fun and challenging group for all to train with. 

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Chasing Greatness:
Stories of Passion and Perseverance in Sport and in Life

Barrie Shepley’s quest to find greatness in himself and others has been far from a straight line. His job as a professional coach and TV sports commentator has taken him to all corners of the earth where he’s experienced many unexpected twists and turns. The stories that Barrie tells will have you crying, laughing, holding your breath, and, at times, even applauding. His stories are about sport but also about life, love, success, and failure. Whether a sports fan or not, this book carries lessons for us all. Learn about Barrie Shepley and his unforgettable journey from small town roots to the highest level of sport success, but also learn what it means to find the best in yourself along the way.

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Daniel

Daniel is an extremely curious person, a wealth of random knowledge and facts. Extremely passionate about a vast array of interests ranging from health to history, science to athletics, everything culinary and the list goes on. Trust us, you would want to be on his team for Trivial Pursuit. Daniel is also years into his battle with brain cancer. He experienced a seizure while on a Zoom call at work in late 2020 and quite literally, his life changed within minutes. After his operation he started to talk about his story but had always known it was more than just him. From then, More Than Our Story became a PROJECT that has evolved into the starting point it is today.

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