by Jimi Hunt
Rugby World Cup also had a bunch more work that needed doing and I had to give it to my employees. I knew they were capable but I found it hard to leave them to it.
We departed on our honeymoon but I can barely remember much of it now. I know it was good and bad. Jo told me that we fought a few times. Who the hell fights on their honeymoon? Wasn’t I supposed to be better? I had completed, mostly, the Rugby World Cup work, I had got the bar open on time, which had been the biggest stressor in my life, and the wedding had gone perfectly. Isn’t the ‘stress’ supposed to be gone now? Why aren’t I better? Why are we arguing? And, most importantly, why am I still crying? This is doing my head in.
AFTER THE HONEYMOON
When we got back, we returned to our normal routine. I was working all my jobs and Jo was at the bar. It was clear I wasn’t any better, despite the recent successes. We weren’t any better. I didn’t know what to do. I had already seen my doctor, a psychiatrist and a psychologist but was getting steadily worse. I thought that I would turn to my trusted friend, Google, for help. I typed in ‘depression’ and the first site that came up was depression.org.nz.
This website was set up by the New Zealand Government to help people with depression and it’s fronted by ex-All Black John Kirwan, the current representative of depression awareness in New Zealand. I started reading and what I read made a lot of sense. Jo was sitting next to me and we were talking about what was on the site. One of the things that hit home hard with me was the section about people who are helping others who suffer from depression. It talks about how carers need to look after themselves as people who are caring for those with depression are often at risk of becoming depressed themselves. That made me sad. I hadn’t really considered Jo’s feelings in all of this. She was selflessly and tirelessly looking after and supporting me. Reading this suddenly made me realise, for the first time, that maybe she needed some help too. I turned to her and asked her if she was coping and feeling okay about dealing with me. ‘I’m okay, Jimi,’ she said. ‘I’m okay.’
JIMI’S LESSON #6: Looking after people with depression sucks.
If you’re reading this and you have depression, think about how it is affecting your loved ones. If someone close to you has depression, take the time to help yourself and learn how to cope with it properly.
One of the things that I did during my depression was to become quite selfish. This is not uncommon. I was trying to fix me. I was the sick one. I needed help. So when Jo said that she was okay I took that completely at face value. She said she was okay, so she must be okay.
Thinking about it now, things must have sucked for her. Like, really sucked. I was leaching her happiness out, pulling her down. I wanted her to become depressed, too, so that she could wallow with me in the blackness. I didn’t want to be alone there. That’s a horrible way to feel and it makes me feel sick to write it here now. I wanted to make the woman I loved depressed so that I would feel as if there was someone at my side.
For the record, I would never actually want that for anyone, especially my wife, but that’s the strange cruelty of depression. And anyway, she was constantly helping me try to get better. She was my ray of shining light. I loved her and she had just told me she was okay. That was good.
So, I went straight back to concentrating on me and continued reading the depression.org.nz site. There is a part of the site called ‘The Journal’ where you can sign up and do a series of workshops online. I thought that from a design point of view the site was great; it was largely video-based, which made it easy, and what it was saying made a lot of sense. Problem is, when you’re depressed your concentration and ability to actually do things disappears. That’s the ridiculous thing. Even if it had said, ‘Complete this six-to eight-week course from “The Journal” at depression.org.nz and your depression will be cured forever!’, I still probably wouldn’t have got past the second week. I couldn’t fix myself. That’s what annoyed me most. I am a smart man. I can learn things. I can research. I have control over my mind. I should be able to fix myself. I should be able to harden up. I should be able to make decisions. I should be able to commit to things. But I couldn’t. It was killing me . . . slowly and painfully.
However, there were two important points that I took from John Kirwan and that website:
JK’s #1 TIP: Have a goal.
JK’s #2 TIP: Get fit.
These both made sense to me. A goal would give me something to work towards—something to plan for and a reason to get up in the morning. Exercising and getting fit release endorphins which enhance mood. Cool, except I hated exercising.
Jo and I sat on the couch talking about JK’s tips. Actually, Jo had been telling me for about two years that I should get fit. She had been trying to get me to go to her gym and do this CrossFit thing that she was teaching, but I wouldn’t have a bar of it. I didn’t really want to do it now, either. Thinking rationally, I knew I should get fit and going to the gym with her would be the easiest way for that to happen. I just didn’t want to. I needed a goal that got me fit. Putting the two together, I realised I needed a goal that I needed to be really fit to achieve.
Excellent, this was coming together. My goal was to find a goal that I needed to train for. Jo sat there quietly. She was very good at being the sounding board for my silly ideas. I was on a rambling roll. What should I do? What should my goal be?
‘Run a marathon?’ she asked.
‘Everyone does that.’
‘Do a triathlon?’
‘Nah. Doesn’t really excite me.’
‘Climb a mountain?’
‘Too far away and it’d cost too much. I need something that is more “Jimi”.’
I thought about all the things that I had done in the past, and the one that stood out to me was the Jimi Ninja River Adventure. It was fun, but in order to make it something that would get me fit I would need to do a little more than just float down a river on a Lilo. I would have to float down a massive river. I would float down the Waikato River—that’s the longest river in New Zealand.
That gives you a quick insight into just how my brain works. It’s a series of random progressions, usually in silence until I come out the other end 32 steps away from where I went in and last spoke to you.
‘Hey, Jo, I’m going to Lilo the Waikato River.’ It was one of the most ridiculous sentences you could’ve heard, even coming from me. Men have been slapped for worse, scoffed at, ridiculed. I will always remember the fact that I was in the worst place in my life, sitting on a cheap couch in our little flat, and my wife turned to me and said, ‘Cool. What do we need to do?’
That was awesome. To have the support of the woman you love when you come up with an idea that most people would call you an idiot for is amazing. I felt better immediately. This was going to be an adventure—a wild, crazy adventure into the unknown with my wife and partner. For the first time in ages I was happy. That spark that people always said they could see in me had been dead for a while now, and this was the first time there was a glimmer, a small flare of hope that the old Jimi was still in there. So what should I do now? The only thing that a man of my generation who needs to get the word out does: I wrote it on my Facebook page. This is what I posted:
Help! I need an adventure. Something that requires training for. Something that is interesting and epic. Current best idea is to Lilo the length of the Waikato River. All suggestions welcome, feel free to re-post and ask your friends. I’m at a blank . . .
I got 22 comments from my friends. Guy posted the following:
Lilo the Waikato?? Are you fuckin retarted!!!
Maybe, Guy, but at least I can spell retarded. BJ chimed in with suggestions around the world’s biggest slip ’n’ slide or rope swing, two ideas that we had talked about previously. And then Sam posted:
I was driving alongside the Mighty Waikato River this morning and thought, the one thing that is missing is a mad professor on a Lilo.
People started to ‘like’ my status. People
started talking to me on Facebook about it. How long was it going to take? Was I going to do the Huka Falls? How many Lilos would I need?
A PLAN IS HATCHED
As strange as it is, these days Facebook makes things real. So I wrote again on my Facebook page that I was going to Lilo the Waikato River from start to finish. The key for me was simple, if I tell everyone that I’m going to do it I’ll have to do it or else I’ll look like a dick. It was on!
What did it really mean? . . . Simple: I was going to buy a Lilo and paddle from Taupo in the heart of the North Island to Port Waikato on the west coast. Jo would come with me and drive a van and provide support. That’s about as much planning as I needed. It would be fun. In fact, it was going to be hilarious. Plus, Jo and I would get a holiday together, as good a holiday as we could afford, in the wonderful Waikato. Sorted. Plans work pretty simply in my head.
Then I wondered, vaguely, how long the river was and how long it would take me to get to the end. Google gave me the answers, sort of: 425 kilometres, and I still didn’t have a clue. Shit. Can I delete Facebook comments? I wondered.
No, so I realised I’d better get onto it. As Mark always jokes to me, if there is an idea in my head the first thing that happens is it gets a logo and a brand. He’s right, so I sat down and started drawing. I actually really like the logo I came up with for Lilo The Waikato—it’s pink, my favourite colour. The L scoops down like a Lilo on top of the blue of a river. Next I needed a web presence to show my progress, so I purchased the name lilothewaikato.co.nz and set about designing and developing a website. Eight hours later it was finished. Making things look good is important to me. One, because it’s my day job and, two, because things that look good make me happy.
As I say in my talks on branding and design, branding equals professionalism. I have seen many wonderful products fail simply because they looked like crap and, conversely, I have seen many crappy products sell well simply because they had good branding.
Lilo was going to look good. People would like it more because of that. Brand Lilo = Done. Now I needed to send it out to the world. I turned to Facebook again and made a page for Lilo. I invited all my friends to be Lilo’s friends. Some did ‘like’ it, some didn’t. I had wanted to keep the whole experience quite simple from the start and just go and do it, but the more people started asking questions the more I realised it was actually a very large undertaking.
I also realised I couldn’t do it on my own and I needed help from my friends to actually get this adventure organised and done. So I reached out, again on Facebook, and asked if anyone could help me get some publicity, help me with organising the adventure, help me get fit—anything really; all offers would be accepted . . . And that’s where it began to get cool.
People offered their help in all sorts of out-there and unexpected ways. Surprisingly, the first offer was from an independent TV producer and director who said that his company would like to help me record the trip. Just a few days before, Jo and I had been discussing the fact that I had done some crazy, fun and interesting things in the past but had never actually documented them well enough. There aren’t many photos, not enough videos, just memories and stories. This adventure was going to be bigger. It needed recording and I was so happy that it was going to happen.
The second offer of help was from Jo and her boss, Darren. Jo was working for CrossFit NZ, a training method that, according to CrossFit, is ‘constantly varied, high intensity, functional movement’. The workouts are short, usually under 20 minutes. That part I liked—getting flogged really hard, but only for a short time. And I didn’t have to run anywhere, which was good as I really don’t like running. Darren said that I could train at the gym for free. I was broke and sad. Free was the perfect word for me. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I do now that I’m writing this: if Darren hadn’t offered me free access to the gym I would never have been able to get fit enough to achieve my goal. I decided that I’d pay him back the best way I knew how, by designing him some stuff! I love contra deals. But what I did for Darren was small compared to what Darren gave me, so big thanks to him.
The gym was going to make me better in the head as well as the body, but I still didn’t really want to go. Now I had a goal to achieve and the only way to get there was to train—425 kilometres weren’t going to float by. I was going to have to paddle a lot of them.
CrossFit NZ had an American coach by the name of Pat Barber. Pat’s a bit of a legend in the world of CrossFit. He came fourth in the 2009 CrossFit games and seventh in the 2011 games when Reebok and CrossFit crowned the ‘Fittest Person on the Planet’. He has about 15,000 people following every word he writes online. It is kind of strange when someone is famous in one small niche of the world but to anyone else he’s just a normal guy, and a nice one at that. He said that he would teach me all the basic moves and how to lift so that I would be able to perform all the workouts, and I thought he was cool. Best of all, we got on really well. I like making new friends, and I hadn’t made many in recent times because I was feeling so antisocial.
I was still in a headspace that made it hard to say anything. It is weird, that situation of making a new friend, when you feel like you’re asking a girl out on a date. But this time it was a guy. Should I just walk up and go, ‘Ummm, hi Pat, do you wanna hang out sometime’? Would he think I was hitting on him? What did he like to do? How the hell do you make new guy friends? So I did what I had been doing since I first became depressed. Nothing.
Seeing this, Jo told me that Pat was new to the country, didn’t know many people and had mentioned that he felt like playing a game of golf. I play golf. So I did what any 14-year-old boy would do—I got someone else to ask him out. I told Jo to tell him that if he wanted a game of golf I would play with him.
The game of golf never happened, but he asked me if I would like a game of tennis. I hadn’t played tennis in years, but I used to be quite good so I jumped at the chance. The cool thing about Pat is that he is, like me, fiercely competitive.
It turned out that Pat had only played tennis a couple of times before. As I said, I used to be pretty good, and I beat him 6–0 6–0. He wasn’t happy. He wasn’t a sore loser but he hated the fact that he had just been destroyed. So he challenged me to a game of table tennis. There was a table at the gym and he had his own bat. Hmmmm. Turned out we were pretty even. Also turned out I won that too . . .
‘Do you bowl?’ he asked.
‘Lawn bowls?’ I said. ‘I’m quite good at lawn bowls.’
‘No, tenpin bowling.’
‘Oh, nope, I’m terrible at that.’
‘Good, let’s go play a game.’
That’s how you make new guy friends—do stuff together. Jo and I turned up to the lanes in Panmure to find Pat had brought his own damn shoes! He’s American, so he has a natural advantage at tenpin bowling. He does the loopy spinny bowls. I tried really hard to roll it down the middle and hit that front pin. Yeah, I’m that crap. Pat was at the level between roll it straight and curve it, where his curvy ones weren’t really working too good. I bowled slow straight ones. Pat bowled curvy erratic ones and, somehow, I beat him by a couple of points. I was so happy. Everything else in my life then was sad, but I looked forward to these exchanges with Pat.
Eventually, we settled on table tennis, simply because we both thought we would be about as shit as each other at it, and decided to play at the gym. I bought a bat and we started playing a couple of times a week. It’s slightly energetic, it’s social and it’s fun—all the things that’d been missing from my life. It was the sort of thing I should have been doing more of. Hell, everyone should do more of that sort of stuff. And it was the first time in years I’d had something to look forward to. Looking back now, I realise that the times when Pat wasn’t available to play I felt quite down.
So there I was, introductions completed and ready to work out. CrossFit is group fitness—everyone does the same WOD (Workout of the Day) and that means you can compete against
everyone else. I loved the competing part of it, but I was still in a mindset where I didn’t want to interact with other people.
Darren and I had talked extensively about what I needed to do in order to get fit enough to be able to make it all the way down the Waikato River. Basically, I needed to get my general fitness up, get strong shoulders and a strong core. The strong core was key, because lying prone on a Lilo for hours each day with my head raised was going to put a really big strain on my back. So Darren developed an exercise routine to achieve my goals.
The best thing for me was that I now had an excuse not to train with everyone else. I had my own workouts, my own goals, and therefore I couldn’t do the things that everyone else was doing. I would turn up to the gym and work out by myself. The good thing was, though, that there were people there who knew what I was doing and what I was training for and they were really encouraging. It felt wonderful to have people willing me on for something I didn’t like doing.
I trained three to four times a week. I didn’t like it. I still don’t like it. I was useless, I didn’t want to turn up and I definitely didn’t want to work out. But I had a simple goal—get fit enough to Lilo the Waikato.
Goals were good, they were what John Kirwan said would help me with my depression. I had motivation and that was to get healthy in the body and in the mind. JK said it so it must be true. It was a pretty strong motivation but I still struggled to go to the gym three times a week. However, I had figured out how to make sure that I got there to get fit and to make the Lilo thing happen. One word—accountability.
JIMI’S LESSON #7: Make your goals public.
When you have depression your brain doesn’t really work properly. Excuses come out even more easily than when you’re healthy, and it’s very, very easy to not turn up to the gym. So I needed to put some things in place in order to make it happen.
