L'athlète paralympique Peter Isherwood Paralympic Athlete

uh hi my name is Peter isherwood my pronouns are he and him I'm a par Olympian for Paris 2024 it's been a long journey I guess and you know starting with wheelchair rugby and pushing and pushing and ended up playing table tennis just with some friends and got really excited about it fell in love with it and started training and practicing I'm still doing the same things I am the one thing I've really noticed is the people that will come out to help you and and are really proud of you and want to be part of your journey um strength and conditioning coach who's helping me out another gentleman's helping me with range of motion and stretching and you know people at different clubs I play at are willing to just work with me and help so I think it the the neat thing about paral Olympics or Olympics for that matter is the kindness of people comes out and it and it really shows and being pretty much the only wheelchair play at a high level in British Columbia I require a lot of help from a lot of people and they've come out of the woodwork not that they weren't there before but now they're especially helpful and it it's a really nice experience uh it's going to be tough um it's definitely going to be tough but you know I think I think um my head's in the right space I'm going in with good expectations of where where I'm at um so you know I'm trying to trying to remove the pressure a little bit um you know getting getting to the par Olympics as a wheelchair table tennis player is is a huge feat in and of itself I think I've put a lot of pressure on myself Through The Years just as a PA of player for table tennis wanting the sport to grow and thinking the better I do the more I can get people involved but I think I'm going to try to remove that pressure go in and and enjoy the experience and play um you know I've been working with a sports psychologist and uh you know it's been really great on just kind of finding the love and the positivity and and just the greatness of the sport again you know it was really great watching the able bodies in the Olympics and just how excited the Paris fans were over the sport the competition was great to watch and I hope that extends into the Paro Olympics as well yeah so preparation uh leading up to the games I I've been competing a lot this year and traveling quite a bit um you know with with table tennis out of Canada especially perah there's not a lot of competition in North America so I've been on the road a lot um I've gone to Thailand and trained uh with a coach there and their national team uh last year I went to Serbia and trained with them so I'd like to thank thank those countries for uh accepting us and and uh helping me out um but in the in the recent time just kind of working with some strength and conditioning so you know I'm in the best fitness I can be in in a short period of time working with coaches kind of practicing with other players um I'm often playing with able bodies well I'm exclusively playing with Able Body because I don't I don't have a lot of wheelchair players here but um you know you can find the right the right play ERS and and work with them that way um you know working with Luba my coach and uh and with some others just to try to find find all the the best parts of my game and I can capitalize on that um you know I actually just had a had a call from Ian one of our uh standing pair of players who's been involved with table tennis Canada for a long time and uh he um you know he just reached out to say congratulations and how excited and happy he was for me and uh you know he just said go and do all the things you know how to do and don't try to get fancy it was a pretty amazing call I I wasn't really expecting it I was starting to think about my uh three-year plan leading into PanAm games to uh try to prepare to make California but um yeah you know I don't cry a lot but it was uh I shed a couple tears it's a pretty amazing feeling to uh to get that call um so yeah I don't have a lot to say about it other than it it was pretty exciting