“If you past the Rock you did something right, some people have been chasing the rock for a long time”
A YMCA affiliate for Springfield College, Harry Rock defines Spirit Mind Body. A Connecticut native Rock has been involved with the YMCA all his life.
Rock’s Journey all started when he was a young boy and his mother sent him to his first summer YMCA camp. “I just love being outside and looking at nature. I love the humps and bumps of the mountains when I’m on the river.”
When he was in college Rock and a friend of his expanded their love for nature into a cross country tour of all the national parks. The two of them traveled in a camper with a makeshift bunk bed they made with plywood.
The two ran out of money in Seattle and decided to find seasonal work at Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. “I loved it there; I was getting paid to ski and had provided housing, for me it was a dream job.”
Then when spring came Rock headed back east and found another seasonal job on the Farmington River leading white water rapid tours. “I would work week-ends and summers when I wasn’t teaching.” While working the job Rock’s boss taught him the sport of canoe poling. The sport changed Rock’s life.
Canoe Poling is the sport of traveling in canoes upstream through rapids as fast as possible using a long pole. It is a sport that Rock has dominated for decades. He has won fifteen slalom canoe poling championships and ten wild water titles.
Wild water is a competition where the athlete has to navigate his own path upstream as fast as he can. The appeal to this is that if you prepare yourself and study the rivers you can gain a great advantage and shave of crucial seconds off your final time.
Slalom, which Rock prefers, is like skiing. In slalom canoe poling you have to race in sprints up stream between colored buoys. Rock prefers Slalom because it is more technical because if you skip a buoy you are penalized.
The YMCA trained Rock from a young age. The values he learned there gave him a work ethic that is incomparable to most people.
“You always want to be the best. I was very lucky because for a long time I was the best at what I did. Its nice as long as your not getting caught, but ya know what, it motivates you! It forced me to get on the river on days it was cold or rainy and I didn’t want to. You gotta put the time into it and you have to be very very dedicated. I love the sport, I love the pursuit of being the best. I just always want to be the best I can be, I cant not do my best, I cant stand not being just average, that’s what the YMCA taught me.”
Asides from skiing, Rock, is also an avid cyclist, rock, climber, roller skier, and a champion of a more unknown sport of canoe poling. Rock even stars in an introductional video out for canoe poling.
But his “world was turned upside down” on “Tuesday at 3:30 p.m. Dec. 12, 2006, twelve days before Christmas” when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. The man who “never took a sick day” was slapped in the face with the shock of having a deadly disease.
“I can fight heart disease and high blood pressure, I can do that by eating right and working out. But what you learn about cancer is, it doesn’t care who you are. It’s the only thing I have found in this world that’s truly not discriminatory, there’s no bias.” Cancer stopped Rock in his tracks. Life was not so perfect anymore. If only life was like skiing and all it took to get going was some snow and slick wax.
But despite all odds Rock kept to his YMCA ways and stayed positive. Spirit, Mind, and Body are the three necessities to life. “I made a pledge in my head…within three weeks, I was going to be in skis.” Rock said what helped him push through his cancer fight was that he “wanted it to happen, so he made it happen!”
His life philosophy is “if I love life, then I’m not done living.” Three weeks later, with his wife out of the house, he got of the couch, blew the dust off his skis, struggled to put on his boots, but against all odds, Rock went out in his yard and shuffled around on his skis. “Psychologically I was alive! I was doing what I set out to do.”
“It took me a few months to get full strength back.” But after that, Rock was back on the mountains climbing up in the summer, skiing down in the winter, and then canoe poling back home spring.
Although battling with cancer is not something that Rock wanted for his life, he is proud to be apart of the club of cancer survivors. To help other men with prostate cancer Rock hosts talks for the American Cancer Society and support groups. He also gets involved with some local events and sponsors runners for cancer research.
But overall Rock is just happy to be alive and doing what he does everyday. “There’s nothing I wasn’t doing then that I’m not doing now. “
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