From synchro coach to bestselling author: Ashleigh Renard really is doing it all

Ashleigh Renard is a former synchronized skating coach and director who retired from synchro and began focusing on her dream of becoming a published author. Her first book, Swing, comes out tomorrow, May 25th. You can learn more about Ashleigh in the interview below and on her website, AshleighRenard.com, where you can also order her book.

Get It Called: Tell us about your involvement with synchro and skating in general.

Ashleigh: I grew up in Manitoba, where my mom started our town’s first precision skating team in 1983. In 1988 she finally let me join the team and I competed with my hometown club until I graduated high school, competing at Canadian Nationals as a Novice, Junior, and Senior skater. I co-founded the first synchro team at the University of Manitoba, Ice Intrepid, which recently celebrated its 20th season.

I didn’t plan to coach as a career, but skating has a way of consuming time, energy, and focus. I was an assistant coach in our group lesson program growing up, then had my first job as director and head coach in a neighboring town when I was sixteen. This is also where I coached my first synchro teams. I assisted some of the top coaches in Winnipeg when I was in university and oversaw the off-ice training for most of the athletes in the province. I took a job as a trainer in New Jersey after I graduated from U of M, packing my skates as an afterthought, but I was only in New Jersey for a few weeks before I was hired as a consultant with the Synchroettes.

Get It Called: Skating and synchro have been a passion and a part of your life for a long time, right? So, how did you know it was time to retire and focus on a different passion?

Ashleigh: A year after moving to New Jersey I moved to Pennsylvania, just outside Philly, and I sent letters to all the skating clubs in the area letting them know that if they wanted to start or grow a Synchro program I was their girl. Wissahickon Skating Club was the first to reach out and I started the city’s first youth Synchro program in 2004.

Even though I had coached for several years at this point, growing a Synchro program from scratch and educating families about a sport they didn’t know existed was a steep learning curve and sometimes very stressful. I got better at dealing with the stress and then, after 15 years, it became more difficult to manage again. I don’t think I couldn’t deal with it––I think I was just tired of dealing with it. Now, when a coach talks about stress most people assume they are speaking about troubles with parents. Of course working with skating parents is not without its challenges, but for me it was the pressure of getting the teams to perform, to medal, while at the same time nurturing the skaters. It was hard to treat them how I wanted to treat them and get results out of them at the same time. I am a sucker for potential, a huge sucker! I see what people are capable of instead of what they are executing in the moment. This allows me to be a really encouraging friend but it was something I had to work against as a coach.

Get It Called: What do you miss most about coaching?

Ashleigh: For the first year I was lonely. I was used to being around so many people and then my circle got very small. I kept my head down, writing my book and starting the search for a literary agent. I kept busy, but I was also very fearful that I would not be able to get my feet under me in this new industry. I felt like a fish out of (frozen) water. About a year after I left coaching I had two agent offers and had found my way into writers’ groups on Facebook. It was at that point that I had some outside validation that I was on the right track.

Get It Called: Tell us about your book. What’s it about?

Ashleigh: It’s the story of how, as a perfectionist mom, I took doing it all to the next level as the world’s worst attempted swinger. So, it seems like it would be about sex (and there are some racy parts!) but really it’s about dropping the facades and the stories about what we think we should be and all we think we should do and learn to be ourselves. A lot of people pick it up because it seems like it may be a sexy, funny read, and that is how I wanted to package it, but the real story is much deeper than that and I really love that it takes people by surprise. Readers may remark on something sexy, but the parts they really want to talk about are what they realized about their marriage, or their dreams, or about being hard on themselves.

Get It Called: You know, “Swing” is a term many synchro teams use to refer to skaters who share a spot or are alternates for competitions. Any intentional double meaning there for the title of your book?

Ashleigh: There are so many meanings in the title! First, the tagline “A Memoir of Doing it All” makes me laugh because growing up as a kid in the 80’s, “doing it” was the first euphemism I heard for sex. Additionally, the superwoman “You can have it all and do it all” stereotype was at its peak.

For Swing, I liked it because it has a multitude of different meanings as a verb: of course it refers to the swing lifestyle or a form of non-monogamy, but also to handle successfully, or to manage. It also means to influence things decisively or to fluctuate from one point of view to another. And yes, I did all those things in my book.

Get It Called: How did being a skater and a coach influence the story and your ability to tell it? Do you talk about skating in the book?

Ashleigh: Writing a book is very similar to choreographing a skating program. You have an idea and in your head it is glorious, perfect! When you try to put it together on the ice with athletes or on the page with words, it never quite goes together like you expected. Some parts are better; some parts don’t seem to work. But somewhere in the process of being there with the athletes or the words every day, it starts to take shape.

We all know that a program has to be perfected. Even if everyone knows the steps it still doesn’t look great until after a lot of practice. The same was true with my story. Even though I knew how it would start, what happened in the middle, and how it would end (my book is non-fiction, after all), it took a lot of rewriting to figure out how to tell it, what to emphasize, what to leave out.

I do talk about skating. One of my favorite scenes is early on when I describe what it was like to be a kid who loved figures and how I would regularly mend my leg and return to the ice after slicing it open with a notoriously poorly placed free leg on my double Salchows.

I also show the stress of dealing with demanding skating parents while also trying to be a good mom. It’s really hard to balance it all and that’s something everyone can relate to.

Get It Called: How do you feel about so many people getting an inside look into your life? What about your former skaters in particular?

Ashleigh: I tried to write four other books instead of this one. I even tried to write this one as a screenplay because I never thought I could admit that this story happened in real life. But, just like many times when I forced something into a program and it just wouldn’t work, I let the writing guide me to the story that wanted to be told. I was terrified through many parts of the writing and the sharing, but I have experience crafting a great finished project while working with my intuition and against it over and over throughout the years and I just decided to let it lead me. I couldn’t rationally explain why writing this story was a good idea––I just had this gut feeling that it would help people.

The lesson I’ve taught my skaters more than any other over the years is that they can trust themselves. Everyone will have an opinion––but they will have the answer. When we know the answer we have to be brave enough to move toward what we know is right for us, even if no one in our life understands. Walking away from skating was an example of me putting this into action. I knew hundreds of people I love would be disappointed, but I had to do it anyway. Writing this story is the same thing. I had to write it even though a lot of people l love don’t understand why. My athletes always knew they had permission to be themselves with me, and to change their mind about who that was when they learned new things about themselves.

As a coach and a role model there is a certain line you have to walk. As a parent there is a certain line you have to walk. As an employee or an official there is a certain line you have to walk. In my book I explored what would happen in my marriage and in my relationship with myself if we all started drawing our own lines. What would the world look like if we could each just be uniquely ourselves? When my former skaters read my book (and a lot of them who are college-aged or older already have) they are going to see me in situations I’ve never described to them before, but in those scenes they are going to recognize the Ashleigh they know.

I had more anxiety around what skating parents would think––specifically, would learning intimate details about me in the present change the way they thought of my time coaching their child in the past? That messed with my head a lot, thinking that not only did I have to be a great coach for their kid at the time that I worked with them but then I had to maintain that image for eternity or else I was letting them down. No pressure! It’s a common subconscious fear, that our main responsibility is to avoid making other people feel uncomfortable.

For generations we have done this as humans, holding ourselves back from what we really want to do because we worry that authority figures won’t be pleased. Well, I am done with loyalty backwards. From now on I’m trying to ask myself instead, is this a move that will inspire my kids and my former athletes to be brave? I never want them to hesitate when doing something courageous and true to their hearts and think, “Wait, what would my mom/what would Ashleigh think of this?”

Get It Called: Do you have any advice for skaters or coaches who also want to become published authors?

Ashleigh: I have advice for anyone in skating who wants to do something different than skating. Our years of training, discipline, and attention to detail have honed in us skills that by no exaggeration have become our superpowers. We can take those talents into any different industry and shine, and rise up as a leader.

I was in my Facebook writers groups for a couple weeks before I realized that in my year-long-self-study-crash-course on publishing I had retained and assimilated a lot of information that people in the industry for decades didn’t know or had never identified as important.
I realized one of my superpowers is that from the time I learn something new to the time I know how to teach it is approximately five seconds. I give my skating teams all credit for helping me develop that one! I have no estimate of the number of times I saw a skater doing something new and had to analyze, integrate, and turn to the rest of the team and communicate clearly what I then wanted all of them to do. It truly is a superpower that I am certain many coaches possess.

Because I have little sense of the tradition or mainstream ways things are done in publishing I just looked for what made the most sense. In doing so I have shifted a few big paradigms around how, when, and why a writer should try to connect with their readers and what renegade moves can be made without any buy in from the publishing gatekeepers.

In mere months I went from being the new kid in publishing to being looked at as a leader. I have been invited to speak on panels at the biggest writing conferences in the world, even entitled “The Future of Writing.”

It’s easy to think the thing we have always done is the only thing we can do well. And I want to encourage everyone to see that the unique gifts we apply to skating are going to shine bright wherever we take them.

Get It Called: Anything else you want to make sure the synchro community knows about you or your new book?

Ashleigh: It’s funny. I haven’t marketed my book to skating people. I have this sense that maybe they just want to see me as Coach Ashleigh forever and that is totally fine with me. But, there are more sides to me than that and I am sure there are more sides to them, too.