What drives Richard Parks, Wales rugby player turned environmental athlete

OI was born in Pontypridd, but grew up elswhere in south Wales, between Newport and Cardiff, and now I call Cardiff my home. My dad is Welsh and my mother is Jamaican. I've got two brothers and two sisters and am the youngest by 10 years. I like to think of myself as a love child, maybe an accident - it depends on who is teasing me. I'm the only professional athlete in the family, the only one who has pursued a lifestyle in sport - and it really has been a life of sport. My first sport was motocross; I started riding motorbikes when I was six years old. Those early years of my life, from six to 11, I felt like I was part of a team. I got sponsorship and I would be out there on the bike, my dad was the mechanic, my mum was one of the core stewards and cooked food for everyone. Being part of a team became a very powerful driver to me, but also the desire to perform and be the best I could be was instilled in me at that age. I lost my sponsorship when I was 11, so I had to stop.

Every boy and a lot of girls grow up wanting to play for Wales and I was no different. I was playing rugby in school, but once I stopped racing motorbikes I turned my full attention to it and loved it. I was lucky enough to play international under 16s and under 18s rugby and then I got a scholarship to a school in South Africa, Michaelhouse. It was 1995, the year after apartheid ended, and it was an incredible experience for me. It was my first time on my own and I learned how to translate the values that mum and dad instilled in me into sport. We trained three times a day, we played in front of crowds of 14,000 people. I came back from South Africa and signed my first professional contract (with Newport Rugby Football Club); I was 19.

In the early days of my career I was injured, I had a stress fracture in my spine and lost my contract. I had about six or seven months out of sport and at the end of that year played university rugby. I ended up winning player of the tournament in the Times European University Rugby competition. That ultimately led to my recruitment with Pontypridd RFC, where I spent the majority of my career. So, ironically, that injury led to one of the happiest, most successful periods of my career. I'm quite philosophical about the challenges we have in life and feel that how we respond to adversity has the power to define us. I believe that, with the right attitude, we can take positives from most experiences.

I played professional rugby for 13 years and my career (which included four international appearances for Wales) was ended through injury. I tore the cartilage out of my right shoulder, rendering it arthritic, and I was forced to stop playing six years ago. It was the darkest, most difficult period of my life - I wasn't ready to retire; I was angry, scared, frustrated. Rugby was how I defined myself, it was who I was, how I measured my self worth, and that was taken from me overnight. Those emotions aren't exclusive to rugby or even sport; there are a lot of stories of athletes battling with the transition, and in the world that we live in now, it is becoming a universal transition or emotion because so many people are having to change careers, reassess. The idea of a job for life doesn't exist any more, or rarely. It's an area that I've done a lot of work in with my corporate clients, professional teams.

For me the pain, physically and emotionally, manifested itself as agoraphobia. There were 21 days when I couldn't leave my parents' spare bedroom, where I was recuperating from my operation. But it was a sentence from my grandmother's funeral - "the horizon is only the limit of our sight" - combined with a book I was reading by (British explorer) Ranulph Fiennes that gave me the courage and inspiration to pick myself up and start moving again, and channel my energies into something positive. It was mountains that saved my life.