During the Rio Olympics, the spotlight shone brightly on Canada’s summer athletes who, on the whole, performed better than ever before. This is the fourth in a series on six athletes who represent a broad range of experiences in Rio and what life has been like for them since then:

Jen Kish was supposed to take two months off after the Rio Olympics and she was looking forward to it.

She’d lived and breathed rugby for five years heading into the Summer Games. So, with a bronze medal around her neck, Canada’s captain headed back to Edmonton to build her dream home with partner Nadene Selewich. But less than a month later, she walked up the stairs and was shocked to find she was winded.

“I was like, what?” Kish recalled. “Is this what it is like to be normal?”

It wasn’t a feeling she expected, or could live with.

“I called my trainer up and said I need to start back training now.”

Kish isn’t retired, but she is one of the few athletes with enough seniority on the women’s sevens squad to leave the centralized program in Victoria and still remain in the mix for team selection, so the 28-year-old returned to her hometown. But she’s found that mixing a normal life and an athletic one isn’t so easy.

“All my friends are like: ‘The Olympics are over, come enjoy yourself,’ but I think once you get into a routine and a lifestyle that you’re comfortable with, it’s hard to go back to living the way you did before.”

So, watching the Edmonton Eskimos play this fall with friends meant she nursed one beer the whole game while they had four apiece.

“I’ve been doing the athlete thing professionally for five years and it’s six days a week, eight hours a day . . . it was just so foreign for me to do nothing.”

And for the record, her idea of “do nothing” included helping with the electrical wiring and framing of the house on acreage just outside the city. She’s built a gym in the basement so she doesn’t have to drive to one, “especially in the winters, which are horrible here.”

Edmonton winters aren’t all she’s had to get used to since moving back home after years of living in Victoria.

“It seems like all of Edmonton knows who I am,” she said.

During the Olympics, local television and newspapers featured her a lot. With her spiked blond hair and full sleeves of tattoos, she tends to stand out in a crowd.

“It’s cool. I can go into a Chapters or a Starbucks and someone will always recognize me, and then I get to talk about my Olympic experience. Whenever I get the chance to talk about rugby, my teammates or sport in general, I’ll take the opportunity to do that.”

But her Rio experience isn’t entirely what she expected it would be, nor is her reaction to the final result.

In the year leading up to Rio, Kish was adamant that only Olympic gold would do and she’d be disappointed with any other colour.

It was the Olympic debut of the fast and physical game of rugby sevens and Canada’s women had long been medal favourites. But after a difficult year with more than their share of injuries and a semifinal loss at the Olympic tournament to Australia, it seemed far from certain that the Canadians would leave Rio with any medal.

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“Gold is the ultimate colour to achieve, but when we won the bronze it felt like gold, and it’s so bizarre to say that,” Kish said. “It’s a bronze medal. It’s third place, and throughout the season we were placing third and it made me feel ill because I knew we were capable of a lot more. But with everything our team has been through and knowing our nation’s reaction, I think that’s what made it feel like gold. We inspired all these young kids to want to play rugby and be on our team.”

She had always assumed that any medal that wasn’t gold wouldn’t feel meaningful. In the end, she found it really did.

“A medal is a medal to me, and to be part of that very small (Olympic) group is an honour and I know my teammates feel the same way — bronze is the new gold.”

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