A couple of my teammates and i have turned to biking to practice
and honestly it's been pretty great.
[Reporter: Devin Heroux] Finally able to train again.
Trying to make the best of what has been somewhat of a nightmare.
Thank you, Jill for making sure our boat is super clean.
Things look a lot different now just to get on the water
but all of this a small price for what the payoff could be another chance to qualify for the Olympics
after the Tokyo games became a moving target.
It was very surreal.
I started seeing the writing on the wall and it kind of almost felt like a weird like dream.
It kind of happened so quickly.
[Reporter] For rowers Jenny Casson and Jill Moffatt
the postponement of the games changed their lives but not their goals.
We cannot do anything about this
and I just thought like i don't really want to sit around and cry about it.
It definitely was hard at first to switch that mindset.
[Announcer] The Canadians have moved through into the lead.
Jill Moffatt looking over a shoulder
just motivating herself for Jennifer Casson.
[Reporter] The pair was one race away from qualifying for the games.
A successful year cut short.
[Announcer] Canada who finished second.
[Reporter] Even next season still up in the air.
It's essential when everything is so unknown
it's so important to stay positive
and whether or not the this the season next year is concrete
it's just sort of be like yep it's happening and that's what we're working towards.
We have the boats that are stored inside with a limit of two people in the boathouse at once.
[Reporter] New challenges and cleaning protocols aside
they're determined to use the year ahead to their advantage.
On an Olympic day you want to be the fittest you're ever going to be in your life
and that's what we were tailoring our bodies for right?
So now it's like well I guess that was the baseline so we're going to go up from there.
[Reporter] For Mark Smith it's a summer of slow drives with his wife Anne.
No real place to be.
A stark contrast to the life he had mapped out.
[Mark] Each morning that I wake up
I think about where we would be if the season were actually happening.
Tomorrow we'd be taking the bus down to the Olympic village.
[Reporter] Instead his first summer off in decades.
A radical but strategic choice he made for all of his athletes as a head coach
of Canada's women's softball team.
[Announcer] And Canada will walk their way off to Tokyo, Japan.
[Reporter] Last season they qualified for the Olympics.
A sport that hadn't been part of the games since 2008.
And they were eyeing a golden performance.
When we did our fitness testing we had 89 personal bests.
We had to be the fittest softball team in the world bar none.
And then the legs are cut out from under you.
[Reporter] Trying to keep the team together in the early days of the pandemic
Mark ran a training camp for his players spread across North America virtually.
Before breaking for the summer that was meant to be their big moment.
It took a little while for us to get our head around it
and to give ourselves permission to grieve and go through the roller coaster of emotions you feel
when you've worked so hard for something
and then through no fault of your own it's been taken from you.
Just checking in to see how things are going?
I know we talked a week or so ago and you were getting back into your lifting
and going to do some throwing?
So just trying to be strategic and in the way I throw through my strengths.
[Mark] One of the things as coaches we speak to athletes about all the time
is controlling the controllables
which means worry about the things that are within your control
such as your nutrition, your rest, your strength and conditioning
and your technical skills training.
And I think those things really reinforce for our players that we're on the right path.
We're doing the right things.
We have to stay the course and be patient.
[Reporter] If anyone knows about patience it's Brent Hayden.
[Brent] I was retired for seven years
and the time off that we're taking to take care of this pandemic
there can come a lot of positives out of that.
[Reporter] At 36 years old he's done this all before.
Brent Hayden captured bronze in 2012.
Retired then pulled back to the pool last year.
I had done a lot of inner searching and I just determined that deep in my heart
it was something that i really wanted to do
and I believed it was possible.
I'm gonna tether off and do some stationary swimming.
So this is how i'm training for Tokyo in quarantine.
Already on an unconventional path to the games
little did he know he'd be granted an extra year.
He took it in stride.
It's a unique time to be an athlete.
Here we are trying to train at the level that we want to be able to train at
in order to be the best in the world
but there are just so many restrictions.
So training quarantine day four and this is what it's like every single morning.
After you show up and line up
and then we're going to get our symptoms checked.
[Reporter] If there's anything Brent has learned throughout the course of his career...
[Brent] We all have our own lanes.
[Reporter] ...It's that an athlete has to do whatever it takes to get to the wall first.
Flexibility and improvisation, key components to success.
Accepting this new reality part of the game now.
What would your competition want you doing?
What would your competition want you to be like right now?
And it's like, oh it's the biggest wake-up call you can get
because I know what my competition is like and they would be thrilled if we were moping around.
[Reporter] So instead they push in solidarity with those they plan to beat.
Whenever the start gun finally fires.
Devin Heroux, CBC News, Toronto