Goodburn's story shows sport can steady the mind when body betrays us

The Herald Scotland

24-05-2025

I'm sitting recovering from a hard 18 holes of golf here in Jamaica and my mind drifts to next week.
I'm returning to Edinburgh for an evening of conversation with Capital Conversations via America, London then a long drive up through the country to hopefully arrive fresh and ready.
Capital Conversations: Inside the Mind will be held at The University of Edinburgh in partnership with Macleod Media.
I'll be sharing the stage with Archie Goodburn, a world championship medalist, a Commonwealth Games swimmer, and someone who, like me, lives with a chronic, complex medical condition that offers no cure, but no clear end either.
Archie represents the best of Scottish sport. But it's not just his speed in the water that makes him remarkable. It's his story outside of it.
In 2024, Archie went public with a diagnosis that changed everything: three inoperable oligodendrogliomas, a rare form of brain cancer.
The news came after months of unexplained seizures and numbness, symptoms which he initially wrote off as migraines.
At just 22, he was thrust into a world of scans, uncertainty, and life-altering conversations with doctors, the kind that leave you suspended between hope and fear.
What makes Archie's path so resonant for me is this shared middle ground we both occupy.
We're not terminal. But we're not 'cured' either.
We live in the grey area, the daily negotiation between gratitude for life and the anxiety of not knowing what's next.
In those moments lying in the MRI scanner, hearing a consultant walk in with new results, you don't feel like an athlete. You just feel human. Exposed. Powerless.
And yet, Archie keeps swimming. He won silver in the 50m breaststroke at the 2025 Aquatics GB Swimming Championships, a performance that speaks volumes not just about talent, but about sheer psychological endurance.
Like me, he's found that sport becomes more than a profession or pastime it becomes a coping mechanism. A form of control when everything else feels unsteady.
His strength, both physical and emotional, is exactly why I'm looking forward to this conversation.
It's not about medals. It's about meaning. How we move forward, not because we're fearless, but because we've learned how to carry the fear.
Beyond the pool, Archie is pursuing an Integrated Masters in Chemical Engineering at the University of Edinburgh.
His academic excellence was recognised when he was awarded the Principal's Medal in 2024, honouring his outstanding contributions to the university community.
For both of us, sport has been our scaffolding, a way to steady the mind when the body betrays us.
Edinburgh also holds a unique place in my story. While I didn't study at the university, I spent countless hours at FASIC - the sports medicine clinic - tucked behind the gym.
That's where I rehabbed many injuries over the years. Long before I ever sat across from a consultant delivering life-altering news, I would spend hours and hours with the medical team and the well known physio Sand Lysol who has looked after hundreds of Scottish athletes.
And that's the thread that runs through this upcoming conversation: control, or the loss of it.
Whether you're on the start line of a final, staring down the lane, or lying still in an MRI scanner, waiting for answers, the emotional weight is oddly similar.
The same surge of anxiety, the same deep breath, the same flicker of doubt. You know everything could change in a moment. And you have no control.
When a doctor walks into the room with a scan result, time warps. There's no warm-up. No preparation.
Just news that can rewrite your life in a sentence. You try to brace for it, but the body reacts anyway, your heart races, your mouth dries, your legs feel like lead.
That's why sport is more than an outlet. It's survival almost.
It teaches us how to stay present. How to regulate the chaos. How to fall apart and still finish the race.
The habits built on the track, in the gym, or on the course, they carry over into the darkest, loneliest places. They remind us that resilience is not about pretending to be okay. It's about finding rhythm in uncertainty. And rhythm, for me, has always started with movement.
This event is about what happens inside, inside the mind of athletes, yes, but also inside the bodies that won't always cooperate.
Inside the medical systems. Inside the quiet spaces between diagnosis and decision.
If you're in or around Edinburgh this coming Thursday, we wouid love for you to join us. There are only a handful of tickets left.
Rhona Macleod will be hosting the conversation, and if you know Rhona, you'll know she brings empathy and depth to every word.
This is not a sports talk. It's a human one. A conversation about identity, pressure, uncertainty, and purpose.
And maybe, just maybe, it'll help someone else standing on their own start line or sitting in their own MRI scanner feel a little less alone.