When I'm kayaking, my mind goes completely blank, so all of those thoughts of feeling wrong, and having a bad day -- those just disappear.

You're out in the wilderness, it's gorgeous, and it's not all extreme Whitewater — there's flatwater sections down the river. You're paddling down and you see bears, deer, fish jumping, and then you get to the whitewater section.

There's often a tendency to break the sport and competition into men and women, because of historical beliefs in skill level.

It's fine to want to compare yourself to the other women that you're running with to see who's fastest and leave the men away, or vice versa. But I'm picking on running because, if you're not actually in a race, it doesn't matter if you're 'male' or 'female' right?

Our concept of sports is really about professional sports, and how they're presented in this competitive environment.

There's slalom whitewater, which is an Olympic sport and again, it's gendered. You're still on the same course, when you're training, you're with everybody, you're not training alone. It's not a team sport. So you're not with your 'all female' or 'all male' team, you're just on the river waiting for your chance to go down, and then you're hanging out with your friends.

And at the end of the day, you're looking to the people you're on the river with, to be your safety -- when you make a mistake when something goes wrong, and things do go wrong, they're who you rely on.

There's no gender there, it's really just skill-based, where you're all working to improve. I think that's what we bring – that it's the exact same for everybody.

Right now in the whitewater space, I would say that one of the top extreme whitewater people is Nouria Newman, like she blows people out of the water in terms of skill.

There's only three or four people who are at the same level as she is. That's not about gender, that's just about pure amazingness.

[As told to @Ragi Gupta ]