I’ve always rejected the gendered notions and bro-culture around kayaking. It isn’t just a men-only sport – a lot of people that I've met over the years who learned kayaking, came across it when some friend of theirs said, "Hey, let's go, tear down this river in this kayak I've got, and you'll learn on the way."

And it’s often a brutal and horrible experience for them. I'm amazed that they enjoy it. If you're not an over-the-top, amazing athlete who just charges at extreme sports, that kind of attitude is pretty off-putting.

I've never operated that way. I've always been very conscious of how we approached the water, people's feelings on the water, giving space to emotions. So gender was never an issue.

I worked a lot with women along the way, because strangely, it tends to be women in this space who pay for actual training to learn the sport rather than just going out there without training.

It usually takes two to three years to advance to doing class four or five kayaking. That process requires not just being skilled and balanced, but also a lot of mental workout – learning how to confront fear, admitting to yourself that things could go wrong, knowing that it's only you who's there, learning how to articulate that fear.

When we’re looking at a big, crazy rapid, with water exploding and waves crashing against rocks, we have to actually break it down to acknowledge, "I'm afraid of this. What's going to be the outcome? If I go into that and stuff goes wrong, what happens? How do I survive that?"

Sometimes the answer might mean swimming out to the side, sometimes it's “I need to put people in the right place, who will throw me a rope or jump in after me and pull me out of the river before I get hurt.”

That's not about gender, that's about the conscious thought of confronting fear, and working through it.

[As told to @Ragi Gupta — continued tomorrow]