This Dyslexia Awareness Week, former sprinter and Recite Me CEO Ross Linnett shares his advice on navigating the challenges and opportunities of dyslexia as an elite athlete.
Recite Me offers a suite of accessibility tools that make websites accessible and inclusive for a diverse range of people online, including people with dyslexia.They have worked with the BEAA to ensure all members can access the association’s site since 2020.
Can you talk us through your sporting journey?
I started sprinting around the ages of 16-17, so quite late. Within about a year and a half I was the fastest in the north-east, winning the north-east comps, then I went on to become a north-east record holder for the 200m. At one point I was the joint-second fastest under-20 in the country for 100m in the National Junior League.
It was fantastic time in my life. But I could never really juggle fully committing to being a professional athlete and fully committing to business. I started the business at 24 and most sprinters peak around 30, so I thought I had time to go back. Then time marches on and you get to 35 and realise it isn’t a choice anymore.
You were diagnosed with dyslexia in your early 20s. How does it affect you day to day?
The dyslexic brain is known as a parallel processing unit. It can process five-six things at the same time but it struggles with things that are linear. Reading and writing are very linear so the dyslexic brain struggles. My biggest struggle in the early days was emails. Even if I’d done an email I had to read it three times because it was very difficult to catch my own errors.
If most people read and you liken it to cycling, when a dyslexic person reads it’s like cycling uphill. You can do it, but it’s tough. There’s a type of mental fatigue.
How did that impact your sporting career?
My coach used to read a lot of books by ofor foraches. That wasn’t particularly an option for me, I couldn’t go and study the theories of training and why things worked, how the body reacts. That was done by my coach, and I didn’t think I’d ever be in a position where I could read about it myself. Luckily now there are a lot of aids to read to you aloud.
There’s also a thing called time blindness. This is going to sound crazy but I’ve only really managed to perfect arriving on time in the last four or five years. My ability to judge time was terrible, and I’d always be late. People would say: ‘Why don’t you leave five minutes early?’ But it doesn’t work like that. You have to think you’re going to be late every time because your assessment of how long something will take is completely off. I always remember, particularly on a race day, leaving the house quite flustered. It’s a bad way to prepare for a race. If it’s a race day, you miss the race – and sometimes it’s what you’ve been preparing for for a year.
How did you adjust to that, and what would you recommend to athletes with dyslexia today?
I would use dyslexic aids. I would shift towards audiobooks as much as you can. Also, plan to arrive early. When I plan to arrive early I end up on time. I’m late by my standards, not by the person I’m supposed to be meeting.
I’m a messy person. You’ve got to compensate by trying to get everything ready the night before. Most people can go and get their trainers, spikes, blocks etc, but a dyslexic has more of a chance of running around not knowing where things are, which can get them flustered before a race. So my advice, if a lack of organisation is one of your symptoms of dyslexia, is to prepare the night before.
You often talk about the advantages that can be found in having dyslexia.
The dyslexic brain tends to be incredibly analytical. We did a presentation with someone who used to organise focus groups for Apple. They’d screen for dyslexics and refuse to have them on because they’d figure out what the focus group was trying to do and invalidate it. The ability to analyse is incredibly high.
Sprinting in particular is a lot more technical than people give it credit for. My father came to watch me run in the Highland Games. I qualified but I ran incredibly poorly compared to what I was used to. It’s a traditional sprint so it’s run on grass and I’d slipped.
My father never used to watch me train so he didn’t really know me with regards to how I sprinted. He said: ‘You run a lot off your feet. You push hard through your feet, and because you’re on less solid ground you’re losing proportionally more when your feet sink.’ My father had the ability to analyse that just by looking at me without much experience in sprinting, because he was dyslexic too. It does come with a lot of advantages.
How can using Recite Me help people with dyslexia, and other forms of neurodivergence?
Recite Me is a toolbar of functions that attaches to a website and allows the content to be customised and delivered to a person in the best way possible for them. One use is it allows the website to speak to you.
Another is not many people realise everyone has a preferred colour combination of text and background colour. You can go to a specialist optometrist and they’ll tell you yours; mine is a kind of blue on a pinky background, and I read 25% faster with it. If reading to me is like cycling up a hill and I get very tired quickly, the hill isn’t as steep with those colours.
The main premise is you can customise the toolbar, and we allow a dyslexic, someone who’s visually impaired or dyspraxic, to customise and read in the way that’s right for them.
When I got tested by the optometrist he was asking me how I felt, and I didn’t realise that when you change the background colour and text you feel different when you read. When I felt good and it wasn’t as hard I also read faster. I’d say go on Recite Me’s tool, change the background and text colour, and keep on changing until reading feels that little bit more enjoyable. Those settings will then automatically apply to every website that uses Recite Me.
Find out more about Recite Me here, or test the toolbar by clicking the 'Aa' (accessibility) button above.
