Well, you can pretty much guess where I’m going with this—I touched the wall at 2:00.81, exactly two one-hundredths of a second behind the girl who slipped into the eighth spot in the finals and about a full second short of where I’d hoped to be. That sweet spot? I wasn’t even close to it. Those great expectations? I wasn’t about to meet them—not just yet. I saw the time flash on the board and right away I knew. I wasn’t where I needed to be, and in my defense I don’t think the way I fell short came from a place of cockiness. I wasn’t overconfident or coasting. I wasn’t taking my spot in the finals for granted. I just didn’t know my body, that’s all. I didn’t know how to manage a busy race day, and as a result I didn’t go after it as much as I should have. It was a lesson I had to learn eventually, but eventually kind of snuck up on me that morning.
So what did I do? Well, it would be nice to write that I sucked it up and pressed on, but that’s not exactly how it went down. First I had to walk the length of the pool deck to talk to Todd, with my tail between my legs. I’d never really understood that expression until that moment. (We were dog people. We had a great big Alaskan malamute at home, Ruger, and whenever he’d get into some piece of great big dog trouble he’d shamble around the house with his head hung low, his tail between his legs.) I’d messed up and I had to make this walk of shame, in front of all these people who’d been expecting me to do well. So yeah, my tail was definitely between my legs. That walk took just about forever. My head was hung way down low. I wouldn’t let myself cry, though. Not yet. The tears would come, but first I had to stand there and listen to my coach chew me out. Better believe it, he lit into me pretty good. He wasn’t yelling, not really, but he was not happy with me. Not at all. He gave it to me straight. He said, “You can’t just come out here and be comfortable, Missy. You need to push it.”
I could only nod, to let Todd know I was listening. If I tried to speak I would’ve lost it. If I tried to answer him or justify my swim he would’ve lit into me even harder—in front of all those people!
He said, “It doesn’t matter where the other swimmers are around you. You need to give what you have to give in the morning, and save what you have to save for the afternoon.”
Again, I nodded. I knew this, of course, but it took hearing it from Todd again for me to remind myself that I needed to swim in that “sweet spot” I talked about earlier, and keep my focus on what it was that I had to do, and not on what everyone else was doing.
He said, “This is a race and you need to race. Never forget that. We don’t just go through the motions. We race.”
Oh, man . . . I was about to lose it. Right there in front of my teammates. Right there in front of all those fans, the entire swimming community. Right there in front of my parents. Because he was right. He was 110 percent undoubtedly right. But then, just as I thought I’d melt into a puddle by the side of the pool, Todd switched things up. He was done yelling—or, sort of yelling. He was done telling me how I’d screwed up. He knew that message had been delivered and that now it was up to me to determine how it would be received, so he moved on to what I needed to do next, and what I needed to do next was breathe. And focus. And let it go. He put his arm around me and said, “So now you have two options, Missy. You have the hundred back in twenty minutes. You can warm down and get ready to swim your race, or you can stay upset and let this affect you and have a crappy hundred back. Up to you.”
Yes, I realized. It was up to me. Totally up to me. The 100-meter backstroke was one of my strongest events—but more important, it was my next event, and I had to rise to it. I had to lift myself up and over this disappointment and get back to work. So this was an important lesson, a great takeaway. A lesson I’d understood in theory and now had to put into practice. A message I’d received and now had to process. This was the first time I really understood the power of letting go, of setting aside a disappointment or a setback and moving on to the next thing. I still felt horrible, though. You have to realize, this was also the first time I’d competed under the weight of all these expectations, under so many sets of eyes. There were all these people watching me, pulling for me. I wondered what they were going to say. They were calling me “Missy the Missile”—a name my father had come up with, a name he’d been proudly promoting, trying to work it into every conversation, every interview (much to my dismay and embarrassment). And here I was in a big race, in a big spot, and the missile was a dud.
For the first time in my young career, I felt like a disappointment. To my parents, to my coach. To myself, mostly.
I bit my lip, still fighting back tears, and headed for the warm-down pool. I put my goggles on, and that’s when I finally let myself cry. Oh my goodness . . . I cried and cried. It’s what my teammates and I call croggling, when you cry into your goggles like that. One of the side benefits of swimming when the heart of a little girl has not yet become the heart of a champion. Nobody can see what’s going on behind those goggles, especially when you’re in the water, so I let it all out. I let myself be upset, and when I’d shed the last of my tears, I had let the moment go and was on to the next thing, just like Todd had said. Yes, it was up to me, totally up to me, and I was determined to power past this low moment. It was time to move on, to move up and out, to get back to work. I told myself I didn’t like this feeling and would do everything I could to avoid feeling this way ever, ever, ever again.
And so, right then and there, I decided to give it my all, and it put me on top of the medal stand later that night in the 100-meter backstroke. Not only that, I came back and found a way to post a killer time in the B final of the 200-meter freestyle: I swam a 1:58.67—another NAG, this one good enough to have won the finals. As moments go, this B final in the 200-meter free was bittersweet. I’d set a record but lost the race, but in the end I won something far greater than another medal. I’d won this great lesson, found this new power. I came out of that pool thinking, Okay, this happened. What can I take away from this experience that will make me a stronger swimmer, a better person? Yeah, I’d screw up from time to time. No, I’m not always going to be at my best. But the thing to do when that happens is to not let it beat you down. The thing to do is move forward. Don’t let these disappointments hinder you; let them help you grow.
Let go.
I’ve thought about that low, dispiriting moment about a million times since that morning, and each time, I take myself back to just how I was feeling at fourteen years old. I remind myself how I hated that feeling, how it sometimes happens that the feeling finds you anyway, despite your best efforts. Because swimming is like anything else in life. Sometimes you just don’t have it and you’re caught short. Even the best swimmers in the world have an off day, but when the moment doesn’t go your way you have to set it aside and reach for the next moment. In the end, it’s just one moment at a time, and it’s on you to string those moments together in a winning way. Some of them will go great, and some of them won’t go great. You just never know. All you can do is all you can do, and here I believe Todd would have placed the emphasis on the second “all”—as in, “all you can do is all you can do.”
And do you want to know a funny thing? I didn’t talk about any of this stuff with anyone. Not with Todd, not with my parents, not with my friends on the team. Normally, I talked to my parents about everything, but here there was nothing to say. It was a lesson for me, and only for me, because I knew my parents couldn’t learn my lessons for me. My coach couldn’t learn my lessons for me. It was on me to power through the agonizing feeling of falling short, of knowing I could have done better, knowing I’d let down a whole bunch of people. To find a way to set it all aside and move on.
It was my lesson, and mine alone. And I’ve never forgotten it.
FOUR
MAKING A SPLASH
I wish I could pinpoint the moment I started thinking of myself as a swimmer. It’s not like I woke up one morning, pulled my goggles over my eyes, and star
ted looking out at the world in this one way. All along, the picture of myself I’d carried in my head was that of a gangly, athletic kid, way, way taller than all of my friends. I was no more a swimmer than I was a volleyball player, a basketball player, a daughter, a cousin, a friend.
But somewhere in there a switch got flipped, and swimming became something else—something more. And in this new light I became something else—something much, much more.
Early on, there was still the matter of what to make of this new self-image. It’s one thing to see yourself as a swimmer, and quite another to attack each race like it mattered more than anything else in the world at just that moment. That competitive switch? I think I always had it. There was no need to flip it because it was already on. For as far back as I can remember, it was on. See, I don’t think you can teach someone to be supercompetitive. That’s something you’re born with, or not. I absolutely believe a competitive nature can be nurtured by your environment, but I also believe it’s got to at least be a part of your nature to start. That said, a lot of the athletes I’ve met who’ve gone on to compete at a pretty high level, they come from big families. Usually, there are older siblings in the picture. A lot of times, it’s the younger sisters with the rough-and-tumble big brothers who go on to become the superstar athletes, like Mia Hamm. But I didn’t have that. I was an only child. There was me and my parents, and the images and influences I took in from paying attention to the world around me. In my case, my competitive switch didn’t get flipped by playing tag football in the backyard with my brothers every day after school. It didn’t come from jostling for position in the family pecking order, or fighting to make myself heard. It came from my parents instilling in me a sense of pride and purpose in everything I did. I was taught to do my best, to give it my all. To be my best, to be my all. Whatever I was doing, I was meant to do it well. Once I started showing some talent in the pool, that mind-set became a part of my approach. I kept hearing my parents’ voices, whispering in my ear, cheering me on, encouraging me to be the best I could be. They weren’t teaching me to win, necessarily, and they weren’t telling me to be better than the girl in the lane next to me—just to be the best version of myself in each moment. Because nothing else mattered.
Out of that, completely on my own, I started stacking my best self against all the other best selves in the pool. Because, let’s not kid ourselves, the girls I was competing against were building on the positive, nurturing impulses they were getting at home, too. They had parents who were working to instill some of these same values in them, too. And so I made a game of it in my head. Every time I got up on the blocks, I’d look left, I’d look right, and I’d catch myself thinking, Okay, this is my best. Let’s see your best! Let’s see whose “best” is best!
Right away, it became a fun challenge for me. But what’s curious is that I never framed the challenge in terms of beating my opponent. It wasn’t about winning so much as assessing—just to see where I was alongside everyone else. Does that seem like a thin distinction? Like I’m splitting hairs? I can see where it might, but to me the difference wasn’t just semantics. It was everything. It was more about seeing what was out there, what I was capable of. If another swimmer touched the wall ahead of me, I was happy for her. I’ve said this already, I know, but it bears repeating. And I was happy for me, because it allowed me to see what my opponents’ “best” looked like, and to think about what I’d have to do to make my “best” a little better. This, too, was in me, somewhere deep down. I came to it on my own, although I’m sure it flowed in a fundamental way from my parents, even though they never sat me down to talk about competing in just this way. If I’d asked them, they’d have told me that the only opponent who could beat me was me. They were referring to the limitations I might place on myself, of course, but also to the wall I’d hit if I allowed myself to overthink or overanalyze my swimming.
Every time I got out of the pool, it didn’t matter if it was a good race or a bad race in terms of the result, I judged my performance based on whatever goals I’d set. As a swimmer, these goals had nearly everything to do with my times. If I met my times, I was happy. If I beat them, I was happier still. If I came up short, I was upset. And if I was upset, my mother would come up to me and talk me through it.
She’d say, “Was there anything more you could have done?”
And I’d think about this—really and truly. Sometimes, there were things I could have done better. Sometimes, there weren’t. We’d talk about it, and then she’d send me off to my room to get ready for dinner and say, “Something to work on for next time, honey.”
The idea wasn’t to make my “best” better than the other girls’ but to make it better than it was, every opportunity I could get. To set it up so that I’d have some new target to shoot for, every race I swam.
My best effort—that was the only expectation ever placed on me by my parents. In school, in swimming, in sports in general. It was such a tremendous gift, for them to empower me in this way. And I’m not just saying that because this is their book, too, and they’re reading over my shoulder! Truth is, I grew up surrounded by other kids with pushy parents who were always on them to go, fight, win! It’s like these parents graduated from the Vince Lombardi School of Parenting, where the motto was “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” Their children would always get so knotted up inside before a meet or a game, and if things didn’t go their way they’d get even more upset than they might have been on their own, because they were made to feel like they’d let their parents down. It was an awful dynamic, but I’d see it all the time, and it would always break my heart to see other kids terrified after a disappointing race because they knew their parents would be unhappy or angry at them. Things were different in our house. It’s like my mom and dad graduated from the Marlo Thomas School of Parenting, where the motto was “Free to be . . . you and me.”
Make no mistake, I wanted my parents to be proud of me, but the way to do that was to put my best foot forward. That’s all.
MOM: That was really the only thing we ever emphasized in our household, to give it your all. And Missy took that message to heart. Whatever sport she was playing, whatever activity she was pursuing, she gave it her all. Even her friendships were molded in this way. She wouldn’t take anyone’s feelings for granted, went out of her way to let her friends know how important they were to her. Even though I was never an athlete, I could relate to placing importance on winning and doing your best. Dick played football, of course, so he understood what it meant to compete and to win, but I think we both realized that the message we wanted for our daughter, the environment we wanted for our daughter, was more about effort and the pursuit of excellence, rather than the excellence itself. It might seem like a fine distinction, but to us it was meaningful. It was the difference between working to become a champion athlete and working to become a champion human being. To us, it only mattered that you put in your best effort, and that you tried to do a little better each time out.
The competition piece, it came from within, and along with it came the drive to be the best swimmer I could be. Early on, I recognized the value in listening to my coaches, working on my strokes, perfecting my turns. When I first met Todd and started swimming for the Colorado Stars, I was still at the level where the kids with the most natural ability tended to do well. But that would change. With Todd’s help, I started paying attention to my technique. I learned where I was strong, where I was weak, and what I could do to fill the space in between. I learned, for example, the importance of having a high elbow, which fingers were supposed to enter the water first, the most efficient way to pull and hold water. Of course, there’s no one right way to swim—every swimmer has a distinctive style, what works best for him or her, so I became a student of the sport, studying everyone in the pool. I got so good at it I could pick someone out just by the way he or she swam, the same way you could recognize someone’s gait when you fell
in behind them at a crowded mall. One look and you’d think, Hey, that’s so-and-so, just by the way they moved.
I didn’t start studying film until much, much later, but by the time I did I was mostly looking at ways to improve my own stroke, the things I had to work on. A lot of times, they’d set up these clinics for us and we’d study Michael Phelps’s turns, or Natalie Coughlin’s underwaters, and try to learn by their examples. That’s a great way to learn, really, but I always found the most effective use of this type of technology was to turn it on myself. When I could see what I was doing right, what I was doing wrong, what I needed to change, I was able to get back in the water and make those adjustments.
Relentless Spirit Page 9