Relentless Spirit

by Missy Franklin

  Like every young swimmer, I had to learn a proper racing dive. It’s a rite of passage. My father had taught me to dive when I was little, when I was diving just for fun. He had no idea what he was doing, but his methods were effective enough. The way he taught me was by diving himself. I’d watch and try to copy him, which was pretty much the way I’d go on to study Michael and Natalie on video. I was a good mimic, I guess. A lot of kids, they forget to tuck in their chin, or maybe they’re just afraid, and they end up doing a belly flop, but that was never a problem for me. It was actually a blast. Once I got the motion down, I used to practice at every opportunity, usually when my father and I were goofing around in the pool or at the lake. It got to where diving became the most natural thing, the most fun thing. But what my father couldn’t teach me was a racing dive—basically, how to start.

  DAD: I couldn’t really teach Missy how to swim in terms of technique, but I could help her get comfortable in the water. Although if you must know, she didn’t really need my help. She was just a natural. I had her in the ocean with me when she was an infant, and she just loved it. She was snorkeling with me by the time she was three. I hadn’t meant to take her out with me—she was so young—but we were on a beach in Maui, and we made the mistake of letting Missy put on all that gear, the mask and the snorkel and the fins, just to splash around in the whitewater. We were on the South Shore, and it was a beautiful day; the water was clear. I was on our blanket, reading a novel, and all of a sudden I heard D.A. let out a scream. She’d been watching Missy, and she’d started to wade out to keep a close eye on her, but D.A. wasn’t a very good swimmer, and she was trying to keep up with this little girl with fins who swam like a fish even then. I raced into the water and started swimming with all my might, and I finally caught up to Missy all the way out there, beyond the shore break. She was getting knocked around by the waves, but she didn’t care. She was totally fine, totally in her element. She’d been chasing some fish, apparently, and she was fascinated by the way they moved, by all the colors. She kept pointing and laughing and saying, “Did you see that one, Daddy?” and “Look, there’s a yellow one!” and “Aren’t they beautiful?” Poor D.A. almost had a heart attack, her little girl out there among those big waves, but Missy just had no fear in the water. No fear at all.

  And then there’s one other story I just have to tell, as long as I have the floor. We were up at our house in Grand Lake, the tail end of winter, and Missy was determined to be the first one in the lake that season. She was about seven years old. I don’t know what put that thought into her head, but when Missy got started on a thing, there was just no stopping her. So we went out to the lake, and there was ice and snow all around. The lake was still frozen, but there were holes in the ice where the current was running. It was starting to thaw. She walked in to her knees, screaming with delight, and then she was in up to her waist, still having a blast. I hollered at her to be careful, but she just waved me off and dove in the rest of the way, headfirst, and when she popped back up I took her picture. Her hair was all frozen-wet, but she was smiling.

  That’s a great story, Dad—but what my father failed to mention was that my parents bet me I couldn’t dunk my head in the freezing water, so obviously I had to do it!

  One of the great benefits to swimming with Todd and the Colorado Stars was that the club didn’t really believe in specialization. A lot of times, even at the lower ends of the youth level, you’ll see a swimmer start to focus almost exclusively on one stroke, one distance. That’s a mistake, I think. If you spend all that time at eight and nine and ten years old doing breaststroke, then you might start to believe you’re a breaststroker for life. If you mix it up, you give yourself a chance to grow into an event, and you set it up so you can better help your team, once you start to compete for your club or your school.

  Probably the best argument I could make about the importance of practicing every stroke is to point to my own development as a swimmer. My stroke changed as I grew. I developed new areas of strength. In fact, my three Olympic trial cuts in 2008—my first!—didn’t include backstroke, which has now become one of my strengths, so you never know how things are going to work out.

  We would swim everything, and we’d learn as a group. The coaches wouldn’t get into the pool with you—that’s really something you only see at the beginner, learn-to-swim level. Our coaches would demonstrate the proper technique by the side of the pool and then we’d have at it. Very quickly, we could see which of our teammates had it down, and those were the ones we tried to copy in the pool. There’s a lot of imitation when you’re just starting out, which is why it’s so important to have an attentive coach, because if you find yourself mimicking the wrong person you can develop some bad habits.

  The drills they had us do were very basic. For example, for our freestyle stroke, they would have us do an exaggerated fingertip drag, which was designed to help us keep and maintain a high elbow catch, but when you’re a little kid you’re not thinking about your form. You’re just thinking, Yay, we get to drag our fingertips in the water! So there were a lot of fun drills like that, intended to reinforce what we were supposed to be doing. (And if you must know, the fingertrip drill is still my favorite.)

  Todd remembers that I didn’t like his practices in the very beginning, because I used to like to race so much. I don’t remember it quite this way, but I’ll have to give him the benefit of the doubt—after all, he was the adult back then (barely!), and I was just a kid. But I do remember how I loved to race. I loved being out in front, swimming in clear water. And I just loved that feeling of getting up on the blocks and knowing there were all these awesome swimmers around me, and that we were all going to push one another to go really, really fast.

  It was my very favorite thing.

  As I moved up the ladder with the Stars, I started swimming with Nick Frasersmith, the coach who’d eventually take me to my first Olympic trials, in 2008, when I was thirteen years old. Nick played a central role in the two major decisions I had to face as a youth swimmer—decisions we considered as a family but were ultimately left to me. (At least, my parents allowed me to think the decisions were mine, but for all I know they might have exercised their veto power if I’d leaned another way.) I’ll get to those decisions in a bit, but for now I simply wanted to introduce Nick, because it was while I was swimming with him that I started to make some real noise beyond the state of Colorado. (It’s not like I ever stopped working with Todd, but for a while there, as I moved up to the next Stars group, he kept coaching the younger kids while I spent more and more time with some of the other coaches at the club, and it began with Nick.)

  One of the first big meets we traveled to when I started swimming with the older Stars group came with one of the first big disappointments of my career, together with one of the first great surprises. We went to Indianapolis, to the Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IU–PUI) campus. We all knew the meet by the initials IU–PUI, so for years we called it the “Oooey-Pooey,” never really knowing what we were saying, or what the initials stood for. It was a big team trip, and a great adventure, and for a lot of us it was the first time swimming at a major meet out of state. We didn’t take a lot of our younger swimmers, so at twelve years old I was one of the youngest ones there.

  Over the years, I’ve come to love the IU–PUI pool. For whatever reason, I tend to swim well there, and I get such a great vibe, but on this one trip things didn’t exactly go my way—at least, not at first. I remember that we tapered for this meet, which was completely new to me. At twelve years old, there’s no real reason to rest. I could swim all day at that age. But Todd and Nick were expecting me to do well in the 200 back, so they wanted me to rest. That was best my event, and I’d been going best time after best time, so it felt to them like the NAG for eleven- to twelve-year-olds was within reach.

  Remember, my parents were never the type to put any pressure on me, so they kind of
soft-pedaled my coaches’ expectations, but I knew what everyone around me was thinking. And they never let me feel like I was expected to break a record or go a certain time, but they celebrated like crazy when I did, in this way letting me know that there was a certain value in winning. Adults can be funny. They put it out there in this casual way that you can set this great record, and in the same breath they try to tell you it’s no big deal. (Talk about confusing!) I knew my times, and knew what I was capable of, but I tried not to let that get in the way of the adventure. Mostly, I wanted to have a good time with my friends. To fly on a plane together, to camp out at the gate while we were waiting to take off, playing cards, laughing. An NAG was almost the last thing on my mind, but it wouldn’t be accurate to suggest I wasn’t thinking about it at all. I was thinking about it because my coaches were thinking about it, because my parents were thinking about it.

  Once we got to the meet, I still didn’t feel any pressure, but something happened. Actually, that’s not the best way to put it, because it sounds like something happened beyond my control, which wasn’t at all the case. What happened was I was disqualified, so obviously it was on me. I hadn’t been DQ’d from a race since I was eight years old, and that had been my only time! Usually, you see it with a swimmer who’s overeager—maybe it’ll be because of a false start. But here it was because I’d spent too long going into one of my backstroke turns. The way it works, if you spend too much time on your stomach going into a turn, that’s a disqualification—they don’t call it backstroke for nothing, people! It was more of a technicality. I knew all the rules, of course, but I was off by a beat or two. (Hey, I was twelve!) In backstroke, at every level, there’s a specific amount of time you’re given to make each turn. If you’re on your stomach for too long, over too great a distance, that’s a DQ. Even as kids, we spent a lot of time working on our turns—it can get tricky. As soon as you flip over, you kind of stop moving. You can still kick with your legs, but you start to lose momentum, so by flipping onto my stomach too early I’d given myself no advantage. In fact, you can make the case that I’d actually given myself a disadvantage by flipping too soon, because I’d sacrificed a lot of forward momentum.

  Still, I had no idea I was about to be called out on this. I just swam my race—and I was first to the wall, as hoped. But then I saw this official marching over to my lane, her eyes locked on mine. I didn’t know what to think. At first I thought she was coming over to say hi, maybe congratulate me, but then I could see she wasn’t smiling, so I had no idea what was up.

  She said, “I’m so sorry, Missy, but you were too long on your stomach going into your turn on the third wall. We had to disqualify you.”

  I remember thinking it was interesting that she’d mentioned the violation came on the third turn. I knew I was way out in front, knew I was swimming well, knew I had a shot at the record; I guess the size of the moment was a little too big for me, just then. I was so worried about my sprint to the finish, I let my mechanics get away from me.

  My heart sank. Really, I was devastated. To come into this big meet with all these great expectations, and then to go and do the polar opposite, to get disqualified . . . it was so unnerving, so upsetting. Also embarrassing. Despite being so young, I had a little bit of a leadership position on our team, so a lot of my friends had gathered around the pool to see me swim this race and possibly set that record. To have to take this walk of shame, after everyone could see what had happened, it was a lot to take in.

  Let’s just say I croggled my little eyes out in the warm-down pool, but then I had to come back the next day and compete in another few events. My teammates were very supportive. They came up to me, hugged me, said all the right things. My parents and coaches, too. What could anyone have said, really? I was still at that stage in my career when I was learning how to deal with mistakes, and disappointments, and having a bad race, but I knew to set my embarrassment aside and focus on my next event. I’d lost points for my team, and I was determined to win them back, so that became my motivation. It was the only thing that mattered, really. Here’s where a lot of the lessons I’d learned from my parents kicked back in, about the importance of being a team player. I couldn’t mope around for the rest of the meet like some Debbie Downer. My job was to cheer on my teammates and swim my best and try to have fun. Because, even then, I was supposed to be the fun, energetic one. That was my role.

  The next day, I had the 200 freestyle, which wasn’t my best event. I hadn’t really started to specialize yet, but I was stronger at the 100 free than I was at the 200. I had a good swim in prelims and then came back to set an NAG in the finals, which nobody was expecting. My time of 1:49.84 made me the first girl under the age of thirteen to break 1:50 in the 200 free, short course, which was just so thrilling. And so unexpected. (And just as a side note, I’d go on to become the first woman to break 1:40 seven years later—so that was a fun record to have, especially because of the mark that had come before it.)

  And the thing of it is, nobody knew it was an NAG at the time. Nobody, that is, except for my mother.

  Here, I’ll let her tell it. . . .

  MOM: I could see from where I was sitting that Missy and Todd didn’t even know it was a record time. They weren’t expecting it, so of course they weren’t looking for it. Even more than that, I could see from the way the race officials were moving around the deck that nobody had any idea. But when I go to these meets, I have all my little stat sheets, assembled by my sister, Cathy. We sit together and we know all the cut times, all the splits. We’re like the official scorers. Missy teases me about it, because she just wants to swim. She tells me I’m a little nuts, and I guess I am, but this is how I follow along. I knew I had to tell them it was an NAG, so I shouted down to Todd from the stands, which is something I never do. We’re always incredibly careful to keep quiet at these meets, Dick and I, but here I couldn’t help myself. Missy looked up and I could see she was mortified, to have her mother shouting down to her coach, like I was one of those pushy parents, but when I finally got Todd’s attention I yelled, “That was an NAG!” Todd looked puzzled. Usually, he’s pretty good about knowing which records were in play, which times Missy was shooting for. He said, “No, D.A., I don’t think so.” So I waved my sheets in the air and started to climb down to the railing. He came over to meet me, and I kind of tossed my sheets over to him. I said, “Look!” I was so excited. So he looked, and sure enough, it was an NAG, so right away he was just as excited as I was. We both started jumping up and down, and then Missy picked up on it, and she was thrilled. Still mortified by her nutty mother, running down the steps, waving these sheets of paper, but thrilled.

  What happens when you set an NAG is that meet officials start to go a little crazy. It’s like nobody had ever set a record before. As I remember it, this was the last event of the night, and a lot of people had started to leave, but we had to stay while they certified the course and measured the pool, dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s. I always thought that was so funny, that they didn’t certify and measure before the start of every major meet. It seemed a little upside-down to me, but there it was. Once all the logistics were in order, they took me out to the 10-meter diving platform and had me pose for a bunch of pictures, and I remember thinking that these records were one of the great things about our sport. Right then and there, in the middle of this cool moment, cameras going off, hugs flying, I stopped to think that I hadn’t just won this one race. This NAG meant I’d also beat out everyone my age who’d ever swum in this pool, in this state, in this country. It reminded me that every time I stepped to the starting blocks, I was competing against the history of my sport.

  Out of that “Oooey-Pooey” meet, I started to get a little more attention—and not for my DQ, thank goodness!

  A couple of months later, we were in Orlando, which would have been one of my last opportunities to make my trial cuts—the times I needed to post in each event over a defin
ed calendar period in order to qualify for Olympic trials in those events. There’d be other meets before Olympic trials, which were to be held in Omaha that year, but that meet in Orlando was the one Nick and Todd had me tapering for, and that was the one right in front of me, so there was a sense that that would be my last, best opportunity for that Olympic cycle. It was so completely unbelievable that my coaches were even thinking that way when I was just twelve years old, but because it was an Olympic year they said it made sense to hold it out there and see what happened. I’d been posting some strong times, just a little bit off the cuts, but not by a significant amount.

  Now, I hadn’t done a lot of long-course swimming since the previous summer, and I guess it makes sense here to talk a little bit about the differences between long course and short course—at least, as it applied to me. Even as kid, I was stronger in long course, because my walls have never been my strong suit. Why? Because I’ve always struggled with my underwaters. If I were to swim a short-course event these days it would be mostly underwater. It can really impact your time if you don’t have strong underwaters, because if you’re going fifteen meters underwater each time you flip turn off a wall, you don’t leave yourself any time to make up the difference. You could have a much faster stroke, but the swimmer who’s mastered his or her underwaters has a clear advantage.

  Long-course events are a great equalizer. You’ll see a lot of swimmers who’ve excelled at short course really struggle transitioning to long course, because what made them strong at one distance doesn’t really translate to the other. In long course, they have to rely on their strokes to a far greater degree, and maybe their strokes just aren’t that strong. You can’t get to long course and not rely on your strokes, because that longer distance will just eat you alive.