Relentless Spirit

by Missy Franklin

  I was swimming both lengths at this Orlando meet, which meant I was swimming short course in the morning and long course at night. When I was twelve, I could get away with that type of thing—really, it was no biggie. For the first three days of the meet, I had the 100 and 200 free and the 100 and 200 backstroke, and I was swimming really well. I was going best times in all of my events, but in each race I was falling just short of the trial cut—by a few hundredths of a second, maybe a tenth of a second. I think if you added up all the tiny fractions of a second I was off, the total would have still been a fraction of a second, so even though I was swimming great, it wasn’t quite the level of greatness you need to make it to Olympic trials.

  I suppose I could have told myself I was still just twelve years old, and that coming this close to the trial cuts was a kind of moral victory, but I’d never used my age as an excuse. That wasn’t going to get me anywhere. It didn’t matter that I was twelve and everyone else in my heat was sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. I didn’t get a head start, or an extra second taken off my time, just because I was five years younger. It didn’t matter what it said on our birth certificates. I was good, but not good enough. End of story.

  Still, I was happy with how I was swimming. I wanted to go to Olympic trials, but I couldn’t really get down on myself, going all those best times. Was I disappointed? Sure. Was I devastated? No, not really. A lot of other swimmers were devastated not to be making their cuts, but they were much older than me, and the four-year Olympic calendar can be cruel. I could come back and qualify at sixteen years old and still be one of the youngest in the pool, so time was on my side. But that wasn’t true for everyone.

  But that was just the first three days of the meet. On the final day, I had the 200 individual medley (IM) and the 50 free—not exactly my best events. My underwaters weren’t strong, so the 50 was always tough for me, basically because you’re underwater for a greater percentage of the overall race distance. In a 100 or a 200, you have all that extra distance to cover, so you have a chance to cover up the shortfall. But in the 50, if you’re behind in that first fifteen, coming off the start, it creates such a challenge to try to catch up—and let’s remember, your underwater on a dive is just as important as your underwater on a turn. There’s just so much that can go wrong for me in a 50-meter swim. Hard to believe all these things have to line up in just the right way for me to even have a fighting chance, all in about twenty-four seconds.

  Even so, I’d somehow made it to the finals in each of these two events, so as I was getting ready for them I kind of set aside my hope to make Olympic trials and told myself it just wasn’t going to happen this time out. And I was good with that. My four strongest events were done, and I’d come up just short, so now the thing to do was leave everything I had in the pool.

  By every other measure, I was having a great meet, so I decided to just enjoy it and try to finish strong. The IM came first. I was in the outside lane, and I could see that I was second to the wall on the fly, and I remember being pretty surprised about that. Normally, I was back in the middle of the pack, so either I was swimming really well or the rest of the field was flat. (For the sake of posterity, let’s agree that I was swimming really well, okay?)

  Next came the backstroke leg, and this was where I usually made up some ground, maybe even started to pull ahead a little bit. The goal was always to build up a bit of a cushion, because my breaststroke was horrible. (No changes there!) But because I’d had such a strong fly, I was able take a nice lead in the back, so when I got to my breaststroke the plan was to do my best and try to hold on. Somehow, I did—with a surprising time. At this point, as I made my turn, I could see Todd running alongside me on the pool deck. Since I was in the outside lane, he was right in my face, going completely psycho.

  Now, one thing you need to know about Todd—he makes a lot of noise when his swimmers are competing. Mostly, it’s just to make sure we can hear him, but I’ve heard other swimmers, other coaches, other parents, complain about the way he sometimes whoops it up. When you’re swimming for him, you appreciate the encouragement. We all think it’s hysterical, when we’re watching one of our teammates and he’s hollering and whistling and doing his thing. But here he was, just four or five feet away from me, jumping up and down, screaming. It was over the top, even for him, but from his tone and his body language I figured it must have been pretty good.

  Every time I pulled my head out of the water, I’d catch a glimpse of Todd, who stayed right with me over that final fifty.

  When I touched the wall, before I even turned around, I heard Todd scream—like a caterwauling yee-hah! kind of scream. He was super excited, almost obnoxiously so. And in that moment I couldn’t think what he was so excited about. I’d gone best times in my 100 and 200 free, in my 100 and 200 back, and he was nowhere near as pumped about those results. For a beat I thought maybe he was so excited because I’d done so well in an off-event. It’s not like I’d won my heat or anything. I finished second, which was a good showing for me at this meet, but not this good.

  Keep in mind, I had no idea what the trial cut was for the 200 IM, because nobody thought it was within reach, so the thought that I’d hit that number didn’t even enter my mind. (That number: 2:20.49.) I wasn’t gunning for it, so I wasn’t thinking about it. But I did hit that number (2:19.12!), and Todd knew I’d hit it as soon as he saw my splits coming out of my breaststroke and heading into my free. That’s why he was so stoked. But even when he was screaming at me—“That was a trial cut! That was a trial cut!”—it still took a while to sink in.

  It was almost surreal, to swim at that level, when you’re not even going for it, but before I had a chance to get my head around what had happened, I had to swim my 50 free in twenty minutes. It wasn’t until I was warming down, swimming easy, that I was able to process the race and what it meant. That’s when it finally registered. When I allowed myself to think, Oh my gosh, I just got my trial cut. I’m going to Olympic trials! I started beaming ear to ear, I was just so happy. I wanted to be anywhere else but in that warm-down pool. I wanted to be in the stands, celebrating with my parents and Auntie C.J. I wanted to be on the pool deck, celebrating with Todd and my teammates.

  I couldn’t even focus on my 50 free, but I’d been through those paces so many times before it was like I was on autopilot. I’d had the mini-disappointment of just missing my times over the first three days, even though my times were better than ever, and then the surprising thrill of qualifying in one of my weakest events, so there was absolutely no pressure headed into this final event.

  I just had to swim. And guess what? Without the weight of the expectations I’d brought with me to Orlando, I was able to relax and swim with abandon . . . and I qualified in the 50 free, too! With a time of 26.21, just under the Olympic trial time of 26.39! It was like the icing on the cake, and totally unexpected.

  Crazy, huh?

  Then, just to put an exclamation point on things, I got my trials cut in the 100 free at another meet a few weeks later, so I was headed off to Omaha to swim in three events. I turned thirteen by the time Olympic trials rolled around on the calendar, but I was still the second youngest swimmer there. (The youngest was Grace Carlson, who went on to swim at Stanford, who made it in her 50 free just a couple of weeks before trials.)

  And I was the happiest little thirteen-year-old ever, ever, ever.

  DAD: One of the things I used to marvel at about Missy was the way she handled pressure, and the way she handled it was basically to set it aside. The magnitude of this moment, swimming at Olympic trials, it was felt mostly by her mother and me, not by Missy. And the ways we felt it were not like what we were seeing from the other parents in Omaha. There were more than ten thousand people in the stands in Omaha. But that didn’t faze Missy. Nothing fazed her. I thought back to how things were before a big football game in college, the pregame tensions that filled our locker room. We had these 250-pound
linemen, dressed in full gear, sweating like pigs, vomiting in the toilet before game time. Even pro athletes will tell you how they get nervous before they take the field. At the youth level, in a sport like swimming, I used to see it all the time. Children used to melt down by the side of the pool before their events. Sometimes, they’d get so nervous before a race that they refused to swim. Here in Omaha it was all ratcheted up, because there were 1,250 swimmers gathered, from all across America, and only fifty or so would walk away with a spot on the Olympic team. And it’s not like you can come back the next year and give it another go. You’re on a four-year cycle, so for most of these kids, this was their one and only shot. And maybe you’ll come up short by a hair, just a fraction of a fraction of a second, and then you think of all those families who’ve put so much into this moment. We didn’t want Missy to feel any of that pressure. To D.A. and me, just then, this was the absolute pinnacle. Just seeing Missy make it here to Olympic trials, we couldn’t have been more proud. We had no reason to think she’d go any further than this right here, and that was okay with us. We were thrilled just to be there with our daughter, and watching her swim on this stage, at this level. Whatever happened after that, it would just be a bonus, but we weren’t counting on anything, and I think Missy took this in and began to feel the same way. Obviously, she wanted to do well, but she knew this moment wouldn’t define her.

  Omaha was memorable for a lot of reasons, but I want to turn my focus away from the pool and back to family. Just to be clear, the swimming part was one pinch-me moment after another. I ended up going best times in all three of my events, but I didn’t make the semifinals (the top sixteen!) in any of them. And I was completely okay with that. I was just so happy to be there and to be at my absolute best and to be in the company of all these amazing swimmers. Think about that! I was thirteen years old and surrounded by some of the best people the sport has ever seen—changing in the same locker room as them, walking in the same hallways as them, getting in the same pool as them, lining up to give autographs to the same fans as them. I wanted to swim well and be at my best, but I knew my main goal at this meet was to learn as much as possible while I was surrounded by such incredible company.

  So that part was great, and couldn’t have gone any better. Because, let’s be real, there was no way I was touching the wall ahead of any of those giants and earning a spot on the Olympic team, and at thirteen years old! This was as good as it was getting for me, just then. It’s the best I could have expected. But what stays with me most from that first trip to Omaha was the part I wasn’t expecting—namely, the way my family rallied around and turned up to support me. I’m not talking about my parents, because they were a constant in my life. In those days, they went to pretty much every meet. And I’m not talking about my auntie C.J., Mom’s sister, and uncle Doug, Dad’s brother, who’d already established themselves as my biggest non-parent fans and hit the road with us at many of my meets.

  No, for this trip, my cousin Darryl arranged a big surprise for me—one of my favorite memories from my swimming career, then and now. He worked the phones and set it up so he and three of my cousins were able to meet us in Omaha and see me swim in what might turn out to be the biggest meet of my life. Like my dad said, we had no idea back then what the future might hold. This might have been as far as I’d ever go in the sport, and my parents and I would have been okay with that. Just making it to those Olympic trials would have been a fine and fitting highlight, something I could always look back on with pride, if that’s as far as swimming would take me. So of course it meant the world to me that my cousins would drop whatever they were doing and come to cheer me on.

  All of this happened without my knowing. My parents had rented a two-bedroom loft in Omaha, and I knew Auntie C.J. would be joining them there. What I didn’t know was that my cousins Darryl, Chelsea, Sean, and Laura would be there, too. I’d always loved my cousins and cherished the time we spent together. As an only child, I think our big family vacations meant more to me than anyone, because my cousins had siblings to goof around with back home. Me, I just had my seven cousins, so I always looked forward to seeing them. They were my siblings. Trouble was, we were spread out all over North America, and now that I was traveling to all these meets and spending all that time in the pool, it was harder and harder for me to get away. Our schedules never seemed to match up. It never even occurred to me that they would come to Omaha, just to see me swim for a grand total of a few minutes. Darryl and Laura were all the way up in Toronto, and Sean and Chelsea were in Racine, Wisconsin, so it made no sense to even think about it.

  My uncle Drew volunteered to drive Sean and Chelsea from Racine to Chicago, where they met up with Laura and Darryl, who were driving from Toronto. From there, it was about another five hundred miles to Omaha. Laura and Darryl shared the driving—Chelsea and Sean were just fifteen and sixteen. They got to Omaha in time to make it to prelims on the first morning of competition. When I went out to the hall of the natatorium after my morning swim I stopped to sign some autographs, and there was Chelsea, standing in line with the other fans. I think I looked right through her at first, not putting two and two together, but then I figured it out and screamed with delight.

  Oh my gosh! I was over the moon, and from there we fell right into our goofy cousin routines. It was such a special, magical visit, and it came with its own unexpected twist. We all got stuck in an elevator for several hours. Mom was freaking out, worrying that one of us would break a leg from a seven-story drop. While we were waiting for the firefighters to arrive, the five cousins pulled out a deck of cards and started playing euchre on the floor of the elevator. We just figured we might as well make the best of a bad situation. It ended up that we had to crawl through the elevator ceiling and get out on the floor above—not exactly the way a swimmer is meant to get her rest between events when she’s in town for Olympic trials, but I didn’t care. I was too busy laughing hysterically at my cousin Chelsea flirting with the firefighters! The rescue personnel kept telling us not to look down, because we could see the open elevator shaft going all the way to the subbasement level, and I remember looking back at my poor mother, who was plainly terrified as they guided her to safety. We kids all thought this was a great thrill, but Mom is still a little freaked out by elevators!

  Yeah, I might have been trapped in an elevator for a couple of hours, waiting to be rescued by the local fire department, but that was nothing. What mattered was that I was an only child surrounded by my “big” family, in a place I never imagined I’d be, at a time in my life when I never thought I’d be there, competing against some of the best swimmers in the world. It was all good.

  Like a lot of clubs, the Colorado Stars is a not-for-profit, coach-run organization. It was started by Nick Frasersmith a few years before I joined, and quickly became one of the most popular clubs in the area. One of the reasons for that was that Nick hired a bunch of fun, talented coaches to work with different age and ability groups. But there’s not a lot of money in club swimming, especially at the smaller local clubs. Todd had another job when he started coaching part-time. And Nick was working two other jobs—as a high school coach and a groundskeeper. Coaches like Nick and Todd did what they did for the love of the sport, not for the money, but they still had to make a living, so at some point I think Nick decided he needed to spend time with his young family. When that happened, Todd became the CEO and head coach of Stars, and the head coach of the senior group, so we were reunited. The club continued to operate as before, with the same focus—only now Todd was the face of the team. And, significantly for me, he was once again my hands-on coach, because I was swimming with the senior group.

  Several months later, Nick wanted to come back to Stars. The job he’d taken didn’t work out, and he thought he’d made a mistake, leaving the club he’d started, but by this point Todd was doing great and the club was thriving and there was no way to bring Nick back into the fold without pushing Todd away.
I was just a kid, not really paying any attention to this stuff, and my parents weren’t really focused on it, either. Nick and I never really talked about it, so this is just me, connecting the dots. But then we learned that Nick was starting another club, and a lot of my friends were planning to leave Stars to go swim with him.

  I was really broken up about this, because about half my friends were planning to leave Stars to follow Nick. For me, this was a huge blow—but my parents left it to me to figure this one out for myself. This was one of those major decisions I mentioned earlier, and in a lot of ways it was a no-brainer. I was sticking with Todd—he was like a father figure to me, a mentor, and a coach, all rolled into one. I absolutely loved training with him, and I had no doubt that beyond my own passion for the sport he was the main reason why I’d been able to swim at such a high level. But staying put on Stars came at a price. It would cost me a ton of friendships that meant the world to me. One of the things I loved best about swimming were the people I got to see every day because of it. I’d been swimming with some of these people since I was seven years old, and it’s not like I could just see them in school. We lived all over Colorado. Some families drove an hour or more just to make it to our practices.

  Even worse, I started hearing from a lot of my friends, away from the pool, who were calling me up and trying to get me to leave Stars and join this new club. A lot of the parents were talking and scheming, too. It was a confusing time, especially for a naive little girl who just wanted to swim and be with her friends. There was a lot of intrigue, but to Nick’s great credit he never came out and asked me to leave Todd and join his club instead. He’s an incredible coach, an incredible teacher, an incredible person. He would never have done that. He did, however, let it be known in a more global way that all of his old swimmers were welcome, so it became the hot topic among my group of friends. It was heartbreaking, really, because so many of my friends were deciding to go swim with Nick. I completely understood their decisions, because Nick was such a wonderful coach, but that didn’t change the fact that I was going to miss each and every one of them—so, so much.