Relentless Spirit

by Missy Franklin

  May the best hundred win, I told myself.

  Typically, I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about a specific opponent. The idea is to swim my race. But this race was different. I’d built it up in such a way that it represented more than this one race. It stood before me like a validation. And as I stepped to the blocks I was overcome by this powerful feeling. I don’t want to say I felt invincible, but it was a little like that. Has that ever happened to you? You work so hard to get to a certain place, you’re pointed so long in that one direction, you’re dialed in in such a way, that you know you can’t be denied? It wasn’t something I could have put into words, wasn’t even something I was thinking on any conscious level. It was just there. And there I was, too—good and ready.

  The moment I hit the water, it was all over in my mind. Nothing against Simone, who is a tremendous swimmer, but as I swam I was myself again. Everything kicked in. The pain and uncertainty of the past months were washed away. I was in London again. I was on top of the world, on top of my game.

  I touched the wall at 1:39.10. I shattered my record by more than a second, beat my number by almost a full second. That might not seem like a lot if you don’t swim, but to a swimmer, that’s an eternity, and I didn’t have to look at the clock to know I’d hit my mark. In my bones, I knew, but when I finally looked up and saw that I’d beat my number, I went a little crazy, especially for me. I feel bad about it now, looking back, because I don’t like to celebrate in such an obvious way. I’ll do a little dance in my heart if I win a big race, I’ll burst into a smile, but I don’t want to show up the other swimmers. I’m mindful of the fact that a good result for me doesn’t always mean a good result for them, so I try to be a little more reserved. But on that day, at that moment, it all came pouring out of me. The frustration, the doubts, the pain . . . they were gone, in that instant, and in their place was this sweet rush of pure joy. It meant so much more than just winning a national title, although that was certainly a part of it. It meant so much more than the twenty points I’d just earned for my team, although that was an even bigger part of it.

  What it meant, really, was that I was back. So I fist-pumped my little heart out.

  “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” That’s a line from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and you’ll see it on posters in locker rooms all across the country. It even showed up in a Kelly Clarkson song, kinda sorta. And here the same thought found me in that pool, whooping it up in this uncharacteristic way.

  1:39.10 . . . I did it.

  EIGHT

  HOME, AGAIN

  Sometimes you need to change things up.

  Trouble is, change can be hard. I know, I know. That’s not exactly a “stop the presses” statement. You won’t find it on a poster above my bed or printed on the band of my goggles. But it wasn’t so obvious to me when I was faced with another huge decision. Remember those big decisions I’d made when I was thirteen and fourteen years old? To go to Regis Jesuit instead of my feeder school, Arapahoe High School, and to keep training with Todd Schmitz and the Colorado Stars when half my friends were bolting to swim with Nick Frasersmith’s new club? Well, those two decisions had worked out to glorious good, but I was just a kid back then, and now I was facing the biggest decision of my newly acquired adult life.

  Once again, I had the full support of my parents—but, once again, they left it to me to call the shots. After they had given me a ton of things to think about, of course.

  What was new this time around was that I also had the full support of my faith, which as I shared earlier had kicked in when I started high school. It had only deepened in the years since, and once I got to Berkeley it took on a whole new complexion. One of the great reasons for that was a student group called Athletes in Action (AIA), which you’ll find on several campuses. And I started going to a wonderful church called Reality San Francisco, where there was a hip, animated pastor and the services were just amazing, so I was on good solid ground here, knowing full well that God and my parents had my back on this. (Forgive, please, the corny play on words—but you’ve been reading for a while by this point, so you know I just can’t help myself!)

  The dilemma was this: as I was recuperating from my injury and struggling to get back to form for my sophomore season at Cal, in early 2015, I was realizing more and more that I’d hit a kind of brick wall in my training. But then, maybe it’s a little harsh to put it just this way. It’s more like I’d come to a fork in the road. I could either go one way, into unknown territory, or another, onto familiar ground. This wasn’t me being critical of anyone or anything—this was just me taking a harsh look at where I was and where I was headed. This was me knowing my strengths, my weaknesses, my comfort zone.

  This was me coming at long last to the realization that, just as there is more than one way to make a family, there is more than one way to go to school and still somehow train for the Olympics.

  Before I get into the nuts and bolts of this decision, I want to pause for a bit and reflect on my time at Berkeley, because it really was a wonderful, transformative, foundational experience. I’ve got to admit, I was a little worried about how I’d fit in as a young woman of faith in such a liberal, anything-goes type of environment, but there was a place for me in Athletes in Action. I joined almost as soon as I arrived on campus, and I had some teammates for company: Caroline Piehl, Taylor Nanfria, and Caitlin Leverenz. It helped that I’d known Caroline from Stars, and that I’d met Taylor on my recruiting trip (and that she was my “big sister” on the team), and that I’d swum with Caitlin on the national team a few times, but here we were charting this new territory together. AIA was such a good, good group, made up of athletes from all different sports, from all different walks of life, knitted together by our love of God and our commitment to live a life in his glory. We’d get together once a week for Bible study, worship, and just to hang. A lot of times, there’d be guest speakers, with really relatable messages for young athletes, and opportunities to volunteer in our community. On Sundays, we’d go as a group to Reality San Francisco, which was a pretty nondenominational church where everyone was made to feel welcome.

  That feeling of welcome extended to the rest of my team as well. I wrote earlier about the immediate warmth and feeling of belonging that found me when I first walked through the doors at Regis, and there was a similar welcome that found me on the Cal campus. Right away, I was struck by the unique culture and chemistry of our team. I’d seen flash-glimpses of this when I visited the school, and of course I’d come to know a lot of the swimmers over the years and they’d all shared their experiences with me as I was making my decision to go to school there, but the Cal culture is not something you can really understand until you’re in the middle of it. Mostly, it has to do with the points of connection Teri McKeever instilled in our team, along with our wonderful assistant coach, Kristen Cunnane.

  Teri’s big thing was “accountability”—it was in the air and all around. We were all made to be accountable to one another, to ourselves, to our coaches, and to the university. We were expected to show up every day for practice—twenty minutes early, on “Teri Time!”—and to give our absolute best, at every single workout. The positive, purposeful attitude that came out of this was amazing. I’d never been in such a team-oriented environment, and I loved it. Straight out of the gate, I loved it. For the first time in my swimming life, I was surrounded by a group of teammates who had exactly the same goals as I did. And it was just one goal, really—to win a national championship.

  Now, I’d had a taste of this kind of esprit de corps in high school, but other than my freshman year I’d never had the full, all-in experience at Regis. Here at Cal, though, we were stocked with world-class talent, and we were thrown together 24-7 in pursuit of this shared goal. Up and down our roster, there were young women who could count themselves among the very best in the world in their events, so the ways we pushed each
other, the ways we held each other accountable, they were all tied up in a deep respect for our abilities as a group, and our commitment to compete at the very highest level.

  As for Teri herself . . . I’d had an incredible experience working with her. She taught me so much about being a leader, about being a strong, independent woman, about fighting through adversity and pain and disappointment. I probably learned more from Teri away from the pool than I did in the water, because her focus was so keenly oriented on the development of our character.

  And so, for all these reasons, and so many more besides, I considered my decision to leave the swimming program at Cal very, very seriously. But I tried to set my personal feelings aside and focus on a kind of bigger picture. And now, following those back spasms in Australia, I was starting to think there’d be some sort of recurrence, as I moved toward the end of the four-year Olympic cycle. Mostly, the tug and pull between long-course and short-course training hadn’t allowed me to focus fully on the work I’d need to do to (hopefully!) defend my gold medals at the Rio Olympics, or (also hopefully!) to collect a few more. Of course, once we got through the NCAAs sophomore year, I’d cease short-course training, but the tentative plan had been to stay on at Berkeley and continue to train with Teri McKeever. In this way, I’d keep those all-important connections to Cal, and to my great friends on the team, and to the other coaches and trainers who’d been such a blessing in my life.

  But once I got hurt I started to feel a different kind of tug and pull. Namely, the tug and pull to go home. When I looked honestly at myself and the progress I’d made in the nearly two years I’d been at Cal, I realized I wasn’t firing on all cylinders the way I’d been when I was swimming with Todd. When I was swimming at altitude, which, believe me, makes a huge difference in terms of fitness and stamina and all those good things. When I was sleeping at home, in my own bed, away from the academic, social, and cultural distractions of being away at college.

  So there I was, at this fork in the road.

  I thought about it, prayed about it, stressed about it. A lot. Teri had been so dear to me during those agonizing moments in Queensland. Really, I don’t think I could have gotten through that ordeal without her. And she’d been so supportive of me and so helpful, going all the way back to London. She was the main reason I’d decided to swim for Cal, and I was so glad I did. The swimming community at Cal was like my family, and Teri was a big part of that, a big reason for that. But as I looked to the year ahead, and all the new distractions that would come my way once I finally “turned pro” and could no longer swim in NCAA meets, I found myself leaning more and more to home, where I believed I would be in the best position to tune out all those distractions and fight my way back to whole.

  DAD: I had some concerns about Cal and Teri and swimming at the collegiate level. But I knew in a lot of ways that Missy was thriving at Berkeley, so I held my tongue. I’d sometimes question why Missy wasn’t swimming backstroke, for example. Sure, there were a lot of strong backstrokers on the team, and it made sense to let them swim those events if they were good enough to win and to save Missy for a long-distance event, like the 500 or 1,000. It was all about putting your swimmers where you could score the most points as a team. That would have been the case wherever Missy went to school. I understood that. D.A. understood that. And Missy was fine with it; she really was. She was always about doing what was best for the team, but as her parents we could see that what was best for the team wasn’t always what was best for Missy. Her muscles hadn’t really been trained for these events, and in some respects she was sacrificing some of the training she should have been doing in order to keep swimming at a world-class level. I believed that a lot of what Missy was being asked to do really wasn’t in her best interests, but she never questioned it. In fact, she loved it. She was team-first, all the way. And I don’t set this out as a criticism of Teri McKeever, not at all. It’s just that Teri’s agenda, as head coach of Cal swimming, was to win meets and keep that top three ranking and get to a national championship. And as I just said, the same situation would have presented itself at any collegiate program. Missy’s agenda was somewhat different. And as long as I’m on it, why is it that the NCAA is stubbornly sticking to these arcane distances? In the United States, the leader of the world, why are we still on the linear system and not on the metric system? We’ve been deeply involved in this sport for nearly fifteen years, and I’ve yet to hear a logical explanation for this. Why do we take our elite swimmers and put them back into 25-yard competition in college when the rest of the world puts its Olympic hopefuls in 25-meter and 50-meter pools year-round, to make them better month by month? It just blows my mind, that this is how it is. Short-course swimming and long-course swimming are really two completely different sports, like racquetball and squash. Okay, so both of them have racquets, and both of them are played in a contained area, but that’s where the comparisons end. Only in swimming, long course versus short course, yards versus meters, our top college swimmers are somehow expected to compete in both arenas. The mechanics are completely different—shorter course, more turns, more underwaters. It’s apples and oranges. Nothing against Teri, but I felt Missy needed to take a different approach. And yet I didn’t really say anything, because our philosophy was to let Missy come to this decision by herself, if she came to it at all. She needed to own it. She needed to come to the realization that she’d gone to Berkeley after becoming the first woman in history to win six gold medals in a single world championships, and that she hadn’t been close to that level of dominance since. So was I surprised to hear that Missy was thinking of moving home and picking up where she’d left off with Todd Schmitz? Not at all. Was I greatly relieved? Oh, absolutely.

  I hadn’t counted on the ways my decision to go back home to Colorado to train with Todd would impact those around me. There was this whole ripple effect. Of course, I knew Teri wouldn’t be happy about it. She’d known all along that I would only compete for Cal for two years before turning pro, but the expectation was that I would stay on in Berkeley and train with her as part of her postgraduate program, which is what they’ve set up for the swimmers who are no longer competing at the intercollegiate level but continuing to train with Teri and her staff and making full use of the Cal facilities. That was my expectation, too. And now here I was, midway through the final season of my NCAA “career,” getting ready to pull the plug on those expectations and go home immediately following the spring semester of my sophomore year, just in time to prepare for the 2015 world championships. Why? Because my heart was telling me to go back home and continue what I’d started with Todd that very first day I showed up to swim for the Colorado Stars when I was seven years old. The very first day he showed up on the same pool deck to begin his career as a coach. I also wanted to return to my fantastic dry-land trainer, Loren Landow, who had prepared me so well for London and Barcelona.

  This is probably a good spot to shine a light on Loren, who deserves all the love and props I can send his way. He’s been working with me since I was a sassy fourteen-year-old (and somehow managed to retain enough sanity to continue training the sassy fifteen- to twenty-one-year-old as well). I was one of the first swimmers he’d ever trained, if not the very first, and until I met Loren I’d worked with trainers who had zero interest in anything outside the weight room. Loren was cut a little differently, and we connected right away. He took the time to ask how I was feeling after every workout. Before we’d even start in, he’d want to know what I was working on in practice with Todd. Then he would moderate what I was doing, based on what was going on in the pool. For the first time, it felt to me like I was lifting weights with a purpose. Before Loren, I was lifting blindly, but he made sure to explain to me how what we were doing in the gym would directly benefit what I was doing in the pool. It was all tied in.

  He’s been such an incredible influence in my life—a real game changer. And one of my biggest cheerleaders. He’s the same way with
all the athletes he trains—professional football players, hockey players, baseball players . . . even mixed martial artists. I can’t imagine how he has the time to devote the same care and attention to guys like Tim Tebow, Peter Forsberg, and Troy Tulowitzki as he does to me . . . but he does. He’s constantly texting back and forth with Todd, comparing notes, telling him to go easy on my kick sets because he’d worked my legs particularly hard, or something like that.

  So Loren was a big part of my thinking, too, as I was weighing (alert the pun police!) the pros and cons of continuing my training in Berkeley or returning home to Colorado. The other huge piece to this dilemma was my roommate, Kristen Vredeveld. Teri must have sensed something in us, because she put us together ahead of our freshman year, and we clicked immediately. I’m a firm believer in fate, and I know in my heart that God has a plan for us, and here I believe he put this young woman in my life to be my best friend, someone I can lean on, someone to support me in these difficult moments. At the same time, though, I had to believe that God (and Teri!) put me in Kristen’s life for the flip side of the very same reasons, so obviously I was torn about how the decision to head home would impact our friendship. My decision was all about what I needed, and not at all about what Kristen needed, and that just wasn’t fair—and so, in a lot of ways, the person I was most nervous to talk to about all this was Kristen, even though I knew she’d be the one person who would totally understand. She meant the world to me, and I hated the thought of being separated from her. The last thing I wanted was for her to feel like I was leaving her behind, or that I was choosing someone or something else over her. It was an irrational worry, because Kristen’s not like that, and the situation wasn’t like that, but I worried just the same. We’d met on our recruiting trip, and we’d been like sisters ever since, and even though we’d been together less than two years at this point I couldn’t imagine waking up every day and going about my routines without seeing her reassuring smile, or drawing on her strength—or, even, sharing in her tears (and by “her” tears I really mean mine, because I was most definitely the bigger crier).