by Leisel Jones
I don’t have loads in common with the other people on my course, but I find I enjoy chatting to people about something – anything – other than swimming. Many of them don’t have a clue who I am or what I do, and these people are my favourites to talk to. Sometimes when I introduce myself to people I meet, they respond with, ‘I know who you are! Why do you bother to introduce yourself?’ But at college most people don’t know who I am and I certainly don’t tell them. I love that they haven’t heard of me. I can think of nothing worse than meeting someone for the first time and assuming they know me. Don’t you know who I am?! Yuck. How horrible. Sam Riley once told me that her dream job was to wear a wig and work as a checkout chick at a Coles. The anonymity! Being inconspicuous! She could think of nothing better, and I totally get it. Quite often when I fill out forms and I’m asked my occupation I will write ‘unemployed brain surgeon’ or ‘out-of-work circus clown’. It’s not that I’m ashamed of being a swimmer – it’s just that I don’t want to stand out. I don’t need other people to know who I am. I am quite often featured in the local Redcliffe & Bayside Herald, so when I go to the corner shop to pick up milk, people recognise me and stare and whisper and point. I have taken to wearing hoodies and dark glasses, even at night, so that I don’t get noticed. I don’t want to be seen.
For someone studying beauty, I am terribly uncomfortable in my own skin.
12
Starving to Swim
I am always on a diet, always counting calories, obsessing over food, and always, always hungry. I am insatiable. I cannot eat enough. I am still a teenager, with a break-neck teenage metabolism, and after swimming and training for hours each day, I can never seem to fill myself up. And yet I still try to diet.
Last year was ‘My Year Without Chocolate’, in which I didn’t eat a single square of chocolate. Not one piece. It was all my own idea and it nearly killed me – very nearly broke my spirit – but I’m sure it went some way towards keeping the kilos off. I don’t drink and I don’t eat cheese. I skip ice-cream, hot chips, burgers and pies. The sight of a piece of mud cake can reduce me to tears, worse if it has chocolate icing. Christmas is the hardest, because it’s peak training season. Nationals are in March, so I have to be extra strict at Christmas. And all of this has to come from me. I am the one who has to stick to the regime. Beyond the beady eye of my coach, it is up to me. When I’m at home, when I’m out with friends, I have to be good. I need the willpower of a saint. But I am strong and determined.
Also, I am convinced I am fat.
Whenever I have to stand on the pool deck in my togs, listening to my body being discussed like it’s an engine and not the arms, legs, thighs and stomach of a teenage girl, I am self-conscious and miserable. I think I am just too fat.
Part of the reason for this is that there is nothing strategic about my diet, nor about the diet of anyone I know. Despite the ad hoc appearance of dieticians in our lives (such as at the Fukuoka World Championships, where they popped up with that salmon cake), we receive no sustained scientific dietary advice. The only dieticians in my life are affiliated with the QAS, and they’re seen as extraneous: outside help you can seek if you really need to shed some kilos or put on some bulk. They are not part of our ‘team’, not in the way our coach or gym trainer is. And seeing a dietician is on par with seeing a sports psychologist: not encouraged. Back when I swam with Ken, he never wanted us to deal with outsiders – coaches knew best – and his strategy when it came to diet was to put most of the girls in our squad on meal-replacement shakes at some time or another. Diet shakes, yeah, that’s a good idea for a teenage athlete! We were always getting weighed in, always being judged. We were actively encouraged to skip meals to lose weight. It is irresponsible and terribly damaging. And it’s a quick way to screw up a teenage girl’s metabolism, to say nothing about the state of her head.
Even now at the QAS we are all weighed three times a week. Weigh-ins take place on the pool deck in our togs, and we are weighed in front of our squad (girls and guys together), plus a team of coaching staff. There are men there as old as our dads, all watching our embarrassment as we are publicly weighed.
Weighed, weighed and weighed again.
Some of the coaches at the QAS gym have a thing going called ‘6:1.20’. This is their code, their secret talk. They think we don’t understand when they call a girl – it’s always a girl – a ‘6:1:20’. But when she’s crying in the showers later, it’s because she knows that ‘6’ stands for the sixth letter of the alphabet, ‘1’ the first, and ‘20’ the twentieth. F. A. T. Doesn’t take a genius to bust that one open.
There is one girl who is really struggling with an eating disorder. Only months ago, she was one of the stringiest girls in the gym, but in the past few months her weight has gone up, so now she gets the 6:1:20 nickname among the coaches. We would never use it among ourselves. It’s disgusting. Someone should stop them. But that’s what the culture is like here. If my weight goes up even 0.2 kilograms, I know about it – everyone knows about it – and I panic and think: Am I going to cop it? Are there going to be questions asked?
Two hundred grams. That’s nothing. That could be your period. That could be a big glass of water. Still, around here 0.2 is 0.2, and there will be questions to answer.
The other thing we do – the thing that’s worse than weigh-ins – is skinfold testing, every four to six weeks or so. I have been doing skinfold or pinch tests since I was fourteen, but they are not getting easier. If anything, as I get older, I hate the experience more and more. It’s humiliating. Just like at weigh-ins, for skinfold tests we line up poolside in our togs. Then some guy from the QAS uses callipers to pinch the fat on our stomachs, the top of our thighs, our calves and those awful bits on the back of your upper arms. Once it’s done, you have to stand there while your results are entered into the computer and then spat back out at us as a single, scary digit: your skinfold measure.
It doesn’t matter that the test is unreliable, that accuracy relies on the same person making consistent measurements at fixed spots on your body with a fixed amount of pressure each time, every time – not measurements made several weeks apart, possibly by different people. And it doesn’t matter that the test ignores each individual’s unique body fat distribution, or that it only measures one type of fat (subcutaneous adipose tissue, or fat immediately under the skin). No, none of this matters. Nor does your embarrassment, your anxiety or even the fact that it is creepy it’s so often a man doing the testing. What matters is whether your skinfolds have gone up or down.
I am always big around the middle. My skinfolds on my stomach constantly let me down. This means my overall results are never low. I am not a lean swimmer. For me to get a skinfold result under 70 is pretty difficult, whereas most people, especially the freestylers, are down around 50 to 60. So I hate skinfolds day.
We try every trick in the book. We starve and dehydrate ourselves, which leaves us listless for the rest of the day’s training. We do anything to get that dreaded number lower. ‘What were you today?’ we ask. ‘Did you go down?’ We stand on the side of the pool, everyone comparing their results. I train with Libby Lenton: she’s a sprinter, so she always has low skinfolds. She is always in that happy 50–60 band, while I wobble up around 70.
So many questions are asked of us when we don’t get a result the coaches are happy with. ‘Why are you not lower?’ ‘Why haven’t your skinfolds dropped today?’ ‘What are you doing?’ ‘What are you eating?’ We have to justify and explain.
A bad skinfolds result leaves me devastated for the whole day.
And all this without any proper nutritional advice. Mum makes sure my diet is ‘healthy’ by keeping the fridge stocked with fruit and vegies. There’s always fresh ham and salad sandwiches for lunch. Lots of carbs. Steak and salad. Pasta. It’s pretty balanced, pretty lean, but Mum is no dietician. She’s no sports nutritionist. So why is my only healthy eating advice coming from her?
From everyone else – swim c
oaches, gym coaches, physios and the rest – the message is clear: starve, starve, starve. Not that they explicitly say this. They just say you need to get your skinfolds down somehow, and let you draw your own conclusions: swimming six hours a day is not doing the trick. Oh, and they say you’re only allowed half a protein bar, because ‘There’re too many calories in a full one.’ ‘What else did you say you ate today?’ ‘Have you thought about meal-replacement shakes?’
Any advice we receive from the dieticians at the QAS is generic, the same info doled out regardless of whether you’re male or female, a sprinter or a distance swimmer. It’s one-size-fits-all, though there are no two sizes the same here.
One evening I am walking down the main street of Cairns with my good friend Jessica Abbott. We are at a training camp – or supposed to be – but Jess and I have snuck out for a contraband ice-cream. Here we are, walking through downtown Cairns, gobbling down our Bubble O’Bills, when Jess spies her coach, Alan Thomson. Without a word, she shoves her ice-cream into my chest – just rams it there, smearing ice-cream down my t-shirt. Thommo is Jess’s coach, she is his athlete, so he controls what she puts in her mouth.
They’re mine! Of course both ice-creams are mine! This is what my grin says as Thommo wanders past.
Jess and I laugh about it now, but she wasn’t laughing at the time. A girl could get in serious trouble for eating an ice-cream.
Some girls I know get in trouble for eating more than 50 grams of carbohydrates a day. That’s a small packet of sultanas. It’s insane, this world, this weird mindset where we have to hide what we eat.
I am forever trying to diet. I am swimming more but trying to eat less.
I am a healthy teenage girl but I’m convinced I am fat.
But most of all? I am hungry.
The whole thing is sick.
13
Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!
We’re off to Canada. The 2005 World Aquatics Championships are in Montreal, so we are headed for the land of moose, Mounties and maple syrup (though, of course, there will be no maple syrup for us).
On the flight over, I have been reading my Buddhism book again, and this stuff is making sense. It’s hitting the spot. After my ‘apocalypse at the Acropolis’ last year (as I’ve come to think of the Athens Olympics), I am determined that things will get better. So I make a conscious decision to enjoy every moment of our meet in Montreal, to soak it all in, to lap it up. And not just the good bits, either: I will savour both the highs and the lows, this trip. I’ll take the rough with the smooth.
I have even decided to take some photos. This is something I stopped doing way back when the novelty of international competition wore off, when I couldn’t focus on anything that existed outside my lane in the pool, regardless of which country I was in. But now all that is going to change. Now I will take everything in. And where better to get snap-happy – where better to make time to stop and take in the view – than in a place with some of the most spectacular scenery in the world? When I get off the plane at Aéroport International Montréal – Pierre Elliott Trudeau, I am armed with a shiny new camera to go with my shiny new attitude.
And my attitude works.
Nothing worries me this trip, nothing at all. Not our uniforms (which are actual ski pants with thick woollen lining, because someone forgot to tell the Aussie designers that it’s summer here in the northern hemisphere). Not the occasional tantrum from my roommate, freestyle-queen Libby Lenton. (Everyone on the team knows Lib can throw a tantrum like it’s nobody’s business, but on this trip there’s hardly any of that. We’re too busy having fun. We are having a blast. In Montreal, Lib’s such a good person to have around.) Not even the comments to the media from my longtime rival, Brooke Hanson, that she’s in the best condition of her life going into this meet. ‘I had my skinfolds done and they’re the lowest they’ve ever been,’ Brooke tells the Age. Skinfolds, shmimfolds, I think.
In fact, not even the icy atmosphere in the marshalling area bothers me here. Normally at a big meet like this, the marshalling area is full of silence, fear and quiet intimidation. That, and clear-skinned Americans in their hoodies and headphones, doing their best to look fearsome. But not today. I have cruised through the heats and the semis of the 100-metre event. And so today, the day of the 100-metre final, the marshalling area is full of my noise as I bounce and stretch and jog and talk.
Oh boy, do I talk. Where I would normally curl up with my headphones and pretend to be like everyone else, today I am wholly and unapologetically myself. I laugh and tease. I trash-talk Tara Kirk from the USA, who is one of my closest rivals and one of my closest friends on the international scene. I muck around with Jessica Hardy, another American and a girl with a really good sense of humour. Jess broke my 100-metre world record in the semis last night, so I tell her I am here to nick it back. She laughs. ‘Bring it on,’ she says. She knows I’m not seriously trying to unsettle her. That I’m incapable of ever psyching anyone out. That I’m just being myself, and that means being silly and chatty and friendly and dumb. Maybe it’s just the woollen ski pants, but today the marshalling area is feeling decidedly thawed.
Then suddenly it’s time to de-robe for our race. I snap my goggles on my face and tug my cap on over them. I always have my goggles super-tight (so tight that I have a bone growth on my eye socket from the pressure), but today I loosen them a fraction. They’re loose; I’m loose. I’m ready to have some fun.
I go to the edge of the pool, kneel and splash water on myself. I don’t like to be dry when I go into a race. The water feels cold. It is a shock when it hits my face, even though I know it can’t be (FINA mandates it must be between 25 to 28 degrees). In a few moments when the race starts, I won’t feel it at all.
I run through my mantra as I splash myself. Slosh! This is my job, I know how to do this. Splash! This is my office. It’s 50 metres long, 2 metres wide and filled with water. When I rock up to work, I know what to do. Splish! This is my job, I know how to do this.
I walk back to my seat feeling calm, confident and in control. No-one is asking me to speak Japanese or perform on trapeze. This is my job. I do this every day.
This is what I do. I can do this. I stand behind the blocks, repeating it again and again.
For the first seven years of my career, I only ever thought about the end result. I focused on the time I wanted to get or a record I wanted to beat. Later, it was the medal I had to win, a bill that had to be paid. But Stephan changed all this. Now I think about the process instead. I don’t fixate on the wall, but on how I’m going to get there.
The whistle blows and we’re ready to start. Stephan’s voice is in my ear: ‘Let’s control the start. We can’t control the last 25 metres, because we’re not there yet. Let’s control the start and get the best one we can.’ This is my office. Let’s control the start. I am shaking and bouncing and blowing out air.
The second whistle blows. I step onto the blocks. I always do a two-footed start. Everyone else does a track start, one foot forward, one foot back. But I stick with my slower two-footed version because it’s all that I know. This is my office. This is how we do things here.
Then it’s whistle number three and away we go!
I break the water and head straight into streamline. Hands on top. Think slick, think slick. I am streamlined. The water gushes past. I press my hands down and slide into my pull-out, breaking the water smoothly at the 10-metre mark. I must control the first 25 metres. For me, this means getting into a 42-stroke rate, or 42 strokes per minute. I know when I am there. In training, we wear clickers inside our caps that beep when we take a stroke, like a metronome or a ticking bomb. So I know what a 42-stroke rate sounds like and what it feels like. If you go out too fast, you just rip the water; you don’t hold a thing, you rip it to shreds. My body is so finely tuned, so in synch with the beat, that if I’m even one stroke too fast I can tell: I can feel it. I have that much connection to my stroke and to the water. I don’t need a clicker in my ear
.
But today I am fine. In fact, I’m bang on. I am feeling the water, holding it. I am smooth and sleek – and quicksilver fast. After three or four long strokes we’re 25 metres in. Now is the time I begin to build. I shift up a gear: 42 to 43. I am slippery smooth, almost marine.
It takes 18 cool strokes to get to the 50-metre mark. I don’t count them but I’d know if I took too many. I hit the wall fast and in total control. I am one of the best turners in the world by this point in my career. I have worked so hard on this, turned so many times, I can twist and flip almost easier than I can swim straight. Hands to feet, hands to feet. Get on, get off, get on, get off. Flick, swish.
Then it’s straight back into streamline before I pull out again. Breathe, stroke, rise, fall. My first two strokes off the wall are so sleek, so smooth, I almost want to stay in them forever. But then I’m building, building, building again. Stephan always says to swim like a Ferrari. Don’t crunch through the gears: instead, build, build, build.
I burst into the final 25 metres. I am starting to burn. My lungs are on fire, my forearms are in agony. I can’t move my fingers; lactic acid has them now. My legs feel as though they’re not moving at all.
I am burning alive, but I’m steaming home. Build, build, build. Never rip. Never break. I am burning and rasping, but still I don’t rip the water. I just build, and build again, and then I build some more. I am smooth and flat and I’m coming home fast. All you’ve got to do is be first on the wall. All you’ve got to do is be first on the wall.
I am burning and steaming. I am dying out here. All you’ve got to do is be first on the wall. All you’ve got to do is be—