Sister Secrets, page 4
11.30am: Hop on the massage table for a ‘flush’.
11.50am: Get changed and catch the bus back to our accommodation.
12.30pm: Have lunch at the dining hall. Again, I usually opt for something plain. A stir-fry with rice, or spaghetti. Something with protein, carbs and steamed veggies if I can get them.
1pm: Return to my room, unpack my swimming bag, get back into my pyjamas and climb into bed for a nap.
1–3pm: Sleep or rest. If I can, I like to sleep for at least an hour, but if I’m too nervous to sleep, then I’ll either read a book or watch a light, funny TV show. Friends, Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Downton Abbey are my go-tos.
3.30pm: Pack my bag and walk to the dining hall to get some food before heading to the pool. Again, something very simple, like plain pasta with a bit of salt, bread with butter and honey or some yoghurt and cereal. And I usually have another small coffee.
4pm: Catch the bus to the pool.
4.30-7.30pm: Repeat the morning’s steps from warm-up exercises through to post-race massage. The top eight swimmers in the semifinal go through to the final the next night.
7.50pm: Pack up my bag and catch the bus back to the dining hall.
8.30pm: Force down as much dinner as possible. Again, something very simple, but I treat myself with a piece of pizza as well.
9.15pm: Arrive back at the apartment, unpack my swimming gear, sit and chat to my roommates or watch a TV show for a while to wind down.
10.15pm: Climb back into bed and get ready to do it all again tomorrow.
BRONTE
I clearly remember the moment my shoulder decided it didn’t like swimming anymore. It was 19 January 2016. Everything was going so well; I’d had my breakthrough year in 2015 and was straight back into training with my eye on the Olympics in August 2016.
In November 2015 my old hip injury, which I’d carried for years, had flared again, requiring scans and a cortisone injection and all the usual injury procedures that I’ve unfortunately come to know well. But I had physio exercises and was making progress and, while my hip was sore, it wasn’t preventing me from training.
Then came the shoulder.
Within the course of one lap my shoulder went from a normal, tight sort of pain (not uncommon to feel when under training load) to a damaging pain. The kind of pain that you don’t just ignore. I tried for a few laps to pretend it wasn’t happening, but was scared of doing more damage. And that’s where my injury journey started.
RACE AGAINST TIME
The next few months were full of injections, scans and physio appointments. And as Olympic Trials ticked closer, it was a race against the clock. My shoulder and neck were the problem, but it was hard to work out what exactly had gone wrong. We didn’t have time for too much trial and error. By the time Olympic Trials rolled around in April I was down to about 70 per cent of my normal training load.
Trials is without a doubt the most stressful swimming competition. If you get sick, if you do one thing wrong, if your taper is off? That’s it. Four years until your next chance. If your hand doesn’t touch the wall first or second, if your time isn’t top eight in the world, you’re not going to the Olympics.
Somehow I got through it. I had a full year’s worth of work under my belt from 2015 and despite fierce competition I was able to secure the individual spot for the 100m and 50m freestyle. I even managed my second-fastest time ever in the 100m. Not bad, considering the lead-up.
My first qualification for the Olympic team four years earlier had been pure excitement. Now it was pure relief. The worst bit was over – or so I thought.
PLAYING IT SAFE
Back in training, even with all my new physio exercises (yes they are boring and yes you have to do them), my shoulder wasn’t improving. I started getting sick a lot. Whether it’s the stress of dealing with injury or my body fighting pain constantly, I find I often get sick when my injuries get worse.
It was the most helpless feeling. The Olympics were getting closer every day and I was down to only 50 or 60 per cent of my normal workload. For someone whose confidence is based on the work they’ve accumulated, not working hard is its own special terror.
I didn’t want to admit that anything was wrong. I didn’t tell anyone I was injured. My coach and physios knew and that was about it. I didn’t ask for help or seek out specialists. All I wanted was to do the exercises I was given and get back in the pool. Looking for radical change with only three months until the Olympics seemed way too hard. Admitting weakness seemed impossible. The more uncertainty my injury injected into my life, the safer I played it. I asked no questions, afraid of what the answers might have been.
JUDGEMENT DAY
Standing behind the blocks for the 100m freestyle final in Rio, I knew I hadn’t done enough work to be there. But I only had one option. Go out hard the first 50m and try to hold on.
I remember being announced in lane two. Walking out into the bright light and smell of popcorn. Australian flags waving throughout the stadium. The water, quiet and glassy. The crowd rumbling and flashing.
And then they blow the whistle and everything goes still. Eight athletes mount the blocks. In one minute’s time their dreams will be realised or shattered.
I don’t remember a lot of the race. It’s hard to remember something that happens so quickly, especially when your blood is pounding with adrenaline. I couldn’t see much out in lane two but I could feel Ranomi Kromowidjojo in the lane next to me catching up inch by inch as we neared the finish. I stopped breathing with 15m to go and put my head down, willing my burning arms and legs to give just a little more as I pushed the last few metres to the wall.
I went half a second over my best time and finished fourth by 0.05 of a second. Five one hundredths of a second is half a blink of a human eye. It’s not a lot to hang four years of work on. But it was the difference between a podium finish and fourth place.
If I hadn’t been injured, if I was mentally prepared for injury, or if I knew all the things then that I know now, would it have made a difference to those five one hundredths? Or would I be on the other side of them? A medal round my neck, maybe even an Australian anthem echoing through the stadium.
That’s a lot of great unknowable ‘ifs’ – the kind you could drive yourself crazy with.
OWN THE PROCESS
Despite the result, I was proud of the performance. Half a second from my best time with the extremely limited training I’d done was better than I’d expected. And on race day there was no other option for me, nothing I could have done differently to ensure success.
But hindsight shows all weaknesses. In the lead-up I should have asked for help. I should have gone and seen the specialists I’ve subsequently seen. In my frenzy to keep everything safe and contained, I closed myself off to all other possibilities. I did whatever I was told to do, wilfully blind to how it made me feel. Some of the exercises I was doing pre-Olympics actually made my shoulder worse, made it sorer. But I ignored the pain because the exercises were the plan and I wanted the plan to work.
What I’ve since learned is that it’s all down to me. Coaches, physios, sports doctors and surgeons all have an input. But at the end of the day I wear the result, so I should own the process. I should ask the questions, seek more answers and use experts’ opinions to help decide my own course of action, rather than blindly following whatever is suggested. Or staying locked on a plan of action when it isn’t working anymore.
In hindsight I can see how what I thought was a tough, winning mindset, was actually setting me up to fail.
FACING VULNERABILITY
Uncertainty is one of the hardest things to deal with. When everything was falling apart I thought it was brave to tough it out. What I’ve since realised is that it’s a lot braver to admit vulnerability. Vulnerability and weakness are not the same, but I treated them alike: as things to be avoided and ignored at all costs.
I was so afraid that if I let doubt creep in, it would mean I couldn’t succeed. After all, we are told again and again that success depends on confidence. So I squashed all my doubts, ignored the things they were telling me and just ‘got on with it’. I thought doubt always led to failure. What it has actually led me to is creativity, progression and success.
LESSONS LEARNED
Just before the 2018 Commonwealth Games I was not doing very well. Injured and sore, training slowly, unable to do the things I used to, I doubted I would make the team, let alone do well if I did make it.
Looking past the Commonwealth Games, there stretched another two years of this. Another two years of being in seven-out-of-ten pain every day. My neck was sore, my back was sore, my hip and shoulder were sore. It got to a point where I couldn’t study because being on a computer hurt my neck too much. I couldn’t even go out for dinner with my friends because my back got too sore sitting down for that long. I couldn’t see how I could continue like this for two more years until the 2020 Olympics.
That doubt made me change what I was doing. I promised myself that no matter what happened at the Commonwealth Games I would take three months off to recover afterwards. I could do four more months like I was. The promise of a break made the future bearable.
In the final of the Commonwealth Games 100m freestyle I achieved my fastest time ever – faster than when I’d won the World Championships in 2015, faster than all but three other people in the world had ever gone. I didn’t get that win by not doubting or by ignoring my doubt. I got the win by paying attention to what it was telling me. Paying attention, but not giving it power. I still put in the work every day to win that race. That race was the culmination of two years of working hard through doubt and pain, not working against them.
Before the 2016 Olympics I squashed my doubts and pretended they didn’t exist, but they hung in the back of my mind anyway. Ignoring them gave them more power.
Despite all the struggle injury has brought to my career, I’m grateful for the insight it’s brought to my life. Smooth sailing feels good but it doesn’t teach you much. I’ve learned more about creativity, persistence, empathy and honesty in the last five years than I learned in the previous twenty.
CATE
For every up there is a down; for every win there is a loss. How you deal with the inevitable setbacks life throws at you ultimately determines whether or not you will succeed. It’s one of life’s great ironies that the only place where success is possible, is also the only place where failure is possible.
We don’t like talking about failure. It makes us uncomfortable. The notion of failure is wrapped up in isolation and shame. As a society, we seem to think that if you don’t win, you’re not good enough. You didn’t try hard enough. If all the time and effort you put into a project (in my case a swimming race) doesn’t produce the desired outcome (a win) then all of that time and effort has been wasted; it was for nothing.
HEARTBREAK
I changed the way I viewed failure after an experience at the 2016 Rio Olympics. I was the red-hot favourite heading into the 100m freestyle final – I had broken the world record just two months before; I had broken the Olympic record in the heats, and then again in the semifinal – in short, I was the favourite. The sure bet. The easy gold medal.
But I didn’t win. I came sixth.
Behind the blocks, instead of being excited to race, confident in the training I had done and my ability to perform, I was terrified of losing. I went into that race, not trying to win; but trying not to lose.
And what happened?
I lost.
The thing I feared most.
We fear failure, almost more than anything else in our lives, because it carries the possibility of social ostracism. We learn from a very young age that winners are accepted, but losers are not. It’s a primal fear we’ve had since the earliest humans: if you were rejected by your clan, you were cast out into the cold and dark, and faced the reality of becoming a predator’s dinner.
Today we don’t have to worry about bears or tigers – we aren’t going to die if a few people don’t like us – but our brains haven’t evolved as fast as our modern lifestyle. On a biological level, we still view social ostracism as a premature meeting with a hungry tiger.
My issue in 2016 was that instead of viewing my race as an opportunity for success, all I could see was the possibility of failure. I feared it and its perceived consequences so much that I became focused on trying to avoid it at any cost. And yet after the race I was forced to live out everything I had dreaded.
BOUNCING BACK
In being forced to live out my worst fears I learned some valuable lessons. These lessons have allowed me to bounce back, and to become not just a better swimmer, but a better person as well.
Lesson one: Life goes on. Your fears are often worse than reality. I thought that the world would end if I didn’t win. Turns out it didn’t. Immediately after the race, it did feel like my world had come crashing down around my shoulders. Time seemed to slow, colours faded and the stadium went quiet. In reality though, time didn’t stop – it didn’t even pause for a second. It kept on going as if nothing had happened.
In a way, it was quite liberating hitting my rock bottom – the world didn’t end, in fact it kept going with an energy bewilderingly callous towards my personal crisis. I was faced with a choice: I could either fall in a heap and become a casualty of my situation, or I could pick myself up, and choose to be a participant in the rest of life. I still had races left to swim; my job wasn’t done yet. I chose the second option. I decided to do what life was already doing: move on. I still had some wonderful people around me who were there to keep me going.
Lesson two: Surround yourself with good people. People who are going to be there through the good times and the bad. People who know you and love you unconditionally. People who will always have your back, win, lose or draw. Having these people around reduces the fear of social ostracism, which, if you remember, is the biggest reason we fear failure in the first place.
I learned this not when I was on top, but after that 100m freestyle final, when I was on the bottom. I was lucky to already have those people in my life. I am forever grateful to my teammates for being kind to me. I was so thankful to have a wonderful coach and my sister beside me. Their unconditional love and support enabled me to set aside my hurt, and helped diminish the growing anxiety I felt about my future races.
Today, I consciously surround myself with positive, supportive people whom I can call whenever I’m in need – and I make sure I am a person on whom they can call too.
Lesson three: You are stronger than you think you are. One of my favourite quotes is from a Winnie-the-Pooh movie. Christopher Robin, in the process of growing up and leaving the childhood magic of the 100 Acre Wood behind, tells Pooh, ‘You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.’ It reminds me that we are capable of so much more than we think. Unfortunately, we usually only come to this realisation when we’re in a situation we have feared. In the hours after the 100m final I had to reach into myself and find a resolve I didn’t know I had. I never believed I was strong enough to endure failure – and that was why my fear was so intense behind the starting blocks. It turns out, I was. And I carry that knowledge with me today. Now when I face a situation that scares me, I know I am more capable than I feel at the time, and so I push through and challenge myself a little bit more.
Lesson four: Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. I am a creature of comfort. I love stability, familiarity and routines. Therefore, it is very easy for me to get stuck in a comfortable rut. I sometimes forget to push my boundaries. In the lead-in to the Olympics, I made a little bubble to exist in: I controlled what I ate, what I did, where I went, how long I slept for and, apart from challenging myself in training (I pushed myself to my limit during my swim and gym sessions), I lived in this very protected bubble. While I had good intentions, the reality was, by limiting my exposure to new and potentially stressful situations, I was inhibiting my ability to develop skills to cope with stress. Since the Rio Olympics, I have made a conscious effort to find ways to get out of my comfort zone – whether it’s an extreme example like skydiving or something more benign like trying a new restaurant instead of revisiting an old favourite.
Lesson five: Take full responsibility. If you are going to own your success (which, let’s face it, everyone wants to do) then you have to be willing to own your failures. Even the parts that aren’t your fault. Don’t make excuses, don’t look for people, things or situations to blame. Examine what you did and find a way to change those things.
As an adjunct to this point I would say: surround yourself with people who will also take full responsibility for their role. One of the reasons my coach Simon and I work so well together is that after a bad race, neither of us blames the other. I take full responsibility for the performance, and work on things I can improve; and he takes full responsibility for his role and identifies things he could have done differently in preparing me for a competition. A failure is only useless if you don’t learn anything from it. And the only way we learn is to take responsibility for our actions.
Lesson six: There is usually a silver lining. When things don’t work out as you planned, it’s easy to let the disappointment and heartbreak cloud over the future. My dark cloud was literally lined in silver.
It came in the anchor leg of the 4 x 100m medley relay. When I dove in, Australia was in fifth, and when I touched the wall, we had won a silver medal. In the heat of the moment I held my nerve, I didn’t panic and I executed the race plan that I wish I had been able to two days earlier. Overcoming my heartbreak, overcoming the fear of failing again and being able to execute a near-perfect race under extreme pressure is something I am immensely proud of – in fact it’s one of the proudest moments of my whole career. While my Rio experience didn’t turn out exactly how I had dreamed it would, that silver medal went a long way towards healing my wounds.
11.50am: Get changed and catch the bus back to our accommodation.
12.30pm: Have lunch at the dining hall. Again, I usually opt for something plain. A stir-fry with rice, or spaghetti. Something with protein, carbs and steamed veggies if I can get them.
1pm: Return to my room, unpack my swimming bag, get back into my pyjamas and climb into bed for a nap.
1–3pm: Sleep or rest. If I can, I like to sleep for at least an hour, but if I’m too nervous to sleep, then I’ll either read a book or watch a light, funny TV show. Friends, Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Downton Abbey are my go-tos.
3.30pm: Pack my bag and walk to the dining hall to get some food before heading to the pool. Again, something very simple, like plain pasta with a bit of salt, bread with butter and honey or some yoghurt and cereal. And I usually have another small coffee.
4pm: Catch the bus to the pool.
4.30-7.30pm: Repeat the morning’s steps from warm-up exercises through to post-race massage. The top eight swimmers in the semifinal go through to the final the next night.
7.50pm: Pack up my bag and catch the bus back to the dining hall.
8.30pm: Force down as much dinner as possible. Again, something very simple, but I treat myself with a piece of pizza as well.
9.15pm: Arrive back at the apartment, unpack my swimming gear, sit and chat to my roommates or watch a TV show for a while to wind down.
10.15pm: Climb back into bed and get ready to do it all again tomorrow.
BRONTE
I clearly remember the moment my shoulder decided it didn’t like swimming anymore. It was 19 January 2016. Everything was going so well; I’d had my breakthrough year in 2015 and was straight back into training with my eye on the Olympics in August 2016.
In November 2015 my old hip injury, which I’d carried for years, had flared again, requiring scans and a cortisone injection and all the usual injury procedures that I’ve unfortunately come to know well. But I had physio exercises and was making progress and, while my hip was sore, it wasn’t preventing me from training.
Then came the shoulder.
Within the course of one lap my shoulder went from a normal, tight sort of pain (not uncommon to feel when under training load) to a damaging pain. The kind of pain that you don’t just ignore. I tried for a few laps to pretend it wasn’t happening, but was scared of doing more damage. And that’s where my injury journey started.
RACE AGAINST TIME
The next few months were full of injections, scans and physio appointments. And as Olympic Trials ticked closer, it was a race against the clock. My shoulder and neck were the problem, but it was hard to work out what exactly had gone wrong. We didn’t have time for too much trial and error. By the time Olympic Trials rolled around in April I was down to about 70 per cent of my normal training load.
Trials is without a doubt the most stressful swimming competition. If you get sick, if you do one thing wrong, if your taper is off? That’s it. Four years until your next chance. If your hand doesn’t touch the wall first or second, if your time isn’t top eight in the world, you’re not going to the Olympics.
Somehow I got through it. I had a full year’s worth of work under my belt from 2015 and despite fierce competition I was able to secure the individual spot for the 100m and 50m freestyle. I even managed my second-fastest time ever in the 100m. Not bad, considering the lead-up.
My first qualification for the Olympic team four years earlier had been pure excitement. Now it was pure relief. The worst bit was over – or so I thought.
PLAYING IT SAFE
Back in training, even with all my new physio exercises (yes they are boring and yes you have to do them), my shoulder wasn’t improving. I started getting sick a lot. Whether it’s the stress of dealing with injury or my body fighting pain constantly, I find I often get sick when my injuries get worse.
It was the most helpless feeling. The Olympics were getting closer every day and I was down to only 50 or 60 per cent of my normal workload. For someone whose confidence is based on the work they’ve accumulated, not working hard is its own special terror.
I didn’t want to admit that anything was wrong. I didn’t tell anyone I was injured. My coach and physios knew and that was about it. I didn’t ask for help or seek out specialists. All I wanted was to do the exercises I was given and get back in the pool. Looking for radical change with only three months until the Olympics seemed way too hard. Admitting weakness seemed impossible. The more uncertainty my injury injected into my life, the safer I played it. I asked no questions, afraid of what the answers might have been.
JUDGEMENT DAY
Standing behind the blocks for the 100m freestyle final in Rio, I knew I hadn’t done enough work to be there. But I only had one option. Go out hard the first 50m and try to hold on.
I remember being announced in lane two. Walking out into the bright light and smell of popcorn. Australian flags waving throughout the stadium. The water, quiet and glassy. The crowd rumbling and flashing.
And then they blow the whistle and everything goes still. Eight athletes mount the blocks. In one minute’s time their dreams will be realised or shattered.
I don’t remember a lot of the race. It’s hard to remember something that happens so quickly, especially when your blood is pounding with adrenaline. I couldn’t see much out in lane two but I could feel Ranomi Kromowidjojo in the lane next to me catching up inch by inch as we neared the finish. I stopped breathing with 15m to go and put my head down, willing my burning arms and legs to give just a little more as I pushed the last few metres to the wall.
I went half a second over my best time and finished fourth by 0.05 of a second. Five one hundredths of a second is half a blink of a human eye. It’s not a lot to hang four years of work on. But it was the difference between a podium finish and fourth place.
If I hadn’t been injured, if I was mentally prepared for injury, or if I knew all the things then that I know now, would it have made a difference to those five one hundredths? Or would I be on the other side of them? A medal round my neck, maybe even an Australian anthem echoing through the stadium.
That’s a lot of great unknowable ‘ifs’ – the kind you could drive yourself crazy with.
OWN THE PROCESS
Despite the result, I was proud of the performance. Half a second from my best time with the extremely limited training I’d done was better than I’d expected. And on race day there was no other option for me, nothing I could have done differently to ensure success.
But hindsight shows all weaknesses. In the lead-up I should have asked for help. I should have gone and seen the specialists I’ve subsequently seen. In my frenzy to keep everything safe and contained, I closed myself off to all other possibilities. I did whatever I was told to do, wilfully blind to how it made me feel. Some of the exercises I was doing pre-Olympics actually made my shoulder worse, made it sorer. But I ignored the pain because the exercises were the plan and I wanted the plan to work.
What I’ve since learned is that it’s all down to me. Coaches, physios, sports doctors and surgeons all have an input. But at the end of the day I wear the result, so I should own the process. I should ask the questions, seek more answers and use experts’ opinions to help decide my own course of action, rather than blindly following whatever is suggested. Or staying locked on a plan of action when it isn’t working anymore.
In hindsight I can see how what I thought was a tough, winning mindset, was actually setting me up to fail.
FACING VULNERABILITY
Uncertainty is one of the hardest things to deal with. When everything was falling apart I thought it was brave to tough it out. What I’ve since realised is that it’s a lot braver to admit vulnerability. Vulnerability and weakness are not the same, but I treated them alike: as things to be avoided and ignored at all costs.
I was so afraid that if I let doubt creep in, it would mean I couldn’t succeed. After all, we are told again and again that success depends on confidence. So I squashed all my doubts, ignored the things they were telling me and just ‘got on with it’. I thought doubt always led to failure. What it has actually led me to is creativity, progression and success.
LESSONS LEARNED
Just before the 2018 Commonwealth Games I was not doing very well. Injured and sore, training slowly, unable to do the things I used to, I doubted I would make the team, let alone do well if I did make it.
Looking past the Commonwealth Games, there stretched another two years of this. Another two years of being in seven-out-of-ten pain every day. My neck was sore, my back was sore, my hip and shoulder were sore. It got to a point where I couldn’t study because being on a computer hurt my neck too much. I couldn’t even go out for dinner with my friends because my back got too sore sitting down for that long. I couldn’t see how I could continue like this for two more years until the 2020 Olympics.
That doubt made me change what I was doing. I promised myself that no matter what happened at the Commonwealth Games I would take three months off to recover afterwards. I could do four more months like I was. The promise of a break made the future bearable.
In the final of the Commonwealth Games 100m freestyle I achieved my fastest time ever – faster than when I’d won the World Championships in 2015, faster than all but three other people in the world had ever gone. I didn’t get that win by not doubting or by ignoring my doubt. I got the win by paying attention to what it was telling me. Paying attention, but not giving it power. I still put in the work every day to win that race. That race was the culmination of two years of working hard through doubt and pain, not working against them.
Before the 2016 Olympics I squashed my doubts and pretended they didn’t exist, but they hung in the back of my mind anyway. Ignoring them gave them more power.
Despite all the struggle injury has brought to my career, I’m grateful for the insight it’s brought to my life. Smooth sailing feels good but it doesn’t teach you much. I’ve learned more about creativity, persistence, empathy and honesty in the last five years than I learned in the previous twenty.
CATE
For every up there is a down; for every win there is a loss. How you deal with the inevitable setbacks life throws at you ultimately determines whether or not you will succeed. It’s one of life’s great ironies that the only place where success is possible, is also the only place where failure is possible.
We don’t like talking about failure. It makes us uncomfortable. The notion of failure is wrapped up in isolation and shame. As a society, we seem to think that if you don’t win, you’re not good enough. You didn’t try hard enough. If all the time and effort you put into a project (in my case a swimming race) doesn’t produce the desired outcome (a win) then all of that time and effort has been wasted; it was for nothing.
HEARTBREAK
I changed the way I viewed failure after an experience at the 2016 Rio Olympics. I was the red-hot favourite heading into the 100m freestyle final – I had broken the world record just two months before; I had broken the Olympic record in the heats, and then again in the semifinal – in short, I was the favourite. The sure bet. The easy gold medal.
But I didn’t win. I came sixth.
Behind the blocks, instead of being excited to race, confident in the training I had done and my ability to perform, I was terrified of losing. I went into that race, not trying to win; but trying not to lose.
And what happened?
I lost.
The thing I feared most.
We fear failure, almost more than anything else in our lives, because it carries the possibility of social ostracism. We learn from a very young age that winners are accepted, but losers are not. It’s a primal fear we’ve had since the earliest humans: if you were rejected by your clan, you were cast out into the cold and dark, and faced the reality of becoming a predator’s dinner.
Today we don’t have to worry about bears or tigers – we aren’t going to die if a few people don’t like us – but our brains haven’t evolved as fast as our modern lifestyle. On a biological level, we still view social ostracism as a premature meeting with a hungry tiger.
My issue in 2016 was that instead of viewing my race as an opportunity for success, all I could see was the possibility of failure. I feared it and its perceived consequences so much that I became focused on trying to avoid it at any cost. And yet after the race I was forced to live out everything I had dreaded.
BOUNCING BACK
In being forced to live out my worst fears I learned some valuable lessons. These lessons have allowed me to bounce back, and to become not just a better swimmer, but a better person as well.
Lesson one: Life goes on. Your fears are often worse than reality. I thought that the world would end if I didn’t win. Turns out it didn’t. Immediately after the race, it did feel like my world had come crashing down around my shoulders. Time seemed to slow, colours faded and the stadium went quiet. In reality though, time didn’t stop – it didn’t even pause for a second. It kept on going as if nothing had happened.
In a way, it was quite liberating hitting my rock bottom – the world didn’t end, in fact it kept going with an energy bewilderingly callous towards my personal crisis. I was faced with a choice: I could either fall in a heap and become a casualty of my situation, or I could pick myself up, and choose to be a participant in the rest of life. I still had races left to swim; my job wasn’t done yet. I chose the second option. I decided to do what life was already doing: move on. I still had some wonderful people around me who were there to keep me going.
Lesson two: Surround yourself with good people. People who are going to be there through the good times and the bad. People who know you and love you unconditionally. People who will always have your back, win, lose or draw. Having these people around reduces the fear of social ostracism, which, if you remember, is the biggest reason we fear failure in the first place.
I learned this not when I was on top, but after that 100m freestyle final, when I was on the bottom. I was lucky to already have those people in my life. I am forever grateful to my teammates for being kind to me. I was so thankful to have a wonderful coach and my sister beside me. Their unconditional love and support enabled me to set aside my hurt, and helped diminish the growing anxiety I felt about my future races.
Today, I consciously surround myself with positive, supportive people whom I can call whenever I’m in need – and I make sure I am a person on whom they can call too.
Lesson three: You are stronger than you think you are. One of my favourite quotes is from a Winnie-the-Pooh movie. Christopher Robin, in the process of growing up and leaving the childhood magic of the 100 Acre Wood behind, tells Pooh, ‘You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.’ It reminds me that we are capable of so much more than we think. Unfortunately, we usually only come to this realisation when we’re in a situation we have feared. In the hours after the 100m final I had to reach into myself and find a resolve I didn’t know I had. I never believed I was strong enough to endure failure – and that was why my fear was so intense behind the starting blocks. It turns out, I was. And I carry that knowledge with me today. Now when I face a situation that scares me, I know I am more capable than I feel at the time, and so I push through and challenge myself a little bit more.
Lesson four: Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. I am a creature of comfort. I love stability, familiarity and routines. Therefore, it is very easy for me to get stuck in a comfortable rut. I sometimes forget to push my boundaries. In the lead-in to the Olympics, I made a little bubble to exist in: I controlled what I ate, what I did, where I went, how long I slept for and, apart from challenging myself in training (I pushed myself to my limit during my swim and gym sessions), I lived in this very protected bubble. While I had good intentions, the reality was, by limiting my exposure to new and potentially stressful situations, I was inhibiting my ability to develop skills to cope with stress. Since the Rio Olympics, I have made a conscious effort to find ways to get out of my comfort zone – whether it’s an extreme example like skydiving or something more benign like trying a new restaurant instead of revisiting an old favourite.
Lesson five: Take full responsibility. If you are going to own your success (which, let’s face it, everyone wants to do) then you have to be willing to own your failures. Even the parts that aren’t your fault. Don’t make excuses, don’t look for people, things or situations to blame. Examine what you did and find a way to change those things.
As an adjunct to this point I would say: surround yourself with people who will also take full responsibility for their role. One of the reasons my coach Simon and I work so well together is that after a bad race, neither of us blames the other. I take full responsibility for the performance, and work on things I can improve; and he takes full responsibility for his role and identifies things he could have done differently in preparing me for a competition. A failure is only useless if you don’t learn anything from it. And the only way we learn is to take responsibility for our actions.
Lesson six: There is usually a silver lining. When things don’t work out as you planned, it’s easy to let the disappointment and heartbreak cloud over the future. My dark cloud was literally lined in silver.
It came in the anchor leg of the 4 x 100m medley relay. When I dove in, Australia was in fifth, and when I touched the wall, we had won a silver medal. In the heat of the moment I held my nerve, I didn’t panic and I executed the race plan that I wish I had been able to two days earlier. Overcoming my heartbreak, overcoming the fear of failing again and being able to execute a near-perfect race under extreme pressure is something I am immensely proud of – in fact it’s one of the proudest moments of my whole career. While my Rio experience didn’t turn out exactly how I had dreamed it would, that silver medal went a long way towards healing my wounds.
