Knock Me Down and I’ll Just Grow Back Stronger

Mar 11, 2020 | Coaching, Swim Team, Training

This year got off to a fantastic start with my 40th birthday, which I celebrated by organizing a 40x 25 meter butterfly relay with the youth swim team. Two years ago, I was recruited to the project of helping to build this ragtag collection of swimmers into a legitimate age group team. In 18 months’ time, with a dynamic and talented coaching staff, we were beginning to gain some real traction with the team’s progress. It was incredibly rewarding to see the kids energized by challenge, including this unique format of collaborating to complete 1000 meters of fly.

Luckily, Brad’s baking assistance saved me from pulling an all-nighter to make 164 butterfly cookies!

I worked all week to organize the details of the event, complete with hot cocoa for swimming outside in January! I made posters, silk-screened t-shirts, and butterfly shaped cookies as prizes. That Friday, the sight of 34 kids swimming butterfly in a massive team effort was the best birthday gift I could imagine. They had a blast and I was peppered with questions after, “When can we do that again?!” I was on cloud nine.

Photos by Brad Goodell

It was only two weeks later when everything came crashing down.
My employer had recently hired a new manager, one who was fixated on quick profit. He wanted his staff to share his vision and enthusiasm for extracting as much money as possible from the pockets of our affluent members. I had been honest with him about my discomfort with using aggressive sales pitches.
Coincidentally, I was fired shortly thereafter, with management leaning on the excuse that it was a violation to have my own coaching business concurrent with employment at the health club. This came as a complete shock to me, because I’d been in business for three years already when the club recruited me to work for them, and the prior management team had approved my self employment status before I was hired on. For some reason, the new manager was permitted to sweep in like a dictator and change the rules in the middle of the game. I was caught in the crossfire of a hypocritical and dysfunctional leadership team, and in what was rapidly becoming an Orwellian nightmare, I watched everything I had built my life around dissolve in a matter of minutes. I didn’t just lose a paycheck, I lost my entire community. This club was one of the first places I set foot in when I first moved to Boulder three years ago, and nearly every person I knew was from the gym or the aquatics program.

But the worst blow of all was losing the swim team. Coaching the team was more than just a job, it was my identity and purpose. From the beginning, I had been subsidizing the underfunded team with my own gear, supplies, and “volunteer” work.

The hours I devoted to coaching were two or three times what the club was willing to pay for, but I rationalized the unpaid work was the equivalent of any other type of passion or pastime. It was meaningful to me, and ultimately it was my choice to spend my spare time on whatever got me excited, just as someone else might choose to spend their time on the ski slopes or working in the garden. Plus, the kids were worth it. It was important to be a role model for them, teach them to love swimming, and to help them reach for things they never thought possible. 

Establishing positive team culture was an early priority with this developing team

They were constantly on my mind as I worked on new strategies to motivate, excite and include each one of them, inventing new games and workout sets tailored to all their unique interests and individual challenges.

 Every day was a new chance to be better, and to encourage them to be better too.

….But now suddenly I had disappeared without a trace. They would never know what happened or how much they meant to me, only that I had abruptly abandoned them. It made my heart ache.

I struggled to accept my new ugly reality. Nights of insomnia were followed by whole days that I couldn’t bring myself to leave the house. An empty, hollow grief haunted me like the charred odor of a burnt down home. My mind kept echoing over and over, “I never got to say goodbye.”

 

I had originally planned to return to the Ironman pro circuit in 2020, with my race season carefully built around the swim team schedule. My first race was just six weeks away, and now I had nothing to do with my time but train. This seemed like a no-brainer, but completing my daily workouts proved to be exceptionally difficult. I was making a mess of my training plan and I was ashamed of my total inability to cope with adversity. I commanded myself to stand up and overcome, but my will to persevere had evaporated. After pouring my heart into my work, I had been nonchalantly discarded like a wad of trash, and the message that sent was unavoidable; I was worthless. I missed some workouts, and produced half-hearted efforts, which only served to reinforce the idea that I had no value left to offer. I tried to find solace in a long run the way runners do in the movies… But I’d find myself short of breath, breaking down in tears in the middle of it. I couldn’t outrun my pain.

It seemed like a waste to be paying for a high performance coach while I was barreling down the road to self destruction, but I realize now that Coach Tim was exactly the anchor I needed in a crisis. He was keeping one vital piece of my identity intact, requiring me to stay grounded, to find strength when I was convinced there was none left to give.

With my bittersweet new freedom from schedule obligations, I took a roll of the dice, and booked a flight for the full two weeks of training camp with the QT2 Systems pro squad. The risk in this decision came from the fact that pro camp is not for the faint of heart. There’s no hand-holding, no excuses, and little room for error. The schedule is demanding, and mindset and fortitude are deliberately put to the test. The caliber of the other athletes there can ignite feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. It’s the type of environment that can break you. 
Going in already broken was quite possibly the stupidest thing I could do. 

I arrived in Florida in mid February, hoping I could hold it together, fearful that I wouldn’t, and a curious thing happened. Day after day, the hard training and heavy volume seemed wholly unaffected by my emotional turmoil leading into the camp. 

I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the inevitable meltdown that would come in tandem with some epic failure of a workout, exposing the truth that I’d only ever been hanging on by a thread. But that moment never came. It was a relief to be away from all the painful memories in Boulder, and the squad environment fulfilled my need for community. I worked on recalibrating my mindset with the help of Brene Brown’s Rising Strong. 

photo by Lisa Becharas

I began to thrive within the enforced routine and structure of the group training schedule. It was clear that consistency was the foundation my resilience was built on, and not the other way around as I had been expecting back home. By the time the training camp ended, I felt physically ready to race, mentally focused, stronger and more confident than ever. The transformation was incredible.

And meanwhile, I had also been offered an amazing opportunity to help develop another growing swim team in Boulder. It was a breath of fresh air to hear the leadership team talk excitedly about new ideas and genuine long term investment in the youth swim team. 

Although I’ve got a few new scars on the heart, I’ve never felt more thrilled for the venture of a new beginning. Sometimes beautiful things can rise up from the ashes of something ugly. I have no doubt that this will be one of those times.