“I know I can,” I finally said. “Definitely.”
And so it was decided, and when it came time for my semifinal heat in the 200-meter freestyle I went out and swam a picture-perfect race. Really, it was the most technically sound, most tactically sound race of my career. I managed to touch the wall with a time that put me in exactly eighth place going into the finals, meaning I found a way to put in the least amount of effort, to conserve the most amount of energy, in order to give myself a fighting chance in the 100-meter backstroke and to keep me in the pool for the 200-meter freestyle finals. I came out of that semifinal swim thinking I couldn’t have written the script any better.
Now, the 200-meter backstroke was my race. Going into these Olympic Games, I’d told myself it was my race. But that’s not what I told others. The line I’d always use when people asked me how I expected to do in London was that I hoped to swim well. Most of the time, that’s where I’d leave it—not because I was trying to soft-pedal my hopes and dreams, or because I was worried about jinxing my chances, but because just making it to these Olympic Games was a blessing, a dream come true in itself. I truly believed that. However, I also believed in my ability, so I’d tell myself I expected to make it to the finals. Or maybe, if I was feeling it, that I hoped to earn a medal. But the truth was—deep down, in the secret corners of my heart of hearts—I was counting on the 200-meter back. I’d been working my whole life for the chance to swim for a gold medal, and this was my best chance. But then, alongside the 200-meter back, there was also the 100-meter back, and now it appeared within reach. In the 200-meter freestyle, I just wanted to make it to the finals. Yeah, this was the Olympics, but it was just another swim meet, and I needed to remind myself to continue doing the things that worked best for me. My US teammate Allison Schmitt was one of the best in the world at that distance, and the international field was incredible, so I knew I had my work cut out for me. I’d placed second to Schmitty at the Olympic trials in Omaha, but she was a full body length ahead of me. The rest of the field, at the top, was also unbelievable. But at the same time, I saw myself in the pool with all these great swimmers. I did. You have to let yourself think that way, right? You have to give yourself permission to be among the very best; otherwise, you’ll always be on the outside looking in.
In other words, “Throw that dang signed teddy bear into the crowd with pride!”
Could I have gone at it any harder and shaved a second off my semifinal time for my 200-meter freestyle? Could I have given myself more of a cushion, maybe put myself in one of the middle lanes for the finals, in third or fourth position? Absolutely, but it would have cost me. Just what it would have cost me was hard to say. All week long, in my preliminary swims, the idea was to use my legs a little less, to kick a little less, to come off the walls with a little less power. A little here . . . a little there . . . that’s how you conserve energy with all these back-to-back swims. I could have gone for it, but I would have felt it in my legs. I would have felt it in my recovery. And mostly, I would have felt it in terms of mental exhaustion.
Psychologically, you give yourself an edge when you hold something back and get the same result. Even when you move about the Olympic Village a little more slowly than usual, when you’re trying to conserve your energy, you get back a little something. You tell yourself you’re ahead of the game. And you are. Just by thinking in this way, you are. You’re putting all this positive energy into your body, building these great reserves of mighty mojo, so that when it’s time for you to fly you can do just that . . . you can fly. It might sound like a lot of nonsense, like an extra effort to gain a fraction of a second shouldn’t really change the equation in a meaningful way, but the mind-body connection is a powerful muscle. It all ties in. It really does.
I climbed out of the pool feeling strong and relieved. Feeling great about my semifinal swim in the 200 free. Feeling superconfident about the 100 back final, too. The fourteen minutes between races couldn’t pass quickly enough, as far as I was concerned. There wasn’t time for me to do a full warm-down so I jumped into the dive pool and did a quick three hundred meters, then hurried to the ready room to check in for the 100-meter backstroke final. Of course, Team USA had to make an appeal to officials at FINA, the international governing body of swimming, in order for this to happen, but we were good to go.
Happily, mercifully, the race couldn’t have gone any better—I touched the wall at 58.33, a hair ahead of Emily Seebohm of Australia and Aya Terakawa of Japan. And in just that moment, it was looking like that eighth-place swim in the semifinals of the 200-meter freestyle had made all the difference in the world.
So far, so good, right? I’d won my first Olympic gold medal! But this isn’t a story about the 100-meter backstroke. It’s not a story about what it means to make it to the tippy-top of your sport. And it’s not a story about finding that sweet spot between holding something back and putting it all out there, either. No, it’s about all the stuff that can happen and not happen in that fraction of a second I wrote about in that cryptic opening paragraph. Remember? It’s about the craziness that can find you in a moment, after you’ve spent a lifetime preparing for that moment. It’s about the space between winning and losing—between working, working, working on the things you can control, and hoping, hoping, hoping that the things you can’t control end up going as well as they possibly can. And it’s about the little deals you make with yourself at different points in a long meet, and the lesson you take from it all in the end.
It worked out that the schedule leaned in my favor the day after the 100-meter backstroke final, the third day of competition for us swimmers. I had the morning off (my first session off since the start of the Olympics!), so I took the time to clear my head and switch my focus from merely surviving in that 200-meter freestyle semi to finding a way to thrive in the final.
I also took some time to geek out over Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift tweeting congratulations on gold the night before!
It helped that I had that extra time, because it’s not so easy to change your approach in what’s essentially the same race. Think how the same shift might apply in your own life. Like, say, you’re applying to your dream college, and you’re worried you won’t even get in, but then once you’ve been accepted and you actually enroll you start thinking if you work hard enough you can become valedictorian. It’s a big leap, right? That’s kind of what was going on for me. I had a lot of confidence going into the final, because I’d been able to make it into the finals even though I’d been holding back, but now I needed a whole new mind-set. The other finalists were all swimming their own races, of course. They had their own busy race-week schedules to balance. It’s possible Allison Schmitt had left a little something in the tank in the semifinals, that’s how dominant she was in this event, but the rest of the girls had probably been swimming all-out. This was the Olympics, after all. Nobody’s coasting or conserving their way through a semifinal round unless it’s absolutely necessary, as it had been for me.
But now I was fresh and confident and thinking how much better off I’d have been if I was swimming in one of the center lanes instead of at the edges in the eighth lane. That half second’s worth of extra effort I might have spent in my semifinal win might have put me in a better spot. But then, it might have cost me in the 100-meter back, so I was excited to be in the outside lane. As long as I was in the finals.
When there’s a semifinal or final, lane four goes to the swimmer with the fastest time; lane five goes to the swimmer with the second-fastest qualifying time; the third-fastest qualifying time is assigned to lane three; and so on to the outside lanes, where the slowest qualifying time of the heat occupies lane eight. That gives those fastest qualifiers from the morning who are swimming in the middle of the pool an edge. Why? They get to see what the field is looking like on either side of them, and adjust their races accordingly. Yeah, everyone has to swim the same distance, but when you’re in the midd
le you have a kind of home field advantage. When you’re in the outside lane, it’s like you’re off in Siberia. You can still see what’s going on, a little bit, but it’s not the same as being sandwiched in among the three or four favorites, where you’re right there in the thick of it, instead of being on the outside, pretty much on your own.
Those outside lanes can be such a disadvantage, there’s even a phrase for those rare times when someone in lane one or lane eight touches the wall first and actually manages to win. They call it an “outside smoker,” and it’s an incredible thing to see. All of a sudden, you see this body whoosh by, four lanes over, and you think, Wait, what is she doing? She’s not supposed to be here! But, of course, she is. She’d found a way to make it into that pool for that finals heat, and she’s swimming for the same prize as those swimmers in the middle lanes.
So you never know, right? And I think it helped me, being all the way on the outside like that. It left me to swim my race, a race nobody thought I’d win. (Okay, maybe my mom thought I’d win, but she always thinks I can win.) It left me to focus and find my rhythm and not worry where I was in the field. I touched the wall at 1:55.82, a best time for me, by a big margin. I was thrilled, because in just that moment this was a great victory. This was me, putting everything into my swim, and getting everything out of it. I saw the time flash on the wall and right away I thought of what my father would always ask me after a meet. He’d say, “Did you do your best, Missy?” He never really cared if I won, only that I did my best. That was the barometer for him. And here I knew I could look him in the eyes and give him that answer. I could look at myself in the mirror and tell myself the same.
Over in the middle lanes, I could see Allison Schmitt celebrating her gold medal—an Olympic record, it turned out. I was so happy for her—I’ve never met anyone more deserving. Really, really. And then I could see Camille Muffat of France and Bronte Barratt of Australia celebrating their second- and third-place finishes, and I was so happy for them, too. Really, really. But then I looked up at the scoreboard and saw Bronte’s time: 1:55.81. And in just that moment I went from feeling good about myself and being happy for these other swimmers to thinking I’d let a medal slip through my fingers. To thinking my best could have maybe been just a little bit better. One one-hundredth of a second! That’s like no time at all—and yet it was all the time in the world, in the 200-meter freestyle. Because at these London games, at least, it meant the difference between fourth place and another Olympic medal.
What had happened to change my thinking? Perspective, I guess. Context. A bunch of What if? scenarios that had nothing to do with my reality. There I was, over the moon with my performance, and then—just like that!—I was despairing. Stuck thinking what might have been instead of what was. It’s funny the way the same time, the same result, can mean two different things, depending on how you look at it, and here I came to realize I was looking at it in the wrong way. Falling one-hundredth of a second short of a bronze medal shouldn’t take away the pride I’d felt just a couple of moments earlier. If anything, it should have made me even happier, to know I was that close to a medal.
Did I even have that extra fraction of a second within me to spend on this race? I don’t think so. That’s not how I swim. In a final, I put every ounce of energy and effort into every stroke, every kick, every turn. (Those are my “relentless” marching orders, remember?) I leave my heart and soul in the pool with every race. And here that effort paid off in a personal best that shattered my previous mark.
Eventually, I was able to look on this race as a great victory instead of as a shattering blow. It took time—for a couple of weeks, it went from shattering blow to a small pinprick of a disappointment, before I got really comfortable with the silver lining aspects of it. A change of perspective doesn’t just happen overnight. Another medal would have been nice. You can always add to your collection! But I came to think the lesson that found me on the back of this swim was even more valuable than the bronze medal would have been. Because, hey, if someone can beat me by a hundredth of a second in an Olympic final, then on some other day, under some other set of circumstances, I can come back and beat her by the same small margin.
So now it fell to me to get back to work and find a way to take back that small sliver of time and make it my own.
SIX
HAVE A LITTLE FAITH
It’s impossible to overstate the power and reach of the Olympics. It doesn’t matter how much you prepare for it, you can’t know how a successful showing on the world stage can turn your life inside out and upside down.
Things got a little wild after London, and not always good wild. We came home to a lot of madness and weirdness and wonderfulness. (Is that even a word, wonderfulness? I think it should be!) The madness and weirdness usually went hand in hand, like the time Mom caught someone going through our garbage. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last, but that day was different. On that day, a woman came to our door at about eight o’clock in the morning with an old swim bag I’d thrown out the night before, asking if I could sign it.
A little out there, but not such a big deal, in a vacuum. Trouble was, there was no such vacuum. This was our new reality, at least for the first while.
The wonderfulness came about in all kinds of sweet, unexpected ways. There was the usual press of media interviews and appearances (so exhausting!), a lot of local parades (so amazing!), the goose-bumps thrill of walking into one of my favorite local restaurants and having everybody stand and applaud (so embarrassing!), the endless stream of little girls who’d drive by our house hoping to catch a glimpse of me and settling instead for a quickie photo of themselves standing on my front lawn (so humbling!). Oh, and the bags and bags of letters and pictures and trinkets that kept arriving on our doorstep, some of them addressed only to “Missy, USA.” The postman actually told us that the only other “person” who received so much mail, addressed to just a first name, was Santa.
To this day, I’m amazed that all that stuff got to me—an affirming reminder of how our great big world can be made smaller and more accessible when we move about as our very best selves.
There were welcome-home events and parties and invitations to participate in fashion shoots and charity auctions and all kinds of exciting opportunities. One highlight: I had teeny-tiny speaking parts in Pretty Little Liars, one of my favorite shows, and The Internship, with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, two of my favorite actors—so much fun! Another highlight: I was a guest on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and when I decided to take my dad along with me he was mostly excited about seeing Jay’s fabulous car collection. So typical! It was all so, so special and awe-inspiring, to be on the receiving end of such abundant warmth and good cheer, and I tried to take everything in stride and return it all in kind, but I think my mom was a little terrified by the sudden surge of attention.
MOM: I’m sorry, but I was really worried about Missy’s safety. She was always pretty grounded, always able to take care of herself, but things were different now. I started coaching her on how to be safe, what kinds of precautions to take, what to watch out for. She was such a trusting soul, I was afraid she’d get caught off guard. I’m sure most of the attention came from a good place, people just wanted to show their appreciation or admiration, and we were all so grateful for that. But you have to be careful. That’s just the world we live in these days. Missy was driving by that point, so I wanted to be sure the car doors were locked before she pulled out of the garage, that type of thing. I even had a security person come to the house and check everything out, and one of the things I asked about was the doggy door we had leading out to the back for Ruger. He was a big, big dog, and this was a large opening, and still I worried that someone could crawl in, so we found a way to lock it. I was a little obsessive about it, and I’m afraid I was scaring the daylights out of poor Missy, but I didn’t care. Nothing was more important than her safety, but she didn’t
like to think about any of that. What really had her worried was the way her friends were treating her at school and around town. Her good friends were terrific, very supportive, but of course there were other kids who maybe wanted to take a picture of her, or maybe treat her a little differently because they’d watched her on television. All of a sudden, they started paying attention to her. It’s hard to suggest it was a burden, being on the receiving end of all that attention, because it was such a blessing. Be careful what you wish for, right? But I don’t think we were prepared for the enormity of the Olympics, of Missy having gone to the Olympics and winning all those gold medals. It changed absolutely everything about our lives, and on balance those changes have been to the good. But early on, while we were still getting used to it, while it was at its most intense, it became a bit stressful, I think, all of that attention. It was nonstop. If she wanted to go to a football game at her own high school, we had to call ahead and let school officials know, so they could call in extra security. It was impossible for her just to get back to her routines.
I was going into my senior year in high school, and Mom’s right—I wanted it to be as normal as possible. I wanted to be like every other girl in my class, just another “sister” in the sisterhood. My classmates and I had been through so much, and now here we were, approaching the finish line of this special time in our lives, and I wanted to see it through. One of the ways I chose to do this was to keep swimming for Regis. It seemed like such a given to me, a no-brainer, especially after talking it over with my teammates and coaches, but it set off a small storm of controversy. I would practice with the team as much as possible, and go to meets as much as possible, and basically just be a part of things as much as possible, which was basically what I’d been doing the previous three years, heading into the Olympics. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
Relentless Spirit Page 16
