Relentless Spirit

by Missy Franklin

  And do you know what? I did okay. Not great, but okay. Good enough to finish third among American swimmers in the 200-meter freestyle. The pain wasn’t any worse than I’d imagined. But it wasn’t any better, either. It was what it was, and it put me in the B final, where my goal was to find a way to post a better time than one of the two American swimmers in the A final, Shannon Vreeland and Katie Ledecky.

  DAD: I must admit, I don’t think I ever felt more proud of my daughter than I did at that meet in Australia. To see the kind of pain she was in, to stay up all night with her and try to comfort her, and then to see this absolute resolve come over her when she decided to swim the next day. It was just incredible, like nothing I’d ever seen, and this goes back to my days playing college football. I’d been around athletes my entire life, but I certainly wasn’t expecting to see this kind of grit, this kind of fortitude. And it’s not that I would have ever doubted that Missy would show such fire in the face of such adversity, just that it had never come up. Until the Pan Pacs, I never had any reason to stop and think what she’d do in this kind of tough spot. It wasn’t an issue. But now here it was, and this little girl was tested in this incredible way. My little girl. Only she wasn’t so little anymore, was she? It was difficult to watch, because her mother and I knew what kind of pain she was in. Probably we were the only ones in that arena feeling that pain with her. But we were also the only ones who knew how deeply important it was to Missy to see this through. However it turned out, she had to see it through. And she did.

  Well, to this day I don’t know how I did it, but in the B final I put up a time of 1:56.04, which managed to hold up against Shannon Vreeland’s time in the A final, so by yet another miracle I qualified for worlds the next year, and it was in that moment that I realized I could accomplish all my goals for this meet. My time in the B final set a Pan Pac meet record, breaking Schmitty’s 2010 time of 1:56.10, but it would be the shortest-held record of my career, because Katie Ledecky swam an incredible 1:55.74 in the A final, just moments later.

  But the record was the last thing on my mind, just then. All I cared about was that I’d qualified for worlds, and that my body was telling me I could swim at a competitive level for the rest of this meet. Make no mistake, it would be the most difficult meet of my life, but there it was, within reach. Whatever pain I would endure for the few minutes I was in the water each race, I could take it. Whatever doubts or worries were in my head, I could chase them away. And I knew in my heart that my parents were at the core of that certainty I now felt. Without them, dropping whatever was going on in their lives to travel all that way just to watch me swim in Australia; staying up all night with me and holding me and easing me through the worst of the pain after my back went out; believing in me wholeheartedly, no matter what. Without them, I wouldn’t be in a position to swim, let alone post any kind of world-class time.

  If somebody had told me two days earlier while I was bawling by the side of the pool that I would be back in the water, qualifying for worlds, I would have laughed at them through my tears. But here I was, doing just that—also through my tears, just to be clear, because I’d never known this kind of pain, mixed with this feeling of accomplishment. It was the strangest mix, I’ll say that, but it left me feeling like I could accomplish just about anything.

  It turned out just about anything was just about everything, as far as that meet was concerned. I ended up swimming all my events, something Teri had her doubts about, but not me. She said, “Missy, doing one event is one thing, but trying to do two events in one night, is that the smartest thing?”

  I knew she wanted what was best (and safest!) for me.

  I said, “It’s not about being smart. It’s about whether I can, and I think I can.”

  And I could. And I did. I qualified in my 100 and 200 back, my 100 and 200 free, and I was even able to swim the relays I wanted to swim. The relays were actually more emotionally draining than my individual swims. Why? Because I felt a responsibility to the other girls on the team. In an individual event, if I came up short, it was on me. It was a personal test. But in a relay, I had all these other girls counting on me. I was swimming for Team USA, so I had to perform at a certain level. Of course, the coaches wouldn’t have let me swim the relays if they didn’t think I was up to it, but knowing this didn’t make it any less stressful.

  I’d already hurt myself; the last thing I wanted to do was hurt my team.

  At the end of this ordeal, I still had to fly home, and I was dreading the flight. It was one thing to take the half-hour drive stretched out on that seat-bed in the team minivan, back and forth from the pool to the hotel, but quite another to fit myself into an airplane seat for a twelve-hour flight. I had no choice, though, and as soon as I got back to Northern California there was a constant stream of doctor visits and MRIs and bone scans. At first, nobody could tell me exactly what had happened in that Queensland pool. Eventually, though, the picture came clear: I had a minor bit of scoliosis, which we’d known about over the years, a slight curve from my L1 vertebra to my L5 vertebra, and what had happened was I’d started getting some serious bone buildup in and around my facets. Everything was inflamed, and when that happens the bone mass begins to press on the nerves, and that’s what causes the spasms—a condition known as irritable facet syndrome.

  Mom had her doctor hat on, so even though I had some of the best doctors in sports medicine weighing in on this, from Team USA and from Berkeley, she was riding point. She was back home in Colorado and she wasn’t technically in charge of my care, but in reality, she was.

  MOM: The good news, really, was that there was no fracture. That’s what had us all so worried. That, or a disk problem, or even a tumor. It wasn’t anything that required surgery. But at the same time, the good news came with a bit of bad news, because there was no guarantee that the problem could be fixed. The bone buildup was there. It was a fact of Missy’s life. The minor scoliosis was there, another fact of Missy’s life. There was no guarantee that this flare-up, if that’s what it was, wouldn’t happen again. All we could do was work to get Missy stronger, and try to keep that inflammation from happening again. It was probably the best diagnosis we could have gotten, given what poor Missy was facing, but it came with its own problems. It meant there’d always be this nagging worry, in the back of Missy’s mind, that she’d clench up again. And she wasn’t completely right for the longest time, after Pan Pacs. She was back to her full schedule, getting her strength back, but every week or so she’d have to cut her workouts short because her back was flaring up. This happened less and less, over time, and as I write this it hasn’t happened in a good long while, but Dick and I worried that it would get inside Missy’s head in some way. And when I say Dick and I worried, what I really mean is that I worried, because that’s my job in this family. Dick wasn’t like that, and thank goodness Missy seems to get this part of her personality from him, because it didn’t seem like she was too worried, either. I’d try to talk to her about it, from time to time, because I knew it must be weighing on her, but she didn’t want to hear it. Her focus was always someplace else. When she got back to school, her focus was on getting ready for her sophomore season. After that, it was getting ready for worlds. And soon it was easy to forget Australia ever happened.

  Relax, Mom. I’m okay. And you and Dad are a big part of that. But I’ll let you in on a little secret. You’re not the only one who worries about me. I worry, too, but I do it in my own way. I deal with it by worrying about the things I can control. If my back flares up again, I’ll deal with it. I’ll work like crazy to make sure that doesn’t happen—but if it happens, it happens.

  One of the ways I worked like crazy when I got back to school was going to physical therapy, in addition to my regular workout routine. Two or three times a week, to start. There was no time to put a pin in what I was doing and concentrate entirely on what was going on with my back. I had classes and practices. There weren
’t enough hours in the day to do what I needed to do. Teri set it up so I could keep my workouts light, but I didn’t want to lose any ground, so I pushed myself. Still, like my mother said, I’d get hit with a little twinge, some little hiccup, every week or two, so I wasn’t completely in the clear.

  Finally, I set aside a couple of weeks at the end of the year just to focus on my back with my trainer, Ann Caslin, and my physical therapist, Kristy Illg. We called it the “Twelve Days of Rehab,” and we went at it, hard. I was still swimming, here and there, but it wasn’t too, too intense. I ramped up my physical therapy to every other day, and I took full advantage of the break in the academic calendar to rest during the day, between workouts. Whatever was going on with me, I wanted to get ahead of it—so far ahead of it that I could at last put it behind me. In February 2015, six months after my injury, I received cortisone shots in my back (after confirming that the treatment was approved by the World Anti-Doping Agency!), and that’s when I at last felt like I had some control over what was happening. The inflammation was gone. The bad days fell away. And I was able to get back in the pool and do my thing. As my routines became routine once more I could look on my one-word rallying cry in a whole new way. Relentless—it was written on my soul.

  My 1:39 Moment

  2015 NCAA CHAMPIONSHIPS—GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA

  Never underestimate the power of goals. Setting them, chasing them, breaking them . . . I love it when there’s a carrot for me to grab at, a place for me to put my focus, my energy. I think I got that from both sides at home. My dad was always on me to challenge myself, and my mom was always on me to do my best, so of course it followed that as I got more accomplished as a swimmer the challenges kept getting bigger, and I kept telling myself my best could be just a little bit better.

  Coming back from Australia, trying to fight my way to full strength, I set a lot of incremental goals. Trouble was, it was taking a long time to get back to where I felt I needed to be. My back was okay, not great, so the usual goals didn’t really apply. As swimmers, we live by our times. Our best times define us and push us further still. But when your body’s beaten up and you’re scrambling just to reach a certain level of fitness, those times either lose their meaning or they remain frustratingly out of reach.

  And yet . . . and yet . . . there was one time I held out in front of me like a lifeline. A carrot. Three little numbers that came to mean more than anything.

  Here’s the backstory (pun very much intended!): I continued to swim after Pan Pacs, but I also continued to struggle. Somehow, I’d managed to push past the pain in Queensland and find a way to swim at a high level, but looking back I think I got through that meet on a rush of adrenaline and an iron will. Plus, I hadn’t really lost any fitness by the time the competition started. Once the initial flare-up eased and I learned I could tolerate the pain, I was good to go, but now that I was addressing the injury and working to prevent a reoccurrence, I was out of my routine. Here I was, several months later, and I still wasn’t myself—I was getting better, stronger every day, but I was not where I was before the injury. I was in the pool, building my strength, building my confidence, but there was a lot of ground to cover. A lot of the rehab work I was doing kept me out of the pool when my teammates were swimming, so I wasn’t exactly “game ready.” I was pain-free for longer and longer stretches, but I hadn’t really had a chance to put it all together and swim to my ability.

  This was a problem, as far as the national championships were concerned. For a college swimmer, this is the biggest meet on the calendar. But unlike other championship meets, it comes around in March, which is way early on the swimming schedule. I’d managed to compete during our regular season, and to make a contribution, but the NCAAs were a whole other level. It’s tough enough just to qualify, and I’d managed to swim well enough to make it, along with fifteen other swimmers from Cal. (That’s a big number, by the way, from one team. Roll on, you Bears!) Now I’d be swimming against the best of the best, and I wouldn’t have to worry about swimming any of the off-events I sometimes needed to swim to help the team, but the calendar didn’t leave me with a lot of time to prepare. I could see where I was, and where I needed to be, so I started to get a little nervous after our season was under way, and I remember going to my physical therapist, Kristy, one day and telling her how worried I was about my training.

  She said, “Why are you worried?”

  I said, “Because I need to go a 1:39 in my two hundred free in just a few months, and I’m not really training for that right now.” That was my target number, because my thing wasn’t just to win—I wanted to set a new standard.

  She said, “Oh, but you are. You’re training for a 1:39 right now.”

  I said, “Umm . . . how? I’m barely in the pool.”

  She said, “If you don’t get ahead of this, Missy, you won’t be in a position to go a 1:39. You need to get strong.”

  Kristy was right, of course. And I was right, too—right to worry, at least.

  Those three little numbers I talked about earlier? Here they were, lined up like they had something to tell me: 1:39.

  In my day, which really wasn’t all that long ago—just last year, as I write this!—the national championships were held over a three-day period. Now they do it as a four-day meet, which makes a big difference. (Gee, thanks, NCAA!) When it was just three days, when you were swimming a compressed schedule, there were some back-to-back swims. I wasn’t sure how my back would hold up under such an intense schedule. The 200-meter freestyle was to be held on the second day, and I got it in my head that this was the most important race of my collegiate season. It wasn’t just me who built the race up in this way. If everyone swam to form, I’d go up against Simone Manuel, a freshman at Stanford who also swam for the national team. I’d known Simone for a couple of years, but this was the first year we were college rivals. And if you know anything about college rivalries, you’ll know that the one between Cal and Stanford runs pretty deep. Simone had kicked my butt in this event at our dual meet earlier this season, at home, just before I got my first cortisone shot to alleviate some of the lingering tightness in my back. Then I managed to hold her off in the Pac-12s, despite a big kick—her signature move—where she would hang back and then move in for the kill at the very end. I wanted to lead from the beginning. That was the way I told myself I had to swim against Simone—any other swimmer, I could chase her down with a big final push, but Simone had such tremendous closing speed I wanted to put her behind me as soon as possible, by as big a distance as possible. I wound up beating her by just a couple hundredths of a second. So in the minds of a lot of people who followed college swimming, this was shaping up as the big matchup of the NCAAs.

  It was a big race for me, too, but not just because of the supposed rivalry with Simone Manuel. The year before, I’d won the 200-meter free at the NCAAs with a 1:40.30, setting an American record. That’s why that 1:39 mark was such a big deal. My obsession with 1:39 started in 2014, months before my back injury, months before I knew Simone would be swimming for Stanford. One thing had nothing to do with the other. I wanted to come back the following year and win with a 1:39; that’s all. Those three numbers meant everything to me, just then. No American swimmer had cracked that threshold.

  I didn’t care if I came back and touched the wall in 1:39.99. I would have been happy—thrilled, actually. Again, that time was in my head before I hurt my back, and it started to loom larger still while I was rehabbing. Those three numbers grew in significance as I fought my way back to whole. They were more than just numbers to me. They became a powerful symbol, a lure. I set it up in my head that if I hit those numbers I’d be able to race at my best again.

  But there’s a downside to attaching too much significance to any one goal. That’s another great lesson I took in from my parents. Remember, Dad had been a competitive athlete, and he understood the value in taking a slow and steady approach. Too
much, too soon wasn’t the way to build or sustain a career, so what I got from him was the benefit of the long, hard climb. And from Mom I got that the weight of a disappointment should never be so great that it could break you. She’d been through so much, at such a young age, and yet no one setback could ever really set her back. The idea was to hold your disappointments to a manageable level. To learn from them. To make it so they couldn’t beat you.

  I didn’t want to fall short at the NCAAs and come away thinking I was done—because, clearly, that wouldn’t have been the case. It would have just meant I still had some hard work to do. But I wasn’t planning on missing my mark. Every day when I woke up for my early workouts, when I went to physical therapy, when I did my strength training . . . I closed my eyes and saw those three numbers.

  1:39.

  It’s like they were lit by neon. If I felt sluggish, didn’t want to get out of bed, didn’t think I had it in me to power through another workout, I could just close my eyes and look at that neon sign.

  1:39.

  If I was just sick and tired of the grind, not seeing any real progress, not feeling like I could fight my way to the other side . . . same thing. Those three numbers kept me sane, kept me going.

  The night before the 200 free, I was really nervous. And, somehow, really calm. I took this as a good sign, because when I was teetering between nervous and calm, that’s when I was at my best. It told me I was excited to swim but also confident. I was nervous but not anxious. There’s a difference. With nerves, you can find a way to set them aside. Anxiety is a whole other mess.

  That night, I kept thinking about those three numbers. And about Simone Manuel. She was in my head, because she was amazing at this distance. It’s like the race was built for the way she swims. I knew she was going to hold something back and then find a way to surge over that last hundred, so I told myself I couldn’t hold anything back, coming off the blocks. I knew she’d be coming for me, gunning for me, but it would be a mistake to leave anything in the tank the first half of the race. The way to win was to push—basically to put my first hundred up against her second hundred.