The Mental Torment and Toughness of Olympic Swimmers

Courtesy: Charles Hartley

The mind can control us. Even if we don’t want it to. We can want to think one thing and the brain will keep playing a tape we don’t want to hear that makes us feel hopeless and inferior.

I have suffered through this. I want to believe I’m intelligent but my brain keeps playing the tape “You’re not smart.” Far too many times I have not been able to stop that message from automatically twisting up my brain making me feel trapped by these self-crippling thoughts. The unrelenting message makes me feel unworthy, incompetent, inferior, and embarrassed.

I bring this up as I think about the Olympic swimmers I’ve been learning about over the past few weeks and how their thoughts have been tough to control at times. At the age of 17 Regan Smith broke the world record in the 200-meter backstroke which you would think would be exhilarating and life-changing in a positive way. But she said breaking that record became a problem in her own mind. She became afraid of the race, of what people would think if she didn’t swim the race as fast. She talked about this during a recent episode of the Unfiltered Waters podcast.

On a separate Unfiltered Waters podcast Caeleb Dressel talked about his thoughts on the flight home after winning five gold medals at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. He kept thinking about the mistakes he believed he made in the races that prevented him from achieving the times he set for himself. The thoughts were self-critical. He thought about what he could have done better, what went wrong.

When he got home he ultimately ended up stopping swimming for eight months because he needed to get control of his thinking about himself and swimming. Remember, he was at the time the fastest male swimmer in the world.

Last night two captains of the U.S. Olympic Team, Ryan Murphy and Abbey Weitzel, talked about the therapists they speak with regularly to deal with the pressures of elite swimming.

This is a common theme in swimming (and in many other walks of life). These elite athletes need help controlling how they think. They spend an extraordinary amount of time practicing with their heads underwater unable to talk with anyone. Doing this day after day year after year isn’t normal behavior. Most people don’t do this, don’t want to and, frankly, aren’t tough enough myself included. As a kid, I didn’t like the pain and mental pressure of competitive swimming.

To become elite at this sport it takes so much time and non-stop extreme pain tolerance with no guarantee any of it will result in a gold medal, fame, fortune, or fulfillment.

I think about these athletes and how they figure out how to get their minds right so the doubts don’t creep in and take over. Dressel talked about a practice when, after the first set, he felt bad and just wanted to get out and go home. But he knew he couldn’t. He had to keep going.

His thought to stop almost won. But he was able to shut it off. This is thought control and it’s not easy because emotions complicate these decisions. Wanting to stop feeling the pain of swim practice is a reasonable thought, but unreasonable if you’re training to be an Olympic champion because pain is exactly what you will have to feel to get that.

Everyone reading this knows what I’m getting at. Often we are inclined to stay in bed and relax and not go to work and have to grapple with intellectually taxing work problems and interpersonal tensions. Who wants that? It’s a reasonable question. But we just get up and go. We think something like this: “Well, I have to go do something productive and be responsible and I know this is going to be hard but I’m just going to gut it out.”

It’s amazing how many times we do this in our lives; it numbers in the thousands or more. We know something is going to be hard to do and yet we get up and do it. Our minds warn us it will be hard. But we usually figure out how to throw those out and get our minds thinking more positively. Because we know if we don’t our lives will get more difficult.

The thing about swimmers, though, is the thinking they have to battle is often tougher, longer lasting, and more agonizing than many other things people do. They know they’re going to feel physical pain. They know it’s going to be long spans of suffering. They know they have to push harder and harder, go faster the next day, which brings on more physical pain.

Their minds have to process these unpleasant thoughts of never-ending pain. No wonder they get scared to swim races they hold the world record in, are self-critical after winning gold medals, and question whether they can keep swimming and if it’s all really worth it. Swimming really tests a person’s thought processes like a few other things. These swimmers are among the most mentally tough people any of us will ever know.

And so as the Olympic swimming begins this weekend, let’s all salute these human beings who constantly contend with thoughts about not wanting to swim anyone, being afraid of the pain, wanting to do other things in life besides going back and forth in a pool. They battle monotony in ways most of us couldn’t possibly appreciate. Monotony is hard on a person’s psyche because it’s not enjoyable; it’s dull and unexciting. People don’t dig dull and unexciting; we’re not built that way. Swimming can be boring and at times seem purposeless.

Yet they keep going. They fought through all the thought traps and figured out how to think more positively enough of the time to qualify for this most esteemed squad, the U.S. Olympic Swim Team. It takes so much courage to shun negative thoughts that come in our minds naturally and tell them to go away, that we won’t be conquered by them, that we will be positive, tell ourselves we are worthwhile human beings, and that each day we will do our best to improve. We won’t succumb to the negative thought processes.

Their minds are just like ours, filled with doubts and negativity, yet they keep trying to push all that way each day. For that alone they’re to be lauded and appreciated regardless of whether any of them wins a medal. They’re inspirations to all of us, especially for showing us how to channel mental strength which we all need so much every day.

These Olympic swimmers are awesome human beings who show us how to overcome our complicated thoughts and keep going, making our contributions, and embracing life with strong thoughts.

About Charles Hartley

Charles Hartley is a freelance writer based in Davidson, NC. He has a masters degree in journalism and a masters degree in business administration.