Beneath the Surface by Libby Trickett

Author:Libby Trickett [Libby Trickett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2019-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

After our honeymoon I was supposed to join the Mare Nostrum Tour in Europe, a series of swimming meets that give Australians exposure to intensive racing under tough conditions. You travel and race, travel and race, building up your capacity to perform at an elite level without a lot of rest or preparation. The tour involves quite a bit of prize money, but it was also just fun travelling from one beautiful location to another over four or five weeks of the European summer. The problem was that I didn’t feel like having fun.

When we got home from Lizard Island I slumped into a funk that I just couldn’t shake. Luke couldn’t talk me out of it, and Stephan couldn’t coach me out of it. I started performing poorly at training, and eventually met with Stephen to tell him I needed a break. I sat in his office with tears welling in my eyes, unable to explain why. He was bewildered, but what choice did he have? It was clear that I couldn’t perform in this state. I pulled out of the Mare Nostrum Tour, and for the next three months I dropped back to one training session a day and started eating mountains of chocolate—I’ve always been an emotional eater.

I just wanted to sit on the couch and cry. When I looked back over the past year, I felt so ashamed and small that I couldn’t find the motivation to go on. I didn’t see the greatest winning streak of my career—I only saw the ways in which people felt I had come up short. I saw the newspaper headlines, the suspicion, the letter. The letter was the feather on top of a pile of shit that made the whole thing fall over. In my mind, the public hated me, they doubted me, and they were laughing at me. All I wanted was for people to like me, but they didn’t. Whether or not this was actually true had no bearing on how I felt.

Maybe I was just tired from the punishing training schedule, the back-to-back meets, the wedding, but I had hit a wall and I couldn’t get over it. For three months I couldn’t bring myself to care about swimming—certainly not in the way I needed to if I was going to be successful. That all this was happening just a year out from the Beijing Olympics was a problem. I could almost hear Stephan grinding his teeth, but it was pointless. I’d been knocked off my game. I was depleted, physically and emotionally. And when I did feel anything, I was just sad.

I didn’t know that I had depression. In retrospect it’s obvious, but I couldn’t articulate it at the time. I had no language to talk about mental health, only elite performance. What was happening to me was clearly the accumulation of years of stress, pressure, expectation, drive, constant pushing, the instability that is caused when you train your mind to be laser-focused, and you push away any negative thoughts that distract you from your goal.

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