In That Moment, I Was Free.
My Story, In Short.
By, Grace Ariola
“The person that climbed out of the pool for the last time was me, Grace Ariola. Just Grace. And I was free. .”
When I was 17, I was a captain for the US Junior World Championship team. I raced seventeen times over six days. I earned two individual medals, a silver and a bronze, and I anchored a few relays to more silvers. I don’t remember it much now. I remember that the team chose me to hold the team trophy at the end, and I hoisted it over my head. I remember that being the highest point of my career, maybe even my life. Chosen by my teammates to celebrate the success of the team. Holding a trophy that made the work and the pain worth something. It made me worth something.
I had two emotionally abusive coaches during my age group years. My first coach wanted us 12 year olds to be tough, mean, and thin. If you were not one of those things, she tried to make you that way, and she called it love.
When I got older, I moved into the next group my team had. My next coach wanted us to be thinner, always thinner. He wanted us to be dedicated solely to swimming, telling us to forget having friends, forget extracurriculars, forget anything that wasn’t swimming. I wanted to be good and I wanted to be the best. I bought in, thinking that focusing only on swimming would bring me the fulfillment I’d been looking for in the sport. I struggled to make friends in school anyways, and I was too tired to do anything else. Swimming became my life, and everyone knew I was “Grace Ariola, the Swimmer.”
I started doing doubles at 13, and practiced two to five hours a day from then on. I improved incrementally each year, breaking local records and then state records. I always shot for those national records, and always fell short. I had trust that someday my time would come, and all the times I fell short would be remedied by future success. I just had to trust the process, and eventually I’d reach my goals. I’d make the Olympic Team, and I’d win a medal. I’d break records and have my name etched into swimming history. I would be remembered.
By the time I went to college, I’d been on the National Junior team for three years, and finally made the jump to the National Team. My time at Texas started out amazing. I made friends, I liked my classes, and I was fitting in with the team. I’d never lifted before, and despite the destruction to my muscles, I enjoyed it. We were doing doubles nearly every day, along with lifting. As a sprinter, it was not kind to me. My body was adjusting, though not very well. It was a tough transition, even though I was accustomed to work. It was different work than I’d ever done. I struggled to get enough sleep, to recover, and to adjust to college classes. I was sick several times within the few three months of arriving on campus. In November, we had our first mid-season Invite. I had the best meet of my life. I tied a team record, went best times in almost all my events, and was confident I had more to give later in the season. It hadn’t even been a full taper, and I’d done that well. I felt very tired, but I was sure I could do better, even if I had to will it so.
I got sick immediately after Invite. I came down with chills, body aches, fatigue, sinus pain, light sensitivity, headaches, ear pain, the whole works. I was miserable. I went to the athletics doctors multiple times and was told it was probably just allergies, and that I could tough it out.
I don’t have allergies. And after so many years of “toughing it out,” I knew I was tough. I was good at swimming because I had incredible body awareness and a very high pain tolerance. I knew that if the pain and discomfort I was feeling was making me this uncomfortable, I knew something was really wrong. The doctors continued to tell my coaches that I was fine to swim, so they expected me to swim. So I swam through for a few weeks. I swam very poorly and I was not myself. I became irritable, tired, and frustrated. As swimming eased up for finals week, I was able to sleep more. I asked for morning practices off, and I rested. I recovered from my illness. We all went home for winter break, and when I came back, hell week started. I got sick again. I couldn’t sleep enough. I could barely get out of bed. I stopped eating because it took away from my sleeping time. I tried to swim through it. I wanted to be tough. I didn’t want the team to see me as weak. I didn’t want to be a bad teammate.
I was sick for about four weeks after Christmas. Every time I went to the athletics doctor, I was told it was allergies, despite my insistence that I don’t have allergies. After three weeks of misery, I told them I wanted to see a specialist because I’d lost hearing in my right ear. When I did get in to see the ENT, I had an ear infection and double sinus infection, along with a viral illness. Antibiotics cleared up my infections and rest moved my virus along. By the beginning of February, I was back on my feet. I was still weak from fighting, but Big 12s were coming up, and I needed to get back into training. I started slowly, then began training again. I swam alright at Big 12s, considering I hadn’t tapered at all and I was still recovering from a pretty significant illness. I still believed I could will my way back to top shape if I just wanted it enough, and that I would be in full form for NCAAs. I desperately wanted to perform, to prove myself, to prove that I was worth something.
I didn’t swim well at NCAAs. I knew something was still wrong, but I knew that if I said anything, it would sound like an excuse for not swimming well. We got a week off, and then continued training for the summer season. I couldn’t keep up. I was being lapped and passed and couldn’t make intervals. I would crawl out of the pool on my hands and knees, legs shaking, and my water bottle and kickboard would fall out of my hands because I didn’t have the grip strength to hold them. I stopped being able to remember my days fully. My mind felt foggy, like I couldn’t see properly. I couldn’t remember if I’d brushed my teeth or done my homework or eaten, or where I’d put something, or if I’d talked to someone or what I’d said. All of it was beginning to run away from me. I began to have heart palpitations and shortness of breath when standing up or going up stairs, but especially when swimming.
I struggled. I struggled with immense, crushing fatigue, coupled with depression and anxiety. My memory came in and out, I could barely speak some of the time because words stopped coming to me. I would speak jumbled sentences that didn’t make sense, and it was extremely frustrating. I was a straight A student and National Team athlete that couldn’t make easy intervals or speak complete sentences. I went home for the summer and rested as much as I could.
It didn’t help. I was exhausted when I came back for sophomore year. I asked to redshirt, but since I didn’t have an official diagnosis and no one could prove anything was wrong, I swam. And I swam poorly. I watched myself become a shell of a person as I became more and more tired. I watched myself become a shell of the swimmer I was as I fell further and further from the athlete I knew myself to be. I stopped doing morning practices altogether because I could no longer wake up and function without fourteen hours of sleep. My teammates began to resent me, and I them. I don’t blame them. To someone who’s never felt chronic fatigue, it’s easy to say that you’re tired. It’s easy to think that someone is exaggerating, because athletes are always tired. It’s easy to think someone is being lazy when they say they can’t walk that far, or to think they’re being dramatic when they’re crying in the weight room after jumping jacks. Before I had chronic fatigue, I thought I knew how tired I could be. You can’t know what “tired” can feel like until you have chronic fatigue. So I don’t blame my teammates for thinking I was lazy or that I was being dramatic, or my coaches for thinking that I could swim through it. I had a very hard, isolated sophomore year where I watched my identity as a swimmer crumble. I watched from outside my body because it was the only way I could cope. I wasn’t adding all this time to my races. I wasn’t falling so far behind. I was merely watching that happen to someone else. Deep down I knew, and I was breaking. And no one could tell me what was wrong, if anything was wrong at all.
A picture snapped by my teammate before morning practice- it is easy to see why they thought I was being dramatic.
My sophomore season ended in West Virginia, at Big 12s. I was the most depressed I’d ever been in my life. I remember very little about that time because my memory was so spotty then, but my journal entries became erratic, angry, and scary. I kept writing “I want this to be over” in different entries, over and over. I desperately wanted out, but there was no escape. There was no cure in sight, nor a diagnosis. My entire world was about feeling helpless and alone, and desperately wanting things to be different. I could not accept my reality and it was killing me. I wanted out of swimming, but I wanted more to swim through it, to be tough, and to see myself on the other side of it with my goals achieved, because that’s what I thought I was supposed to want.
And then COVID hit, and I went home. I stopped swimming mostly, save for the few days I was able to get to a pool. I began to heal, emotionally and physically. About four months into quarantine, I was able to get to the Mayo clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. At my very first appointment, I explained my symptoms. The doctor said immediately, that sounds like Post-Viral Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. After a week of testing, my mom and I walked down a long hallway to the Chronic Pain and Fatigue wing of Mayo. There, they confirmed that I did have chronic fatigue syndrome and postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. It explained the brain fog, the pain and fatigue, the heart palpitations, all of it. I was happy to have a diagnosis, but I had hoped desperately for any other answer. The problem with CFS and POTS is that there is no cure. It is just something you live with and learn to manage. The doctor told me that I should consider medically retiring. It was very unlikely that I’d ever get back to myself in swimming again, and it would likely make my recovery tougher.
It was very hard to think of myself and medical retirement in the same sentence. I remember thinking of myself again in the third person, watching myself be told to medically retire. Grace Ariola, the Swimmer, was being told to medically retire. Impossible. I told my coaches of my diagnosis and what it meant. They didn’t really understand I don’t think, but if they’d never seen or experienced POTS or CFS before, they couldn’t possibly have. It was hard to know that I would go back to a team and coaches that wouldn’t know what I was trying to overcome. It was hard to go back and explain that I couldn’t be a part of the team this year, that I had to swim alone, slowly, and build my way back to normalcy. I went back for my junior year, knowing that I wouldn’t be competing, only recovering, only watching.
I started in August at 300 yards a practice, three times a week. Then 300 yards a practice, five times a week. Then 400 yards a practice. I increased my yardage every two weeks, allowing my body to feel safe before I increased. I had to learn to regulate my emotions, as stress triggered greater fatigue. I recorded races for the team at their meets. I tried to be a good teammate. Throughout the year, I worked my way up, little by little. By February, I was up around 3000 a day. I could sprint a little bit. At Big 12s, I did a dive 50 during warmup each day, and then hiked up the stairs of the Texas Swim Center to record the session. During the hard parts, I always watched from outside myself, never experienced. I had to protect a failing identity. I would watch myself race the 50s in warmup, and watch myself recording races during my junior year Big 12s, while my team was all on deck. Former National Teamer Grace Ariola, recording races at Big 12s. Watching. Unable to race. Watching herself, watching her team.
It became more bearable to experience when I thought back to how miserable I’d been a year prior. I was proud to see how far I’d come from that point. I had a plan and a diagnosis. I had a life and energy and a personality again. I could see a future for myself. Even my memory was slowly returning. I still held out hope that I could come back for my senior year and make all the years of pain worth it, that the last two years could be put to something and make my story awesome. That one day, I’d stand under the lights, in front of a camera and be able to say that I overcame something awful, and I was on the other side with a medal around my neck, and that everything that I’d been through had been worth it to get to that point. That was what I hoped for. That was what I still wanted more than anything.
As I went through the summer of 2021, I watched Olympic Trials from my couch with my boyfriend and roommate, neither of whom had ever swam, nor did they know how good I’d been. I watched as my friends and peers made the Olympic team, sobbing with happiness for my friends and devastation for myself. I realized while I was watching Trials that I wasn’t going to have the fairy tale ending I’d wanted. I was never going to make the Olympic Team. On a couch in Austin, a thousand miles from where I started, I felt the final death of my dream. I decided to keep swimming because I wanted to give something back to the team. I had taken up a lane for the last year, and I still thought I had to pay it back, that I could pay it back. I continued to train. I also realized that on that couch, I hadn’t been watching myself. I had been on the couch, watching my friends. I began to experience, as myself, the shift of my identity and to process my new reality.
When I came back to campus for my senior year, I had every intention of continuing to swim through to at least Big 12s, through February. A few weeks into the season, I realized that I just…couldn’t. While there were a myriad of factors that led me to that decision, the greatest influence came from a friend. A friend in my year who’d swam for Stanford decided to retire, and I asked her why. She told me that she knew she had only been going on because of guilt and nostalgia. She was happier without swimming. I finally knew that was my truth. I was only swimming because I felt guilty I had taken up space for the last three years. I felt guilty that I’d never reached my goals, and that so many people had invested in me. I felt guilty that I was a disappointment to those people. But I was ready to start seeing myself out of my own eyes again, to see myself as something other than Grace Ariola the Swimmer, the Failed Swimmer. That was how I knew I was ready to go on. I could look out of my own eyes into a reality that didn’t involve Grace Ariola the Swimmer.
I went to morning practice the next day intending to think about my truth. I didn’t have to be done. I could wait until the first meet to decide. As I was walking to the pool, one of my coaches started talking to me, telling me about something he’d seen. I don’t even remember what he’d said, when the words, “I think I’m done,” fell out of my mouth. I think we were both shocked. I explained, and he told me to tell my other coach after practice. I did. Then I left. I told them that I would continue until the first meet, which was two weeks away. An entire childhood spent inside chlorinated walls yet spanning across the world, enscripted with my blood and life, came to an end. The Inaugural 2021 “Dust Off Your Boots” Invitational in Austin, Texas was the last meet of my career. I always thought my last meet would be the Olympics, Olympic Trials, Nationals, NCAAs. Something important. My last meet was a Friday night dual meet in October, with nearly empty stands. But my family was there, and they filled the stands enough for me. They cheered loud enough for me. They made it important enough for me.
My last race was the anchor of a 4x50 free relay. It was my favorite position of my favorite race. I dove in, and it was over. I was done. All those years of work and tears, concluded at a dual meet in October. I experienced it all, I swam that last 50 and I felt that last breath of adrenaline fade from my system. I took off my goggles for the last time and high-fived my freshmen teammates. The person that climbed out of the pool for the last time was me, Grace Ariola. Just Grace. And I was free.
Life after swimming was difficult to wrap my mind around. All of a sudden, I didn’t have to go to the pool anymore. I didn’t have to do anything except go to class and write a thesis. I’d been volunteering at the city animal shelter all throughout college, and after I retired, I suddenly had more time to give. I could spend time with my boyfriend. I could stay up late and not worry about the catastrophic consequences it would have on me. When swimming was no longer my life, when I stopped being constantly aware of how far I was from my goals and how much I used to be able to do, I also found my symptoms evaporating. My anxiety and depression became manageable, and my fatigue dissipated tenfold. It was still present, but I could function as a normal person within months of retiring. My life became my own again.
A few years ago, I heard an analogy for grief that I always revisit. Grief is a ball, and the size of the ball never changes. You are the box that contains the ball. When the ball hits the edge of the box, you feel the grief. As time goes by and you heal, the size of the box increases, and the ball hits the edge less and less. It still hits it sometimes, and the pain is exactly the same. It is always there, but you feel it less and less.
Sometimes, the grief will creep up on me. It felt like the death of a friend, and everywhere I look, I see reminders of my friend. I struggled in the month of August this year as my peers returned to college. I struggled in the summer as my peers went to meets and trained. I struggled at graduation when my peers were posting all their accomplishments, and I had to accept that I had not and would not accomplish anything that I had imagined. I struggled in March during championship season when my peers were at NCAAs, when my teammates celebrated each other and again I was reminded of how much I had missed. Even though I knew my life was better for me, the grief and bargaining remained. I constantly questioned if I would change anything if it meant I could get my swimming career back. Especially at those times of grief, there is constant reevaluation of whether or not my current life is worth what I gave up. And as heartbreaking as it is, the answer changes. I know that at one point I wanted my swimming career more than anything, is it a betrayal of myself to want something different now, after all the suffering? When I was in the midst of the decision to retire, I felt guilty for my past selves. The ones that wanted it so bad they would endure anything to have made it. I felt guilty for them, that if I decided to be done, their anguish would have been for nothing. I had to realize that their anguish was my anguish, and I hated their suffering. I know that Past Grace wouldn’t want me to suffer anymore. And I wish someone had told Past Grace that she didn’t have to suffer, that she didn’t need to keep going.
This is who I thought of as I wrestled with past suffering as a reason for present and future suffering. I felt guilty for giving up on her dreams, but she wouldn’t want me to be miserable. She wouldn’t want this pain for me.
The further out I get from retirement, the more often I side with my current life, with Present Grace. But every once in a while, I feel the sting as fresh as the day I stopped. Sometimes it’s so strong that I think I’m going to start training again, that I can still come back from this and emerge back into the swimming world. Sometimes I’m floored by the loss. I recenter myself, with the giant dog in my lap, with the cat on my shoulders, with my plants riddled with spider mites, with my hobbies, with my boyfriend. With my family.
Some days, the actual swimming itself feels like a lifetime ago. I don’t even think I miss the sport. I miss the feeling that being an athlete gave me. I miss being a part of a team, even though it’s been years since I was actually a teammate. I miss being good at something. I miss being able to try with abandon, without fear of how much I’m going to pay for it later. I miss who I was before my illness. Yes, there is still a lot of loss and grief, because there is a lot to grieve for and many parts of me lost. But every day I am further from the pool and further from the things that nearly drowned me, the more I heal and the more I see what I can be, instead of what I used to be. There is still a lot of healing to do, but I know there are many of us on this journey together. I take comfort in knowing that I’m finally not alone.
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