Kicking, Screaming and Losing: A David Thompson Swimming Story

In the year 2006 I had been alive on this earth for thirty three years.  In seventeen of those years I swam competitively, first at the National level in Canada and then Division 1 College in the United States.  I had 7 more years into the sport of triathlon.  In all those years, I have held very few solid truths in the swimming world.  One of them is that you can never, ever, ever, learn to swim at a world class level if you didn’t start in grade school.  It is one thing to be a good swimmer, but to compete with the best of the best is a whole other matter.  Now I will fast forward to the year 2008 and I have had to modify this truth a little bit.  It is not much but it is profound.  You can never, ever, ever, learn to swim at a world class level if you start after grade school, unless you are David Thompson.

I remember when I was 10 years old, I heard the story of a guy that started swimming at 18 years of age and managed a world ranking (top-50 worldwide).  And that was big news.  Big.  It is not as big as a 6th place finish at the Lifetime Fitness triathlon in 2007, but it was still big.  I know less than a half dozen swimmers who started swimming at such an old age of 15 and managed to swim well.  Starting swimming at age 12 is a liability, starting after age 18 is a death sentence if you want to be a champion.  Until Thompson came around, I knew no one who made it while starting swimming at age 24.  No one.  David’s swimming performance is so improbable that it is not supposed to happen.

It is not possible for me to tell the story of David Thompson’s success without contrasting it to my own failures.  I have tried to separate our two stories in draft after draft of this article so that I didn’t have to put myself in it.  I have given up.  I could not find another way to isolate the causes for David’s achievements.  It is all too easy to write that rah-rah-rah baloney about how he has more willpower and ability, trains harder and believes in himself more than anyone else.  If this is all it took, many more of us would be champions.  We all work hard.  We all do the best we can.  And we all pray that our hard efforts will pay off.  I now know better.  The truth is; all the willpower in the world is not enough to be the best of the best.  And it is certainly not enough to swim at a world class level when everything is against you.

I have been swimming my entire life because it is the only physical activity that comes easy for me.  In 1980 I was watching reruns of the 1972 Olympics and thinking that I wanted to be Mark Spitz and win an Olympic Gold.  I spent my entire grade school, high school and college existence in blind devotion to this crazy dream.  I thought; if I believe it 10,000 more times than anyone else in this entire world, then there is nothing that can stop me.  For my whole life it was the belief that mattered.  Any failure was a failure of belief.  It didn’t matter if my opponent was 2 feet taller and out-touched me by a hundredth of a second.  I am a failure when I lose.  It didn’t matter if I was sick or injured.  I am a failure when I lose.

I recall David and I swam a set where both of us performed poorly.  It was this crazy set of 200 meter swimming intervals, and each repeat counted only if we both met a specific goal time.  It was a long night as neither of us could make the times.  I was pissed off, and he wasn’t, which pissed me off more.  As funny as it sounds, it annoys the heck out of me to see someone who fails and doesn’t see themselves as a failure.  Some weeks later, I told David we would be doing the set again.  “To teach that damn set a lesson.  We cannot let that set get the best of us.”  His response was very odd to me.  “Okay, but I don’t need a lesson.”  We completely rocked that set the second time around, and neither of us missed a single goal time.  I was elated.  But David had the same bland reaction to the second set as the first.  Nothing is a vendetta to him.  It was like another day at the office.

When David and I started swimming together in 2006, I struggled to understand why he didn’t take failure personally.  I was so consumed by it that I didn’t notice that successes weren’t personal to him either.  I mean, this guy showed up twice a week, every week, and swam with me until he puked or passed out.  And he never celebrated or complained.  Everywhere else he was a superstar, but I treated him like dirt.  I would set up workouts to my advantage so I would win every time.  I would deliberately let him swim close to me and then blow him away.  It gave me the excuse to say it was good prep for his pro races.  “This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me” was a favorite saying of mine.  And every week he kept coming back for more with that same steady focus.

I know that it is your passion that defines you.  But if David never takes failure personally, then how could he be passionate?  I got my answer in the fall of 2006, and it was the only time I ever got a David Thompson lecture.  It was in the middle of yet another set of endless sprints where I gave myself my customary advantage.  I forgot to mention that in most of our workouts, I more than make up for his lack of complaining. 

As usual, I was whining about how much the workout sucked, how we should fire the coach (I wrote all the workouts), and how I was generally too old and was just going to lose anyway.  It was the losing comment that set David off, which surprised me.  He said, “At least you are here, alive and kicking.  Because it is better to go down kicking, screaming and losing, then sitting around, waiting, for nothing.”  It turns out David is passionate about competing, but not in the way I expected.  A lifetime of losing is better than a lifetime of the fear of losing.  It is hard to get scared of losing when you know there are worse things out there.  I was 33 years old and only starting to learn how you can hate losing and not hate yourself. 

Many of you David Thompson fans out there know that his 2008 season was filled with injuries.  You would think after reading this that Thompson brushes it all off like it is nothing.  No celebrations or complaints right?  If you follow that logic, you would be wrong.  I have never seen David Thompson more troubled as I have seen in 2008.  After one practice where he couldn’t kick a single length of the pool, he just said, “I’ve gone through good times and bad.  No matter what I do this isn’t the good times.”  Soon after that I didn’t hear from David anymore.  I thought that 2 years of collaboration had finally met an end. 

I had hoped that David had just found some other way to train swimming and I would see him tearing up the race course like he always does.  I am a Thompson fan as much as I am a Thompson coach.  When I didn’t even see him on the participants list in races I feared the worst.  If I were him, I would have quit.  When I got injured in 1996, I ran as far as I could from swimming.  I have been running from swimming for a long time.  I only stopped when I started swimming with David Thompson.  So it came as a shock to hear from David recently and find he wants to swim again.  And what it meant to me was, that he can hang on when I would have let go.  I expected him to quit.  I don’t understand why he didn’t.  Maybe one of these days I will learn.  Until David’s injury, I had very little appreciation that champions aren’t superhuman.  They just hang on long after us mere mortals let go.

I’m not sure if this article was what you expected.  You might have thought I would discuss techie stuff about Thompson’s elite swimming technique.  When you look at Thompson race, it appears like he is superhuman.  It is all too easy to believe that it boils down to physical ability that Thompson has and others don’t.  But most people don’t get to see how human Thompson really is in the pool.  Swimming is a sport that he struggles with immensely.  He is counting on perfect swim training and a perfect open water race just to be in the same league as his competitors.  He stands alone in success despite starting swimming at a late age.  He has never swum with that grace that you see in swimmers at Olympic swimming events.  The only thing he has going for him in the water is that he doesn’t take failure personally.  There are no crowds cheering at his swim practices.  There are just a lot of puzzled lifeguards at public swimming pools wondering why a guy would kill himself for hours on end.

By the way, I have discussed the content of this article with David on numerous occasions.  He has not agreed with me.  He was shocked that I would take the time to write his swimming story and tell so little about his swimming.  He credits his ongoing athletic success by the careful planning and circumstance of avoiding injury.  A long career without setbacks, he claims, encourages and reinforces positive and strategic thinking.  He cites the fact that he has lost only 2 years due to injuries, whereas I have been injured for over 75% of my elite athletic career, both in swimming and triathlon.  David has told me that if he experienced injury as much as I, he might have thought about a transition as I have done.

I respect David’s position and he is correct that I know a lot about injury.  I have bust up just about every single joint used for running and swimming.  But here’s what I have found after all those horrible experiences.  Injuries do not define who you are.  Injuries reveal who you are.  I chose to leave competing and try to become the best coach I could be.  David has chosen hang in there to become a champion of the world.  I don’t think there’s an injury out there that can stop him.  It is as if he already knows he is the best, and it is the world that hasn’t figured it out.  Despite my immense determination to succeed, I didn’t look at the sport as if I were already a champion.  Instead, I always thought I had something to prove.  I submit that this difference was my undoing.  Maybe I’m right and maybe I’m wrong.  I suppose we will all find out for certain as David recovers from his injuries of 2008.  When he crosses that line and becomes the world’s best, let me be the first to say, I told you so.