It's Not What We Do That Defines Us...Or Is It? Reflections on Identity

After reading posts by Brendan, Elizabeth and Dave about what it means to be a climber, I spent a good bit of time pondering the concept of identity and the difference between saying, "I am a climber" and "I love climbing." The differences, though subtle, are important. One phrase implies an effect on identity, and that can be incredibly complicated. It got me thinking a lot about how I've defined my own identity in the past, and brought back some slightly painful memories.

Amie and I after an awesome afternoon of climbing!

Back to My Roots
This past weekend, I had the chance to climb at the gym where I first donned a pair of rock shoes - the Lindseth Climbing Wall at Cornell. I went with Amie, a high school swimming friend I'm convinced will change the world someday. After spending so many hours in pools with her as teenagers, it was amazing to be able to share climbing with her. She was a perfect partner.

It was also a joy to get back to my climbing roots, and back to where my excitement for the sport came from. It certainly didn't hurt that, in addition to climbing for the first time with one of my best friends, I ran into the instructor who taught my first climbing class, Women's Basic Rock!

My passion for climbing ebbs and flows - something I've learned to accept. I don't remember feeling love at first sight when I started in the fall of my senior year of college. Until that point, climbing was completely off my radar of possible activities; I didn't know what I was missing. As it turns out, the sport wasn't something I couldn't live without, just a really enjoyable way to spend a few hours. It made me feel strong and powerful. I didn't immediately fall in love, but climbing did awaken something in me; something that completely shook my world. 

"It isn't just a sport. It's my life. My Identity."

Doing what I loved - competing! (J. Lucia)

The first semester of senior year marked the beginning of my 13th year as a competitive swimmer. Swimming was something I completely fell in love with; I was obsessed. I saved every single meet program and heat sheet to go over my progression and my competition from 1995 on. Practice was all I cared about. I switched teams in high school in favor of a coach with a reputation for devising some of the hardest workouts possible. (He was also a strong male figure in my life when I needed one, and an incredible human being.) I picked colleges to look at based on whether I could swim at them or not, and the quality of the coaching. I was never an all-star, never an Olympic or NCAA caliber athlete; swimming was just something I couldn't live without.

And then, along came climbing. I don't think getting on the Lindseth climbing wall is the sole reason I started questioning my path - all of college was about learning and growing - but it was certainly one of them. After 13 years of eating, sleeping and breathing swimming, I was getting burned out. I didn't look forward to practices and couldn't find the motivation to push myself as hard as I used to. That November, I sat down with my coach for one of the toughest discussions I'd ever had. He told me to take a week off to really think about whether I wanted to finish out my senior year or not.

I sat out an entire week of practices. It felt like an eternity for someone who'd only go without swimming one out of every seven days. I'd count down the minutes until each workout, thinking about my teammates about to jump into the water. They'd survived another day of classes, homework, sleep deprivation, and everything a college athlete has to manage, but I wasn't there. Despite the fact that the week of wasn't designed to end my career, just to help me reflect, there was a hole in my heart. It felt like I'd already lost something incredibly important, like someone or something had died.

"Where did that girl with the passion go? She'd hate seeing anyone work harder than she did. She wouldn't back off for a single yard. It was never enough. And it still isn't. Of course I was relieved, Coach finally told me it was okay, that everything I've felt doesn't make me an awful person. I don't want to let the team down, but by being in the pool with the attitude I have, that's precisely what I'm doing. But so what? It's just swimming. Shit, it's never just swimming. Ever. It's 90% of who I am. Who will I be if I'm not an athlete?" (Journal excerpt, 11/14/2005)

The Path to Understanding

Loving climbing, Nov. 2005. (D. Herscovitch)

I made a list of things that comprised my identity over the course of that week. I described myself as a student, a woman, a fighter, a perfectionist, an individual, a sister, a daughter, a friend, and a competitor. I made a list of reasons I should swim. The list included things like, "because I love it, because I love achieving my goals, and because I love being part of a team." 

During that same week, I finished a roof route in the climbing gym for the first time, something I'd worked at for two months. (The picture on the right was taken right afterward!) I made peace with my relationship with swimming and finished out my senior year. It wasn't the best five months of my career, but I did it. Despite achieving a lifetime best in one of my events, the 100 breaststroke, during a time trial, I failed to make the team of swimmers who would represent Cornell at the Ivy League Championships that year.

Moving Forward and Moving On
It's taken me a long time to understand that, though I might have been a swimmer, it didn't define who I was. I fought against it for so long, and the internal battle wreaked havoc on my performance in the pool. Swimming was something I did, something I was passionate about, and something I devoted an incredible amount of time to. But it was okay to stop caring so much, to release some of the pressure I put on myself, when the time was right. It didn't make me any less of a swimmer, or change who I was. In fact, when I moved to Alaska after graduation, I joined a masters swim team in Anchorage and even competed in a meet. It didn't last long, though...I found so many other things I wanted to try and had both the physical and mental freedom to do so.

I'll always be a competitor. I'll always be happier when I'm active. I'll always love learning and trying new things. But there's a lot of pressure to live up to the expectations that come with saying, "I'm a swimmer," or "I'm a climber." That's why I hesitate to identify as anything but myself, anything but just plain old Katie. I want the things I'm passionate about to help me learn and grow, but not define my identity.

Swimming: A Retrospective

my two best swimming buddies and I back in high school!

I started swimming competitively when I was nine years old after chasing my best friend around our community pool that summer. She convinced me to attend a practice at the local YMCA, and before I knew it, I was in love. I don't remember my first race, but I do have snapshot memories of certain meets and special moments.

I switched from the YMCA team to another team in middle school, the Lansing Cats, to follow my YMCA coach. I'd decided to take the sport a little more seriously, nearing the point of obsession. I kept a stack of all my old meet programs and psych sheets in my bookcase, memorizing the names of my competitors and getting to know the field at each meet.

As my desire to improve increased, I switched teams a second time to the best team and the most well-known coach in the Ithaca area, the Ithaca Aquatics Club (ITAC). My coach, Roy Staley, had a reputation for being one of the toughest coaches to swim for in the area. The practices were long (20x500 free was one of our favorites), the workouts intense, but Roy taught me some of the most important life lessons I've learned. He was a strong male presence in my life when I desperately needed one, whether he knew that or not.

At the time, the Ithaca High School women's varsity swim team was a force to be reckoned with, and still is, but I wouldn't have a prayer of keeping up with the IHS girls now. Two of them swam in Olympic Trails this past year. Two others are making serious waves at Williams College. And countless others, whom I met when they were six or seven years old, have accomplished some incredible things.

Cornell Women's Swimming and Diving, 2006.

When I started swimming at Cornell, I felt a bit like a big fish in a small pond. I'd been pretty successful in high school swimming, but college was a different story. I was training with and competing against some incredibly talented girls, and had my share of last place dual meet finishes in the distance events. It seemed no matter how much faster I got, I couldn't quite keep up. I did improve, but it was discouraging. That, coupled with trying to balance varsity athletics with school and a social life made college swimming stressful. My boyfriend introduced me to all the things he loves - climbing, backpacking, and hiking - which made me realized I'd missed a lot.

After graduation, I was ready to take a serious break from the sport. The lack of swimming facilities in Denali National Park, where I took my first post-college job, certainly helped! When I moved to Anchorage for my first and only Alaskan winter, I joined a masters swim team, SWAM, with the intent of swimming and racing because it was fun. I practiced for a few months, noticing the bad habits I had in age group and college swimming were still there. I raced in a short course meters meet in December of 2006, and that was it. It just wasn't as fun as I wanted it to be.

I'm certainly not bitter about the way my swimming career turned out. I definitely wasn't one of the fastest girls, but I loved it, and tried as hard as I could. I haven't missed swimming at all, perhaps a little at first, but only because it was such a big part of my routine. I find it hard to commit to any athletic endeavor now that requires a rigorous training schedule, mostly because I spent so much of my adolescence and early adult life doing just that. And Philadelphia makes it easy to ignore swimming - pools in the downtown area are pretty hard to find.

But after watching friends train for triathlons, watching the Olympics, and reading about a few swimmers doing some amazing things, including being featured in Outside magazine, I might just be ready to give it another shot. I won't be swimming the English Channel, and doubt I'll compete again, but who knows? Right now, I'm on a mission to find a 25 yard pool in Philadelphia, just to swim in, which alone has been quite a task! But I really think I'm ready for it, and ready to find the balance between all the things that are important to me at the moment.