"Lucy: the swimmer"

This is how I was known for the best part of 10 years of my life. “I’m Lucy, and I’m a swimmer.” Before that it was “Lucy, the gymnast”. For so long, my identity was hugely linked to the sport I did. In other words, a large part of my self-concept was taken up by my athletic identity, without exploring many alternatives; also known as athletic identity foreclosure.

Aged 14 at my first open water 5km event, representing GB in France.

Athletic identity is “the degree to which an individual identifies with the athlete role, within the framework of a multidimensional self-concept” (1). This basically means that the greater you identify with your sporting role in comparison to your other life roles (daughter, student, coach, blogger, accountant etc.), the stronger your athletic identity. There are benefits to a strong athletic identity: commitment to the sport/performance (2), competitiveness and goal orientation (3), and self-esteem (4). However, if someone identifies with their sport too closely, or it’s the only thing they truly identify with, issues can arise. These issues usually begin when this identity is challenged in some way; usually as a result of injury, or career termination (5). They can include social physique anxiety (4), athlete satisfaction (6), and burnout (7).

When I quit swimming, it was a voluntary choice. I no longer felt that I was getting out of the sport what I was putting in. I was tirelessly training, day in and day out, only for this effort not to translate over to where it mattered. It was literally all-consuming. If I wasn’t training, I was thinking about it, or worrying about whether I ate too soon or too close to training, or about whether the practical I had in my physiology lab was going to affect my session. Eventually I decided that the sport was taking up too much of my conscious thought to be worth the absence of results. So I quit.

This next phase of my life was so much harder than I thought it would be. Transitioning out of sport is tough. But transitioning out when you have been close to what you wanted to achieve at the elite level and watched it move further out of reach is almost more difficult. It felt like there was unfinished business but I just didn’t have the energy to pursue it anymore. I didn’t have the energy to keep training for that 0.1 second that would take my 200 free time under 2:00.00, so there it stays – haunting me at 2:00.10. Okay... maybe not haunting as such. But it does play on my mind - one less breath.

I was a swimmer. Not just ‘someone who swam’. And that is the difference. It was my identity. My whole identity. I went to Loughborough for swimming. My course choice was dictated by those provided at Loughborough, so that I could swim for them. I enjoyed uni and I wanted to do well but I never saw being a student as a big part of my identity. After freshers week when we were essentially given a ‘free pass’, we didn’t live the normal student lifestyle by any means. Most of my money went on food and swimming fees rather than on alcohol and cheesy chips. Our weekends were taken up by traipsing around the country for swimming meets rather than on the Echoes dance floor, and we’d pass people coming back from a night out when we were on our way to morning training at 5.30am.

I embraced this lifestyle. It made us different. It made us admirable. I felt some kind of pride in my ability to resist temptation and stay on track with a lifestyle that was totally committed to my goals. We had access to Powerbase Gym during ‘elite hours’ when it would be empty, rather than having to queue to get onto a squat rack. I always had something to talk about at family gatherings when someone asked me what I did. It gave me a huge sense of self-worth. My parents had a reason to be proud of me. When I quit, all this was gone. I went from being an international athlete, to ‘just a normal person’, from the world-renowned Powerbase, to PureGym. There was nothing that made me stand out from the crowd, nothing that made me extraordinary, for the first time in my life. That was something I found really difficult to get used to. There was nothing that I was really good at.

Not only do you have to deal with a loss of identity, but a loss of routine attached to that identity. My whole life, I’d got up, gone training, gone to school, trained again, done my homework, then gone to bed. Literally, eat, sleep, train. Repeat indefinitely. I hated the early mornings but it was the routine that kept me getting up. I’d been given a programme from the first time I stepped into the gym so I knew what I was doing, and I had professionals S&C coaches to ask if I didn’t. But all of that disappeared. I no longer had the rigidity of training to hold me accountable to getting things done. And for the first time in my life I actually had to think about exercising. What do people even do in a gym?? How do people fill their time when they’re done with lectures in the afternoon?? I just felt a loss. A whole part of myself that wasn’t there anymore, and it took a while for me to find my feet again.

---

Sometimes I feel myself slipping into this fully consumed state again with CrossFit. My job is in CrossFit. My training is for CrossFit. Now that my uni friends have largely moved back home or to London, my friends in the area generally are from CrossFit. You can see how easily issues would arise if anything were to happen. So, what can we learn from my experiences?

• There’s a difference between a sport being part of your identity, versus it being your whole identity. I’m very careful nowadays to say that “I do CrossFit”, not that “I’m a CrossFitter”. I can’t tell you how much that small difference adds to self-perception. CrossFit is not all that I am, it’s part of who I am.

• Make a conscious effort to be aware of other things you enjoy. Previously, it wasn’t that I only swam. But swimming was the only thing I valued. Now, I try to put more emphasis on the fact that I enjoy reading books, learning, writing posts for this blog, playing the piano, going on walks… valuing the things I previously did but overlooked.

• Dual careers are essential. A dual-career athlete is someone who has a job, or studies, alongside their sport. For instance, studying and swimming would have made me a dual-career athlete. This meant that although I felt lost when I quit swimming, I still had my degree to finish, and therefore some kind of focus. There’s a large body of evidence to suggest that dual-career athletes, both transition out of sport better, and experience greater wellbeing and successes during their sporting career (6). Jess Ennis spoke about how having a child and coming back into sport made her enjoy it more, and put everything into context. She could have a bad session and her baby wouldn’t know any differently. He would still love her just as much.

If you relate to my statements about my strong athletic identity in swimming and CrossFit, here’s a task for you. Draw a large circle. Divide that circle up into segments of all the things that make up who you are. Mine would look something like: CrossFit athlete, sister, friend, daughter, personal trainer, coach, home owner, blogger, reader, learner, MSc graduate, wannabe performance lifestyle advisor, tenacious, gritty, conscientious, compassionate…you get it. The list goes on. And it’s more than just CrossFit.

---

1. Brewer, B. W., Van Raalte, J. L., & Linder, D. E. (1993). Athletic identity: Hercules' muscles or Achilles heel?. International journal of sport psychology.

2. Horton, R. S., & Mack, D. E. (2000). Athletic identity in marathon runners: Functional focus or dysfunctional commitment?. Journal of Sport Behavior, 23(2).

3. Martin, J. J., Adams-Mushett, C., & Smith, K. L. (1995). Athletic Identity and Sport Orientation of Adolescent Swimmers with Disabilities, Adapted Physical Activity Quarterly, 12(2), 113-123.

4. Martin, J. J. (1999). Predictors of Social Physique Anxiety in Adolescent Swimmers with Physical Disabilities, Adapted Physical Activity Quarterly, 16(1), 75-85.

5. Ronkainen, N. J., Kavoura, A., & Ryba, T. V. (2016). A meta-study of athletic identity research in sport psychology: Current status and future directions. International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 9(1), 45-64.

6. Burns, G. N., Jasinski, D., Dunn, S. C., & Fletcher, D. (2012). Athlete identity and athlete satisfaction: The nonconformity of exclusivity. Personality and Individual Differences, 52(3), 280-284.

7. Martin, E. M., & Horn, T. S. (2013). The Role of Athletic Identity and Passion in Predicting Burnout in Adolescent Female Athletes, The Sport Psychologist, 27(4), 338-348.