By Delaney Parks
“Rotate your body!” calls the coach. “Lift those arms up high!” and “roll to your side and take a breath!” I’m six years old and swimming laps across the pool. As I go, the instructions become more muffled as I lose myself in the kicks and paddles. Something shifts, and then I don’t hear the coach at all. I become unaware of time, the specifics of what my body’s doing, if I’m even breathing, giving way to my body’s instinct, losing myself in the weightlessness of floating.
When I make it to the other side of the pool, I hoist myself out and inform my mom breathlessly, water dripping from my skin, that I was “swimming freestyle for real this time!” It was my first exposure to the feeling of semi-consciousness, where I could let go of my overactive mind and let my body take over. I began constantly craving the feeling—one that I’ve only experienced in the water.
According to a recent literature review, numerous studies indicate that water activities may decrease symptoms of depression and anxiety. Researchers have also conducted studies supporting the Blue Mind theory, an idea coined by scientist and author Wallace J. Nichols that claims “blue” aquatic spaces allow people to enter a meditative state of mind and experience peace.
So seven years later, it was almost impossible to grapple with the idea that the one thing that always had the power to soothe me could become the source of the worst anxiety I had ever experienced.
Once I caught the swimming bug, it spread to every part of my life. There was no off-season—the main season spanned the whole school year, and in the summers I began to juggle long-course meets (in a 50-meter pool) with my community summer team, the Penguins. One year I swam before school, at 4:30 a.m., the next I’d switch to evenings, six nights a week. I was excited to add one more set of practices with the high school team, but there was one issue. My school had one of the best teams in the state, and they were known to cut athletes who had spent their lives in the pool.
Gripping the slippery starting block with my toes, I took a final few gulps of the humid, chlorine-infused air. My heart pounded, my legs quivered, and each part of my body was aware that this was do-or-die. Everything I’d practiced 12 hours-a-week, would finish—if all went well—in the next two and a half minutes after the buzzer blared and I swam the 200-yard freestyle.
But as soon as my body hit the water, I could feel a slowness, a heavy realization in my stomach that froze my muscles and dragged me down to the black line at the bottom of the pool.
I stopped at the wall where I should have flipped and took heavy breaths—not just panic, a panic attack. One concerned parent asked if I had asthma—I wish.
Later that week after school, I gazed into the mildly sympathetic eyes of my would-have-been coach, as he told me, “I’m sorry. You didn’t make it this year.”
How could my body and brain have conspired to give up on me in this defining moment? I had been a competitive swimmer for half of my life and everything from the perpetually split, dry ends of my often-damp hair, to my go-to username, SwimmerGirl01, had nestled the sport in my whole identity, my whole body.
But what had first made me fall in love with the sport—the feeling of the water on my skin, weightless, fluid, subconscious—had shifted to heaviness, a suffocating drowning sensation. Swimming had become the face of my anxiety.
I denied it until the public panic attack made it undeniable, but that wasn’t the first time anxiety had seeped into my once-meditative headspace in the pool. Since middle school, my non-swimmer friends had asked me point-blank: “Why do you keep swimming if you complain about it all the time?” My answer, always: “I do love it. It’s just not always that simple.”
I’m not the only swimmer who’s felt the weightlessness of the water become the thing that nearly drowns them. The most decorated Olympian of all time, Michael Phelps, opened up after retiring about his severe anxiety and depression and how they tended to follow seasons of intense competition. More recently, other elite swimmers such as Caleb Dressel have weighed in on this national conversation—revealing the debilitating impact that anxiety can have in trapping them inside their heads.
Ashley Sun—the old friend who escaped the sport early
Nation’s Capital Swim Club, swam together 2015-2017
Ashley says she always enjoyed the swimming part of competitive swimming, but not so much the competing part.
The meets gave her “a lot of anxiety.” The atmosphere was “nerve-wracking,” since those around her would get serious during the build-up to their events: intense stretching, getting locked into focus with their headphones, or even “nonverbal, and totally freaking out.”
“I would be unable to sleep the night before [a meet]. And I’d be really nervous to compete in front of people who I didn’t know. I was thinking, so many people can see me and they’re good at swimming and they probably think, ‘Oh my god, that girl was so slow,’” Ashley recalls.
The environment at practice also felt very high pressure. In the beginning, that was largely the fault of the coaches—including the one we both had at age 12, who once informed Ashley that her butterfly stroke looked like “a dying chicken.”
When Ashley eventually quit the sport at the beginning of our sophomore year—only months before I made the same decision—she says it was mostly because of how competitive everybody seemed to get, and how much pressure there was to never miss a single practice.
“There’s a sense that, if I’m not going to the Olympics, or if I’m not gonna do D1 [Division I] in college, why am I even swimming?” she says.
Jackson Knouse—the Division I athlete who stuck it out
George Mason Makos, Burke Centre Penguins, Robinson Swim Club, George Mason Men’s Swim and Dive, swam together 2012-2019
Jackson Knouse, who I swam with on my summer team, the Burke Centre Penguins, stuck it out with swimming through college. At George Mason University, he became one of those Division I athletes.
Jackson loved the community of high school swimming and the Penguins. But on his club team, the Makos, people tended to stick with existing friends from their high schools—and there were hardly any swimmers from his school on the team.
This sense of alienation, he says, only got worse when he reached the college level. As a walk-on, he hadn’t gotten to meet the other guys on the team during recruitment. They were confused at first about who he was, and he remembers feeling like a “lost duckling.”
After the rocky start, Jackson started to realize that their definition of socializing was mostly partying. As an engineering major, it was tough to juggle morning practices—two each day on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, only one on the remaining “light days”—with a challenging class schedule built around the practice swims. He managed all this while feeling isolated from his teammates socially because he didn’t drink.
His internal competitiveness motivated him, but swimming became like a job, he says.
“In my senior year, I actually kind of cried in my coach’s office, and I was like, ‘I don’t know anyone. I have no reason to be here, other than the fact that my Dad wants me to finish swimming,’” he says.
Jackson’s father, I remember, would always be out on the deck at summer meets with a “meet sheet” of his competitors’ times in hand. When it came to college swimming, Jackson tells me he didn’t have a choice: if he didn’t swim for his university, his dad wouldn’t help him pay tuition.
Despite that pressure, Jackson says anxiety didn’t follow him into the water—unless he started overheating or cramping during his distance events. “When I was in the water, it was more like brain empty, no think—just stare at the line at the bottom of the pool.”
When Jackson finally retired from competitive swimming last year, he was “over the moon.”
“I get to become a literal human,” he says. “I’ll wake up in the winter and text my girlfriend, ‘Is this what it’s like waking up when the sun is out?’ I swear I didn’t see the sunrise for like, three years.”
Similar to Jackson, relief dominated my emotions in the months after I quit. Once I actually started living life without the looming threat of practice every day, I was almost embarrassed to admit I barely missed it at all. I reveled in the fluid hours after school ended, previously reserved for practice and full of anxious energy, that I could harness towards classes, clubs, friends, or the art of doing nothing at all.
Sophia Kim—the one who kept pushing, even as her mind rebelled and her body plateaued
swam together 2015-2018
Sophia Kim has had a little more distance from her peak of competitive swimming intensity, as she finished out her high school years on the school team as well as the Nation’s Capital Swim Club, NCAP, back in 2020, when we both graduated.
At 12, Sophia started swimming competitively—quite a bit later than most. She quickly started dropping time, and her first coach singled her out and pushed her during practices. When she switched teams to NCAP, she noticed immediately that the atmosphere of the club was more competitive.
“I don’t really consider myself a competitive person, but you’re always competing against each other. People start to pit you against other people,” she says.
When we were sixteen, one of our coaches would print out attendance records every few months and distribute them to everyone back when we were swimming on NCAP together. At that point, I was on the verge of quitting and I remember my lack of attendance being embarrassing.
Sophia was frustrated by it for a different reason—she kept showing up and working hard, but all of a sudden, it was like she hit a wall and wasn’t seeing the results she wanted. At this point, she was also starting to seriously question the relationship between swimming and her mental health.
“You start to plateau. You can see how well you do against your peers. And you just see ‘I’m good, but not that good,’” she says.
One morning on her way to summer swim, Sophia had another panic attack and decided to take a few weeks off. It allowed her to clear her head a little bit and come back to the sport on her terms. Sophia’s feelings about the sport are still complicated, but she still loves what she describes as the “motion” of swimming, and the Blue-mind style connection it allows her to form with the water.
“In practice, there’s only technique and what you can do to better yourself, you don’t really think about whatever is going on outside. The water is such a separation from the rest of the world. In the very literal sense, that helps with your mentality as well. It was kind of meditative,” she says. “All you do is stare at a black line like back and forth for hours.”
Now that she’s been out of the water—at least in the competitive sense—for a few years, Sophia concludes that she misses the friends she made and the way the water felt, but not the amount of stress that it brought her.
“I think swimming is what taught me the most about growing up at this stage of my life,” she says.
For a few years, after I decided to leave competitive swimming, I continued to coach during the summers, dragging myself out of bed before the crack of dawn to plunge into icy water and teach younger kids the very sport that had brought me so much joy and misery.
At my side was my boss and former coach, Wesley Kittelberger. I’ve known the Kittelberger family since I was little, and Wesley, who’s four years older than me and now works as a special education teacher, is a major role model for me.
Wesley says that in addition to providing routine during break, summer swim was the first true sense of community she ever had—an experience I realize I have in common with her. She was drawn to the autonomy of swimming—the individual nature of the sport was “humbling,” but also “empowering,” for her.
“If I’m not the best, that’s okay,” she says. “What else can I get out of it?”
A major part of coaching, as she says, is helping kids to be okay with being uncomfortable. The physical nature of submerging yourself in a new environment is challenging—and each step of the way as kids learn new skills and advance, that discomfort can come back in new forms.
“We’re building such different mental skills and practicing mental toughness on a different level. than in other sports,” she says. “You have to guide kids in a different way.”
After revisiting this part of my past, I can’t deny that I resent what competition did to my mental health. Still, I have a deep love for swimming, and especially coaching. Every year, even after quitting competitive swimming, I looked forward to the day after Memorial Day, opening day at the pool, for months. I still swear I’ve never had a more rewarding or immersive job—it is literally impossible to get stuck in your head when a five-year-old is gripping onto your hands for dear life as you teach her how to dive, treading water in the deep end to stay afloat yourself.
I loved everything about coaching: getting splashed in the face often enough to develop a breathing pattern built around it, mentally filing away hilarious one-liners to use for a kid’s Paper Plate Award at the end of the summer, dipping away from the swim meet buzz to check in on a nervous 10-year-old swimming her first major race.
I never wanted to project my past feelings on the kids I taught, but it was hard not to worry that the same pressures of competition that plagued me might someday drown them as well. At the same time, I also saw them discover the joys and meditative wonders of the water. At the end of the day, as Wesley says, a healthy relationship with swimming is all about setting expectations, values, and boundaries. She guides her swimmers to look inward to ask, “‘Where am I feeling anxious, and where am I feeling motivated?’” she says. “If it’s not working towards your goals and values, the pressure can be relieved.”
I don’t swim very often anymore. But now, whether I’m diving into the familiar chlorinated biome of our local pool on a visit to my parents, or wading into the choppy waves on the shore of Portugal during a study abroad trip, I can recapture that peace. As I shiver, a sense of lightness floods me, an inadvertent smile spreads across my face, and I close my eyes to fully submerge. My Blue Mind is back.
The Woodlands 