Bins, vomit, headaches: Being a great swimmer often has a painful price

Straits Times

5 days ago

Luke Hobson, who won silver in the 200m freestyle, said he felt like he was about to explode after the race because of the effort he put in.
The bin can't talk but it tells a terrific tale. It has a plastic bag inside and it sits on a chair. It is positioned at the bottom of a staircase, down which the swimmers come after a race. The bin at the world championships arena is simple and yet speaks a profound tale of effort, pain and limits.
The bin, you see, is to vomit in.
After he wins the 400m freestyle at the World Aquatics Championships, Germany's Lukas Martens has gone so hard that he throws up. He wins by 0.02 of a second and only because he gives everything. Lani Pallister knows the feeling. In the 1,500m at the Australian trials, when she touched home first, an official brought her a barf bag while she was still in the water.
Yup, more vomit.
After the gruelling 1,500m final, Pallister, who wins bronze, tells The Straits Times: 'I thought I was going to throw up from about 500m in.' She smiles, she didn't.
There's a number that athletes swear by and reach for, a number that determines commitment, a number that in fact you can't truly measure. We've heard of 100 per cent, but what does it look like?
It looks like Moesha Johnson of Australia, who swims the 10km, 5km, 3km, 4x1,500m relay in open water (two golds, one bronze), then does the 1,500m heats in the pool and when we meet it's after the 1,500m final.
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'I'm feeling absolutely ruined,' she says. But is justifiably proud. After all that mileage, 22.5 furious kilometres, she's still sixth in the 1,500m. Johnson is a powerful portrait of an athlete at the limit. Her hands are trembling and I ask, is it the effort?
'Yeah. It's the effort, the exertion, the lactate, the fatigue, the adrenaline, everything.'
This 100 per cent, you can't quite tell it, so it has to be explained. Like American Luke Hobson does, standing with his silver medal from the 200m freestyle, exhausted yet coherent.
How do you feel at the end of the race?
'Like you're about to explode, legs, arms, just all the way through your core. Heart rate's up, head hurts. It's not the most comfortable thing ever, but I kind of like seeing how hard I can go and how much I can make it hurt.'
Swimming isn't weightlifting with the veins in the neck bulging and it's not long-distance running with its grimacing faces. Only later in the media mixed zone, gulping for air like some oxygen-starved tribe, do you understand endeavour. Camouflaged by water and goggles, you see only smoothness, not the open water swimmers regurgitating feeds as they race.
'The amount of effort and exertion it takes is something that is unimaginable,' says Singapore's 10km swimmer Chantal Liew. 'Especially with open water, we're not just looking at the heat, but you're looking at competitors pummelling you from all sides, nerves, having to feed in the middle of that race, and it just got to a point where you're trying so hard and you're giving everything you got and in the middle of that race I was just vomiting.'
No swimmer makes the Forbes richest athletes' list and few will ever get mobbed on a street. They're just explorers, investigating how fast they can traverse a stretch of water, obsessed with their contest with the clock. If they win, they receive medals they don't even look at later, yet they'll go every extra yard for it. Like Gregorio Paltrinieri, the Italian, who fractured a finger in a collision in the 10km, won silver, then swam two more races for two more silvers.
Water is kinder to the body than land, but still swimmers are among sports' finer masochists. 'We train more than other athletes,' says Swiss Noe Ponti, and then adds, 'maybe gymnasts'. Greatness hurts, that is the deal, to the point where Pallister says, 'I think we're all addicted to that pain a little bit. And the adrenaline that comes with it'.
The day after making her first world championships 1,500m final, a formidable feat, Singapore's Gan Ching Hwee speaks of this accepted suffering with eloquent matter-of-factness. In practice, she says, 'you're actually training your body to get used to the pain of racing so that when it comes it's not like a huge surprise'.
When Gan started hurting, with 10 laps to go in her 1,500m heat, she just remembered her training, her endless repetitions, like her 14x150m set she did at race pace in June in Phuket. With every stroke a conversation with herself is unfolding: 'I've been there before. My body has been through that pain. You have to talk yourself through it.'
Suffering is intrinsic to all sports, even shooting and chess, yet it's exhilarating to watch these athletes up close, pouring out their talent into the water, divided only by cruel margins. After her 1,500m final, Gan's head was throbbing and her ears ringing. 'Everything just slowly gives way,' she says. She'd emptied herself, she had nothing left to give.
Not even to the bin.