I kept questioning myself until the early morning. I couldn’t even fully enjoy Kennedy curled up into me with her arm slung around my body. Even the soft, rhythmic patterns of her breathing tickling my neck as her head rested on my right boob didn’t rock me to sleep. I’d been running my fingers through her hair for an hour, hoping to put her to sleep so she didn’t know it was another restless night for me. I started to worry if I would ever get out of my funk. How much longer was it going to take for me to equilibrate from the Olympic fantasy I’d been living in for the past two years? How the hell did I find a purpose that defined me as more than just being a swimmer? What if I never found out? What if I was going to feel this miserable despite having all the amazing things that I had?
I had no reason to feel this way. I had family and friends who loved and supported me. I had a home. I had a wonderful girlfriend. I’d accomplished the things that others spent a lifetime dreaming about. Whenever I found the strength to applaud myself for my swimming accomplishments, looking at my medals hanging on the adjacent wall, an evil voice in my head told me that scraps of gold and silver didn’t count as real accomplishments.
My thoughts spiraled for hours until it wore my brain out, and I finally went to sleep.
Chapter Eleven
Here was how I spent my free days without any sort of training:
I woke up to Kennedy stepping out of the shower around seven thirty. The first thing I saw was my beautiful girlfriend standing in front of the closet—our closet—with a towel wrapped around her and another one twisted on top of her head. On good mornings, she would see me stirring and stretching, and she would jump on me. She smelled like fresh shower and body wash and would kiss all over my face as her wet hair towel draped over me. As she put makeup on and dried her hair, I started the coffee and made her scrambled eggs. Little Kennedy had always loved scrambled eggs with bacon bits, but adult Kennedy loved it when I added spinach, onions, and peppers. So really, it was a “messy omelet,” we joked. Then I made us protein smoothies with almond milk, bananas, whatever kind of berry we’d decided to buy that week, protein powder, and spinach so she could drink it on the ride to her internship. I added her scrambled eggs to her lunchbox so she could eat when she got to the studio, put her coffee in her thermal mug, and drove her to work.
After giving her a kiss good-bye, I went to the gym—treadmill for forty-five minutes, a spin class or a hot yoga class, followed by another forty-five minutes in the weight room. It was a good afternoon when the buff gym rats didn’t walk up to me, usually the guys in ripped tank tops or the ones who always had to grunt while they did a rep. Half of them checked me out in the mirror, and I had no idea if they were checking out me or my workout. On the bad days, a few of them had the arrogance to give me unsolicited advice, and a number were just flat out wrong and had no idea how their bodies worked.
One January day, I waited patiently for the squat bench press machine that some beefcake had been hogging for a good fifteen minutes. He would do a set with two-hundred pounds, grunt, pace around the machine about two times while he collected his breath too loudly, and repeated. I found other ways to fill in the time, like pull-ups and dumbbell presses. When I finished those, he was still using the machine. That was when I decided to take a water break and stared him down until he noticed me.
“You waiting for this?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said flatly.
“Okay, let me take these off,” he said and headed over to the plates.
I raised my hand. “No, that’s okay. You can leave them.”
His dark eyes scanned me from head to toe as he sucked in his grin. I weight trained twice a week for forty-five minutes and had been doing that since I was fifteen. I could squat two-twenty, bench press with seventy-pound dumbbells in each hand, and do pull-ups in a forty-five-pound weight belt. But despite that, Beefcake laughed as if I was full of shit.
“Nah, come on,” he said, about to take the plates off.
“I’m not joking. Leave them on,” I said as he slid off a fifty-pound plate.
“You know I have two hundred pounds on here, right?”
I laughed. Beefcake had tons of muscles but no brains. “I know how to count,” I replied. “If you are that set on helping me, can you add ten pounds to each side?”
“Ten pounds?”
“Yes. That would be great.”
“That’s two-twenty.”
“I’m well aware.”
“You’re saying you can squat more than me?”
I buzzed my lips, deciding to let my snarkiness shine during this really awkward moment for Beefcake. “If you squat two hundred, then yes, I guess I can do more than you.”
Beefcake’s dark brown eyebrows drew together as he acquiesced to adding twenty pounds and then gestured for me to go ahead, almost as if to prove my worth. I offered him a tight smile, wrapped my fingers around the bar, did five perfect squats at two-twenty, and marveled at his agape mouth when I finished my set.
“Jesus fu—”
I never ever bragged about my Olympian status at the gym…or to strangers in general. That would be classless. But something about Beefcake really pissed me off. His tight scowl. His patronizing tone. The fact that he hogged the machine for fifteen minutes for me to outdo him, and then he gave me this look as if I’d said something derogatory.
If I was going to pull out my Olympian card on any stranger, it was going to be for Beefcake.
“Girls can lift,” I said with a sneer. “Don’t look so shocked about it.”
“But—”
I leaned into him, but not too close because his skin glowed too much, which meant he reeked of sweaty man musk. “Not to brag, but I did just come back from the Olympics. Five golds. Now, are you done with this machine? Because I would like to finish my set.”
With his mouth still open, he waved for me to continue, and I did as he slung his sweat rag over his shoulder, gawked at me for another five reps, and finally walked away.
That was how I turned what could have been a bad gym day into a really satisfying one.
Then I usually came home, ate some kind of salad, but since I wasn’t training, I treated myself to cheese or croutons, mediated for twenty minutes, and showered. Then came an afternoon of boredom when the extra pep from the mornings and workout fizzled out of my system, and all the free time allowed the anxiety I had about my life and career to take over. I tried to nap it off, usually waking up at five when I started cooking dinner. Something about having a delicious meal for my girlfriend right when she came home was exciting to me. I really enjoyed cooking her food, much more than just for myself.
But on the bad nights, after a full stomach and after watching Jeopardy with Kennedy on the couch, taking turns with who got to rest their feet on the other’s lap, the worry became so loud in my head that sitting on the couch became stifling. For solace and time alone, I decided to shower. As the bathroom collected steam, and the streams of hot water pounded on my back, I would sit on the ground and sob. I didn’t want Kennedy to see or hear me because part of my irrational anxiety was that I wouldn’t get better, and she would regret moving out here to be with someone who was depressed. I was terrified of losing her for a third time, and at the same time, I was terrified my life had no direction. It made me feel even worse when I would come back downstairs and lie to her about it. The first few times, I played it off as how I was switching to night showers. But obviously, that wasn’t true. My actual showers were right after my workouts in the morning. My nighttime showers were nothing more than a crying session masked by running water.