Why I Chose Rest Over the Race for Now

My dream is to still be swimming into my 80s, and this break is just one step along the journey.

After months of pain, tears, and declining mood, I have decided to pause swimming for four weeks or longer to allow my shoulder to heal.

So what?! Why am I sharing this?

I am not a quitter. I don’t give up on my commitments, and for the last few weeks, the idea of pausing swimming felt like giving up, and that didn't feel very good.

I love swimming. I was a competitive swimmer for 5 years as a kid. I quit just before I turned 13 due to burnout and injury. In my late teens and early 20s, I picked it up again swimming with a master club doing triathlons until a sprained ankle sidelined me. After that I swam sporadically.

In March 2023, I retired from corporate life and decided to get back into swimming. Starting with twice a week. It felt good and I was enjoying my time in the pool. In May of 2023, I thought it would be fun to swim with a goal in mind. So I decided to train for a 1500m open water swim in Barbados that November. With this goal in mind, I increased my training to three times a week.

My daughter, who is a competitive swimmer, joined me in the race. We both had a great time, and I became hooked on open-water swimming races. I got home inspired and kept training.

The first bump in the road appeared in February 2024, my right shoulder started to hurt. While frustrating, it only hurt after I swam, not during. So I started physio and kept swimming.

In May I set my sights on a new race—a 2km swim in Curacao on October 5th, 2024. I trained through the summer and kept seeing a physio for my shoulder.

However, in September, roadbump number two showed up. My left shoulder started to hurt. And it hurt while I swam. Not just after. It got bad enough that I was worried about being able to do the race on October 5th. There were many tears. I took a week off training before the race and had my physio show me how to tape my shoulder for the race.

I was able to push through and do the race with the shoulder taped. I even surprised myself with how well I did. I won my age group! There were many happy tears when I was called up to the podium! It was very exciting.

With the race over, I knew I had a problem. My left shoulder hurt while I swam, and my right shoulder hurt after. I love swimming, and I want to do many more races. My life goal is to be still swimming in my 80s.

Obviously, there was something wrong with my stroke, that kept injuring my shoulders. I knew I couldn’t keep swimming the same way and expect the injuries to go away.

A few months before the Curacao race I had followed Brent Hayden on Instagram. A 4-time Olympian and Bronze medalist in the 100 free at London in 2012. He shared stories from his virtual coaching program where he had helped others fix their stroke and eliminate shoulder pain.

I started his program in late October with hopes that he could help fix my stroke before an upcoming race in Spain in May. The idea behind his program is that you aren’t fixing your freestyle, but building a whole new stroke from scratch.

Imagine learning a different way to walk or run at 45. You have 45 years of muscle memory built up telling your body how to move without thinking. I started swimming around 8 years old. I have 37 years of muscle memory telling me how I should swim. Starting from scratch and learning a whole new way to swim freestyle was one of the most challenging things I have done in a long time.

Working with Brent I learned that in my original stroke, I didn’t rotate my shoulders/body enough. This meant that when my arm was out of the water, during the recovery phase, it was pulling it across the water. To keep the arm above the water, my little deltoid muscles had to work extra hard. This caused tendonitis to start in the left side. Here is a video of me swimming last summer where you can see me doing that.

Working with Brent has been really awesome. His program allows you to start from scratch and develop your new stroke through a series of drills and virtual feedback sessions where he coaches me using videos of me swimming. Within 6 weeks of working with Brent, my stroke count went from 56 strokes per 50m to 32 strokes per 50 meters, a massive efficiency gain. I have hovered at 30-32 strokes per 50 for the remainder of the program and I am pleased with this progress.

Here is a video of me swimming after completing 10 weeks of the program.

The pain in my right shoulder has improved dramatically. It’s still there, but it is fading. We have fixed my stroke enough that I am no longer reinjuring it every time I swim and it is starting to heal.

My left shoulder tells a different story. As I’ve worked on rebuilding my stroke, there have been weeks where the pain subsides and others where it intensifies, which is incredibly frustrating. The issue stems from tendinitis around my deltoid and biceps. Although I now swim with better form and avoid overloading these muscles, I still rely on them for my strokes.

I thought that if I fixed my stroke, the pain would go away.

It was supposed to be a 12-week program. We began mid-October, and it is now mid-March, and I have only completed 10 weeks of the program. I have had to pause a few times due to the pain in my shoulders, illness, and vacations. My race in Spain is only a couple of months away and I was starting to feel the pressure to get back to distance swimming so I would be ready.

In the meantime, we are 4 months into Canadian winter and my SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) is in full swing. It’s the first year I am managing it without medication (a story for another day), and that has been challenging.

This weekend I hit a breaking point with both. I realized that every time I swam, my left arm was getting worse. It hurt during and after swimming. For weeks I have felt like I needed to keep swimming. I have the race coming up. I am working with Brent. I didn’t want to pause the program again. As I pushed through I could also feel myself losing the love of the sport and I could feel my mental health slipping.

On Sunday I googled how to recover from tendinitis in the shoulder and the number one, most recommended treatment was rest.

Well shit.

The only way to get through this one with my mental and physical health intact was going to have to be to quit for a while. I was going to have to give myself permission to do that.

So I did a trick a therapist taught me a few years ago. Pretend you are sitting across from yourself and talk to yourself the way you would speak to your best friend.

Would I tell my best friend to suck it up? Keep swimming through the pain so as not to miss the race in Spain? Keep swimming not to let Brent down? Keep swimming even though she was crying after each session? That she should feel like a failure if she didn’t keep going?

Or would I tell my best friend that she needed to listen to her body and mind?

That she needed to give her body time to heal.

That she needed to do the physio rehab exercises (that she most definitely wasn’t doing) and stop hoping her shoulder would magically get better just because she fixed her stroke.

That if she can’t do the race in Spain, she can most certainly still enjoy Spain and cheer on her daughter while she swims.

So that is what I am doing. I have permitted myself to pause swimming. I have a plan in place to do my physio exercises at least 4 times a week. I am replacing swimming with indoor cycling and treadmill walking to build my cardio. I am continuing with pilates and strength training, modifying for my shoulder where needed.

I am hoping that in a few weeks my shoulder will improve. The Canadian winter will not last. Each day is getting longer and soon it will get warmer and the SADs will start to get better and I will become a more resilient person again when that happens.

It’s not easy. I want to be swimming, but I know this is the best course of action.

I am not a failure.

This is not a sprint.

It’s a marathon.

My life’s goal is still to be swimming at 80. A few weeks break at 45 won’t derail that dream—it might be exactly what I need to achieve it.