By SwimSwam Contributors on SwimSwam
By Matt Rees
In July 2024, I wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal focused on the five best books about swimming. Had I written that article this year, my choices would have been the same – with one exception. I would have included a book, Outside the Lanes, written recently by a one-time child prodigy swimmer, Becca Mann.
Outside the Lanes (Blue Star Press)
She’s now a professional writer and it shows. She has penned a gripping and heartfelt account of life as an elite swimmer – both the experience of being one of the sport’s demigods and the devastation that comes with having your Olympics dreams crushed. Outside the Lanes captures the grind that goes with competitive swimming better than any book I’ve read short of Gold in the Water.
The book is also a cautionary tale – showcasing the risk of narrow, single-minded devotion to trying to achieve a goal. Such devotion, as Mann shows, can hinder more than it helps. And while much of Outside the Lanes is the story of heartbreak, Mann has recently experienced a Phoenix-like rebirth in the pool (more on that below).
Elite athletes are, by definition, wired differently than mere mortals. Mann is no different. As an 8 & under, she was swimming the 200 fly and the 400 IM in meets. At age 10, she decided she was going to be one of the world’s best swimmers. And to prove it, she swam across Hawaii’s Au’au Channel (a distance of about 9.3 miles), which took her nearly six-and-a-half hours.
That was also the age at which she learned that Michael Phelps has just won his 8th gold medal at the 2008 Olympics. She writes that his historic achievement triggered “a myriad of emotions . . . the most prominent of which resembled jealousy.” And she told her parents, “I’m going to have more than that one day. I’ll get nine.”
She got off to a good start. When she was 12, she set national age group records in the 800 and the 1500. At age 13, she moved from the Chicago area to Clearwater, Florida, so she could train there. “My plan was to make the 2012 Olympic Team a year and half later,” she writes, “get gold, and then move back to Illinois and start my freshman year of regular high school to be reunited with my sisters and cats.”
She started swimming nine times per week – seven of the practices were 7,000 meters each and two were 10,000 meters. That converts to about 74,000 yards – or 42 miles.
She ultimately broke Sippy Woodhead’s national age group record in the 800, which had stood for 34 years. She also set 1500 record. (Both records still stand). But the real goal was qualifying for the Olympics. She made finals in three events: the 400 and 800 free and the 400 IM – a remarkable achievement at just 14. She didn’t finish in the top two of any of the races, but she still seemed destined to be one of America’s next water wonders.
The sting of not making the Olympic team, she writes, prompted a decision: “I would have to stay in Florida another four years because I wouldn’t give up on my dream this easily. . . . I’d channel this failure into my training. I had four years to get to the top. I would make every day count. . . . I had to be an Olympian and I couldn’t just be an average Olympian.”
Her intense training quickly resumed, and before long she had broken two more national age group records – in the 400 IM and the 1500 – and won three gold medals at the Junior Pan Pacs meet. She also finished second in both the 5km and 10km race at the 2013 Open Water National Championship meet.
But she clashed with her coach, who she gives a pseudonym, though SwimSwam has identified him as Randy Reese. She decided to move to the fabled North Baltimore Aquatic Club – better known as NBAC and the home of Michael Phelps. She stood out, even among the professionals in the group. After winning the 400 free at a high-level meet, the then-NBAC coach, Bob Bowman, said she could choose the workout everyone would do at a future practice. She chose a 6,400 meter ladder set with a mix of free and IM, on tight intervals. The set was her favorite, she writes, though most of the NBAC training group “hated” it.
That may explain what happened next. NBAC swimmers would spend more than one-third of the year at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. Mann loved being there – even the days when they’d have an early morning workout, a mid-day workout, and evening workout (with an hour of weight training squeezed in as well). But she didn’t click with much of the group. She recounts an episode at the OTC when a swimmer a decade older than her said, “Who would ever want to be your friend?” None of the other swimmers present stood up for her.
But she eventually found a friend, who happened to the most celebrated NBAC swimmer other than Phelps: Allison Schmitt (she had won gold in the most recent Olympics). Schmitt befriended Mann after she fibbed to Bowman about Schmitt and other members of the training group staying out beyond their curfew. “Allison realized I could be trusted,” writes Mann. “She took me under her wing.”
Mann describes Schmitt as “funny, charismatic, and it was impossible to have a bad time around her.” And that’s a pretext for Mann characterizing her life at the time in glowing terms: “I was the coolest, happiest sixteen-year-old in the whole world. I knew everything there was to know about the world I inhabited. Nothing could stop me from having fun and achieving my dreams.”
Alas, adversity followed soon thereafter. Mann had also begun to focus on open water swimming, seeing it as another path to qualifying for the Olympic team. But that dream was dashed following a bruising race in Russia’s Kazanka River. (A Spanish swimmer punched her in the lip during the race.) Mann describes the race in terms that will be familiar to any competitive swimmer: she ended up with the proverbial piano on her back. With one kilometer to go, she writes, “My body was giving up. My brain couldn’t inspire it. My heart threatened to pump out of my chest. Every time I lifted my head to sight for the end of the course, the land spun. My brain wasn’t winning. My breaths were ragged, like sobs.”
Mental pain followed the physical pain. As the newly-crowned Olympians “were jumping around, cheering and hugging each other,” writes Mann, their shouts of joy “sounded like bloodcurdling screams.” She vividly describes the anguish that followed:
I wanted my mom. I needed my mom. My eyes fell on a portable trailer bathroom just outside the Mixed Zone. I rushed inside before anyone could see me. . . . I stared at myself in the mirror as I sobbed, taking in every detail of my face. The wrinkle in the center of my forehead was deep. My eyes were red and puffy, the right one swollen from a punch. My hair was plastered to my head. My top lip was swollen – twice the size of my bottom one. I looked like hell. I sounded like hell. I felt like hell. Every breath took effort, as if my body couldn’t quite remember how to do it. . . . What had my entire life of training been for, if not to win Olympic gold in open water? Who the hell even was I without my Olympic dreams?
Because the open water trials occurred a full year before the Olympics, Mann had time to refocus her efforts on qualifying for the American team in pool events. On her phone, she had a countdown to Olympic Trials, which revealed she had 400 practices remaining.
I was determined not to waste a single one. I raced every time I was in the pool as if I were racing in Trials. . . . I counted every stroke, never letting my stroke count go above forty-one strokes per fifty meters. If it did, I made sure I only did forty on the next lap.
Such was her dedication, she writes, “I brushed off my college recruiting trips since I refused to miss a practice.” And with the benefit of hindsight, Mann can now see that her life was highly unorthodox.
I had absolutely no idea how “normal” teenagers acted. I spent my entire day in a pool, surrounded by people a decade older than me. People catered to me all the time. I got massages. I had a nutritionist. I had people who booked my travel competitions and analyzed my blood. I had weekly filmed technique sessions with my coach. I didn’t know what the real word was like.
She writes one page later: “I refused to have a life outside swimming.”
But the laser focus seemed to work. Mann continued to drop time and felt confident that in college competition the following year – she was planning to attend the University of Southern California – she could break the American record in the 400 IM.
But then “everything went to hell.” On February 28, 2016, she had a panic attack. The next morning, she struggled through practice. At a meet soon thereafter, she swam her slowest 200 free in six years. She scratched the rest of her events (at her mom’s behest) and flailed through practice the following week.
By the start of April, nothing had changed. A blood test showed she had a range of issues, including vitamin B12 deficiency and low glucose. Her resting heart rate, which had been in the low thirties, shot up to the mid-fifties. She had irregular sleep patterns – 16 hours one night and none at all other nights. “My Olympic spot was slipping through my fingers,” she writes. “My best efforts were no longer good enough.”
Less than a month before Olympic Trials, she began to experience back pain. An MRI revealed that she had herniated her L5-L1 disc and had bulging discs at L3-4 and L4-5. But Mann knew the source of her ailments was something else: overtraining.
When it came time for Olympic Trials, she scratched the 400 IM, where she was seeded second. She was in the stands when Elisabeth Beisel finished second – .23 seconds faster than Mann’s best time, which she’d done while in heavy training. “I was a racer,” writes Mann. “I would have gotten that. I would have found a way to go .23 seconds faster. What the fuck am I doing? Why didn’t I swim that? What is wrong with me?”
She also scratched the 200 free, the 200 IM, and 200 fly. When it came time to swim the 800, she writes that just before the race, “I didn’t want to dive in.” And after the first 100, “I felt like a corpse.” She went 11 seconds slower than her best time – and missed the final by one spot. She left Omaha that afternoon and drove with her parents back to her home in the Chicago suburbs. When one of the finalists (Cierra Runge) scratched, Mann had the opportunity to take her spot. She passed. “I didn’t want to swim for another two months, even if it meant going to the Olympics.”
Mann went on to USC, and swam there, but she describes a mostly unhappy experience – a product, it seems, of coaching challenges and her own burnout. The book closes with a vivid account of her 35-mile swim in 2019 across three channels in Hawaii – becoming the first person ever to complete the swim.
Since then, Mann has been almost entirely absent from competitive swimming meets, other than dabbling in U.S. Masters meets in 2023, and putting her degree from the prestigious USC screenwriting program to good use. But something miraculous happened recently. She entered the 1500 at the U.S. Summer Championship meet. Her time (16:43.69) was 38 seconds slower than her best performance – and about 31 seconds slower than her time as a 14-year-old. But it was good enough for 6th place – and suddenly she now’s back on the U.S. National team.
Time will tell what happens next in Mann’s swimming career and whether she decides to make a final run at the Olympics. Whatever she does, it’s clear that the final chapter of her story is incomplete. When she writes that chapter, I suspect she’ll put her formidable storytelling skills to good use and produce something riveting – for swimmers and non-swimmers alike.
Matt Rees is a Masters swimmer in Walnut Creek, California, a former White House speechwriter, and the president of Geonomica, a ghostwriting firm.
Read the full story on SwimSwam: Outside The Lanes: A Pro Swimmer’s Story of Resilience, Reinvention & Redefining Success
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