Lydia Brutvan: Walking Away to Move Forward, Redefining My Athletic Journey Beyond College

I walked away from competitive swimming the spring of my junior year in college. A year and a half later, I became the youngest woman to ever win one of the most famous races in the world of endurance triathlon. 

Photo credit: Jamie Kennard

Most athletes hit the peak of their athletic career in college. In fact, most athletes hit that peak and then their careers end shortly after, when they graduate. Very few athletes, unless they enter the professional world of their sport, peak athletically after they exit collegiate athletics. And that’s not their fault—they typically aren’t presented with many other options. Collegiate sports are almost always upheld as the preferable, if not only, route to take if athletes want to continue competing after high school. 

But what about after college? Or even during college, if collegiate athletics aren’t for you? 

I started swimming competitively when I was eight years old and fell in love. I loved how straightforward it was. I loved the grit. I quickly found that the times I was working hard in the pool were the times when my mind felt the quietest. At eight years old, I didn’t have a name for the noise that filled my head sometimes, the circulating thoughts could refuse to dissipate. On good days, the noise was annoying; on bad days, it was debilitating. My love for the sport had its ups and downs, as all things do, but after a decade of competing, I knew I wanted to continue swimming at the collegiate level. Swimming was one of my main considerations when choosing a school, and I entered my freshman year of undergraduate with every intention of swimming for all four years. 

Photo credit: Wesleyan Athletics

But pretty early into my collegiate career, my relationship with swimming began to change. It was no longer the remedy to my anxiety; but rather, more often than not, the cause. The structure and culture of college varsity sports was far from what I had expected, so different from the kind of swimming I had come to know growing up in a small but competitive town. The large team, the social pressures, the glorified work-hard-play-hard culture—for many, it was exactly what they had come to college for, but for me, it was alienating. I was one of the only people on the team who worked part time while in school, one of the only people who would rather go to bed after a weekend swim meet rather than get drunk with the rest of the team. Swimming became something to be dreaded, not because of a loss of love for the sport itself, but because of a lack of love for everything that now came with it. My junior year, it reached a breaking point. 

Many athletes face a point like this in their collegiate careers. Maybe the coaching style on their team isn’t for them, maybe they don’t click with their teammates, maybe their love for their sport takes a newfound backseat to whatever passions college has unlocked in them, maybe collegiate sports just aren’t what they thought they would be. But when contemplating their options, athletes grapple with the many years of competition that brought them to competing in college in the first place. For most, their sport has become so intertwined with their identity that leaving college sports isn’t an option. Without my sport, who am I? 

Photo credit: Ironman Photography

I knew that if I walked away from collegiate swimming, I wouldn’t be leaving swimming behind entirely as long as I kept pursuing triathlon, a passion that had always been superseded by competitive swimming. But I knew, should I choose to leave the team, my relationship with swimming itself would still face a massive change. I knew that if I chose to prioritize triathlon, the financial burden would be a major step up from that imposed by swimming. The plan had always been to swim for all of my time at school, and for thirteen years I had never truly considered leaving the sport behind. I had always been rigid, type A, stick-to-the-plan. To make such a leap of faith contradicted what felt safe. Maybe swimming had turned into something that heightened my anxiety, but surely taking such a drastic, unplanned, expensive step would be even worse? 

I made the leap. I was told by coaches that I would regret my decision, that I would become unmotivated without the structure that college swimming provided. I was discouraged by my friends, for reasons ranging from social to physical to mental. 

And yet. I’m a better athlete now than I ever was while competing in college. I’m also a happier athlete now than I ever was while competing in college, in spite of leaving collegiate athletics behind. Or arguably, because of it. It’s easier to quantify being faster than it is to quantify being happier, so being faster is usually what people notice first when considering my post-collegiate career. But I wouldn’t be faster had I not made the decision to choose being happier over doing what I thought I was supposed to do. 

Photo credit: Jamie Kennard

The bottom line is this: you always, ALWAYS have a choice. If you know you’re unhappy in your sport, or on your team, or with how you’re training, you always have the option to do something different. If you know that ending your athletic career when you graduate college isn’t something you want to do, you always have the option to do something different. Which sounds obvious, but when you’ve been doing the same sport for years or even decades, it can be hard to change things, or even to recognize that changing things is an option. My experience taught me that, when given the choice between a situation I’m unhappy with and an alternative that is uncertain, I will choose uncertainty every. Single. Time. Just because your path isn’t the well-beaten one doesn’t mean it’s not the right one for you; it just means it’s not the right one for everyone. 

I graduated with my undergraduate degree in May, and now I’m in my first semester of law school. I’m well and truly a post-college athlete; I’m so broke, I’m so busy, and I’ve never loved the process more than I do right now. I experience the least amount of anxiety over sports now than I have in my entire life, even though I’m also racing at a higher level of competition than I ever have. That doesn’t mean that I care less about my performance now; I care more than ever. But I’m finally in a place where I can process that in a way that doesn’t manifest as anxiety. 

Take the leap. Try doing something new, or try doing something old in a new way. Embrace the uncertain. And if it’s wrong, try again until you find what’s right.