Main character energy

Rowan Clarke meets elite swimmer, Becca Mann, about her candid new memoir, Outside the Lanes

There are plenty of swimming memoirs, but none like Becca Mann’s new book, Outside the Lanes. Utterly engrossing, it reads like a novel. As it hooks you and draws you in, you find yourself absorbed, backing Becca, gunning for her, feeling her every triumph, failure, fear, strife and beauty with her.

“I think that the reason for that is because I’m a fiction writer, so I like writing stuff that’s very character driven,” she says. “It isn’t your typical memoir. I don’t like that style of writing.”

Hero of her own story

Becca’s engaging prose isn’t just a style choice. Dealing with difficult, deeply personal content without shying away from painting her – and others’ – flaws, Becca says that she found it helpful to think of herself as a character.

“I had to separate myself from the character of myself and think about me as a character with a want, a need, a flaw, and how all of those were in opposition to each other,” she says. “Once I did that, I was able to not be precious about painting myself in a bad light, or not write about something because it might upset so-and-so. Obviously, everything happened. But at the same time, I was pretending that it wasn’t me and it wasn’t my life.”

From a very young age, Becca lived in a vivid, imaginative world in which she was her own heroine. At the age of five, she had embraced the ‘quest’ to move up to her older sister’s swimming lane, allying herself with Lucy in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, Joan of Arc. ‘I was the heroine of my own swimming novel’, she writes.

It also sent her on real life adventures that very few children would dream of undertaking. At the age of ten years old, she set out to swim ten miles from the Hawaiian island of Lanai to Maui.

“As a kid, I was overly confident in my ability to swim for a very long time and to do it painlessly. I proved that I was capable, but I didn’t prove the painlessly part,” says Becca. “It was one of the first instances where I realised that the challenge was what made it so much fun, because there’s nothing better than struggling for three hours and touching land. The pride, joy and accomplishment that comes after is so much greater and more powerful than the pain that you go through during the time.”

Creative swimming

It was a gargantuan feat for a ten-year-old child, but that she swam through the pain and learned lessons from the experience was testament to Becca’s mindset – and her love of quests, challenges and competition.

“All I wanted to do when I was a kid was pick up a sword and go to battle for my kingdom, which is not a viable life path. So, my way to do that was through writing and swimming,” says Becca. “The swimming aspect was that my brain would run wild with all these scenarios that I’d come up with, and process what I wanted to write. I could be in sync with my imagination because my body was occupied. The other thing is that swimming is inherently very dramatic when you’re at the elite level. I was going to battle whenever I’d have a swim meet; I felt like I was training for the battle ahead.”

As in all dystopian tales, Becca’s story also contains plenty of darkness. Her creativity, ambition and success countered by her struggle with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, failure and self-doubt – none of which she shies away from describing.

“The first symptoms of OCD, intrusive thoughts that were distressing to me, came when I was eight or nine… but the floodgates opened when I moved away from home,” she says. “Swimming both helped and hindered it. I thought that I had to do particular things, or think certain ways in order to swim fast, but also, if I was having a terrible day where my brain was in an OCD spiral, and I was upset, anxious, or having a panic attack, the one thing that could always cure it was swimming fast.”

Her vivid accounts of training sessions and competitions, winning and losing races, friendships and rivalries with some of the best-known names in competitive swimming, triumphs and failures in the pool and open water, are a fascinating window into the world of elite swimming.

But her struggles with chasing greatness, achieving, failing and finding peace with those failures are entirely relatable. For outdoor swimmers like us who swim to soothe mental health conditions or somehow better ourselves, it’s inspiring.

How to fail

Becca’s successes are matched by how she learns to fail. In her book, one swim in particular stands out. Set in a location of dreams for anyone who loves Gothic and fantasy, Lake Bled, Becca describes one of her most difficult swims, which was gruelling and emotionally painful. But she also describes how she has learned to cope with such extreme challenges.

“Whenever something starts to go wrong, I just accept it. Like, if I get dropped from a pack, I’m like, OK, people have broken away, I’m not going to freak out about that. How do I get up to where I need to be? What are my energy levels? What do I possess right now, in this moment, to get where I want to be,” she says. “I’m able to look at it from a very objective perspective, where I almost see myself as an avatar in a video game, assessing my energy levels and skills.”

Having swum in both the pool and open water, it’s the mixture of challenge, adventure, unpredictability, grit and strategy that Becca loves about open water swimming.

“It speaks to the battle that I was talking about earlier, where I like to pick up a sword and fight. It very much satisfies that in me,” she says. “I’ve actually gone back to it. I’ve been training for six months now, and I went to the open water nationals a month ago and was the fifth American, so I should make the national team, which is really exciting.”

Being diagnosed with OCD and having therapy has helped Becca deal with some of the intrusive thoughts that plagued her swimming career, including questioning her worthiness. As she returns to competitive swimming, those thoughts haven’t gone away, but she’s learned to deal with them, and her love of swimming has strengthened.

“I feel like I have an extremely healthy relationship with swimming now,” she says. “I think my relationship with swimming before was based on love for the sport, but also this need to prove that I was better than everybody else.

“I’m very much a doer. Even if a goal was years in the making, the second I got it, I was like, ok, what’s next? I never stopped to celebrate,” says Becca. “But, one of my friends told me this, and I thought it was really insightful and kind. She said, you don’t celebrate your accomplishments, but you’re always celebrating the person that you’ve become through this journey. I really liked that. I don’t stop and celebrate the accomplishments, but I take what I learned and I become a better person for it.”

‘Outside the Lanes’ by Becca Mann is published by Blue Star Press and is available to buy now.