Swimmers will be in the water doing laps and working on their technique, each trying to cut precious tenths of a second off their race times. If you are looking for swimmer and Co-captain Hillary Jones '01, however, the water is not the place to find her. More likely, you'll see her riding a stationary bike, or running stairs, or maybe doing plyometrics. Jones, you see, is the swimmer that can't swim.
Let's clarify that: Jones can swim. In fact, she swims very well, but because of an injury she never swims in practice. The only time she swims is for meets, where her speed in the 100m sprint allows her to spend only 52 seconds in the water.
Jones' life centered around the water from an early age, and although she didn't begin swimming competitively until she was 12, she said she was a "water rat." Unfortunately, competitive swimming went from a joy to a nightmare in a few short years. When she entered high school, Jones swam for both a club and her school, but on a relatively low yardage training program. In her sophomore year, however, her school hired a new swimming coach, who switched her to a high-yardage program.
While she was doing the program, she began to feel pain, but tried to fight through it. Even when the pain became more severe, her coach falsely accused her of not being tough enough. The coach's ignorance eventually caused her to do irreversible damage to her shoulder ligaments. Jones explained that, like many good female athletes, she is loose-ligamented. This allows her to perform at a high level, but also leaves her prone to injury. "After five weeks in the program, I couldn't raise my elbows above my head," Jones said. Essentially, the over-training had caused her shoulder ligaments to lose their elasticity, making them analogous to an old rubber band that no longer snaps back into its original shape.
Eventually, the pain became so severe that Jones could swim for only small amounts of time before she hurt too much to continue. She finished out the rest of her high school career and was successful, although the only training she did was to ride a stationary bike for hours on end. After her senior season she had surgery on her shoulder to repair some of the damage by shortening four ligaments. Shoulder surgery, however, is the most difficult orthopedic surgery to perform, and the hardest type to recover from. She did intensive rehab for five months afterwards and continues to do physical therapy.
While the surgery helped, Jones is still unable to swim for even short periods without pain. This requires her to come up with imaginative ways to train for a sport without actually performing the activities associated with it. With help from her coach at Amherst, whom she says has come up with creative ways for her to train, she does a program that involves many different activities. These include biking for long, moderate stretches, running when the weather is nice, and plyometrics with the divers. She does also spend some time in the water, doing vertical kicks while standing in deep water for long periods of time.
She also does something called the swim bench, which according to Jones, "simulates the underwater pull part of the stroke, but not the recovery part."
Despite not being able to work on her swimming technique in practices, Jones has still experienced much success at Amherst. She will compete in the National Championship meet in March and she holds the Amherst record in both the 50m and 100m freestyle. Despite this success, she says that she has spent some time wondering what could have been if she had stayed injury free. But, she said, "I try not to think about 'what if' too much because it becomes frustrating." Instead, her outlook on the situation is, "You have to do the best with what you have; we all have different things that we have to overcome. Some people love training, but hate racing, and none of us are perfect. For me, my shoulder is the one ingredient that does not work." She admits that before she was injured she had her sights set on a Division I program, but, she says, "If I hadn't been injured, then I wouldn't have had the opportunity to come here, and I'm really happy here."