diving

Last Updated on September 30, 2026

I Used to Be a Diver

I was trying to remember recently how I got interested in diving in the first place. It was such a big part of my life for a long time, and then at some point I just stopped. I never went back to it. I don’t even think about it that much anymore. My dad found these black-and-white photos that he took of me diving when I was in high school, and looking at them brought back all of these memories that feel so physical and visceral, like my body remembers this whole life that I haven’t thought about in years.

Starting at age 5, I was always on the summer swim team, and then eventually I started swimming year-round in elementary school. I really loved swimming. I was also doing gymnastics when I was a kid, and I was really good at that too. I did tumbling and balance beam and uneven parallel bars and floor. I even took rhythmic gymnastics for a while. I was really active. I think I had a pretty good sense of where my body was in space, which obviously makes a lot of sense when I think about how I eventually ended up diving. Diving is sort of this strange combination of swimming and gymnastics, and I already loved both of those things.

When I was in 4th or 5th grade, my friend Gaelyn Felix was diving. She was practicing at Stanford with a club team, and I remember being really interested in learning how to do what she did. I don’t remember whether I stayed with it continuously from that point or whether I took a break for a while when I was doing other sports in junior high, but at some point diving became a pretty regular part of my life. By high school, I was training all year round.

I went to Castilleja, and after school I would walk over to Stanford and go to diving practice there, and then my mom would pick me up afterward. I remember doing one-meter and three-meter there, and practicing over and over and over again. At some point, I think maybe during my senior year, my diving coach John Todd was also coaching at Paly, so I practiced on the boards there too. I can’t remember exactly why that arrangement changed, but I remember being at both pools.

The funny thing is that I didn’t compete very much in high school. There were club diving meets and invitationals that we would sometimes go to, but Castilleja didn’t have a diving team, so I didn’t have regular high school meets the way someone who was on a swimming or diving team normally would. I was allowed to compete for Castilleja at the CCS championships, though, and I think I did that once, maybe twice. The pictures my dad found are from one of those CCS meets. I’m pretty sure it was either my junior or senior year.

I remember that meet partly because it was one of the few times my parents came to see me compete, and I remember not doing particularly well. It’s kind of funny to look at the pictures now because the thing I remember about that day is that I didn’t do that well, but that’s not what the photographs show. They show me standing at the end of the board with my arms above my head, and then these moments of my body folded into a tuck or stretched out in the air. I look like a diver. Obviously I was a diver, but there’s something strange about seeing photographic evidence of this version of myself and realizing, Oh yeah. I really did this. I spent years doing this.

I went to Kenyon College in Ohio. Being on the diving team was a very serious commitment and became a huge part of my college life. I was a good diver in high school, but at Kenyon I learned so much more, especially on three-meter. We had dry-land exercises and training in the mornings and practiced in the pool in the afternoons and evenings. I practiced learning dives on the trampoline using both spinning belts and twisting belts. The swimming and diving program at Kenyon was a really big deal, and we traveled all over Ohio to meets and trained over holiday breaks. Sometimes we would train at Ohio State University to use their bubbler. They had a diving well with a chamber of air that could be released and break up the surface of the water so that it wouldn’t hurt so much to smack the water when learning new dives. Even so, I remember having huge bruises on my arms and legs from smacking. I once hit my toe on the board and was on crutches in the snow for a few weeks.

My coach was Fletcher Gilders, who was such a character. Even though he was technically retired, he was incredibly committed to us. I can still hear him calling my name just as I surfaced after a dive and he wanted to give me feedback. He told us so many crazy stories about his life. He told us that he had medaled in two different Olympics and competed in swimming, diving, trampoline and gymnastics. He had been in the Air Force and claimed to have seen proof of alien life. He hunted deer in the local woods and made us venison stew over breaks. He’d sometimes slap a venison steak to thaw on my back instead of an ice pack after practice.

The diving team itself was pretty small, even though the swimming and diving program as a whole was huge, so we spent a lot of time together. I can still remember all of these tiny pieces of that world that wouldn’t mean anything to anybody else. I remember my drying off routine with my shammy towels. I remember tucking it in the side of my swimsuit as I climbed up the three-meter ladder and then the sound of it smacking the ground when I threw it down. I remember constantly getting wet and drying off and getting wet again. I remember squeezing the water out of my hair in a specific way.

I developed a system for drying myself off that I still do now without thinking about it. I dry my left arm, then my right arm, then my right leg, then my left leg. I do it in this very specific order, and I still do it every time I get out of the shower. I don’t think I ever consciously decided that was how I was going to dry myself. I just did it so many thousands of times around a pool that it became part of my body. There are these little rituals from diving that apparently got stored somewhere in my nervous system and never left.

I also remember how hard diving was for me. My mom used to tell people that I wasn’t afraid, and I remember thinking, No, I am afraid. I’m definitely afraid. Diving was scary. You’re throwing your body into the air, sometimes from three meters above the water, and rotating and twisting and then trying to know exactly where you are so that you can come out at the right moment and enter the water correctly. And you do it over and over again.

Competition made all of that much more intense for me. Diving is such an exposed sport. You’re standing there in a swimsuit, and everyone is looking at you. They announce your name. They announce the dive you’re about to do and the degree of difficulty. Then everyone watches while you do it, and immediately afterward the judges give you numbers telling you how well you did. Then you climb back up and do it again and again.

Adrenaline doesn’t necessarily help you in diving. In swimming, adrenaline can make you swim faster. In a lot of sports, being really activated and excited can help. But diving is so much about timing and precision that if you’re overly anxious or your adrenaline gets too high, it can completely interfere with what your body already knows how to do. I think sometimes I would almost have an out-of-body experience when I competed. I could do something perfectly well in practice and then get into a meet and suddenly everything felt different.

I liked practicing much more than I liked competing. I liked learning the dives. I liked figuring out how to do them. I liked repeating things until my body understood them. I liked the challenge of it. I was never really someone who wanted to show off. I didn’t quit diving and then spend the next years trying to impress people at swimming pools by doing elaborate dives. When I was done, I was just done.

I dove my freshman year at Kenyon, my sophomore year, and then the first part of my junior year. Then I went to Australia, and when I came back for my senior year, I decided I didn’t want to dive anymore. I had burned out. I had spent years training and competing and pushing myself, and I just didn’t want to do it. So I stopped.

I have mixed feelings looking back on all of it now. It was such a huge part of my high school and college experience, and I learned a lot from it. I also think sports were really stressful for me, and I probably pushed myself harder than was good for me sometimes. There were people on my teams who were simply more consistent than I was, and it was hard to be somebody who could sometimes do really well and sometimes not do well at all. If I could go back and choose again, I wouldn’t have spent so much of my life doing competitive sports.

When I look at these pictures my dad took, I feel tender toward that version of myself. I can see how much I was doing. I can see the strength and the training and the years of repetition that went into being able to put my body into those positions in the air. The pictures don’t show the fear I felt much of the time. I was anxious. I didn’t always perform the way I wanted to. I didn’t always enjoy being watched or judged. But I kept getting back on the board for a very long time.

And then eventually I didn’t.

That’s part of the story too. Diving was something I loved, something I worked incredibly hard at, something that shaped my body and my habits and a huge portion of my young adulthood. And then there came a point when I had had enough, and I let it be over. I don’t think I understood at the time how completely I was closing a chapter of my life. I was just done.

Now, all these years later, I can get out of the shower and dry my left arm, then my right arm, then my right leg, then my left leg, without ever consciously thinking about why. And somewhere inside that routine is this whole other life — chlorine and springboards and wet hair and shammy towels and twisting belts and walking from Castilleja to Stanford after school, and a girl standing at the end of a diving board with her arms over her head, preparing to throw herself into the air.