Swimming Taught Me: Kelly Honke
Kelly Honke (Dunn): Nebraska Swimming Class of 2015
Academic All-Big Ten (2013, 2014, 2015)
Nebraska Student-Athlete HERO Leadership Award (2013)
Tom Osborne Citizenship Team (2014, 2015, 2016)
Nebraska Scholar-Athlete Honor Roll (Fall 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014; Spring 2013, 2014, 2015)
Kelly’s Career:
After a solid high school career, I was able to fulfill my dream of competing at a Big Ten University. I spent 4 years swimming at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. While my achievements in the water weren't quite what I hoped, I had the opportunity to be team captain for the last half of my career, and this to me was the most meaningful part of the experience.
Kelly’s Present:
I now live in Lincoln, Nebraska where I've started a family and have been working as a sales woman for a mid-size company in town, actually right across the street from the University that brought me here about 7 years ago.
Kelly’s Reflection:
Swimming will always hold a special place in my heart, and I wouldn't trade the experience for anything. I'm a true believer that there is purpose in everything, and while swimming wasn't always best times and celebration for me, the heartbreak and struggles have helped shape me in to the woman that I am. St. Catherine of Siena once said, "Be who you were created to be and you will set the world on fire." It took me a while to realize that I wasn't just created to be Kelly, the swimmer, but once I did, it changed everything.
As athletes, and especially in sports like swimming, we are constantly comparing ourselves to others; always hungry to be better than we were the day before. The challenging balance for me was remaining hungry but also loving myself. My senior year of high school I developed what I now realize was a pretty serious case of bulimia, a series of binging and purging for most of that year. It stopped when I got to college because I started working closely with a nutritionist and was worried she would find out. I never told anyone about my body image battles until after college though. I struggled in college, but mostly with a pretty typical plateau that many athletes face. My swimming career ended abruptly, anti-climatically from a performance standpoint, and not at all how I imagined it would. I swam poorly at my final meet, and remember the empty feeling I had when I looked up at the score board after my final race and realized I wasn't good enough to compete on our relay later that day. 12 years came to a close in a matter of about 52 seconds.
Once swimming ended, the bulimia returned, but thankfully not so severely. I remember very specifically the moment I decided to stop fighting my body and start loving life after swimming, and I have not struggled with the actual binging and purging for about 3 years now. Learning how to exercise for my body and health and not for performance was difficult, but I finally realized that exercise wasn't about having thin thighs or toned arms to look a certain way, but it was to take care of my heart, my mind, my muscles. I still struggle in some ways with confidence, and often find myself playing the comparison game. But loving who you are is a decision you make every day just like anything else in life. My college coach worked with me through a lot of my mental battles during my time at Nebraska, and he taught me how to "love the process." This is a lesson I carry with me still in all aspects of life.
The lessons I carry from swimming don’t end there though. Was it hard? Yes. Did I lose sight of the joy in the sport? You bet. However, it took me losing the joy to realize how much joy swimming brought me, and more than that, swimming taught me that you have to fight for what matters to you. When I simply couldn’t swim fast enough at meets to score points or qualify for bigger and better meets, I had to go back to why I loved swimming beyond how well I performed. It was the people, the coaches, the discipline, the challenge. Swimming taught me that nothing is actually won on our own, and victory is always sweeter with your friends, family and team behind you. Swimming taught me that the process is more important than the result because this is where we are refined as athletes but also as people. Swimming taught me that although the outcomes aren’t always in my control, my response to an outcome is and this is where I should spend my time focusing on who I am.
Swimming was more fun that it was pain, don't get me wrong. And like I said, I wouldn't trade it for anything. If I could go back though, I would remind myself that my identity was not who I was in the water, and my value could never be defined by the time it took me to swim a race.
