The Mona McSharry Interview: Emerging from the lows after the extreme highs of Tokyo

Her alarm croaked at 5.30am. The short journey to the university pool is typically undertaken by foot. On this December morning, though, it’s minus 2C outside and so the key is turned in the ignition.

Two hours of gliding up and down the 50 metres of water that has become McSharry’s second home these last three years has fed an appetite. Tossing together a post-training snack ever so slightly delays our conversation.

There are five days to Christmas. The work continues. The work can’t stop. 2024 is the year she has had circled on the calendar long before Tennessee and Tokyo.

At 23 years of age, Paris is Mona’s Olympics. Paris is her shot. A Paris podium is not beyond her reach.

That reality does not daunt McSharry. She’s excited for what is to come. She’s entering this defining chapter with a smile back on her face.

Such a positive outlook is all we’ve ever known of the Sligo swimmer. That warm, familiar smile was there when, as a 20-year-old Olympic debutant, she emerged poolside for the final of the women’s 100m breaststroke in Tokyo.

It was there when she walked to her block for the 100m breaststroke final at the World Championships the summer just gone. It was there right before she swam to World junior glory and a hat-trick of European U23 golds.

That warm, familiar smile of hers disappeared out of sight during a difficult 2022.

For a chunk of that year, she had no desire to compete in Paris. She had no desire to get in the pool. She had come to hate the one thing she had always loved.

And to have reached a point where she hated swimming made her feel, for a period, as if she hated her own life. That was a reality she struggled with.

McSharry is chatting from her apartment just off the University of Tennessee campus. It was in the same apartment where months of unhappiness and emotional unrest spilled over one Sunday morning in July 2022.

“I woke up and I just started crying,” McSharry recalls. “I called my friends back home and I told them, ‘I am not happy, I am really upset, and I am not sure what is going on with me’.

“They were honestly amazing at calming me down and helping me figure out the start of what was going on.”

That Sunday morning was her rock bottom and the beginning of a full reset.

“I was hiding from myself the fact that I wasn’t happy in swimming because this is something I have mapped out for my life and something that I felt I had to do.

“In my head, I was like, I am going until 2024, that’s my plan, that is the big year. I am not stopping.

“It is hard when you feel trapped in something. But I wasn’t trapped. I could stop at any time. But it doesn’t feel like that. That all came to a head that Sunday morning.”

Those Sunday morning tears were the tipping point of an almost 10-month period where McSharry’s light dimmed and her form dipped.

***

Before the low had come an unbelievable and unexpected high.

In the summer of 2021, she succeeded in getting people out of bed at the most ungodly hours. At two and three in the morning, we woke and watched her glide through the water and the rounds of the 100m breaststroke.

Ireland hadn’t had an Olympic swimming finalist since you-know-who 25 years earlier.

Tokyo was meant to be Mona’s preparation Games. Instead, she announced
herself on the biggest stage.

As the five-ring roadshow pulled out of the Japanese capital, the Irish team were brought into meetings to discuss the void that greeted the falling curtain of an Olympic cycle.

They were told it is OK to not know your next move. They were told it is okay to feel lost.

“I remember my response being, ‘I am going to be so busy as I am heading straight back to school to start my sophomore year. We are going to be training and racing, and so I am going to be fine. I don’t have time to feel low’.”

That lack of time would ultimately prove more sapping than she knew.

Reflecting now, she knows she did not allow herself enough space on the calendar and in her daily goings-about to properly come down and decompress from owning an Olympic final lane.

Instead, her mood suffered and went south. And continued slowly in that direction for months.

That autumn semester was rigidly structured and grindingly relentless. In lecture halls and in the pool, she wore herself thin. She heaped crippling pressure on herself.

“I had just competed at the Olympics and did a lot better than I thought I was going to do. I made a final. Because of all these things, I was building up in my own head that I had to be this great now in everything I was doing,” McSharry explained of her draining mentality.

“It just got to a point where I was not enjoying training. I didn’t want to be there. It became a chore. Everything around swimming became a chore. I also felt really guilty for not wanting to be there. So I was constantly being conflicted.”

That December, she travelled to Abu Dhabi for the World short course championships. She departed with a bronze medal in her favoured distance.

Her first World senior medal brought little joy. She was more relieved to have met expectations, both her own and the ones she perceived others to have.

“I was in a place where I need to perform because people are watching me and then when I do perform, I can calm down, rather than racing because I enjoy racing. I lost a lot of the reasons why you should do sport.”

This unhappiness continued and remained unconfronted throughout the spring and into the summer of ‘22.

She pushed through. Until, of course, she could push no more. A wall... and not a tiled wall she could touch, turn, and push off.

“That feeling of being low definitely built over time. After swimming at World short course, I did speak to my coach about how I felt completing the races. But we still kind of thought that was related to me putting too much pressure on myself.

“Then the spring semester is just so busy that you just keep going day-to-day and you hope you are going to feel better the next day.

“It’s not like I was in a low every minute of every day. But it just all came to a head. I was completely broken down at that point. I didn’t really know there was anything going wrong to try and talk to
someone until I broke down completely.”

Once the Europeans were out of the way in August, she checked out for an entire month.

There was much to unravel and unpack.

MCSHARRY has lived in the water since she fell into an Austrian pool during an early family holiday. The fall prompted her parents into action. They would take it upon themselves to teach their daughter how to tread and kick and splash.

Once home, her mother Viola carried Mona into the sea at Mullaghmore. There began her education. At eight years young, she graduated to join the Marlins club.

Throughout her secondary school years, Mona and her brother, Mouric, rose at 4.30am each midweek morning. Session number one of the day began at 6.30am up the road in Ballyshannon.

At 15, she was 0.9 seconds off the Olympic qualifying time for Rio. At 16, she was European junior champion. A week after turning 17, she was World junior champion.

Swimming was so much of her existence. And now, in the summer of 2022, she was trying to grapple with this hatred of the sport that had come to define her.

“It was really hard because I’ve grown up and always loved it. I’ve never had a situation like this. Everyone has days where they are like, ugh, why do I do this. But that is really only a passing thought.

“Up until that point, I loved it so much. It was everything. It was my whole life, almost, and shaped a lot of things that happened in my life. Once that was gone, it made it very hard because I felt like you are almost hating your life.”

McSharry describes herself as an introvert. That summer, she stayed on in Knoxville after the last bell had sounded on the academic year. Housemates had packed up and shipped out. Aside from her puppy, Luna, she was alone.

She had deliberately closed herself off.

“When I went to practice, there was a big group there. But I didn’t want to be at the pool. I wanted to get through the session as quickly as possible and then leave. I wasn’t interested in communicating with people. I would talk to people at practice, but it wasn’t a huge connection.

“Outside of that, I really just spent time by myself. I didn’t make an effort to spend time with other people in Knoxville, so that was part of the problem. But given the place I was in, I wasn’t able to do that either.”

Returning home during her month off was cathartic. She filled up her cup and took as many gulps as she could. She attended her cousin’s wedding. She did regular things. She got a taste for what life would be like without swimming and enjoyed it.

Existing contently outside of the pool and 22 strokes off the block brought serenity.

While on leave from the water, she ruminated on the thought of quitting. What terrified her most was who she would be.

“That summer, I was definitely contemplating being done. Part of me was so scared to be like, I wanna stop swimming, but I don’t know if I do. And what am I if I am not a swimmer because this is what I have done for so long?”

Her time off answered the question she’d been asking of herself. The conclusion reached was that if she chooses to finish, she’ll be fine. The same way that if she chooses to stay stroking, she’ll be equally fine because all those regular person things will still be waiting whenever she throws off the goggles.

REFUELLED and re-centred, she boarded a plane back to Tennessee.

“When I returned after the break, I told my coach that I wasn’t ready to be done, but if I had another fall semester like I did last year, I would need to be.”

Change was required. An
altered mentality had to be chiseled. Training and her attitude towards training had to be more than increasing speed and shaving milliseconds.

Racing constitutes such a minute part of a swimmer’s year. And so if the sole piece she enjoyed was racing, swimming wasn’t worth persisting with.

If she couldn’t find joy in her daily trips poolside, she was as well not be there at all.

She gave herself until Christmas. She surprised herself by the turnaround achieved. She’s still not really sure how she turned it all around.

The introverted Mona made far more of an effort on deck to chat and connect with teammates. She removed the pressure she had dressed herself in since Tokyo. She adopted a healthier outlook toward her sport. She struck a better balance between being a 23-year-old young lady and one of the outstanding breaststrokers in the world.

The shift in approach and mood spawned a season unmatched. She was second at the NCAAs last March. She was second with 10 metres to go in the 100m breaststroke final at the World Championships last July. She was 10 metres from Ireland’s first ever world long course medal. Finishing fifth and feeling gutted spoke of raised ability and raised ambition. Touching the wall ahead of her was the world record holder and three Olympic gold medalists.

Less than a month later, she swept to three European U23 gold medals on home shores.

From starting out the 2022/23 season unsure of whether she even wanted to continue swimming, she climbed out of the pool last August wondering how she could ever give up her sport.

“Last summer, I fell in love with swimming again. That was really nice to feel, and to be able to fully enjoy it again.”

Olympic qualifying time already tucked under her swim cap, she glides into a 2024 schedule of World Championships, SECs, NCAAs, and Paris. She glides into the new year in a “good place”.

So after all that has gone on, how is Mona McSharry now?

“She’s excited for what is to come,” says Mona, signing off.

“A little nervous too, but she is going to use that to the best of her abilities to give it all and try and enjoy every single moment of it, and just take it all in.”