{"id":111705,"date":"2019-10-04T17:32:21","date_gmt":"2019-10-04T06:32:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/?p=111705"},"modified":"2019-10-04T17:32:23","modified_gmt":"2019-10-04T06:32:23","slug":"listen-libby-trickett-on-beneath-the-surface","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.booktopia.com.au\/blog\/2019\/10\/04\/listen-libby-trickett-on-beneath-the-surface\/","title":{"rendered":"LISTEN: Libby Trickett on Beneath the Surface"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Beneath<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

She may be one of the original golden girls of Australian swimming, but Libby Trickett never wanted to write a sports memoir.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, sport is what she calls a narrow part of who she really is – an athlete yes, but also a woman and a mother who suffered from a severe battle with depression. In short, a complex human being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So Libby wrote Beneath the Surface<\/a><\/strong><\/em>, a memoir that accounts for her life as a whole from her time spent as an elite swimmer to everything that came after. This week, she came to Booktopia to sign some copies of it and to sit down for a podcast with Joel Naoum and Shanu Prasad where they talked all about the book and where it came from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou\u2019re incredibly intense as an elite athlete, you are incredibly fierce and focused and driven. You have this one singular goal that you\u2019re after – for me, I was training 35 hours a week for 50 weeks a year for the better part of a decade,\u201d says Libby. \u201cThat amount of focus and dedication \u2026 I find it remarkable now and I did it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But even at her best, Libby never felt 100% good enough and it was a mindset that carried itself into her life outside of swimming after she retired in 2013. Decades of intense training, where milestones could be measured and progress tracked, had left Libby with extremely high standards for what she should be achieving. The \u201creal\u201d world, she found, came with no such guide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Beneath<\/a>
Libby Trickett at her signing session for Beneath the Surface<\/a><\/strong><\/em>!<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou do have really high expectations of yourself, and if you don\u2019t measure that with patience and understanding that, you know, you\u2019re not going to be an elite level business person or an elite level parent at the drop of a hat – maybe not ever – it can be really difficult to make that adjustment,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This realisation paved the way for the pre-existing mental health issues that would only intensify after Libby gave birth to her first daughter. While swim training gave her constant constructive feedback, parenting did not – only judgement, and the feeling that she wasn\u2019t living up to some higher standard of love and care.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cParenthood is easily the best thing I\u2019ve ever done in my life, it\u2019s filled my soul with joy in so many ways, but also it crushes you in a lot of ways,\u201d Libby says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Struggling with parenthood in a way that felt unmanageable and unhealthy, it didn\u2019t take long for Libby to realise that she desperately needed help. Beneath the Surface<\/em> is the story of what happened after she sought it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Listen to our full chat with Libby below and grab your signed copy<\/a><\/strong> of Beneath the Surface<\/em> before they sell out!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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