How Chiropractic Helps / Misty Hyman: Olympic Swimming Champion

As a young swimmer, Misty Hyman dreamed of Olympic gold.

"I dreamed of someday being in the Olympics and hearing the national anthem playing for me," she said.

Her dream was achieved during the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, when she broke the American record and placed first in the 200m butterfly race. Hyman defeated Australian swimmer Susie O’Neill, who had not lost a race in six years and retired after the Olympics.

Recently, the 22-year-old swimmer graduated from Stanford University, and she is training for the upcoming Goodwill Games and the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece.

	Hyman Describes Her Olympic Moment "I was just really shocked, to tell you the truth. When I was swimming my race, I was in a ‘zone,’ like people talk about. It was of those peak experiences where everything was just in slow motion and I couldn’t feel a thing. I was so in the moment, so focused on my race, everything was just flowing like clockwork. I felt like I was the only one in the pool. "I was so focused on my race, that when I touched the wall, it took me a really long time to snap out of the zone and realize what had happened. I had to look at the scoreboard like three times, trying to figure out what it really meant."
Misty Hyman upset the favorite to win the gold medal in the 200m butterfly at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sidney.

"I started swimming because I have asthma pretty bad. I was one of those kids that got pneumonia once a year and I am allergic to everything," Hyman said. Her doctor thought swimming would strengthen her lungs as she learned to hold her breath and by exposure to the moisture.

At age 5, she started swimming with a local club in her hometown of Phoenix, Ariz.

"I really didn’t swim that well at first, I couldn’t even finish the length of the pool without getting out and crying. After I got in good shape, I realized that I had a talent for it," she said.

Within a few years, Hyman’s asthma greatly improved, but she was still getting sick during the winter months when she was not swimming.

"I was about seven when I started swimming the year round," said Hyman. "Funny thing was, my mom opened up the phone book to look for the closest year-round program in our area. It turned out to be down a dirt road about ten minutes away. Little did we know, it had one of the best coaches in the country. I had no idea what I was getting into when I started, but it has brought me a real long way."

She began swimming for the Arizona Dessert Fox team, under Coach Bob Gillett.

"It was apparent at seven years old, when Coach Gillett told me that I obviously had a talent in the butterfly and we would specialize in that. So I grew up knowing that butterfly was my specialty, and he always said it is better to be the best at one thing than to be mediocre in a lot of things. So we really focused my training on the butterfly," said Hyman.

During her high school career, Hyman was named National High School Swimmer of the Year (1995, 1996) and United States Olympic Committee’s Female Athlete of the Month for December 1995. In the summer of 1996, she missed making the 1996 U.S. Olympic team by only 3/100ths of a second.

At the 1997 Arizona State High School AAAAA Championships, she set three national high school records for the 100m backstroke, 100m butterfly and 200 medley relay as part of the Shadow Mountain High School swimming team. Hyman graduated with a 4.0 GPA and was named Outstanding Female by her graduating class in 1997.

Stanford University, which has one of the nation’s best collegiate swimming programs, offered Hyman an athletic scholarship. She went on to become one of the most successful swimmers in Stanford history, earning 28 All-America honors and nine NCAA titles.

At the end of her freshman year at Stanford, Hyman became acquainted with Dr. John Moore, a chiropractor who provided care for several members of the women’s swimming team.

Dr. Moore, who maintains a private practice about 20 minutes from Stanford in Portollo Valley, Calif., has always been interested in caring for athletes since he played high school basketball and football.

"I wanted to be a chiropractor fairly early in life, from having used chiropractic care myself and also my family having gone for different sports injuries. I was a junior or senior in high school when I starting thinking about going into chiropractic," said Moore, who practices with his wife, Ellen. They met while attending Palmer Chiropractic College West in the mid-1980s.

"When I first met Misty, I was working on the pool deck with some of the other athletes. She was just finishing up her freshman season, so I asked her let me check her," said Moore. "She has been very motivated and very outgoing as far as looking around to see what could help her. Head Coach Richard Quick values chiropractic care, because I have been around for eight seasons."

"When we first started working together, it was more for general performance. She didn’t really have any injuries or anything structurally to work on. On the surface, there didn’t appear to much to do, as we kind of delved deeper with her system we probably ended up doing more nutritional work than structural work," said Moore.

"She had a few minor injuries over the three years that I have worked with her. We have worked on everything from her ankles to knees, especially her shoulders, and of course her spine. The only thing that we have really had to worry about is that she has had a couple of minor shoulder injuries, one minor back injury."

As she learned about chiropractic, Hyman began to integrate it as part of her training and preparation.

"When I met Dr. Moore, I felt like it really helped me. He told me to come into his office and said he could show me some things that will really help me. Sure enough, a lot of the things that we have fixed with me in the last three years are biochemical things," said Hyman.

"Now I actually consider chiropractic as part of my training regimen. It is definitely a time commitment, and I go in weekly and sometimes more than that. I always talked to him about the different variables — biochemical, structural, mental. The more variables you have at their optimal level, the faster I am going to swim.

"I really believe in chiropractic, and I really believe in more natural and preventative care. I feel that keeping my spine structurally aligned prevents me from getting a lot of injuries. The nutritional advice that he gives me helps me to stay healthy and helps me to train better. It is definitely a maintenance thing," she said.

In the year leading up to the Olympics, Hyman began working closely with Moore and a nutritionist from U.S. Swimming to develop a very in-depth nutrition program.

"There was a point where she would come out two or three times in a week. I kidded her that she had her own parking space," said Moore.

"I was going in multiple times in a week just to keep everything in balance. I wanted to do everything I could to get ready, and I felt that he played a major role in my success," said Hyman. "I had a really bad sinus infection, multi-layered sinus infection, the summer before the Olympics, so I was taking a lot of antibiotics and inhalers because my asthma got really bad because of the infection. I really decided I wanted to take some time and really get my body healthy without taking all those medications, because I felt like it was just making me toxic. I don’t think I felt as good as I could. We actually did a controlled juice fast, under his supervision, and I felt a lot better. I feel the more natural you can be, the healthier you are."

"I have worked with probably a dozen or more national team members, and she has really adopted the chiropractic lifestyle more than any other elite athlete. Just in terms of getting there every week for care, doing things she needs to do nutritionally, with taking supplements (Misty takes up to 50 supplements a day). She really did what it took to be the best," said Moore.

"And through adopting different lifestyle changes, she would take suggestions, whatever it was. Through a period of a couple of years, she has been able to stop her asthma medication. She feels better than she has in a long, long time."

"Dr. Moore is a great person who is always looking for ways to help make me healthier, not only as an athlete, but as a person. It is very exciting for me to work with somebody who is really excited about what he does. He has done so many things over the years to help me, that I am just really thankful to have met him and have had the opportunity to work with him. I hope to continue working with him, aiming for Athens in 2004," said Hyman.

A couple months before the Olympics, Stanford’s head coach Quick came to Moore’s office to discuss traveling to Australia with the swimmers.

"I went to Atlanta in 1996 on my own, stayed with a cousin and I ended up caring for a couple of swimmers there. When the 2000 Olympic Games came around, Richard Quick said it did not look like U.S. Swimming would take a chiropractor, so I was prepared to just stay home and watch it on TV," said Moore.

After five Stanford swimmers made the Olympic team, Quick made arrangements for Moore to travel to Australia to care for the swimmers as part of the Stanford staff.

"It was a big accomplishment for me just to be at the Olympics, just to make the team, because in 1996 I missed making the team by 3/100ths of a second. I was just ecstatic to be there," said Hyman.

"My coaches and I felt like I had been really working and training hard and I had done some amazing things in practice. We knew that I had the potential to do really well and go a lot faster than I was going. My coach, actually a year before the Olympics, said he felt like I was the only one in the world who had a chance to beat Susie O’Neill. I didn’t believe it at the time, but he kept reminding me and we kept working towards that goal," said Hyman.

As she described, the sport of swimming in Australia is considered a national sport.

"If you take our basketball, baseball and football and put them all into one national sport, in Australia that is swimming. It is like soccer in Italy, and Susie O’Neill is like Michael Jordan in Australia. You would go downtown and see 10 ft. by 10 ft. billboards of her face, so I was just in awe of the whole thing," she recalled.

"I knew I was the underdog. People were telling me that if I do really well, maybe I could win a bronze medal. In my head, I really wasn’t trying to beat Susie at all; I just wanted to do my best," she said. "I had my best training camp in my life between the Olympic Trials and the Olympics, and I made some huge breakthroughs. Things were really coming together, so I was just really focusing a lot on my own swim and my own race strategy.

"When I got up behind the blocks, I wasn’t thinking about the fact that Susie was next to me and it was the Olympic finals. I was just focusing on swimming," Hyman said. "To actually have that breakthrough race, to have all the pieces and everything I knew I could do finally come together at just the right moment, at just the right time, was incredible. I still have trouble putting into words. I still get emotional about it. It was just a really amazing feeling."

Following her Olympic victory, Hyman began to receive endorsement offers from several companies, but she still had one year left at Stanford.

"After she won the gold medal, especially since it was this huge upset win, McDonald’s talked with her. She was scheduled to be on the cover of a Wheaties box, and she had other endorsement deals in the works. She had a very tough decision that she had to make quickly," said Moore. "She had to decide whether to take the deals and lose her last year of collegiate eligilibility or swim her last year with Stanford. She decided to swim her last year in college."

Hyman never regretted her decision to return to school and helped her team finish second in the NCAA Tournament in March, even though they had a significantly smaller squad. Now, she is busy training for the Goodwill Games to be held in Brisbane, Australia, in September.

"Misty has decided to train in the Bay Area through the 2004 Olympics, since all her support people are here," said Moore. "She is a wonderful girl. Working with her is incredible because not only is she a world-class athlete, but she is also a very wonderful, sweet person – very energetic, very positive – and follows your advice 110 percent. Her philosophy is that she makes a living with her body, so she needs to know all she can about it. She has really pursued a lot of information pertaining to health and athletic performance."

"Swimming has just been such a huge part of my life. It really opened a lot of doors for me in terms of getting to travel all over the world and going to Stanford. It really has brought so many wonderful things in my life. I feel that swimming had allowed me to learn a lot about myself and really pushed me to grow as a person," sad Hyman.

"I feel really lucky to have gotten involved in something that I love to do so much. I’m lucky to have found something I was very talented at, something that I really enjoyed doing, and it happened almost by accident. Most people only dream about it."

About the author: Pattie Stechschulte, an award-winning writer, is the freelance associate editor of Today's Chiropractic magazine and has been responsible for TC Online since its inception in November 1999. Inquiries should be addressed to her at 3803 Brads Court, Marietta, GA 30066; or E-mail pattiest@todayschiropractic.com.