LOS ANGELES — The choice was
hers. Rebecca Soni could slide over into the
lanes with the U.S.C. distance swimmers for a
series of 300-yard repeats with precious seconds
to catch her breath. Or she could join the
sprinters for a series of 50-yard swims with
enough time in between to converse.
On the surface, this might
not seem like much of a choice. Soni, a junior
whose best event is the 200 breaststroke, once
tried to keep swimming when her heart seemed to
want to jump out of her chest.
Soni, a 21-year-old from
Plainsboro, N.J., has won the
N.C.A.A. title in the 200-yard breaststroke
the past two years. She enters this week’s
N.C.A.A. Division I swimming and diving
championships in Columbus, Ohio, as the
Pacific-10 champion in the 100- and 200-yard
breaststroke. At the Pac-10 meet, her winning
time in the 200, 2 minutes 6.11 seconds, was the
second-fastest ever for an American woman.
Soni has hopes of making
this summer’s Beijing Olympics after swimming
along the edges of the spotlight last year. She
represented the United States in a dual meet
against Australia in Sydney, but did not compete
in the 2007 world championships in Melbourne.
The United States team for the worlds was
selected off the results from the 2006 summer
nationals, which took place a few weeks after
Soni underwent a procedure called a cardiac
ablation.
Starting when she was 16,
Soni experienced episodes once or twice a month
in which her heart would beat very rapidly
during exercise. It was more of a nuisance than
a serious health hazard. Her mother, Kinga Soni,
who is a nurse, consulted cardiologists who told
her that many people can live with the ailment
without altering their lives.
Soni made plans to have
the procedure done in New Jersey, before she
left for college, but she became scared and
backed out. “They told me as long as it doesn’t
bother her too bad, she didn’t have to have it,”
Kinga Soni said.
Toward the end of her
freshman year at U.S.C., the episodes became
more frequent. Her heart, Soni said, would rev
the way a car does when it is traveling too fast
for the gear it is in. During one such incident,
she checked her heart rate and counted 400 beats
in a minute. “It’d go so fast, you just kind of
go limp,” Soni said, adding, “I’d get it in the
middle of a good set, and I’d have to get out of
the water.”
Her plan was to have the
procedure after the 2006 summer nationals so she
could focus on making the world championships.
She had high expectations after winning the
200-meter breaststroke at the summer nationals
the previous year. But she was feeling so
sluggish in the water that it didn’t make much
sense to wait.
“I wasn’t feeling very
well,” Soni said, “and I was pretty much
depressed.”
She had the procedure done
in July 2006 in Los Angeles. A catheter was
inserted in her groin and electrical energy was
used to destroy areas of abnormal tissue in the
heart that were causing the rhythmic
disturbances.
“It was actually pretty
cool,” Soni said. The next month, in defense of
her title, she finished 10th in the 200
breaststroke.
Soni said her heartbeat
has been normal since the procedure. During her
sophomore season, it was her training that was
out of rhythm.
Mark Schubert, the coach
who had recruited her from the Scarlet Aquatic
Club in New Jersey, left U.S.C. in the spring of
2006 to become the national team’s director. His
replacement, Dave Salo, has a different training
philosophy, favoring high-intensity, low-mileage
workouts over the high-mileage regimen that
Schubert followed and that Soni had grown up
with.
While coaching a club in
Irvine, Calif., Salo had developed
Amanda Beard, the breaststroker who has won
medals in three Olympics. Soni was not impressed
and considered transferring. “But I didn’t know
where to go,” she said. “One day I’d be like, I
have to leave. The next day I was like, but I
love the school.”
She worried that Salo
would meddle with her stroke and her
conditioning. “It took a while for me to trust
him,” Soni said.
Salo had never coached
someone who was so hard on herself.
“She doesn’t come away
from good swims with a lot of contentment, a lot
of satisfaction,” he said.
He added, “She just needed
to know my vision for her went beyond college
swimming.”
At last spring’s N.C.A.A.
meet, Soni came within tenths of a second of the
time she clocked as a freshman to defend her
title in the 200-yard breaststroke. The next
month, she posted a personal best in the
200-meter breaststroke in the dual meet against
the Australians.
That sold Soni on the
program. So did winning the 100 and 200
breaststrokes at last summer’s nationals. This
season, Salo said: “She has been kinder on
herself. She doesn’t get as frustrated in
training. I think she’s grown up as an athlete.”
Salo coaches his swimmers
to be self-sufficient, challenging them to be
equal partners in the workouts.
“It took me a long time to
understand what he was doing,” Soni said.
“Before Dave, I never really thought of anything
for myself. I just followed what the coach said.
With Dave, it’s like you have to learn what you
have to do for yourself.”
Without a backward glance,
Soni joined the sprinters for the series of
50-yard swims. Seeing that, Salo was reminded of
how far she had come.
“A year ago she wouldn’t
have done that,” he said.