Amanda Beard's life is full of dramatic highs and lows. As someone who enjoys competitive swimming, I have reached the conclusion that it takes a special kind of crazy to be in this sport for any extended period of time. Like, healthy balanced people would not do this sport lol. Beard was transparent about her many and varied struggles with mental health. I'm glad she was able to get the professional help she needed.

One thing that struck me is how much knowledge about sports nutrition, especially for women, has grown in the past couple decades. When Beard was swimming for one of the top college programs (UofA), she wasn't able to feed herself properly (one reason I lived off campus--UofA doesn't have a cafeteria and dorm kitchens are inadequate), didn't connect her malnutrition to her cycle of binging and purging, and a nutritionist she saw didn't address the fact that she was an elite athlete. Nowadays it's common knowledge to drink a protein shake in the 30 minute window after workouts, how to calculate macros, etc, and I hope that coaches are proactively teaching their athletes about it. Pre youtube and tiktok, I guess this info was harder to share. Unless your coach taught you, where would you learn it? And don't even get me started on how Beard's coach reacted to her going through puberty. Ugh.

The audiobook narrator was pretty annoying (think early 90s SoCal, which was probably intentional but still irritating). And the ghostwriting voice was bland. But overall not bad, especially if you like sports memoirs like I do.