d3so Profiles: Kate Augustyn and Tanner Filion

Intention, mystery, and the 100 Backstroke record

Kate Augustyn

We lead with—Someone Racing Right Next To Me—a post drawn from our conversation with MIT’s Kate Augustyn earlier this month. Our goal was to convey the exceptional intent displayed by Ms. Augustyn in her training and how that played out when it mattered most, in the last 25 yards of her record-setting 100 Backstroke victory at Nationals. We are grateful to Kate Augustyn for sharing her extraordinary insights into how her record-setting swim came about.¹

Tanner Filion

This season was marked by existential uncertainty for Division III swimming and diving, dominated by one pressing question: 'What, if anything, makes Division III swimming special?'

We have come to feel that we have an answer, but it is an answer that needs to be told in stories, and the most powerful story is that of Tanner Filion. If you haven't yet read our early season piece on Tanner Filion—Mr. 2,260—we hope you'll find the time to do so. The follow-up post, The Open Book, was made possible by Mr. Filion's extraordinary willingness to share some of the most challenging moments of his life. We present his story with the hope that you find it as edifying as we did.

Next up…

We continue reevaluating our schedule in light of other demands on our time. For the next 4-6 weeks, we plan to release new posts every two weeks.

These posts will delve deeper into topics we care about but typically can't cover during the busy season: in-depth analyses of recent events and profiles of prominent Division III swimmers.

Taking a bit more time with these pieces seems to be the way to go. We can do interviews (sometimes multiple interviews), spend a little more time on the fact-checking, and give the editing process the space it needs.

We hope you enjoy the upcoming posts and appreciate your continued support.

1. We don’t have great interviews skills (we are working on it), but we do have one great interview question, saved for the end of the interview: ‘What question should we have asked you that we did not think to ask?’

Sometimes the question yields nothing because the important stuff has been covered. Sometimes it unleashes a flood of information, and we find the question did not come at the end after all, but more like at the interview’s halfway mark.

When posed to Ms. Augustyn, she pointed out several obvious questions we had missed and then, to everyone’s benefit, she took over the interview. We scrambled to keep up with someone who was clearly better organized than we are, and possibly significantly more intelligent, sharing something objectively interesting while doing a pretty good (but not great) job of hiding her impatience with us.

Obviously, none of this is meant to clown Ms. Augustyn, but rather to use self-depreciating humor to relieve ourselves of the lingering embarrassment we feel that she, so effortlessly and appropriately, dunked on us during this interview.