2025 Update: Life Since the Olympics
One month after the Olympics
After the Olympics, I was completely broken. Devastated. There are no words for the emptiness I felt. I’d spent years chasing one dream, and when it all ended, the silence that followed was deafening.
Everything felt so wrong and unfair. I questioned everything: my purpose, values, priorities, who I was… And if chasing LA 2028 was something I could put myself through.
That pain and anger needed somewhere to go, so I gave it a new target: an Ironman 70.3. I had grown up swimming and missed the feeling of pushing myself in the pool. I also wanted to get into cycling and I just missed feeling fit after years of focusing on bulking for kiting. So type 2 fun it was.
Fall 2024
That fall started my season of rebuilding: I spent time at home, traveled to some new places, trained for the Ironman, and did a lot of soul searching. I was coming up short of answers, but I started listening to the small voice inside that was tugging me toward Long Beach.
I’d always loved the area, having spent a lot of time there training over the last several years, and it felt like the right place to finally put down roots. My plan was to move there by early summer 2025, create a real home base, and give myself a bit of stability. The idea was to move there at the beginning of summer 2025. If I chose to come back to kiting, living in Long Beach would make that easy. And if I went for another Olympic cycle, I’d be able to manage the training and travel a lot better – both financially and logistically.
At the end of December, I made one of the best decisions of my life: I got a puppy with my mom. I’d wanted a dog for years, but my lifestyle just never allowed it. This time, it felt right. Her name is Nala, and you can find her running around at the beach with me or on the couch next to me while I’m working. She’s the best!
5 months after the Olympics - January 2025
In January I went back to college. I still had one semester left at the University of Hawaii, so I went back to Oahu to finish my last few classes after taking a 2.5 year leave of absence. It was the best thing I could have done for myself at that time.
For the first time in years, there was no pressure, no expectations (other than turning in assignments on time). I was just… living. Going to class. Meeting people. Relearning how to be a normal twenty-something-year-old.
It was the reset I didn’t know I needed. I learned so much about myself and that time there really helped me recalibrate my values and priorities – rebuilding from the inside out and really come back to myself. I surfed, went to the gym, ate well, and found peace in small routines. I started surf foiling, which quickly became my favorite escape. The feeling of gliding across the water reminded me why I fell in love with the ocean in the first place. For so long, I’d treated my body purely as a tool for performance that I forgot what it was like to move just because it felt good.
That’s not to say it was all perfect. I had my fair share of late-night overthinking sessions going through a full-on identity/quarter life crisis: I questioned whether I could or wanted to put myself through another campaign and go for LA 2028. I wondered what life outside the Olympic sailing bubble might look like, and who I could be beyond just an Olympic athlete.
Ultimately, I realized I still wasn’t ready to be a full time athlete again. The thought of LA 2028 lingered in the back of my mind, but for now, I needed to keep exploring life outside of my sport.
9 months after the Olympics - Summer 2025
In May, I graduated from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa with a Bachelor’s in Business Administration, majoring in Marketing. After graduation, I landed a job with a tech startup based in Silicon Valley. It was a leap into a world I knew little about, but it excited me.
I moved to Seal Beach with Nala and embraced this new rhythm: surfing in the mornings, working remotely through the day, and hitting gym or kiting in the afternoons. For the first time, I had balance – a life that felt like my own, built entirely on my terms.
Then came July – and with it, the Long Beach Olympic Class Regatta. I hadn’t kited since the Olympics, but I couldn’t resist racing at my new home spot, the future venue for the 2028 Olympics. I trained for exactly 5 days before the regatta. I had mixed feelings going in, but it ended up being so much fun to be back out on the water. I finished 7th at the OCR, but it wasn’t at all about the results this time – it was about reconnecting with the part of me that still loved to compete.
Meanwhile, my job kept me on my toes. I worked under the head of marketing, helped out with the sales team, pitched to Silicon Valley Bank, and even represented the company at SpaceWERX events at the Space Force base in El Segundo.
It was a whirlwind of a summer – early mornings, long workdays, spontaneous surf sessions – all powered by bottomless coffee cups. It finally felt like I was building a life that was completely mine.
And for the first time since the Olympics, I felt like myself again.
