The Pool Where Katie Kubiak’s First Chapter Ended Brought New Life To Her Next Journey

Katie Kubiak walked across the pool deck at the Rosen Aquatic & Fitness Center in Orlando for what she thought was her final meet ever.

She didn’t want her swimming career to be over.

She was only a freshman in high school. She wanted to keep swimming with her team. Maybe swim in college, maybe even the Olympics. But her disease was progressing. Her doctor wanted to perform spinal surgery the previous fall; she’d put it off so that she could finish her club season that spring.

Now that was over. She swam her last race — a relay with her friends — and took a long, drawn-out cooldown swim, her body cutting through the water, flipping and pushing off the wall, wanting to embed the memory of how it all felt.

That was in 2018.

This past December, Kubiak rolled across that very same pool deck for her first U.S. Paralympics Swimming National Championships, where she won an astounding five titles and announced herself as one to watch for the 2028 Paralympics.

“Especially with nationals being at the same exact venue I was at when I was forced to quit the sport for surgery, doing what I did at nationals was a great feeling that I picked up where I left off,” she said. “That was always the hardest part when I had to stop swimming was that it felt so abrupt, and it felt like I had so much more to give. Nationals quieted those voices. The journey is continuing on from here.”

Kubiak, now a junior double majoring in journalism and film at NYU, has a condition called late-onset congenital myopathy. Growing up in Mequon, Wisconsin, Kubiak had only mild symptoms as a small child, but by the age of 10 the muscle weakness and spinal instability were progressing more rapidly. Additional health concerns only made it worse.

The pool was where a lot of that weight, both physical and mental, would go away. It was a different world than on land, one where she could be more herself. But with the surgery at the age of 14, that was gone.

She knew that Para swimming existed — one of the coaches on her club team is 2008 Paralympian Tom Miazga — but when her able-bodied career ended she needed some time to process the situation before jumping into something new.

“My mental state was not in a place where I was ready to think about it,” she said. “Being 14, I was grieving so much what I had just lost and the career I thought I was going to have with swimming. To me it was always the ‘what if’ of not knowing what could have been in the immediate years after. So I fully removed myself from swimming for a very long time until I had a second to cope and come to terms with my disability and my new body before reintroducing the sport I’d done for 10 years, realizing it wasn’t going to be the same sport anymore. It was definitely a process.”

The spark she needed came while watching the 2020 Paralympics, held in 2021. In particular, she watched Mallory Weggemann, who was an able-bodied swimmer before an epidural gone wrong left her paralyzed from the waist down as a teenager. Weggemann won two gold medals and one silver in Tokyo, her third out of what is now four trips to the Paralympics.

“For me, seeing how strong and powerful she was in the water after becoming disabled was that push I needed to get back in, because it proved to me that I could do it, too,” Kubiak said. “She played a very big role in me getting back in the water.”

Kubiak reached out to Miazga. He helped her with a plan to start swimming again, but she describes the next year as very off and on. In her head, she still remembered what the strokes were supposed to feel like, what turns were supposed to feel like, how her body was supposed to feel.

“And it didn’t feel like that anymore,” she said.

Her brain kept trying to do things the old way and her body resisted the new adaptations. It was too frustrating.

But starting college at NYU was another turning point. She was living independently and becoming more comfortable with herself and her disability, and in the spring of 2023 she decided to try swimming again.

“I wasn’t worried about my body feeling the same as it did when I was able-bodied anymore,” said Kubiak, who by then had been using a wheelchair full-time for a while. “I wasn’t as worried about skills coming as naturally as they used to, because I figured my body still knows how to swim. Even if it’s not the same, it’s still in there, and it’ll figure it out. And it did. It was a lot healthier way to approach the comeback instead of being so intense and hard on myself.”

Her first Para meet was in March 2024. She set five new American S4 records — in the 50-meter freestyle, 100-meter freestyle, 200-meter freestyle, 50-meter backstroke and 150-meter individual medley. It was her first meet in almost six years to the day.

She didn’t know anything about the records until she’d left to head back to NYU.

“More than anything, it proved to me that I’m capable of doing this and once I got back into training it motivated me to train harder so I could keep improving,” she said.

At the Cincinnati Para Open in May, she made national team qualifying times. Then in the fall she began working one-on-one with NYU swimmer Anna Li, who grew up swimming alongside Para swimmers on teams in her native Australia. Kubiak credits Li’s influence as a big reason for her success at nationals, where she won the 50-meter backstroke S4, 50-meter breaststroke SB3, and the 50-, 100- and 200-meter freestyle S4 events. She set new American records in all five.

“Nationals was probably the really big wakeup call in a sense that this thing that you’ve been dreaming about may actually be closer than you think,” she said. “That was really great for creating a continuum between my able-bodied career and what my Para career has become. To me they don’t really feel separate anymore, which is nice. They don’t feel like a before and after. They feel more blended, which I feel like is how they should be.”

Karen Price is a reporter from Pittsburgh who has covered Olympic and Paralympic sports for various publications. She is a freelance contributor to USParaSwimming.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.