The Physics of Fitness
Between training 20 hours each week and homework for his physics major, Pollen, who was inducted into the Garnet Athletics Hall of Fame last year, couldn’t carve out much time for socializing. It was, he admits, a grueling schedule. But proving — to himself and everyone else — that life with a physical disability needn’t be an obstacle to success was more important to him than his downtime.
“I didn’t want to be disadvantaged, and I didn’t want to be different from everybody else,” says Pollen, a record-breaking freestyle swimmer who has lived without his left leg since he was a toddler. “I thought, ‘If I could just outwork everybody, then I could compete on the same level with them.’”
Swimming with one leg presented some challenges at first. “I used to joke that, before I became a serious swimmer, I would just go round in circles,” he says. But he soon realized that if he trained hard and focused on building up his upper body strength, he could be competitive with his able-bodied buddies.
“I could beat my high school teammates, and I could beat people on the opposing teams,” he says. “That was really rewarding.”
At Swarthmore, Pollen discovered most of his fellow student-athletes had started swimming at a much younger age. But he soon spotted their Achilles’ heel. He realized most of them took summers off. “So I swam my butt off during the off-season so I could be ready for the college season,” he says.
Pollen also focused on weight training, and in 2010, he hired a personal trainer. He was getting stronger and stronger, and the next season, he smashed the 100-freestyle record for American swimmers missing an arm or a leg. The year after that, he did the same for the 50 freestyle.
“There were two guys at that meet who were previous Paralympians,” he says. “I knew that I was good, but I didn’t expect to beat them. And I touched the wall first. It’s one of my proudest accomplishments.”
After college, Pollen decided he wanted to help other people have that feeling, too. He became a certified personal trainer. “There I was, this Swarthmore-trained physicist doing a job that you really didn’t need a college degree for, let alone a physics degree,” he says.
A year later, he discovered the field of biomechanics. He realized it combined his interests seamlessly. “Biomechanics is this perfect hybrid, combining the physics of human movement with the science of exercise,” he says. “It’s my two loves put together.”
After completing a Ph.D. at Drexel University in health and rehabilitation sciences, during which he investigated injury risk among college swimmers, Pollen is now an assistant professor of exercise science at Thomas Jefferson University. “I teach what I always wanted to study,” he says. He still works as a personal trainer and lives in Philadelphia.
Teaching college students hammers home just how disciplined he was at Swarthmore. “I look back, and I think, ‘Man, I didn’t have as much fun as I should have had in college, because I was so focused,’” he says. But there is no suggestion of regret. Pollen’s drive to push beyond his physical limits defines him. “I wouldn’t do it any differently.”