The four months away from the pool in the fall and winter of 2006 was the longest period he had gone without training since joining the Blazers. He had gained weight. He had lost confidence in his abilities.
“I hit rock bottom,” says Jaben, looking back. “It was a really hard reality, but I started thinking, ‘I’m just going to work hard on school now. Maybe swimming wasn’t meant for me.’ ”
•••
But, then again, maybe it still was.
Brian Hoffer, the head coach of the Missouri Tigers swim team, was willing to try to find out.
Ironically, as Hoffer recalls, Jaben hadn’t given Missouri much, if any, consideration when he came out of high school. He was a high-profile recruit, and Missouri wasn’t in the same part of the collegiate swimming spectrum. But now, Jaben had been released from his scholarship from Florida and was looking to restart his swim career. Now he was targeting them (along with Texas).
Jaben e-mailed Hoffer, who was well aware of Jaben’s abilities from his Kansas City Blazers days. But it wasn’t that same swimmer, physically or mentally, who showed up in Columbia — not initially, at least.
“I came to them so broken as a swimmer,” Jaben says.
Hoffer says, “We kind of took it one day at a time. We didn’t try to solve all the problems overnight. We really didn’t have any short-term goals. (We said) ‘Let’s get this going, and maybe we can find that love of swimming that maybe wasn’t there.’ ”
Jaben transferred to Missouri and joined the program in January 2007. He wasn’t eligible to compete for the team the rest of the season, but that was fine because he wasn’t ready to compete. He could practice with the Tigers, though, and slowly it started coming back
His times, his passion … and some of his old aspirations.
Before he left Florida, Jaben, who is Jewish, had flirted with the thought of attaining Israeli citizenship and competing for the national team. He was in contact with the national team, yet for reasons he still doesn’t know, he was denied citizenship.
But he started having those thoughts again.
Jaben began competing with Missouri’s club swim team in April and — realizing he was quickly regaining his old form and passion — he decided to compete at the Israeli national meet in August.
As he tells it, he won the 800-meter freestyle and finished well in several other events while competing against the best swimmers in Israel. He swam personal-best times in most of those events. His Israeli citizenship had come to fruition, and after that performance, his spot on the Israeli national team effectively did as well.
He flew home to let everybody — including Hoffer — know that he was taking the year off and moving to Israel. A week later, he was gone.
“I just packed three suitcases full of everything I could and said, ‘All right, I’m moving to Israel,’ ” Jaben says. “This is what I wanted to do.”
•••
It’s been a whirlwind tour since then.
Jaben joined a team in which he was the only swimmer who couldn’t speak Hebrew with a coach who couldn’t speak English. Just another obstacle, though.
He traveled with the team to Mexico City for a month of altitude training. Then to competitions in Holland, Hungary, Belgium, Luxembourg and a month of training in South Africa in February.
That was all leading up to the European Championships, which served as the Olympic qualifying meet, in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, in March.
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