No Limits Read online

  In a weird way, the broken wrist gave me an urgency that in the long run turned out to be a positive.

  Right after Thanksgiving, at the short-course national championships in Atlanta—short course in the United States usually means the races are held in a 25-yard pool—I dove in against Ryan Lochte in the 200-yard individual medley. Ryan set an American record, 1:40.08; I finished second in 1:41.32, Eric Shanteau came in third at 1:44.12. Bob couldn’t have been more pleased. Here I had not even had the chance to swim even 50 yards of butterfly since the break and yet I could step it up against Ryan, maybe the best short-course racer in the world.

  I remember going to a meet in Long Beach, California, in early January, and being asked there about the broken wrist. The scar on my wrist was still fresh, still purple.

  The accident, I said, had made me refocus on 2008, which was going to be the biggest year of my life, and my goals.

  I told a pack of reporters who were there, “If I could live in a bubble right now, I probably would, so I couldn’t get hurt, I couldn’t get in trouble, I couldn’t do anything. Just swim, eat, and sleep. That’s it.”

  I also said, “I think I’m more excited now than when that happened.” I added, “I plan on not screwing around anymore until after the Olympics. I have pretty hefty goals this year. It’s going to take a lot to get there.”

  • • •

  To get there meant placing first or second in my individual races at the Olympic Trials.

  The Trials are never a formality.

  It didn’t matter that I had won eight medals in Athens. That was then. The fact that I had won the 400 IM at the 2004 Olympics would have absolutely no bearing on whether I would, for instance, again enjoy the privilege of representing the United States at the 2008 Games in the same event. I had to earn it.

  Different countries allocate spots on their Olympic teams in different ways. Some, for instance, do it based on results over the preceding years; some allow coaches to pick; some pick by committee.

  That’s not the American way, at least in swimming. There are no picks.

  In the United States, there’s only one way to make the Olympic swim team in the individual events: first or second in that race at the Trials.

  Third gets you a four-year wait to try again. If you can.

  Hayley McGregory finished third in the 2004 Trials in both the 100 and 200 backstrokes. She would go on at the 2008 Trials to set a world record in the 100 back in the preliminaries; in the finals, she finished third. In the 200 back, she finished third. She did not make the team.

  It can be like that. So cruel.

  “If I’m third at the Olympics, it means I’m on the medal stand in a few minutes. If I’m third at the Trials, it means I’m on the couch for a month,” Gary Hall, Jr., one of the most accomplished American sprinters of the last twenty years, once said. Winner of ten Olympic medals between 1996 and 2004, twice the gold medalist in the 50-meter sprint, Gary would finish fourth in the 50 in Omaha. He did not make the 2008 team.

  Our selection process is without question the most difficult in the world, far more nerve-wracking than the Olympics, actually, because the depth in the United States in swimming is unmatched anywhere in the world.

  And the 2008 Trials were going to be the deepest in history.

  During the same week the swim Trials were going on in Omaha, the U.S. Trials in track and field took place in Eugene, Oregon. All over Eugene—at the airport, on buses, on highway billboards—advertisements declared the U.S. track team the “hardest team to make.”

  Wrong. It’s the swim team.

  In track, the top three in each event to go the Games.

  In swimming, only two.

  It figured that, in the 400 IM, those two would be me and Lochte. But nobody was handing us anything. And Lochte was hardly ready to concede first place to me.

  A couple months before the Trials, the U.S. Olympic Committee holds what’s called a media summit. It gathers a bunch of athletes it figures are good candidates to make the Olympic team and, for the better part of a week, allows hundreds of reporters to have a crack at asking questions for the features their editors want before the Olympics start. Then the athletes can go back to training without being pestered by reporters for the duration.

  The 2008 media summit took place in Chicago, at one of the city’s landmark hotels, the Palmer House Hilton. At the summit, Lochte was asked about racing me. “I always feel like I can beat him,” he said.

  Lochte is a good friend, one of my best friends in swimming. It’s one of those deals where we are hardly alike but like a lot of the same stuff. I call him Doggy. No good reason. Doggy is a Florida surfer dude; I grew up near Baltimore. Doggy’s idol is the rapper Lil Wayne, who is also one of my favorite musicians. Doggy sometimes wears gold chains around his neck, baggy pants, a diamond-encrusted grill in his mouth. Cool that it’s Lochte’s style; not mine. I have a bulldog named Herman. Lochte’s dog, a Doberman, is named Carter, after Lil Wayne, whose real name is Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr. In May, Lochte sprained his left ankle when Carter the dog ran out the front door of Lochte’s house in Gainesville; chasing Carter down the street, Lochte said he turned the ankle. At least that was one version of the story. His dad later said it happened after a skateboarding trick gone bad. Who knows? Doggy is a free spirit.

  A free spirit who is a hellacious competitor.

  Lochte had won silver in the 200 IM in Athens. He didn’t swim the 400 IM in Athens because he had finished fourth at the 2004 Trials, 10 seconds behind me. At the 2006 U.S. nationals, Lochte had narrowed the gap to about a second and a half. At the 2007 worlds in Melbourne, I had beaten him again, this time by about three seconds.

  I had not lost a major-meet final in the 400 IM since I started swimming it at the national level. Even so, I knew what I was up against: maybe the second-best all-around swimmer in the world.

  I also knew, though, that I had improved, even since Melbourne, even taking into account the broken wrist. My breaststroke had very quietly gotten way better than it had been. In practice, I had been working on subtle differences: keeping my shoulders closer to my ears, my hands flatter, my fingertips up when I accelerated forward. At that Long Beach meet in January, a short-course event, I raced the 100-yard breaststroke; the field included Mark Gangloff, who had come in fourth in the 100-meter breast final in Athens. Mark won the race that night, in 53.09 seconds and, for most, the reporters and the people in the stands, that seemed to be the news—that I’d lost. To me and Bob, that was not at all the news. Instead, to us, it was that I’d finished just behind Mark, in 53.41. I had almost beaten one of the world’s best breaststrokers, only a few weeks after surgery. Bob said later, that was one of the most impressive things he’d ever seen me do.

  At the same time, my backstroke, for some reason, had been giving me fits. I didn’t have the consistency I wanted. And my 400 IM times through the early months of 2008 had been unremarkable. At a meet in Santa Clara, California, six weeks before the Trials, I won the 400 IM in a flat 4:13.47. My backstroke felt horrible that night, as it had for the previous few weeks. I had no tempo. My kick wasn’t there. Instead of 100 meters, I felt like I was swimming a mile on my back. However, two days later, still in Santa Clara, I beat Aaron Peirsol in the 100-meter backstroke. Aaron had won the 100 back in Athens. This was the first time I had ever beaten him in a backstroke event.

  So maybe the backstroke was there, after all. I really couldn’t be sure.

  At some meets, the 400 IM is last on the agenda; that’s the way it was in Barcelona, at the 2003 Worlds.

  In Beijing, as in Athens, it would be first.

  So, in Omaha, at a temporary pool in the middle of the Qwest Center, the best set-up for a meet in the history of American swimming, it would be first, too, as USA Swimming deliberately set up the program for the Trials to mirror the schedule in Beijing.

  My first swim in Omaha, the prelims of the 400 IM, turned out not good. I finished in 4:13.43. Locht
e, swimming in a different heat, was timed in 4:13.38, faster by five-hundredths of a second.

  Lochte told reporters afterward that his ankle was, in fact, bothering him: “The hardest part was the dive. As soon as I dived in, it was like, ugh.”

  I told reporters, “I’m not really too happy.”

  In fact, I had gone to meet Bob and told him, I feel awful.

  A few minutes later, I had definitive proof. I did feel awful. My lactate test said so.

  When you do anything physical, like swimming, and particularly if you’re swimming all-out, that exertion creates lactic acid. In scientific circles, there is controversy over whether lactic acid itself is the thing that drags down athletic performance or whether other stuff within the body, signaled by elevated levels of lactic acid, causes fatigue. It doesn’t matter to us swimmers. What matters is that we are constantly tested to see the rate at which we can clear lactate from our systems because that indicates our ability to recover.

  That’s why, at most top meets, moments after a race you can see a parade of swimmers lining up for individual lactate tests. Someone pricks your ear and collects a few drops of blood; those drops are then placed into a machine, which measures the number of millimoles of lactate per liter of blood. For me, the point is to drop the level as close to 2 as possible. The way to make it drop is to swim easily for a certain number of minutes.

  These swims are held in a separate pool just steps away from the competition pool. Ideally, you’re taking the lactate test three minutes after leaving the competition pool, and then it’s into the warm-down pool. The lactate test tells me how long I then need to swim down; typically, it’s between 17 and 22 minutes.

  My lactate reading after the prelim 400 IM swim read 12.3.

  Superhigh.

  Nerves, I guess. I had no other explanation. I remember feeling momentarily flustered. Why was my lactate so high? I had a long swim-down to think about it.

  At that point, I just wanted to get onto the team. If I was going to have a loss, I started rationalizing, if only for an instant, better at the Trials than at the Olympics.

  As soon as I thought that, though, I also thought this: One thing I am for sure good at is responding. At the risk of being obvious, I have an enormous appetite for competition, and a huge will to win. Always have.

  Eddie Reese, who is the swim coach at the University of Texas, and also had the honor of being the U.S. men’s swim coach at the 2004 and 2008 Olympics, has a saying: 80 percent of swimmers like to win, 20 percent hate to lose, and 95 percent of the Olympic team comes from the hate-to-lose group. When I’m focused, there is not one single thing, person, anything that can stand in my way of doing something. There is not. If I want something bad enough, I feel I’m gonna get there. That’s just how I’ve always been.

  So to make the team—no, to win the 400 IM at these Trials—I had to refocus, and quickly. In the finals that night, I had to get a lead. If I did that, I felt confident my competitive instinct would come out. No matter how tired I was, how painful it was, I would get there first, would hold Lochte off.

  But it was going to be a battle.

  The prelims took place at eleven that Sunday morning Central time; the finals went off at seven that evening.

  Just before the finals, my racing gear already on, I went to my bag and took two salt tablets. Bob looked at me quizzically.

  He said nothing.

  I said nothing.

  If I had told him how I was truly feeling, he would have freaked.

  My heart was racing. Like an out-of-control freight train barreling down a set of tracks, that kind of racing.

  This had been a problem for me dating back at least eight years, to the first time I’d had one of these episodes. Then it was at a practice. My heart rate elevated and, for what seemed an eternity, wouldn’t come down. Ultimately, the pounding subsided and we didn’t think anything of it until it happened again. Then we went for a battery of tests, including for Marfan syndrome, a disease that affects connective tissues and can be fatal if there is leaking in the vessels that lead to the heart. Flo Hyman, one of the best volleyball players of all time, a silver medalist at the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games, who died suddenly during a match, had Marfan, though nobody knew that until an autopsy revealed the disorder.

  As it turned out, I did not have Marfan. Instead, the doctors said, I was a salty sweater, meaning, simply, I lost high amounts of salt in my sweat. When I got below a certain sodium level, I got dehydrated easily.

  The easy fix to this was to supplement my diet with salt pills.

  For all the years since I first went to the doctors about this, Bob’s concern—make that his out-and-out fear—had been that I would have one of these incidents at a meet.

  And here it was happening in Omaha, just moments before the first race of the Trials was to be broadcast live on NBC.

  I knew that if I’d told Bob, it might have sent him over the edge. Just imagine: Live from Omaha! Here he is, Michael Phelps! And he’s clutching his chest!

  Which is why I didn’t say anything.

  I just had to go out there and swim.

  Once that first swim is over, if it’s good, I have momentum. Then the meet feels as if it’s all going downhill. It’s just getting past that first swim. Four years of work, dedication, drive, and commitment all distilled into four minutes of racing. This was going to be the gateway, the first race in answering what I was going to be doing in Beijing, and how I was likely to do it.

  In track they have a starter’s pistol that signals the start of a race. In swimming it’s a beep.

  Beep!

  After the opening butterfly leg, I had a lead of about a body length on Lochte.

  In the back, he closed to half a length.

  In the breast, he pulled even.

  With 50 meters to go, the question was clear: Who had enough left?

  As I turned, I glanced over at Lochte. I saw where he was. As Lochte rose to the surface, I was still underwater, surging, dolphin-kicking. When I finally broke the surface—the rules are 15 meters underwater, no more—I had left Lochte behind.

  I touched in 4:05.25. A new world record.

  Lochte finished in 4:06.08. Both of us had gone under the prior record, my 4:06.22. And he was supposed to have a banged-up ankle that was bothering him?

  The two of us were far, far ahead of the rest of the field. Robert Margalis, who finished third, was more than seven seconds behind Ryan, eight behind me.

  “Nice job, Doggy,” I said to him after it was over.

  “That hurt,” he said.

  “Yeah, tell me about it,” I said. Then I told him, “We got this in Beijing. Let’s go for it. Let’s go get gold and silver in Beijing.”

  All smiles, I saw Bob a few moments later. That’s when I let him in on how my heart had been galloping along beforehand. I didn’t tell you because I knew it would turn you catatonic, I said.

  Lochte’s time that night was three seconds better than he had ever gone before. At this level, that’s an incredible amount of time to knock off. If I was planning on me getting gold in the 400 IM in Beijing, Lochte silver—for sure, Lochte obviously had other plans. But the question Lochte would now have swirling around inside his head was: Could he get better still, or had he already maxed out?

  “Going into the race, I thought I could beat him. I hate to lose. I don’t like it at all,” Lochte said afterward.

  He also said—and this is why after the Trials, heading toward Beijing, I thought the 400 IM could be the toughest individual race on my schedule—“I know there are a lot of places where I can improve.”

  • • •

  Though I respect Lochte immensely, love to race him, understand—I was not afraid of him, concerned about him, worried about him.

  Whatever he was doing to get himself ready for the Olympics was out of my control.

  I don’t worry about other guys when I’m training, not even Lochte. I get myself ready. Of course I’m racing
at the Olympics, or anywhere, against other guys. But I’m also racing against the clock. And, maybe mostly, against myself, to see how good I can be.

  That said, I want to be clear: I have the utmost respect for my competitors. I love to race them. Those guys help me. The faster they get, the faster I get, because I don’t want to lose.

  If I could do 4:05 at Trials, I thought, maybe I really could do 4:03. My lactate response after the 4:05 proved perfectly normal. Which made me think: I’d had a racing heartbeat beforehand yet had thrown down a world record, and immediately afterward the blood work showed I was completely back to normal.

  Which made me also think that it’s all in how you respond to pressure.

  I also knew there were things I could fix to get me to 4:03. I knew my breaststroke could be faster. I knew I could go out harder in the fly and still be relaxed. That’s one of the biggest things I have in the medley; I can go out so much faster than other guys in the fly, that first leg, yet be more relaxed and comfortable. It’s called easy speed. I have it.

  3:07.

  The dream kept visiting me throughout my week in Omaha, as I went on to qualify to represent the United States at the Beijing Games in five individual events: the 400 IM, 200 free, 200 fly, 200 IM, and 100 fly.

  I also swam 47.92 in the preliminaries of the 100 free, the tenth-fastest time ever. The point of that swim was to be in the pool for the 400 free relay, nothing more. I didn’t even swim the semifinals or finals of the 100 free.

  After the Trials, then, it seemed all but certain I would swim at the Games in three relays: the 400 free, the 800 free, and the 400 medley.

  All in, eight chances for gold.

  All in, including preliminary and semifinal swims, 17 races in just nine days.

  After the Trials, all of us on the U.S. team went off to Palo Alto, California, for a training camp; then to Singapore, for more practice but in the same time zone as Beijing; then, finally, on to Beijing.