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PERSEVERANCE: THE 400 INDIVIDUAL MEDLEY

Leading up to and through the 2008 U.S. Olympic Trials for swimming, which were held in Omaha, Nebraska, in late June and early July, I kept having a most particular dream.

It involved the number 3:07.

The 2008 Summer Games in Beijing would get under way on August 8. I had no idea what 3:07 meant, or why, or why I kept dreaming about it.

But, there it was: 3:07.

Logically, naturally, it seemed like a time.

But a time for what?

3:07 in the afternoon? In the morning?

I am a fanatic for training and for hard work and discipline. Even so, I wasn't getting up at 3:07 in the morning to go to the pool, that was for sure.

I couldn't figure it out.

It was especially perplexing because swimming, like baseball or football, is a sport with its own history and lore that lends itself elegantly to numbers and statistics.

Everyone who follows baseball knows that Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs during his career, for instance, or that Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941, or that Bob Gibson pitched so magnificently in 1968 that he ended the year with an ERA of 1.12.

Everyone who knows a thing or two about football knows that the Miami Dolphins went 17-0 in 1972, or that Tom Brady threw fifty touchdown passes during the 2007 NFL season.

Even people who don't know much about swimming almost surely know that Mark Spitz won seven gold medals in 1972 at the Olympic Games in Munich. And that I could win eight in Beijing in 2008. Eight is an auspicious number in Chinese culture. The Games were going to start on 8/8/08, at precisely 8:00 p.m. local time; the date and time were picked because the Chinese word for eight, ba, sounds like the word for prosperity, fa.

The problem I was having, though, was simple. There is nothing in swimming in which 3:07 made any sense whatsoever, which was totally weird, because there are vast columns of numbers in swimming to crunch. The sport is measured mostly in meters but sometimes in yards. There are world records, Olympic records, American records, even what are called U.S. Open records, meaning a mark that is set on American soil, whether by an American or someone from somewhere else.

The swim calendar in recent years has kept to a fairly consistent routine, too, at least for American swimmers, which makes it all the easier to track the numbers: meets early in the year in places as different as Long Beach, California, and Columbia, Missouri; in May or June in Santa Clara, California; and one or two major meets, such as the U.S. Nationals, the Pan Pacific Championships, the swimming world championships, and, every fourth summer, the Olympics.

Moreover, I can, at a given moment, pretty much rattle off times for the events I swim, in either yards or meters.

In none of those columns of records did 3:07 compute.

Still, the dream kept coming.

3:07.

When I'm in training, as I was before the 2008 Olympics in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I had moved after growing up near Baltimore, we typically practice early in the morning, then again in the late afternoon at the University of Michigan's Canham Natatorium. In between, I usually take a nap.

We would swim miles in the morning, then more miles in the afternoon.

Eat. Swim. Do other workouts, like weightlifting. Sleep. That was the routine. Believe me, working out that hard in the morning and then again in the afternoon made a nap no luxury. It was an essential.

One of the things about my naps is this: If I'm sitting there right before I doze off or immediately after I get up, I can visualize how I want the perfect race to go. I can see the start, the strokes, the walls, the turns, the finish, the strategy, all of it. It's so vivid that I can vividly see incredible detail, down even to the wake behind me.

It's my imagination at work, and I have a big imagination. Visualizing like this is like programming a race in my head, and that programming sometimes seems to make it happen just as I had imagined it.

I can also visualize the worst race, the worst circumstances. That's what I do to prepare myself for what might happen. It's a good thing to visualize the bad stuff. It prepares you. Maybe you dive in and your goggles fill with water. What do you do? How do you respond? What is important right now? You have to have a plan.

I'm not really sure, precisely, why I'm able to visualize like this. I have always been able to do it, ever since I was little. It's also true that I got lots of practice growing up; since I've been swimming it's been very much a part of the rhythm and routine of my life and of the house in which I grew up.

I grew up the baby brother in a house rumbling with girl power. My sister Whitney is five years older than I am, Hilary seven. When she was little, Hilary wanted to be the next Janet Evans, the record-setting American swimmer who was perhaps the best female distance swimmer of all time; Janet won five Olympic medals, four gold, between the 1988 and 1992 Games. Hilary grew up to be an excellent distance swimmer and set records at the University of Richmond. Whitney, as a teenager, was one of the best butterfly swimmers in the United States; she competed at the 1996 Olympic Trials.

So I was always, always around the pool. When I was a baby, my mom used to pick me up out of my crib, my pajamas still on, and drive me and the girls to the North Baltimore Aquatic Club (NBAC) at the Meadowbrook Aquatic and Fitness Center. She would change me in the car and, while the girls were swimming laps, I would stay there and play.

The North Baltimore club has a tradition of excellence, including female gold medalists at the 1984, 1992, and 1996 Olympics, and training there included sessions during which kids were taught how to visualize, as part of the process of setting goals. Whitney remembers it like it was yesterday. Sit quietly in a room, lights down, see a race from start to finish: diving in, how and when to breathe, what it would feel like to turn hard off the wall, to power to the finish, even how to get out of the pool.

Mom and I used to go through relaxation and programming techniques at home. My coach, Bob Bowman, had my mom buy a book that set out drills and exercises, including one in which I would tighten my right hand into a fist and relax it, then do the same with my left hand, as a way of learning to deal with tension. At night, before falling asleep, I would lie on my bed and she would read to me from that book, and I would practice.

When I was thirteen or fourteen, Bob started asking me to play a race in my head as though it were a video. When we were in training, we'd get to the last repetition of a set, particularly a really hard set, and Bob would want me to do that last repeat close to race speed. He'd say, okay, put in the tape and see yourself, for instance, swimming the 400 individual medley at the nationals.

To this day, if Bob says, okay, put in the videotape, that's what he means.

They say that the mental aspect of sports is just as important as the physical part. There can be no doubt about that: Being mentally tough is critical. At an Olympic final, you know everybody has physical talent. So, who's going to win? The mentally toughest. Bob is a big believer in that. I am, too. Bob also believes that my visualization skills carry over to my training, and to my racing, and that it's part of what makes me different.

Bob and I have been together for so long -- we started together when I was eleven, and I turned twenty-three during the 2008 Trials, in Omaha -- that he doesn't even have to say much to me now to make sure I'm preparing mentally as well as physically.

He doesn't have to nag. Not like that would work.

He just says something like, how's the visualizing going?

Fine, I'll say.

Or, he'll say, have you started yet?

Yes, I'll say. Or, not yet. Whatever. Bob just wants to make sure it's happening.

It always happens. Always.

But nothing was leading me to the answer of what my dream meant.

3:07. I kept trying to figure out the mystery.

An Olympic-sized pool is 50 meters long.

I don't swim the 50-meter freestyle sprint in competition. But I knew, of course, that whoever was going to win the sprint at the Beijing Olympics would do so, given advancements in pool technology and in swimsuits, in particular the Speedo LZR Racer, in well under 22 seconds.

The 100-meter freestyle winner would go in about 47 seconds. The 200 free would end in about 1 minute, 43 seconds, the 400 free in about 3:42, maybe slightly under.

There are three other strokes on the Olympic program: the backstroke, the breaststroke, and the butterfly. But races in those two strokes are only at 100 and 200 meters, not anywhere near long enough to be in the water for 3:07.

There are three relays on the Olympic program, too. Two of them are freestyle relays, the 400 and the 800. Four swimmers take turns swimming laps, 100 meters apiece in the 400, 200 apiece in the 800. In neither of those could 3:07 mean anything.

The other relay is what's called the 400 medley relay. Again, four swimmers take turns swimming laps. In the medley each swims a different stroke: in order, the backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly, freestyle. The winning time in the medley tends to be about three and a half minutes.

I was completely stumped.

Finally, I went to Bob to ask him what he thought it might be. Bob usually has the answers. It can be frustrating but it's true: Bob usually has the answers.

Bob's interests out of the pool range across a wide variety of subjects. He can tell you about thoroughbred horses. About the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. About the genius of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Bob played violin and went to Florida State because it was an excellent music school; he studied music composition very seriously. He then switched to child psychology. Bob gets asked all the time if I see a sports psychologist. He answers: every day.

The dynamic of our relationship over the years has been this: Bob pushed. I pushed right back. Bob can be gruff. He can be demanding. Sometimes he yells at me; as I've gotten older, I've shouted right back. The venting we do at each other just shows that I'm not scared of him, and he is for sure not scared of me. And the vast majority of the time, as in any partnership that works, and ours works, totally, we get along great. Because, bottom line, Bob is not only coach and mentor but so much more.

When I was younger, he had taught me how to tie a tie. For my first school dance, when I was thirteen, he let me leave practice fifteen minutes early; when I showed up with the tie and went to put it on, he noticed that my shirt was buttoned one button off. So we fixed that together. When I was a teenager, he taught me how to drive. His car was a stick shift, and that's how I learned. I always had trouble: I remember going to school one day, on a hill at a busy intersection, and of course I stalled the car in the middle of the hill. There were tons of people behind me. We fixed that together, too. I remember getting out of a workout and going to the prom -- regular black tux, stretch white Hummer limo -- and Bob was there to watch me head off.

All the little things like that: Bob has always been there for me.

At the Trials, I told Bob, I'm trying to make sense of this 3:07. What do you think it could be?

At first, he said he didn't know.

The only thing he could think of, he finally said, was that 3:07 somehow related to the 400 individual medley, a race that like the medley relay combines all four strokes. The difference, of course, is that it's just one person doing all the swimming, not four. Also, the order is different from the medley relay. In the IM, it goes: fly, back, breast, free.

I had held the world record in the 400 IM since 2002. When I first set the record, at the summer nationals in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, I touched in 4:11.09. Over the years, I had lowered the record a number of other times. At the 2007 world championships in Melbourne, Australia, I had lowered the 400 IM record to 4:06.22.

3:07, Bob said, had to be a split time, meaning an intermediate time in a given race, in this instance after the breaststroke leg, or three-quarters of the 400 IM, with only the up-and-back freestyle portion to go.

If you do that, he said, you're going to finish in 4:03-something.

That would be at least seven, nearing eight, seconds better than I had gone in first setting the record just six years before.

More than two seconds better than I had gone in Melbourne.

4:03? Obviously, some strong part of me believed I could go 4:03.

If you put a limit on anything, you put a limit on how far you can go. I don't think anything is too high. The more you use your imagination, the faster you go. If you think about doing the unthinkable, you can. The sky is the limit. That's one thing I definitely have learned from Bob: Anything is possible. I deliberately set very high goals for myself; I work very hard to get there.

4:03?

Then again, why not? No limits.

•••

Every year since I have been swimming competitively, I have set goals for myself. In writing.

The goal sheet was mandatory. I got used to it and it became a habit. When I was younger, I used to scribble my goals out by hand and show the sheet to Bob. Now, I might type them on my laptop and e-mail him a copy. Each year, he would take a look at what I'd given him, or sent him, and that would be that. He wouldn't challenge me, say this one's too fast or that one's not. When I was doing this only on paper, he typically would look at it and give it back to me; now he simply files away the electronic copy I send him.

I usually kept my original paper version by the side of my bed.

The two of us are the only ones who have it, who ever got to see it.

The goal sheet was famously secret for a long time...Until now.

I didn't look at the sheet every day. I pretty much memorized it, how fast I wanted to swim and what I had to do to get there. If there was a day when I was down, when I was not swimming well, when I simply felt tired or grouchy, I would look at it. It was definitely a pick-me-up.

Pretty soon after I made my first goal sheet, I hit every one of the times to a tenth of a second. Precisely. Exactly. It's like I have an innate body clock. I don't know how or why I was able to do this. I just could, and often still can. It's another way in which Bob says I'm different, and always have been.

When I was thirteen, Bob felt I needed to have some formal lessons in goal-setting. One day, on a school holiday, he surprised my mom by saying, I'm taking Michael to lunch today. He came and picked me up, and we went to this restaurant that I liked. He pulled out a sheet of paper. He said, okay, what are your goals this summer?

Of course, I replied, I don't know.

He started suggesting some things I ought to do and said, why don't we pick three events. Let's start, he said, with the 1500 meters. The 1500 is almost a mile. A Bowman favorite. We were trying, even when I was that young, to lay down a base of endurance work. Let's do that in 16 minutes flat, he said.

Let's also pick the 200 fly, Bob said, and I put down 2:04.68. That time was precisely one-hundredth of a second under the national age-group record. That would be a big drop for you, he said.

Okay.

Bob then said, let's pick the 400 IM. He suggested a time of 4:31.68, which was also near the age-group record.

He said, take this paper home and put it on your refrigerator. You'll see it every day.

That summer, at the 1999 junior nationals in Orlando, I didn't win any events.

In the 1500, I went 16:00.08. I was off by eight-hundredths of a second.

In the 400 IM, I swam 4:31.68. Precisely.

In the 200 fly, I swam 2:04.68. Precisely.

The 200 fly time was nearly 10 seconds better than the best time I had done in practice about six weeks beforehand, when Bob had ordered a set of three 200 flys as a tune-up.

In that 200 fly in Orlando I took third place. Bob congratulated me and said first place might have been bad luck. He said he had never coached anyone who had won juniors and then had gone on to win nationals as a senior.

Later that summer, I went to the senior nationals in Minneapolis. In my first race, I finished 41st. My next race was the 200 fly. I finished dead last in my heat, in 2:07.

This was maybe a lesson for Bob. Maybe I wasn't ready just quite yet. Maybe I was just emotionally overwhelmed. I had touched in 2:04.68 a few weeks before; logic said I should have gone at least that fast in Minneapolis.

That summer I turned fourteen. I can still remember being on the pool deck at nationals, getting ready for my heat, and thinking, there's Tom Dolan. Tom Dolan! He was 6-feet-6 and was supposed to have only 3 percent body fat. He had gone to the University of Michigan and had already won a gold medal in the 400 IM at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. He was a legend not only for what he had done but also for how he trained: to the point of exhaustion, maybe beyond.

Another time at the meet in Minneapolis, I remember, I was sitting in the stands and there, across the pool deck, went Tom Malchow. Tom Malchow! He had gone to the University of Michigan, too. And he had won a silver medal in the 200 fly in Atlanta.

I was in awe. Here I was, on the very same pool deck with Olympic swimmers.

The last day of the meet in Minneapolis, I wasn't due to compete in any races. This meant nothing to Bob. "Get ready, Michael," he said. "You're doing a practice today."

What?

I didn't even have a suit with me. Why would I? I wasn't supposed to race.

I thought to myself, we're already at the pool, are we really going to get in the car, go back to the hotel, drive all the way back here and train?

Yes.

It took us a good 40 minutes to go there and back. I didn't like it, didn't like any of it. Bob didn't care. I went back in the water.

That fall, back in Baltimore, we started training for the 2000 spring nationals in Federal Way, Washington, near Seattle.

With six weeks to go, Bob had an idea at practice. Let's do what we did last year as a trial run: a set of three 200 flys. Into the water I went.

My best time of the three turned out to be 2:09. Bob was obviously disappointed. After the 2:04.68 from the year before, he thought I was going to do 2:05, at least. Maybe, he told me, you could even break two minutes.

In the back of his mind, Bob was holding out the possibility, no matter how remote it seemed, that I could finish in the top two at the Olympic Trials that summer in Indianapolis and make the Olympic team. At that point, I had produced nothing to suggest that the 2000 Olympics were truly possible. This did not deter Bob. He believed in me, completely.

The way swim meets work, the heats are usually in the morning or early afternoon, and the finals at night. When I was a teenager, the heats would pretty much always go off in front of just a few people in the stands, typically parents, brothers and sisters, other coaches. I have come to like a noisy crowd. Early that afternoon in Federal Way, there was almost nobody in the stands.

I went 1:59.6.

That broke the age-group record for fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds. I was still only fourteen.

That night I came back and raced the 200 fly again. I finished in 1:59.02, behind only Stephen Parry of Great Britain and Malchow.

Afterward, I had my first interview. I was asked, did you think you could break two minutes in the 200 fly? Here's what I said: My coach told me I could do it.

It's after that 1:59.6, Bob likes to say, that he knew I would make the Olympic team, maybe sooner than later. I had no idea. I was, after all, fourteen.

The day after that, I set another age-group record in the 400 IM, lowering my time in that race by seven seconds, to 4:24.

The next day, I wasn't swimming in any finals. Sightseeing? No way. Into the pool I went.

We got home from Federal Way on a school day. My mom, who was at work, had put a large banner saying, "Congratulations," on the lawn and had trimmed it in red, white, and blue. Bob, who had brought me back to the house, took down the entire display. When she got home, Mom was furious. Bob was unmoved. It was a matter, Bob said, of tempering expectations. Best to keep everything in perspective. Bob asked my mom, "What are you going to do when he wins nationals? He got third. If he wins, are you going to buy him a car? If he sets a world record, what, a house? You can't get excited about every step. There are so many steps. We're on, like, step 200 of 3,000. How are we going to keep going?"

Bob has, without question, helped refine my intense drive and dedication. He has also, without question, helped me believe that anything is possible. Two seconds faster than the world record? Doesn't matter. Three seconds faster? Doesn't matter. You can swim as fast as you want. You can do anything you want. You just have to dream it, believe it, work at it, go for it.

I wrote the sheet that lay out my goals for 2008 a few weeks after coming back from those 2007 world championships in Melbourne. That meet in Australia had been one of my best ever. I won seven gold medals and set five world records, including that 4:06.22 in the 400 IM.

In the 100 free, I wanted in the Olympic year of 2008 to go 47.50.

200 free: 1:43.5.

100 fly: 49.5.

200 fly: 1:51.1.

200 IM: 1:53.5.

And the 400 IM: 4:05 flat.

There's more on the sheet, other races as well as split times for every single race.

But these were races I was likely to swim at the Olympics.

In writing that I wanted to go 4:05 in 2008, I knew full well that was ambitious. That would be more than a full second better than I had ever done before.

And yet: 3:07.

Which meant 4:03.

•••

I started swimming when I was seven.

Mom put me in a stroke clinic taught by one of her good friends, Cathy Lears.

"I'm cold," I remember saying.

And, "I have to go to the bathroom."

And, "Can't I just sit here and watch the other kids? I'll stay here by the side."

Mostly, I remember, I simply didn't like putting my face under the water.

Miss Cathy told me I could use the backstroke, if that's what I wanted. But I was going to check off every item on the practice plan. "You're going to learn," she said, "one way or the other."

I complained and whined some more.

Even so, I finished every item on her plan. And soon enough I learned how to flip over onto my tummy and learned to swim the freestyle.

It would be a couple years yet until I would be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. All everyone knew, in particular my mom, my sisters, and my coaches, was that I had all this energy and that I could bleed off a lot of it by playing sports: baseball, soccer, lacrosse, swimming, you name it.

What I discovered soon after starting to swim was that the pool was a safe haven. I certainly couldn't have put that into words then but can look back and see it now. Two walls at either end. Lane lines on either side. A black stripe on the bottom for direction. I could go fast in the pool, it turned out, in part because being in the pool slowed down my mind.

In the water, I felt, for the first time, in control. Swimmers like to say they can "feel" the water. Even early on, I felt it. I didn't have to fight the water. Instead, I could feel how I moved in it. How to be balanced. What might make me go faster or slower.

It would be ridiculous to say that I was a world-class talent from the very start. If it wasn't for the fact that Hilary and Whitney were swimming, I probably wouldn't even have started swimming.

I was a kid. A kid who was given to whining and -- it's true -- crying. I was seemingly forever on the verge of tears. My coaches remember a kid who was constantly being picked on. When I was younger, it seemed like almost anything could set me off into an emotional jag or launch me into a full-on tantrum, throwing my goggles and generally carrying on.

All this agitation was probably just my way of seeking attention. Mostly, I wanted to fit in, especially with the older kids. I just wanted to be acknowledged.

And yet, amid all this drama, I already had a dream: I wanted to win an Olympic gold medal.

One.

Just one. That was it at the start. Just one medal.

I also knew that winning Olympic medals was, truly, possible. It happened to people I knew. When I was seven, Anita Nall, a North Baltimore swimmer, won a gold, a silver, and a bronze at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. When I was eleven, Beth Botsford, another North Baltimore swimmer, won two gold medals in Atlanta.

My Olympic ambitions might not have been obvious, granted, especially early on and especially in the mornings, when I'd have to get up for practice. I have never been what you'd call enthusiastic about being up early in the morning.

Mom would come to get me out of bed. It would still be dark out. She would turn on a soft light in my room, a little night-light, and say, "Good morning, Michael. It's time for morning workout."

I would grump and groan.

Mom would go down the steps. I would just lie there in bed, nice and comfy. A few minutes later, she would come back and say, "Pop-Tarts are coming out of the toaster now. I'll be in the car waiting for you. Pick them up on your way out the door, because Bob's expecting you at workout."

My mom would go out to the car and sit, waiting for me. Bob is a morning person. He likes to get up before dawn. It's his favorite part of the day. Always has been.

Later, into middle school and high school, I remember driving in the dark to the pool and there never being any lights on at any house on the way there, and it would just be my mom and me, alone, going to practice. Sometimes my mom would yawn; I still can't believe how loud she sounds when she is yawning.

Once my mom had dropped me off at Meadowbrook, about 15 minutes away from where we lived, in Towson, Maryland, I usually wouldn't make it home again until it was dark again. Bob would take me from practice to school, or to breakfast and then to school, and then in the afternoon we would go back to the pool. Mom would come get me at maybe seven at night.

I would always be the last one out of the pool. She was always working so late; I remember it seemed like I was always the last one to leave. Unless I'd been kicked out of practice early by Bob, for not doing what he wanted the way he wanted it done or when he wanted it done; in that case, I had to sit there and wait for her, anyway.

All of this driving around, the back and forth on the roads around her job, required enormous dedication and sacrifice on my mom's part. At the same time, it was a total reflection of who she is. And that's something I am forever grateful for.

She made it abundantly clear that we -- she, my sisters, me -- came first, even as she insisted that we have a passion for life itself and for something, or some variety of things.

We had to have goals, drive, and determination. We would work for whatever we were going to get. We were going to strive for excellence, and to reach excellence you have to work at it and for it.

Mom calls this common sense. She grew up in a blue-collar area of western Maryland. Her father was a carpenter. Her mother's father was a miner. Neither of my mom's parents went to college. They had four children -- Mom was the second of the four -- and all four are college graduates; Mom went on to earn a master's degree.

My dad, Fred, used to take me fishing when I was a little boy. He would take me to Baltimore Orioles games. He taught me to look people in the eye when I was meeting them and to shake hands like I meant it. He was a good athlete himself -- a small-college football player -- and, unquestionably, I inherited my competitive athletic drive from him. If I was playing sports, no matter what it was, my father's direction was simple: Go hard and, remember, good guys finish second. That didn't mean that you were supposed to be a jerk, but it did mean that you were there to compete as hard as you could. The time to be friends was after the race; during it, the idea was to win.

My mother and father were high-school sweethearts in a mill town in western Maryland. Dad played football at Fairmont (West Virginia) State College; Mom followed him there. After they were married, they moved to the Baltimore area. My father moved out of the house when I was seven. As time went on, we spent less and less time together. Eventually, I stopped trying to include him in my activities and he, in turn, stopped trying to involve himself in mine.

The last time I saw my father was at Whitney's wedding, in October 2005. He and I didn't talk at the wedding; there just hasn't been anything to say for a while. Maybe there will be later.

Having said that, I feel I have everything and everyone that anyone could ever ask for. I have the greatest people in the world around me and supporting me.

My mom is an educator, now a school principal, and her passion in life is changing the lives of children. When she recognized a passion in her children for swimming, she was all in to help each of us.

At the same time, things were going to be done in our house, and done a certain way, because that's the way it was. Homework was going to get done. Clothes were going to get picked up off the floor. Kids were going to get taken to practice. We were all in it together.

Not only that: Our house was always the home where any kid was welcome. If there was a kid who needed to stay over to make swim practice the next morning, we had a sleeping bag and a pillow.

That work ethic, and that sense of teamwork, was always in our home. All of that went to the pool with me, from a very early age.

It's why, when I won my first Olympic gold medal, the first people I wanted to see when I had a quiet moment were my mom and my sisters.

•••

They say that what the decathlon is to track and field, the 400 individual medley is to swimming.

Most swimmers, like the vast majority of those who compete in track and field, are specialists. They do the backstroke, for instance. Or the breaststroke. That's not to say they don't know how to swim the other strokes. They do. But once they get to a certain age, they usually compete only in the one they're best in.

That's why the IM is tough. You have to do all four strokes, and do them all well.

The 400 IM is tougher still because it's all four strokes and at distance. It requires strength, endurance, technique, and versatility.

This race can make you hurt bad. Your shoulders start to burn. Your legs ache. You can't get a breath. The pain is sometimes dull, throbbing. It's like your body isn't even in the unbelievably great shape it's in. All you want is for the pain to stop.

Who's the mentally toughest? That's what the 400 IM is all about.

I had won the 400 IM at the 2003 championships in Barcelona in what was then a world-record time, 4:09.09.

A year later, as I got ready to get into the pool for the 400 IM Olympic final in Athens, Rowdy Gaines, himself an Olympic champion in 1984, now an NBC analyst, was saying that this was the race that was going introduce America to Michael Phelps.

I knew well the recent Olympic history of the event: Americans had gone 1-2 in the 400 IM in 1996 and in 2000. Dolan had won in Atlanta in 1996; Eric Namesnik, another Michigan man, had gotten silver. In 2000, Dolan repeated as Olympic champion; Erik Vendt, who had grown up in Massachusetts and gone to the University of Southern California, took silver.

Lining up that Saturday evening in Athens, I was in Lane 4, Vendt in Lane 1.

I have since watched the video of this race dozens of times, maybe hundreds. It's the one race that, from the eight days of competition in Athens, still stands out most to me.

After the butterfly leg, I led by more than a second; after the back, more than three, more than two body lengths ahead. The breaststroke had long been the weakest of my strokes. It was imperative on this leg that I not give up ground. I didn't.

100 meters to go. I turned and started doing the free.

50.

The swimmers who swim the fastest in the heats are assigned in the finals to the middle lanes. The advantage of swimming in the middle is that it's easier to keep an eye on what everyone else is doing. Coming off the last wall, I saw that Alessio Boggiatto of Italy in Lane 3 was still approaching his turn; in Lane 5, Hungary's Laszlo Cseh was not yet at the wall, either.

I still had that one lap to go.

But I knew already that I had won.

And so, underwater, I smiled.

Not even a half-minute later, I glided into the wall, and I was still smiling.

I popped up and looked for Mom in the stands. Even before I looked at the scoreboard, I looked for Mom, and, there she was, standing next to Whitney and Hilary, all of them cheering and just going crazy. I turned to look at the clock. It said, "WR," meaning world record, next to my name. 4:08.26. I raised my arm into the air.

I had done it.

I had won the Olympic gold medal I had been dreaming of since I was little.

I had also, in that instant, become the first American gold medalist of the 2004 Athens Games.

I really didn't know what to do, or say, or think.

"Mike! Mike!"

It was Vendt. He was swimming over from Lane 1. Truthfully, in the excitement of the moment, I hadn't noticed yet that he had finished second. We had gone 1-2. Cseh had finished third.

In finishing second, Vendt had carried on one of the quirkiest streaks in Olympic history. Four Games in a row an American named Erik or Eric had finished second in the 400 IM; Namesnik had taken silver in 1992 as well.

"Yeah, Vendt! Yeah!" I shouted. "Yeah! We did it!"

I could not stop smiling.

"So proud of you," Bob said.

"It felt great," I replied.

A little while later the top three finishers were called to the medals stand. An olive wreath went onto my head, the gold medal around my neck. The American flag went up, along with another for Vendt's silver and the Hungarian flag for Cseh's bronze. The "Star-Spangled Banner" began to play. I took the wreath off my head. The right thing to do is to take a hat off your head for the anthem; maybe a wreath was the same.

As I listened to the anthem, playing for me, for my country, my eyes grew moist. Even so, I could not stop smiling.

I had done it.

After warming down, I grabbed my cell phone.

When Mom and my sisters go to meets, Hilary is the keeper of the phone.

"Where are you guys?" I asked her.

"We're over by a fence, behind you. They're going to kick us out."

"Hold on. I want to see you guys. Meet at the gate."

Bob went with me, along with a doping official who was doing his official thing, just keeping an eye on me as he was supposed to do. Nothing untoward, nothing unusual about it. I walked toward the fence, my gold medal around my neck. My mom didn't see Bob or the doping guy. She just saw me. To my mom it looked like I was ten, back at Meadowbrook. I had my gold medal around my neck and, in her mind's eye, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in my hand.

I put the medal through the fence and said, "Look, Mom. Look what I did."

•••

That 400 IM in Athens was, as I see it, the turning point. I was nineteen. I had my first Olympic gold. My mom and sisters were there to watch -- that was, to me, what meant so much.

I did not go on to win eight gold medals in Athens. I won six. Eight overall, six gold, two bronze.

On the one hand, the Athens Olympics were an extraordinary success for me. I had met the original goal and gone well beyond.

On the other, I did not meet all my expectations.

Thus I had ample motivation to keep swimming, keep pushing myself. Beijing was four years away. That's a long time. And yet not.

Because stuff happens.

In the fall of 2004, I had major worries about my back.

A year later, I broke a bone in my hand.

In 2008, two years after that, I broke my wrist.

So many newspaper, magazine, and website stories have been written about me that sometimes it seems almost everything about me has been well documented.

But not everything.

I was so worried about my back in 2004: It turned out I had a small stress fracture, and needed rest. There were times I would be in Bob's office feeling broken down physically and emotionally. Whitney had endured back problems that seriously affected her career. I was scared and worried. Plenty scared, seriously worried.

I can't emphasize enough how, during all this, Bob was there for me. This is the side of him that doesn't get depicted often in all the stories that have been written about us, which tend to focus on how it's his way or the highway; this was the side that reminded me why I would never swim for any other coach. Bob made it plain how much he cared. He stayed positive. He sought, time and again, to reassure me. He would say, you're fine, we're going to get through this, we're going to get your back taken care of, it's all going to work out. Which, ultimately, it did.

Later, in the fall of 2005, the first week of November, I was hanging out in Ann Arbor with a bunch of swimmers. I was not in a very good state of mind. I don't remember why. Boys will be boys, I guess.

In fact, I don't recall very much about the entire thing except that we were at this guy's house and I hit something with my right hand -- maybe a post, maybe a wall. I don't even remember why I hit it. I'm not aggressive like that. It was just a weird situation. To this day, I have no idea why I did it. But it happened.

The bone underneath the pinky on my right hand broke in half. It popped, just like that. The bone almost came out of the skin.

I put my left hand over it and tried to hold it in place.

I called Keenan Robinson, a trainer at the University of Michigan I had come to trust and rely upon, and he helped me put it in a temporary splint, then got me to the emergency room.

Keenan called Bob. Bob called me back a bunch of times on my phone. I didn't answer. Bob called a girl I was seeing at the time, trying to get her to answer. It wasn't until the next night that he finally got me on my cell.

It was not a pleasant call. I have bad news, I said. Oh, God, he said. After that he said, we really need to get our act together, "we" meaning me. I know what I did was stupid, I said. I know I made a mistake. I can't change it.Ultimately, I underwent surgery. Doctors fixed the break with a titanium plate and three screws. Keenan did an amazing job helping me with the therapy; the scar is hardly noticeable.

Bob was amazed at how quickly I was able to come back. I rode the stationary bike hard until I was allowed back in the water; the day after Thanksgiving I was back at it.

Fall and early winter are typically not big months on the swimming calendar and while obviously a certain number of people in Ann Arbor knew about the break, Bob and I didn't advertise it.

My second broken bone is far better known.

Then again, the time pressure the second time around was very different.

In the fall of 2007, after dinner one night at Buffalo Wild Wings in Ann Arbor, one of those restaurants with a sports theme, I was walking to my car. As I neared it, walking on the driver's side, I slipped. I fell down and hit the ground. In reacting -- you don't really have time to think in this kind of situation -- I put my right hand down to cushion the fall. I caught myself. Nothing hurt. Everything seemed all right.

The next morning, Sunday, I woke up and it looked like there was a golf ball on my right wrist.

I thought, this isn't good.

This can't be good.

This could be really bad.

No way I was calling Bob. At least not first.

I called Keenan and said, "Can you come over and look at something?"

He replied, "What is it?"

This was, after all, Sunday morning. It's not like anyone would have been anxious to roll right over.

"It's like there's this giant golf ball on my wrist. I slipped last night and fell."

A few minutes later, Keenan showed up. As soon as he started touching the wrist, started trying to manipulate it, I felt nauseous. Literally sick to my stomach. It was the same feeling I had when he had touched the hand two years before.

I knew right then the wrist was cracked. Fractured. Broken.

I started doing some quick math in my head.

This was late October. The Games were the next August. Two full months left in 2007 plus seven months in 2008. Would there be time?

Wait. The Trials were at the end of June. Two months in 2007, plus less than six months in 2008 to get ready. Would there be time?

I was not sure. I worried that I might be done, not just for the Olympics, but for my entire swim career. I was a mess. In tears.

Keenan said, we have to call Bob.

Bob had decided that day that he was going to make soup. He had gone to Whole Foods and stocked up on vegetables. He was going to make himself a huge pot of sumptuous vegetable soup.

Keenan called Bob. Bob told Keenan, put Michael on the phone.

I was as upset as I could be. I told Bob, I think I just gave away gold medals. I guess it was a good try, I said. I'd had a good run. I don't know how I'm going to be able to come back from this.

Bob listened quietly.

He said, the meet's not next week. Let's see what you can do. He also said, I was there for you in the beginning; I'm going to be here at the end, and however it ends up is how it ends up.

After we hung up, I found out later, Bob threw out his soup. He suddenly had no appetite.

Keenan took me to the emergency room. X-rays confirmed it was broken. At the hospital, I was asked for my autograph; I'm right-handed and couldn't sign. So I was asked for photos. While hooked up to IV lines.

The next day, Keenan, Bob, and I went to see the surgeon. One of the things about being at the University of Michigan, which after the incident two years before I knew full well, is that they have there some of the greatest doctors and nurses in the world. The surgeon said we had two options:

Let it heal on its own, which would take a while. That's what most people do, the doctor said. Your hand would be in a cast for maybe six weeks, he said.

I said, what's the other choice?

Surgery, he said, the advantage of which would be that the bone would be put back into place then and there with a pin, and you'd simply wait for the stitches to come out. About ten days, he said.

That was a no-brainer.

Surgery it was. "You're talking only one pin?" Bob said, mindful that the prior break had involved three screws and a plate.

I said, "When's the next available date?"

They couldn't schedule the surgery immediately; it would be a few days away.

Meanwhile, Bob heard, "Ten days," and thought, okay, maybe this isn't the end of the world. What my clumsiness had done, he made clear, was eliminate my margins. Before the break, I maybe had some wiggle room in my schedule. Now I would have none.

"You can still do this," Bob told me. "But are you ready to listen?"

"Yes."

"Starting right now," he said, "you're going to have to do every single thing I ask you to do. You're going to have to do it my way."

I thought to myself, this is not going to be fun. But that's not what I said."Okay," I said. "I'll do it."

I finally worked up the courage to call Mom and tell her, too. That is, I called during school hours, when I knew she would be working and wouldn't have her cell phone with her, and got voice mail. Mom, I said, I've had this little incident on the curb; it's okay, Keenan's taking care of me; talk to you later.

When Mom heard that, she said later, she thought, Oh, good God.

We had gone to the doctor in the morning. That afternoon, per Bob's instructions, I was on a stationary bike.

For me, riding a stationary bike is one of the most boring activities imaginable. It's horrible. One of the worst things I've ever done. Some people think swimming is boring or monotonous. Not me; swimming is fun. Riding a stationary bike is the least amount of fun possible. The thing was, though, I knew I needed to keep working out. The bike was making my legs stronger. Much as I didn't want to do it, I did it. It was the right thing to do. I had given Bob my word. I was going to do exactly what he wanted, exactly how he wanted it done. I rode that bike every day until I underwent the surgery. Bob gave me a day, maybe two, and then I was back on the bike. A few days after that, I had my hand in a plastic bag, and I was back in the water, kicking.

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. Lochte, 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.

he 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 a