No Limits (17 page)

In Australia in 2003, Bob deliberately asked our driver to show up late. That way I had to spend more time waiting at the pool, and we missed dinner. I ordered pizza. That same trip, he stepped on my goggles, on purpose. I had to make do.

A power outage one day at the pool in Michigan meant nothing. We swam in the dark. That was good, Bob said. Made you swim by feel. Forced you to count your strokes.

Back in Australia in 2007, at the Worlds in Melbourne, my goggles started sliding down my face as I turned into the final 50, the freestyle leg, of the 200 IM. The goggles filled with water. I couldn't see Lochte or Cseh at all. I knew that I had turned about a half-second ahead and so I just drove for home. When I touched and turned, I blinked and blinked and blinked until I could see the board: 1:54.98, a new world record.

So what if I couldn't see? What's important now? Getting it done, no matter what.

•   •   •

The night before that 200 IM in Melbourne, I swam the finals of the 200 fly. This is how good that race was. Afterward, Bob just smiled at me.

I was timed in that 200 fly in Melbourne in 1:52.09, not just a world record but by 1.62 seconds. The runner-up in the race, Wu Peng of China, touched more than three seconds behind. Typically, when a record is broken, the line that gets superimposed on the television broadcast or on the arena big board runs just behind a swimmer's fingers; records are usually taken down by hundredths of tenths of a second. In this instance, the line was near my feet.

I felt like I was twelve again, in the sense that you break records by that much only when you're twelve.

It was the sort of thing that made newspapers and television around the world take notice of swimming, in a non-Olympic year, no less. On ESPN, they debated my place in sports history. The back page of the
Herald Sun,
Australia's largest newspaper, featured a photo of me rising out of the water in midstroke; the headline reached across the entire page of the tabloid, just one word: “Greatest.” My hometown newspaper, the
Baltimore Sun,
called it “stunning” and offered comparisons to Bob Beamon's history-making long jump, 29 feet, 2½ inches, two feet past what had been the world record, at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Mark Schubert, our U.S. team coach, told the Baltimore paper that what I did might have been even better. “I don't think it's comparable to Beamon's performance because that was a lifetime, out-of-body experience that we never saw again,” he said, meaning Beamon never again jumped that far. “I think we're going to see an even better time from Michael. I just think he's that good.”

Honestly, in the warm-ups before the 200 fly final in Melbourne I had felt crummy. My arms felt sore. I had gone 1:43.86 in the 200 free just the day before.

Once I got up on the blocks, I had to get over all that. How I felt then was not the least bit important to what was possible now. It was time to go out and race, the weight training obviously making a huge, huge difference in what I was now able to do.

The time in Melbourne surprised me, but not the record itself. I had realized the month before, at the annual midwinter meet in Missouri, that I was on the verge of something special. I showed up at the Missouri meet with a full goatee. My hair was hanging out of my cap. I was obviously not shaved and certainly not tapered. Even so, I had gone out that night and lowered my world record in the 200 fly. In Victoria, at the Pan Pacs in 2006, I had gone 1:53.80; in Missouri, I took nine-tenths of a second off that, dropping the record to 1:53.71.

To go under that in Melbourne by more than a second and a
half is why I had enormous expectations for myself in this race in Beijing, why I put 1:51.1 on my 2008 goal sheet.

At the Olympic final, immediately before the starter called, “Take your marks,” I pushed my goggles to my eyes. Not sure, even now, why.

I race in metallic Speedo goggles, a model called the “Speed Socket.” I also race in two caps. The sequence goes like this: I put the goggles on, then one cap, then the other. That way the goggles are secure.

Nothing seemed amiss.

Obviously, however, something was wrong. Fernando and Mona could see that all the way from Norway.

At the beep, immediately after I dove in, the goggles started leaking. I couldn't tell whether the seal had broken on the top or bottom.

That wasn't important. What was important was to go.

When I turned at 50, the thought flashed through my mind that maybe the leak wouldn't be that bad. It seemed manageable.

At 100, though, things started getting more and more blurry. Just after that, as I made my way up the pool to the far wall, with perhaps 75 meters to go in the race, the cups of the goggles filled entirely. I could not see.

I could not see the line on the bottom of the pool. I could not see the black T that marks the coming of the wall. I could not see anybody else in any other lane. I could not see.

This wasn't football, or basketball. I didn't have the luxury of calling a time-out.

I couldn't take the goggles off and swim old school because the goggles were trapped under both caps.

This was an Olympic final. I had to go. At that instant, that's what was the most important thing. I had to go hard and fast.

There was no time to think about anything. But what was there to think about? I was the farthest thing from freaked out. This very thing had happened to me just the year before, in Mel
bourne, in the 200 IM finals. It happens sometimes in swimming. It was happening to me now.

In the 200 fly, there's a regular and predictable progression of strokes as the race goes along. That is, there are so many strokes per length of the pool, the number typically going up by one per lap because of the inevitable demands on the body and the fatigue.

The first length usually takes sixteen strokes. The second, eighteen; the gap is two because the race starts with a dive. The third length usually goes nineteen strokes. The final length, nineteen or twenty.

When my goggles filled, I was on the third length. Thus, the magic number to get to the far wall was nineteen, maybe twenty. Because my goggles were already leaking before the turn, anticipating the crisis, I had started a stroke count as soon as I made the turn into that third length.

Four or five strokes into that third length—that's where it all closed in and I could no longer see.

Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. Where was that wall?

Twenty, and a glide; there, there it was.

Perfect. I had spaced it perfectly, the glide carrying me into the wall and a touch. I hadn't come into the wall in midstroke or hammered into it or jammed my fingers or bent back my wrist or any of the other things that could have gone wrong. In Omaha, Emily Silver had broken her right hand after swimming into the wall at the finish of the 50-meter free semis. It put her out of the pool for more than a week.

In the stands, Whitney was concerned. His stroke is tight, she said to Mom.

Bob was also wondering what was going on. The way we had planned it, I should have been much farther ahead, pushing for 1:51. Bob's mind had already started racing. Maybe, he figured, for some inexplicable reason I was looking ahead to the 800
relay, which both of us knew I was going to have to race later that morning, about fifty-six minutes after the end of the 200 fly, and was just going hard enough in the fly to get the job done.

Little did he know that I wasn't looking anywhere. I couldn't see. It was as bad as it could get.

Coming down the homestretch, I was just hoping I'd given myself enough of a lead so that nobody could run me down.

Seventeen. Eighteen.

I could hear the crowd roaring. For me? For someone else? Was it close?

Nineteen. Twenty. Wall, wall, wall, where was that last wall?

One more stroke. Give it one more stroke, twenty-one and reach for it, glide just a touch.

There, there it was! I felt it with my hands. Again, I had timed it just right. I didn't ram into the wall with my shoulder or, worse, my head. I reached for it, hands out in front, and got it with my fingers.

Just the way I would have tried to do it if I could have seen what I was doing.

With my right hand, I reached up and ripped off my goggles. Both the caps came flying off, too, into the water with the goggles. I leaned on the lane line with my right arm, blinking hard. I tossed the caps behind me onto the deck with my left hand, picked up the goggles with my right and flung them behind me, too, then looked up, breathing hard, shaking my head from side to side, squinting at the scoreboard.

Next to my name it said, 1. It also said WR, a world record, 1:52.03. Incredible.

I was simultaneously thrilled and, candidly, frustrated as I got out of the pool and said to Bob, “I couldn't see anything.”

I was not put out so much at the wardrobe malfunction—stuff happens—but frustrated at the opportunity lost. My fly had come on so strong in 2007 and 2008. I had extraordinary confi
dence I could go super-fast at the Olympics. I had, and yet I could have gone faster. There was no doubt in my mind that I could have gone faster. No doubt at all.

And it was natural, there in the pool, to wonder, would I have an opportunity ever again to swim this race so fast?

I shook it off.

What was important now was taking the briefest of moments to appreciate what I had just done.

Nine swims down, eight to go.

Four for four in gold-medal swims. Cseh had gone four seconds faster than he had ever gone before, and still come in second, in 1:52.70; Takeshi Matsuda of Japan went two seconds better than his prior best, and came in third, in 1:52.97. The field I had just beaten was so fast that bronze in Athens would not even have gotten a spot in the final eight in Beijing.

And now, of course I had ten gold medals over my three Olympics, more than anyone else in history. I thought, wow, the “greatest Olympian of all time,” that's a pretty cool title.

It was too dizzying, way too much for me to appreciate right then and there. I had to go swim a relay. That relay was truly what was important now.

In the stands, meanwhile, Hilary said to Mom, it's ironic, isn't it? The 200 fly got Michael to the Olympics for the first time. The 200 fly is the event in which he got his first world record. It was the event that made him somebody in the international swim scene. Now that's the event that launched Michael into history with his tenth Olympic medal.

Mom thought about that for a moment amid the din there in the Water Cube. She looked at Hilary and said, where do you come up with these things?

My BlackBerry buzzed before I set out for the Water Cube the morning of the 200 fly and the 800 freestyle relay, a text message from back home: “Dude, it's ridiculous how many times I have to see your ugly face.” Then came another message: “It's time to be the best ever.”

I had to laugh.

I laughed a lot at the Beijing Games. It felt different than in Athens and that's because it was different. The 2008 Games were my third Olympics; I knew what to expect. I had been through the media storm in 2004, for instance, so I knew what was coming in 2008. That time, I was a deer in headlights; I had never gotten that much media attention. Also, in Athens, I was only nineteen. Maybe I was too young to appreciate fully what the Olympics were all about. It's like all the little lessons Bob and I had been working on for fully a dozen years; they were all there to see in Beijing, on display in particular in that 800 relay.

I knew, for example, how to conserve energy through a whole meet, whether it was seven, eight, or nine days. Related to that was the furious work I had put in during the hours in the pool and the weight room. If few people truly understood how hard I had worked, the grueling nature of the workouts Bob had put me and the others in our training group in Michigan through, the endurance that I had built would reveal itself in the relays.

Part of it, as well, was how I had grown up since Athens. I was now twenty-three. I had moved to Michigan, lived on my own, made mistakes, endured health scares. My relationship with Bob was forced to evolve, and it did. That maturity would be on ample display in the relays as well; we had to swim with passion but at the same time swim smart.

Then, too, there were the relationships with my teammates, which mattered to me immensely, and the opportunity to take all three relay titles back to the United States. That also mattered to me intensely. The 800 was not likely to be a replay of the 400 earlier in the week. What could be, after Jason had seemingly captivated the entire world with his anchor leg? But that didn't mean it could or should be taken for granted. And in this 800 we had a very definite goal, to do something no team of four guys swimming four laps apiece had ever done: break seven minutes.

We wanted to go six-something.

This relay had an incredible Olympic history. We wanted to make a little history of our own.

•   •   •

Before I found a place of my own in Michigan, I had to bunk with Bob. It was the most miserable month ever, for him and for me.

This arrangement occupied late November and early December 2004. Bob wanted to watch over me. I didn't want to be watched. The DUI had given him more reason to watch me more closely. I felt bad enough about it already.

“Are you eating enough?” Bob would ask. “Sleeping enough?”

Stop treating me like an eleven-year-old, I finally said after one too many of these sorts of questions.

The television was his television; we watched what he wanted to watch. I would retreat to my room to play video games or to hack around on my computer.

Finally, we got into it big time. I couldn't stand even one more second.

“I'm out of here!” I said.

“Okay,” Bob said. “Don't let the door hit you on your way out.”

“Good,” I said right back, ever so cleverly. “I'm going back to Baltimore.”

I threw my things in the car and walked out, then called my mom.

“Now, Michael,” she said, calmly, “what are the advantages of coming home? Of course you can come back, but would you train here? Are you going to find a new coach? What about school?”

I turned around. I even showed up at practice. But the feeling that he was making every decision in my life for me had hardly gone away. I had to get some space.

A few days later, I signed the papers to buy a condo near campus. I wanted out from Bob so badly that I slept there on an air mattress helpfully supplied by a Michigan assistant coach.

The dynamic was complicated further, and to be truthful, aggravated, by my back problems. At the very same time that I wanted the adult freedom of being on my own, I also needed Bob's reassurance. Little wonder things were edgy. Another MRI in early December offered clearer evidence of a stress fracture. I was given three options: stop training for six months; practice through the pain with uncertain short-and long-term consequences to my discs; surgery, with at least three months of no swimming. What was unsaid, of course, was that my entire career might be at risk—even if it was being thought by me and by anyone who knew Whitney and the family history.

More opinions were sought.

In the meantime, as I rested, my symptoms—just like that—went away. We began to incorporate cross-training and core work into my training, meaning push-ups, pull-ups, sit-ups, sessions with a medicine ball.

And I was left to figure out how to live this new life in Ann Arbor.

At first, I had no dishes. Having gone to the grocery store for milk and cereal, I did have something to eat. What to eat it in? A Gatorade container would have to do. I poured the cereal in there, sloshed the milk in on top, swirled it all around and drank it all down.

Soon enough, I had dishes. I put them in the dishwasher, then poured liquid hand soap in the soap tray. That led to a bubble bath all over the kitchen floor.

As time went along, I did become more accomplished in the house, sort of. At one point, the smoke detector started singing. I hadn't been cooking. I didn't smell anything burning. What could it be?

I called Bob. “Michael,” he said, “when was the last time you changed the batteries in the smoke detector?”

“You need to do that?”

I took a handful of courses—at some point, I would like to get my college degree—and got the Michigan “M” tattooed on my left hip, a counterpoint to the Olympic rings on my right.

After getting a crash course after Athens in fame, I was mostly allowed to be alone in Ann Arbor. Nobody bothered the football players much; in the same way, I was mostly left to be myself and be by myself, if that's what I wanted. At the same time, I had to learn to juggle sponsor commitments around the country even as Peter and I weighed a seemingly relentless flood of invites from anyone and everyone interested in a piece of me, everything from the Miss USA pageant (yes) to bar mitzvahs (not really).

That winter, Bob and I wanted to be both cautious with my training, yet as aggressive as we could be. In March 2005, it was back to Indianapolis for the meet that would qualify swimmers for that year's Worlds in Montreal. I won the 200 IM, outtouched Ian Crocker in the 100 fly, and then, in the 100 free, set a personal-best, 49-flat, holding off Jason Lezak, who, like me, had not been training his hardest over that winter. At that Indy meet, my back felt fine; the times and the wins were not nearly as reassuring as that simple fact.

By the time we got to Montreal, I had for the year put in maybe half the miles in the pool I had done in years prior. I did win gold medals there. But it was clear after the 400 free prelim disaster, then that same week losing emphatically to Ian Crocker in the 100 fly, that I was not where I wanted to be. Montreal was a wake-up call.

“Phelps flop,” screamed one newspaper headline. A columnist for the
Montreal Gazette
wrote, “Visitors to the World Aquatics Championships the past week have been wondering why the city of Montreal has lifeguards posted around the pools. Any chance you saw Michael Phelps struggle home over the final two lengths of his 400-metre freestyle heat yesterday? The U.S. superstar was breathtaking in the worst way imaginable, failing to make the eight-man final while looking like a weary age-grouper…”

The only thing I could do was use it as motivation.

•   •   •

Though I was taking some courses, loved going to Michigan football games, said “Go Blue!” when I was honored with an ESPY for what I'd done in Athens, it took me a while to learn how to fit in at Michigan. I was never going to be just a regular college kid, not just another member of the high-performance training group—called Club Wolverine—at the pool.

Because I had turned professional years before, I was not rep
resenting Michigan at dual meets with the likes of Wisconsin or swimming for the Wolverines at the Big Ten or NCAA championships.

In its way, this was another challenge. If I didn't have the academic record of the college guys who were, for example, engineering majors, was it weirder for them to be in the same pool with me?

Then came the sudden death of Eric Namesnik in January 2006, which jolted everyone who'd ever had a connection to Michigan swimming and, for that matter, anyone with any connection of any kind to swimming, or even to the Olympics. Twice the Olympic silver medalist in the 400 IM, Snik, which is what everyone called him, died four days after being critically injured in an early-morning car crash on an icy road. I had first met Snik when I was eleven; he was only thirty-five, with a wife and two children, when he passed away. His favorite saying: “Dream no small dreams, for they have no power to move the hearts of men.”

That April, meanwhile, Erik Vendt showed up in Ann Arbor, intent on resuming his racing career. I could not have been more thrilled. I needed, to use Bob's analogy, to make a considerable deposit into the fitness bank. And no one had ever trained harder than Erik Vendt.

Erik had taken time off after Athens. He'd gone backpacking around Europe, then moved to New York. There he worked at a swim school, teaching kids. The kids' attitude completely changed his. Before, he had looked at swimming as racing, placing, and medals. Working with the kids, he saw the success and pride of getting in the pool for the first time, getting their face in the water for that first time. Seeing their excitement and joy made him excited all over again about swimming. He was toying with the idea of coming back when, listening to the Olympic theme song from the telecast of the Winter Games from Torino, Italy, in February 2006, he literally got chills up and down his spine and
thought to himself, I guess I'm not done yet. So he called Jon, and said, do you think I could get in with the Club Wolverine crew? Get back in here, Jon said.

Erik, who's from Massachusetts, had gone to college at USC, swimming under Mark Schubert. Mark had left USC to become the U.S. team national coach; with Bob and Jon, Erik figured he'd get punished in practice just like he would have with Mark but, at Michigan, he'd also get more of an emphasis on weight training, which I was aggressively starting to work on that year, too.

If I was willing to work hard in practice, Erik had perhaps an even greater appetite for it. He set out to remake himself into a freestyler instead of an all-arounder in the individual medleys, everything from the 200 free to 1500, no small thing because he was himself a two-time Olympic silver medalist in the 400 IM. And Erik just ate up whatever Bob threw at him. If, on a scale of one to ten, I was now turning in consistent eights at practice, very few sinking to a two, rising every now and then to a ten, Eric was maybe a nine each and every day. I had, and still have, never seen anyone work out so hard and be so competitive, both in workouts and in the racing itself.

Aside from that, Erik and I had history together, going back to the 2000 Olympic team and our one-two finish in the 400 IM in Athens. He was four years older, which suited me perfectly, because at North Baltimore I was always the young kid hanging out with the older guys. He would motivate me when I needed motivation. He never held anything back, always told me exactly how it was. I sometimes didn't like to hear whatever it was Erik had for me, but better to hear it from him than one more time from Bob. Erik would also mediate when Bob and I had one of our periodic moments. On the road, Erik and I took to rooming together.

Without Erik Vendt, there was no way I could have gotten through the years from Athens to Beijing.

All of us in Club Wolverine pushed each other hard. In Balti
more, I had been used to winning every practice set, it seemed. Not here. Davis Tarwater had emerged as one of the best in the country in the butterfly. He and I would go at it in fly sets; I had never had anyone go with me in those sets but, literally, he and I would be swimming side by side in what seemed like every set. Peter Vanderkaay was a 2004 Olympic teammate of mine from Athens. Klete Keller, who trained in Ann Arbor until moving to Southern California, had been a teammate in both Sydney and Athens.

This was no boys-only club. Katie Carroll was a Big East swim champion at Notre Dame. Kaitlin Sandeno won four Olympic medals, one in Sydney, three in Athens. As we got closer to the Trials in Omaha, we were joined by Michigan high school star Allison Schmitt. At first, there were some raised eyebrows in what was largely a group of post-grads, of older swimmers, about Allison's arrival. She was going to go on to college in the fall: Did she really belong? She quickly not only proved that she did belong, she brought immense life to the party. In truth, she brought all of us closer.

Jon may have sometimes affectionately referred to Kaitlin as “the Princess,” but the girls got no breaks. No one wanted any. We were all there to train for the Trials and the Games, as the clock across the pool counted down the time, in days, hours, minutes, seconds, down to tenths of a second, before the start of the Beijing Olympics.

•   •   •

Morning practice at the Canham pool got started at either seven or seven-thirty, depending on the season, and went for roughly two hours.

If it was seven, my alarm would go off at six-twenty, maybe six-thirty. I still was not a morning person. I wouldn't be out of bed until six-forty-five. That gave me just enough time to grab something I could eat on the run, get to the pool, throw my suit on,
walk onto the deck, get my equipment, and be ready to dive in. I would practice most mornings in a swimming brief, what the rest of the world might call a Speedo; they were Speedos, of course, often a model called the Flip Turn, and I particularly liked one with yellow moons and yellow unicorn heads set against a magenta background. It was so hideously ugly that it actually had tons of style. Same for a neon-green one plastered with red cherries.