No Limits (8 page)

Early on, Bob put me through a butterfly workout that went on for 3,000 meters. That was nearly two miles of only butterfly.

When things started getting much more serious, in my mid-teens, I was worked through a freestyle set that went on for 12,000 meters. That's about seven miles. It went like this: one 800, two 700s, three 600s, four 500s, five 400s, six 300s, seven 200s, eight 100s.

I would do a set built on this combination: 300 free, 200 fly. Each 500 amounted to one. I did ten.

The worst sets ever would involve long repetitions, say thirty 100s, bad enough, but with a twist. At the 50-meter mark you'd have to climb out of the pool, then start the remaining 50 from the blocks. One of my favorite sets, Bob likes to say, because getting out of the pool and diving back in adds an extra component to the thing that's just brutal. After twenty, you're grabbing the block. You can't see straight. Things are blurry. You feel like you can't move.

But you can. That's what I came to understand. At that point it's pretty much just goals. If you want to meet your goals, this is what it takes.

•   •   •

Bob was born and raised in South Carolina. He was an accomplished musician and artist and president of his high school's National Honor Society. He was also a swimmer. Unlike everything else he did, swimming didn't come quite so easily. Even so, he got to Florida State on a swim scholarship and, training with the distance swimmers, qualified for the 1985 spring nationals in the 100 fly. He should have been training with the sprinters, but figured more work meant better.

Not always.

Finishing up at Florida State, Bob got a job coaching with a local swim club. His boss gave him a stack of stuff to read with the understanding Bob was supposed to get it read in a month. He read it all that night, came back the next morning and asked for more.

Early in his coaching career, Bob was perhaps even more impatient and demanding. In nine years, he coached in seven places in five states.

One of those stops came in Napa Valley, north of San Francisco. There he learned from Paul Bergen. In 2001, Inge de Bruijn of the Netherlands won three individual events at a world championships; Tracy Caulkins had done it before her, in 1978. Paul Bergen coached both of them.

Paul was exacting. So is Bob.

Paul liked to train thoroughbred horses. Bob, too. Plus: Horses don't talk. Swimmers can't, either, at least when swimming. Bob and I would learn to communicate without saying a word.

Bob didn't come to Baltimore with the slightest intention of coaching me. He had been turned down in 1995 for what he thought then was his dream job, head coach of the Dynamo Swim Club in Atlanta. The club offered the job to someone else. Bob thought, that's it. He decided to try for a degree in farm management at Auburn University, thinking he ultimately would run a horse farm. While he was there, he figured, he would take a part-time assistant's job at Auburn.

The 1996 Olympics in Atlanta were coming up. Looking for advice, he spoke with Murray Stephens, the head coach at North Baltimore. Murray had trained Anita Nall and Beth Botsford. Murray had developed a culture that demanded excellence. He respected Bob.

How much, Murray asked, is the Auburn job paying?

Told $10,000, Murray said, we'll pay you $35,000. When can you start?

Bob said, how about next week?

From that very first day, even if he hardly showed it, Bob knew I was, as he likes to say now, made for swimming.

My growth spurt came before I turned fifteen. By that time, I was almost as tall as I am now. Getting that big that fast obviously increased the length of my stroke. That meant I could do more in the water and thus became way more accepting of Bob's ever-increasing demands. In turn, he could tell, as could I, that I kept getting better and better.

Which gave me genuine confidence.

Another slogan Bob likes is one from Bill Parcells, the football coach: You can't dream up confidence. Confidence is born of demonstrated ability.

Even when he saw me at eleven, saw my body, the way I was built, Bob knew I would be an excellent swimmer.

I was blessed with very large hands and feet. My feet are now size fourteen. My hands have been compared to dinner plates. Big hands and feet are one of the things coaches look for; they're tools that give a swimmer an excellent way to hold onto the water while swimming. The very best swimmers carry very few bubbles, very little air, when you look at their hands and feet under water; they're able to slide their hands in, and to position both hands and feet on the water, where they're the most effective. That's what “holding onto the water” means.

I have a long torso in relation to my legs. That helps me plane on top of the water like, well, a boat.

My wingspan is longer than my height. I'm now 6-foot-4. My wingspan is three inches longer, 6-foot-7. A swimmer with long arms who takes longer strokes obviously ought to be able to take fewer strokes in a single lap; that can be a big advantage.

In a way, I'm both perfectly tall and short. My shoulders are wide but my waist is only 32 inches. I have the torso of someone 6-foot-8 but the legs of someone more like 6 feet exactly. In the water, that means lower drag.

I'm very flexible in my shoulders, elbows, knees, and ankles. That's big in swimming because what you want to be able to do is to exert a lot of force but do so fluidly. Also, flexibility gives you a range of motion by which you can hold the water more effectively. The flexibility in my ankles means I can whip my feet through the water as if they were fins.

Flexibility runs in the family. Whitney, when she was a competitive swimmer, used to be able to lock hands behind her back and bring them up, without unlocking, over her shoulders, all the way in front.

Also, I have a very high endurance capacity. Some of this is because I started swimming at seven and had, by the time Bob arrived at NBAC, put in four years in the pool. That was truly important in developing my heart and lung capacity. They think now that you can really do a lot with a young athlete, before he or she hits puberty, to build endurance for later on; longer swimming sets when you're young, for example. That's exactly what I did.

At ages nine and ten, I was swimming seventy-five minutes per day four times a week, then ninety minutes per day five times a week.

At age eleven and twelve, I moved up to swimming every day of the week, each time for two and one-half hours.

With all of that, what struck Bob the most about me when we first started together was not anything physical.

It was what was in my head.

Then as now, I was intensely competitive. Not just in the pool. In anything.

Who was going to be first into the front seat of the car?

Who was going to pick out the first video at Blockbuster?

Who was going to be first at the dinner table?

In practice, I always tried to lap as many people as I could. But I was never, in my head, training against them because I never, ever trained against other people. I always trained against the clock.

At meets, I always wanted to win. I absolutely hated to lose.

Nothing about that has ever changed.

With Bob's prompting, I discovered something else about myself early on, too. I could be motivated not just by winning. By improving my strokes. Hitting split times. Setting records. Doing my best times. There were any number of things I could do to get better. Winning never gets old, but there was a way to win that showed I was getting better, and could get better still.

Bob used to say to me, let's just see what you've got in you; use all the gas in the tank. I started using his saying. I would say to him before a meet, let's just see what I have in me. I wouldn't say, I want to win. It would be, I want to see what I have in me.

At the same time, Bob emphasized sportsmanship, accountability, responsibility. The program placed an extraordinary premium on attitude. It was said, over and again, that the single most important factor in anything we do, and particularly in this endeavor, was this: What is your attitude?

At NBAC, one of the slogans, and Bob had a million slogans, was, “Attitude, Action, Achievement.” That was the order in which you could expect things to happen. You could see every day's practice as an ordeal. Or you could see it as adventure.

To that end, Bob would always tell me when I was younger: We become what we think about most.

Bob also used to give a talk that went something like this: Are you going to wait until after you win your gold medal to have a good attitude? No. You're going to do it beforehand. You have to have the right mental attitude, and go from there. You're going to be an Olympic champion in attitude long before there's a gold medal around your neck.

The thing that got me the most, and still does, was to take swimming away from me. NBAC had a program for perfect attendance at practice; if you made each practice, you got to
wear a yellow cap that said, in blue letters, “100% Never Settle For Less.” I was always wearing a yellow cap.

Bob is one of the most passionate people I've ever seen at what he does. Ever. He works around the clock. I really feel that he lives for the sport of swimming. He is up and going at it way before the sun peeks into the sky. He gets to the pool two hours before I'm out of bed. I've never seen anybody who does what he does. And he brought me along from a kid who really couldn't swim any strokes the way they're supposed to be done to where I am today.

Bob began to remake my strokes the summer I was twelve. Of course he knew exactly what he was doing; he had come to the NBAC with numerous American Swim Coaches Association awards for teaching stroke technique, and his first job was to reshape my basic two-beat freestyle kick to the more advanced six-beat kick.

He pushed. I pushed right back.

On purpose, I would lapse into the basic kick, what I knew and what I also knew had worked for me until then. Other times I'd just be lazy and do two beats. Either way, Bob would kick me out of practice, yellow cap and all. When I'd call my mom, she would tell me, no, she could not leave work early to come get me. I would have to wait until practice was supposed to be over. That's when she would come get me.

This went on until I started doing what I was supposed to do. The first day I went through an entire day of using a six-beat kick is the day Bob out-and-out dared me. He told me I wasn't old enough or mature enough to do it.

I did it.

If it sounds now like Bob was a trainer breaking the wild horse that was me, well, it is what it is.

It was much the same with morning practices, meaning a move to two practices a day, morning and afternoon. All first-rate swimmers practice both morning and afternoon. For months, I
resisted. I relented after some college kids told me, hey, you know you might really get a lot better and a lot faster if you get in the pool in the morning, too. Or maybe Bob simply wore me down.

A few months after I turned twelve, Bob had called for a meeting with my mom and my father. It took place at Meadowbrook, upstairs in the babysitting room.

It was possible, Bob said, that Michael might one day make the Olympics. I'm not saying he will. I'm saying he could.

Come on, Bob, my mom said. She was in education. She saw kids every day. Michael's just a kid, she said. We don't know how he's going to change when the hormones kick in. When he wants to hang with other kids in high school.

That's why we're talking now, Bob said. Michael could be the real deal. I don't know when, he said, but he could if everyone here is willing to make the commitment.

And, he added, if he truly, genuinely loves it.

Bob talked about where they might send me to high school, what the schedule of a typical day might look like, and what sorts of sacrifices I would have to make, that we would all have to make. For one, he said, Michael ought to stop playing other sports. This was big. His concern was not just the time that other sports were taking away from practice in the pool, it was that I'd get hurt playing something else. Because I was so energetic, I would bounce from sport to sport to sport. I was the kid with a stick in his hand, a glove, a ball, whatever. One particular afternoon when I was nine stretched into evening, then into night, all of it around sports: I went first to a lacrosse game, where I told the coach I could only play the first three quarters; then to the baseball field, where I'd been selected for a home-run derby; then to the pool for practice until after it got dark outside.

Bob said, we're going to take this sort of thing and ease back. He also told my parents, this has to be normal. Don't talk about anything that you don't normally talk about. We're just going to
enjoy the sport of swimming. And then we're going to see where it takes us.

•   •   •

There were, of course, choices that had to be made.

My academic track in high school had to be designed, with help from teachers and school administrators, to allow me to fulfill the essential Maryland state requirements for a diploma but no more. No honors classes, no advanced placement. Could it be worked out so that I might on some days be allowed to arrive at school later than the other kids? Might it be possible to be let out early?

Homework got done. In my mother's house, homework always got done.

There was, naturally, push-back from some in the school. A teacher once said to my mom, I taught your son very little chemistry. She replied that, during that school year, my son visited five countries because of swimming. Which was going to be more important in his life? Seeing what life was like in those five countries, or knowing how many atoms there are in so many grams of carbon-12?

There were other sorts of sacrifice as well.

My freshman year in high school, I wanted to fit in with my football-playing friends.

Let's talk about this, Michael, my mom said.

How many hours of practice a week would you have to commit to in order to play football? Where is football likely to take your friends? Will they make the varsity team? As high school goes along, will they make the county championships? Area all-star teams? Are any of them likely to be good enough to get a Division I scholarship? Play in the pros?