Perspective: To smash Olympic swimming records, Michael Phelps had to condition himself as much mentally as physically.
For 20 years, Michael Phelps swam for five miles a day, six and seven days a week, trawling through resistant liquid, staring at a black line on the pool bottom. Phelps swam on Sundays and his birthdays. “Nobody else did that,” his coach Bob Bowman said. When Phelps’s chest began to bloom with gold medals, outside observers attributed it to a genetic gift. But that missed the most important fact about Phelps, one with significance for all of us.
have recognized “the connection between physical health, emotional health, and judgment.” Those who ignore it will find themselves trailing in a wake — just as Phelps’s competitors did over a career in whichBy 2008, Phelps was an international force, fully in his prime, and he set his sights on an Olympic record. Phelps wanted to go for eight gold medals at the Beijing Games. No one had ever won more than seven in a single Olympic meet, a mark set by Mark Spitz in Munich in 1972.
Without the ability to think and gauge alertly in the moment, he’d be just another disappointed man who had an ambition but couldn’t quite carry it out.The brain robs your body of the energy to think. Just because you’re sitting in a chair reading or typing, barely lifting your arms above desk level, doesn’t mean you aren’t physically working. You are, quite strenuously, especially after three or four hours of sustained thought.
“I think the hardest thing to do, the hardest time to do something, is when you’re tired,” Phelps told me during a midwinter conversation in Bowman’s small office just off a pool deck at the peak of his career. Open on a desk in front of him was a training notebook. “I have 170 more days of this,” Phelps said, pointing at it. “Brutal.
Phelps and Bowman began setting milestones in conditioning to see whether Phelps could reach them. Phelps would strive for a world-best time on a particular stroke and distance — and then Bowman would say, “Let’s do five straight repeats of it, just to nail it.” The records began to fall.
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