Beneath the Surface

by Phelps, Michael; Cazeneuve, Brian; Costas, Bob

  On November 6, Stu held a teleconference with me announcing the details. We got the sport into the headlines, which was where we wanted to see it.

  The bonus even generated interest in Australia, were their dollar has a different value than ours so the bonus didn’t come out to a round number. I traveled there at the end of the month for meets in Sydney and Melbourne. It was my second trip Down Under during the year, and it was the second time I had lost my training equipment.

  “Bob, I can’t find it.”

  “Well, I guess we’re not here to train.”

  “Bob, it’s not my fault if they lost it.”

  In fact the first time the airline sent the bag to the wrong section; this time I left it on the plane. When Bob and I have our worst arguments—really intense, serious, how-did-you-get-to-be-such-a-knucklehead arguments—they’re over by the next day, sometimes by the next hour. Because we know we both want the same things and because he respects how hard I work, because I respect how much he knows, and because we both realize how much we need each other and can trust each other, we don’t hesitate to use each other as an excuse to blow off steam. It’s something you can only really do with close friends and family.

  Of course, it’s bad when you’re half a world away and the guy from the baggage department recognizes you because he helped you find your suitcase the last time you lost it.

  Actually I could have filled a few more bags by the time I left. A lot of these meets have sponsors who give you prizes for doing well at their meets. The event in Melbourne had a kitchen appliance manufacturer as one of its sponsors, so every time I won a race, they gave me a new blender. By the end of the meet, I had five blenders and one mixer, presented to the meet’s outstanding swimmer. Ironically, one local newspaper had started the erroneous rumor that I was thinking of moving my training base to the land Down Under, or at least splitting my training time between there and Baltimore. It wasn’t true, but if I had thought about it, I could have opened a nice catering business on the side.

  Bob wanted to put me through some stress when we were at the Melbourne meet. He deliberately asked for the driver who was scheduled to pick us up to show up late, so I would have to spend more time waiting at the pool. He made sure a couple of the meals I ordered weren’t quite right. Bob thinks of everything and he wanted me to acclimate myself to being able to react calmly when something didn’t go according to plan. That way if it happened again when I was at the Olympic Trials in Long Beach or the Olympics themselves, in Athens, I would know how to work around a problem because I had dealt with it before.

  Of course even Bob hadn’t planned for the day that some rabid Australian fans started following me. A German swimmer helped us out by putting on my cap and switching cars with us. The fans followed the German swimmer’s car as we escaped.

  That wasn’t the only brush with danger on the trip. Remember when Bob didn’t want me to go bowling? Well, he figured I couldn’t hurt myself jumping into water, even if I jumped from really high. I had been wondering for years what it would feel like to take a dive off a 10-meter platform. Jamie and I asked Bob, during the trip, if we could try it and he surprised us by saying we could. Jamie did it right. When you enter water from that high, you want to slide through it with your hands or your feet, because if you land flat, the impact feels a lot like being slapped by a door. Remember, Michael, stay vertical, as straight as a pencil and you won’t get hurt. Unfortunately, just as my mind said, “Think Letter I,” my body said, “Let’s try Letter L.” I guess I stretched out my feet as a defense mechanism, because I landed at a 90-degree angle with legs extended and butt exposed. Ouch, what a spanking! Remember, Michael, just because you can try it doesn’t mean you should do it. Remember the sledding.

  On our way back, we stopped off in Long Beach, California to do a promotional appearance for the Olympic Trials that were going to be held there the following summer in a temporary pool. I stopped off at the site where the pool was going to be built, which was still a large, empty parking lot, and used a giant piece of chalk to scribble the words: 400 IM 4:09.09. The time was the world record I hoped I would be able to break at the Trials. I signed my name underneath it.

  I use whatever I can to motivate myself. Tell me I can’t do something and it’s like a lighted match next to a fuel tanker. I don’t throw goggles anymore, but I always keep the internal tanker at the ready position. In December, Swimming World magazine, a very respected publication within the sport, put out an issue that contained the cover headline “Super Flyer.” It was picture of Ian Crocker strumming a guitar and leaning back against his car. It also contained a two-page foldout centerfold of Ian swimming the fly. Attention all units: activate tanker. Don’t get me wrong, not only do I respect Ian as a swimmer, but I like him personally. He’s about as modest and soft-spoken as any athlete who is that good and has that much to boast about. Ian also signed on with Octagon after finishing his great career under Eddie Reese at the University of Texas and he and I have become friends. That didn’t stop me from ripping out the centerfold picture of him and putting it on my wall above my bed. Every morning when I woke up, I had to see the photo of Ian and it was like a double espresso and a kick in the butt put together. If I wanted to be on the next cover and have the next centerfold, I had to get up that morning and train so I wouldn’t lose again.

  Away from the pool, I became more aware of my increasingly higher profile in the local area and I tried to put it to use, especially to help kids. I’m a national spokesman for the Boys and Girls Clubs. I always invite the kids to my meets where my mom makes sure they receive goody bags, and I visit their center in Aberdeen.

  I did some public service announcements along with Oriole catcher B.J. Surhoff and Oriole legend Cal Ripken Jr., on behalf of Pathfinders for Autism, the organization that helps those afflicted with the disease. We taped the PSAs to appear during National Autism Month in April.

  But my favorite place to give back has been the Riverview Elementary School in Landsdown, Maryland. These are really good kids who have had to overcome a lot. Some of them come from broken homes or have parents who have been in jail or on drugs. For a long time, the school has had some of the lowest Maryland School Assessment test scores in Baltimore County.

  Three or four times I year I go there to talk to them about what swimming has done for me and what it has meant to enjoy something so much that I’m always trying to set goals for myself and working to achieve them. I read the the story of the tortoise and the hare to the students, handed out signed poster cards and conducted a question-and-answer session. I’d go from class to class with Mick Small, the school principal, and tell the students, “My mom was a teacher and education is a very important part of my life.” I try to be pretty honest with them about some of the struggles I faced as a student, myself: watching my parents separate, getting teased, not being able to focus on my work and not always being the coolest kid in school. Then I tell them just how strong they can be.

  Inevitably they ask why I like swimming so much. “In some sports, you can just get by on a lot of natural talent. In swimming, it helps to be long and lean, but you can’t be good at it without putting in the work. There is a direct connection between what you put into it and what you get out of it. If you have big ears or trouble focusing, but you work harder than the guy in the lane next to you, you’ll beat him.”

  In 2003, the students began a year-long project based on my preparation for the Olympics. We figured out how many miles it took to travel from Baltimore to Athens. Then, each time the kids read a book, newspaper, or magazine article, the teachers would give them points, just like airline miles. If the students could accumulate 100,000 points, the teachers reasoned that they would have enough miles for the trip to Athens. I loved watching the kids make progress each time I visited. In late spring, Mr. Small told me that the test scores had improved and that the kids had exceeded the 100,000-point barrier. “See,” I would tell the students “no goal is too high if
you put your mind to it.” Perhaps I was also speaking to myself.

  19

  I’LL FOLLOW YOU

  Bob and I had a little seasonal meltdown just in time for Christmas. He wanted to push me as hard as he could over about six-week period after we came back from our trip, and nearly everything I did during that time wasn’t good enough. One day I was feeling under the weather and I arrived late for practice after I overslept. A few days later, Bob thought I was loafing through an afternoon practice and told me, “If you’re only going to do this much, you might as well get out.” I got out of the pool and said, “Okay, I will then.” Bob said, “Merry Christmas,” and I was out of there. I went to Corey’s house and hung out until 11 p.m., which is when I’m usually asleep. Things were rocky between Bob and me for a ten-day period. It was a game of “How much stress can you take?” and “How much can I manufacture?’, and he was playing the game very hard. We both sort of knew we’d be on each other’s case for a while and we also knew it was something we needed to do to be able to push each other as far as we could.

  Training sessions at Meadowbrook could run about six or seven miles a day, or about 75,000 meters a week. I need extra pancakes for the days we swim our “Janet Evans sets” (distance medleys). In the four years between the Athens and Sydney Olympics, I probably took four or five days off and none of those were holidays. In addition to the double sessions, we also cross-train in the afternoons. Cross-training is important to swimmers, to help build strength, stamina, and flexibility.

  Bob has changed my program often over the last few years, as we’ve discovered what works and what doesn’t. I used to run two or three miles at a time, at roughly a seven-minute pace. But during sophomore year, I started feeling tight after running, and I had pain on the outside of my knees. It got so I was having trouble walking around without pain after each run.

  That’s when Bob had me switch to riding a stationary bike for half an hour to 45 minutes three times a week. I asked him once about experimenting with outdoor biking on dirt roads, because the stationary bike can get boring. “Absolutely not!” he told me. (If bowling was out, biking didn’t stand a chance.) So boredom it is.

  When we don’t have meets, we exercise every day except Sunday. Apart from the bike, I do about four or five varieties of pushups, 50 to 100 at a time; several types of sit-ups and crunches, usually around 500 or more each day; and I do up to five sets of eight pull-ups, increasing the weight during each set. Bob is extremely precise about form. He says if we do our workouts the way we are supposed to, we won’t get hurt.

  I even have an early-morning regimen for stretching in the shower. That serves as my warm-up swim for the morning. Since I had no school in 2003-04, I’d wake up at 7 a.m. and swim until 8:30 or 9, depending on Bob’s mood. The sooner I’d get out, the sooner I’d be able to eat and nap. At 3:45, we’d start up again. I’d get there at 3:15 to stretch. After swimming, we’d do between half an hour and an hour of dryland training. It helped that I didn’t have to worry about messing up a test or not finishing a paper.

  Apart from my scientifically balanced diet (at Pete’s, that used to be one omelet in each hand), I take daily Vitamin C and a multivitamin and Bob insists that I have an instant breakfast drink after races in order to get quick carbs back into my system. I also take daily salt tablets to make sure I don’t lose fluids too quickly.

  We hired a physical trainer in January to start working with us, but he started destroying our legs. His program may have been good for certain types of athletes, but it didn’t work for swimmers, since we have specific needs of flexibility and stamina that he didn’t understand. I had never been at the point, after a workout, when I haven’t been able to swim fast because I was physically too tired from the workout. We did three sessions a week with him, an additional session of dryland training and one really hard hour six days a week. After it appeared the sessions were doing more harm than good, Bob let him go after three or four months.

  Bob and I were trying to iron out some technical glitches early in the year. We were trying to keep my chin down during the butterfly sessions. We were working on the roll of my hips in the freestyle events, because the longer my body was as I swam, the smoother the strokes felt. Bob also noticed that when I breathed on my right side during the freestyle races, I didn’t come back far enough to my left side in order to complete the next stroke most efficiently. When I swim at my best, there are very few bubbles around my hands when I swim underwater, and Bob was trying to get me to that point. We were also trying to improve my turns because that long body that had grown to six feet, four inches wasn’t good at tightening itself into a ball as I approached the wall.

  We were also devoting a lot of time working on backstroke and freestyle strokes and, in essence, trying to determine which of two races I would add to my schedule during the summer. At that point, we knew I would swim my best stroke, the butterfly, twice (100 meters and 200 meters); both individual medleys that combined the four strokes (200 meters and 400 meters); and, hopefully, if the coaches decided to use me, on three relays (4x100 free relay, 4x200 free relay, 4x100 medley relay). We had a dilemma about trying more events. I had swum well in both the 200-meter backstroke and 200-meter freestyle and I knew I could conceivably try to swim either or both of those events in addition to the rest of my program. For the next few months, Bob and I would debate and discuss the merits of those two events and how they might affect my other races because of the tight schedule at both the Trials and the Olympics and the inevitable buildup of fatigue.

  I had another loaded schedule at my first big meet of 2004, the Spring Nationals in Orlando. As he did at the ’03 Summer Nationals, Bob entered me in five events, and for the second straight time, I won five races: the 100 freestyle, 100 butterfly, 200 IM and the two races I was thinking of adding to my Olympic program, the 200 freestyle and 200 backstroke. Of all the races, the 200 back, my first race of the meet, was also the most exciting. My Olympic teammate, Aaron Peirsol, had set the world record of 1:55.15 two years earlier in Minneapolis, and he was clearly considered the early favorite heading into the Olympics. I wanted to see how close I could swim to his time. Honestly, before that meet, Bob and I were leaning toward adding the 200 free and not the 200 back. If I were to swim a slow 200 back in Orlando, there was a chance that that might knock it off my plate for the season.

  After the race began, I tried to look up at the board each time I came off one of the walls to see how far off record pace I actually was. I could see that I was a good half-second behind the pace at the 150 mark, and I needed to pick it up. I turned really well at the third wall and increased the pace as much as I could. I could tell I had a strong finish and I was hoping I had made up enough time. Nope—1:55.30. It was pretty close, but it was another hands-on-the-head moment. In the meantime, Bob was processing all of this on the pooldeck. “Hoo-wah. Yow. Ay-yaye,” he said, apparently experiencing his own technical glitch in word processing. “Wow, how does he not swim it at trials after a time like that?” Bob was right. We had a success, but we also had a problem of too many options, and we weren’t ready to commit to a decision about our schedule just yet.

  During Nationals, Bob had spoken to Jon Urbanchek, the head coach at the University of Michigan for the previous 22 years, about the fact that Jon was planning to step down at the end of the season. Would Bob have an interest in interviewing for the upcoming vacancy, Jon wanted to know.

  It was tempting. During his tenure, Jon had built the Wolverines into one of the best collegiate swim teams in the country, with 13 conference titles and an NCAA team championship in 1995, the 11th in the school’s history. Jon coached great swimmers such as Mike Barrowman, Tom Dolan, and Tom Malchow, who were all Wolverines before they became world-record holders.

  I had been planning to take some courses close to home, at Loyola College, while training with Bob after the Olympics. As much as the job excited him, Bob didn’t want to break up our team, but he also didn’t want to
make a decision about a place he might stay for 20 years based on being able to coach me for another four or eight. He agreed to go to Ann Arbor for a formal interview. I was planning to go to the Bahamas to shoot a commercial for one of my sponsors, the Argent Mortgage Company. Bob had been planning to join me on the trip anyway to monitor my training, so he made a low-key detour to Michigan on March 22.

  The commercial shoot for Argent was pretty memorable, because they had me swimming against a dolphin. I had never seen a dolphin up close and the people working on the set told me that dolphins are naturally people-friendly to begin with, and this one was especially used to swimming next to people. Yes, but it didn’t mean I was used to swimming next to dolphins. She was bumping up beside me during the shoot and it was freaky. The dolphin would swim off, disappear for five minutes and all of a sudden she’d pop up and I’d turn and see this big, bottle-nosed dolphin sitting right in front of me. I almost freaked out when I first saw her. The skin felt kind of rubbery. I have pictures of this giant bottlenose giving me a kiss. My eyes are just bug-eyed and I’m saying, “What do I do? What do I do? I have this bottle-nosed dolphin kissing the side of my cheek.”

  “Relax, Michael. Whatever you do, don’t panic. Just pet her. Pet her.”

  It was before the 1988 Olympics when Matt Biondi, the best U.S. swimmer at the time, went to swim with dolphins, not to shoot a commercial, but to learn how they move through the water so efficiently. I can see why. They are amazing creatures. They are not the best kissers.

  I filmed a series of ads and promotions during the spring, trying to take advantage of the pre-Olympic window. Peter and Bob made a great team. Peter negotiated many great opportunities for me, and Bob made sure the opportunities didn’t detract from my training schedule. Bob liked the idea of out-of-town trips, because they took me away from the local hype. Each time, Bob insisted that if we were going away, we would need to have a week in the other city. If we did that, he felt I could still get in good training each day; if I flew in and flew out, he figured the workouts would be unproductive and I’d end up losing training days.