No Limits by Michael Phelps

Author:Michael Phelps
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

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DETERMINATION: THE 200 FLY

One thing that separates Michael from other swimmers, Bob likes to say, is that if they don’t feel good they don’t swim good.

That’s not the way it is for Michael.

Michael, he says, performs no matter how he’s feeling. He has practiced it a long time. He knows exactly what he wants to get done, and he’s able to compartmentalize what’s important.

Bob, with his seemingly endless collection of sayings, naturally has an acronym to describe the mental aspect to my racing. It’s “W.I.N.: What’s Important Now?”

It’s true. When it comes down to it, when the time comes to focus and be mentally prepared, I can do whatever it takes to get there, in any situation.

I can because I know this, too: At the highest level of sports, and especially at the Olympics, you have to expect that everyone competing against you has physical talent. So: How do you channel peak performance into championship performance? You have to be mentally tough, that’s how.

How do you get to be mentally tough? You have to train your mind just like you train the body.

Unleash your imagination. Work hard. Embrace obstacles, difficulties, and mistakes.

Nothing in life is easy. You can’t wake up one day, announce you’re going to go do something, and expect it to be a success. At least not consistently. You have to put time and energy and whatever you’ve got into it. You have to want to do it, want it badly.

That’s the point that perhaps some people who say they want something, whatever that something is, don’t fully understand. A lot of swimmers I trained with said they wanted to achieve something great but didn’t truly put time, energy, dedication, and heart into it.

I put time, energy, dedication, heart, and soul into it.

If I wasn’t in the right mood to practice, I got myself into that right mood. I’m not saying that Bob and I didn’t disagree, even argue with each other—of course we did—but I got myself into the place I needed to be to get the work done that I needed to get done.

When you’re challenged: What’s important now?

When it gets to be race day: What’s important right now?

And when things don’t go right on race day, and you absolutely have to take action: What’s important this very instant? Sometimes there simply is no time to think. The situation demands action: What’s it going to be?

As I lined up on the blocks for the finals of the 200 fly on Wednesday morning, the 13th of August, the first of two finals I would swim that morning—the second would be the leadoff leg of the 800 freestyle relay not even an hour later—I could not have been more ready to rock. The 200 fly was my race. This was the event in which I had first set a world record seven years before.

Thousands of miles away in Norway, Fernando Canales, an assistant Michigan swimming coach, and his wife, Mona Nyheim-Canales, were watching on television. Fernando is a

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