No Limits by Michael Phelps Read Free Book Online

afterward that his ankle was, in fact, bothering him: “The hardest part was the dive. As soon as I dived in, it was like, ugh.”
    I told reporters, “I’m not really too happy.”
    In fact, I had gone to meet Bob and told him, I feel awful.
    A few minutes later, I had definitive proof. I did feel awful. My lactate test said so.
    When you do anything physical, like swimming, and particularly if you’re swimming all-out, that exertion creates lactic acid. In scientific circles, there is controversy over whether lactic acid itself is the thing that drags down athletic performance or whether other stuff within the body, signaled by elevated levels of lactic acid, causes fatigue. It doesn’t matter to us swimmers. What matters is that we are constantly tested to see the rate at which we can clear lactate from our systems because that indicates our ability to recover.
    That’s why, at most top meets, moments after a race you can see a parade of swimmers lining up for individual lactate tests. Someone pricks your ear and collects a few drops of blood; those drops are then placed into a machine, which measures the number of millimoles of lactate per liter of blood. For me, the point is to drop the level as close to 2 as possible. The way to make it drop is to swim easily for a certain number of minutes.
    These swims are held in a separate pool just steps away from the competition pool. Ideally, you’re taking the lactate test three minutes after leaving the competition pool, and then it’s into the warm-down pool. The lactate test tells me how long I then need to swim down; typically, it’s between 17 and 22 minutes.
    My lactate reading after the prelim 400 IM swim read 12.3.
    Superhigh.
    Nerves, I guess. I had no other explanation. I remember feeling momentarily flustered. Why was my lactate so high? I had a long swim-down to think about it.
    At that point, I just wanted to get onto the team. If I was going to have a loss, I started rationalizing, if only for an instant, better at the Trials than at the Olympics.
    As soon as I thought that, though, I also thought this: One thing I am for sure good at is responding. At the risk of beingobvious, I have an enormous appetite for competition, and a huge will to win. Always have.
    Eddie Reese, who is the swim coach at the University of Texas, and also had the honor of being the U.S. men’s swim coach at the 2004 and 2008 Olympics, has a saying: 80 percent of swimmers like to win, 20 percent hate to lose, and 95 percent of the Olympic team comes from the hate-to-lose group. When I’m focused, there is not one single thing, person, anything that can stand in my way of doing something. There is not. If I want something bad enough, I feel I’m gonna get there. That’s just how I’ve always been.
    So to make the team—no, to win the 400 IM at these Trials—I had to refocus, and quickly. In the finals that night, I had to get a lead. If I did that, I felt confident my competitive instinct would come out. No matter how tired I was, how painful it was, I would get there first, would hold Lochte off.
    But it was going to be a battle.
    The prelims took place at eleven that Sunday morning Central time; the finals went off at seven that evening.
    Just before the finals, my racing gear already on, I went to my bag and took two salt tablets. Bob looked at me quizzically.
    He said nothing.
    I said nothing.
    If I had told him how I was truly feeling, he would have freaked.
    My heart was racing. Like an out-of-control freight train barreling down a set of tracks, that kind of racing.
    This had been a problem for me dating back at least eight years, to the first time I’d had one of these episodes. Then it was at a practice. My heart rate elevated and, for what seemed an eternity, wouldn’t come down. Ultimately, the pounding subsided and we didn’t think anything of it until it happened again. Then we went for a battery of