No Limits by Michael Phelps

objective being to peak at the meet itself. That’s called the taper. The challenge is in getting the timing right, complicated by the fact that what works for one swimmer might not—indeed probably won’t—work for another. There’s no one-size-fits-all. Bob puts it this way: When you taper swimmers, it’s like a haircut. You never know if it’s any good until it’s too late.
    That 51.6 also suggested my taper was dead-on where it needed to be.
    As for the shave, swimmers shave their bodies before a major competition on the theory that body hair creates resistance. You have to shave everywhere; well, everywhere that isn’t covered by your suit. It makes you feel clean and smooth. Super-clean and super-smooth.
    For most of the winter, in Ann Arbor, I had let my beard grow. As the year went on, I showed up at most pre-Olympic events with facial hair, sometimes a goatee, other times an excellent Fu Manchu. I’m just messing around with it a little bit, I told everyone after we got to Beijing, sporting the Fu.
    When the facial hair goes away, that’s how you know I’m getting serious.
    I showed up for my first Olympic swim in Beijing, the prelims of the 400 IM, clean shaven. Even the hair on the back of my neck was neatly trimmed. Courtesy of Lochte.
    He didn’t have me trim his; he likes to keep his hair long andshaggy. Besides, no one would trust me with clippers. Or at least no one should.
    If it seems just a little weird that Lochte would be trimming my hair one day and then we’d be racing each other two days after that for Olympic gold—well, that’s both the way swimming is and the way he and I get along. Someone’s got to trim the hair on the back of your neck if you want it done, right?
    During one of the media scrums before the Olympics started, Lochte had said, “When me and Michael talk, it’s strictly anything but swimming. We don’t talk about swimming at all. That’s—I guess that’s good for both of us. We’re not always getting wound up in this whole Olympic thing. I mean, we have down time to relax.”
    The day before the 400 medley prelims, Friday, August 8, was the day of the opening ceremony. Much as I would have loved to have gone to the ceremony, there was just no way; I had to swim the next day and couldn’t run the risk of marching and then standing in the heat and humidity.
    I didn’t want to get up and worry about shaving the morning of the prelims, which were the following night, so I decided to shave down then. In our little suite in the Olympic Village, there was nothing on the floor to keep the water from the shower inside the shower itself; we were forever, it seemed, dealing with a small flood. I was in the shower, with my music on, shaving, and Lochte yelled out, hey, why are you shaving now?
    When I explained to him what was up, he decided he would shave then, too.
    While we were in the midst of shaving down, I said, referring to the 400 IM, let’s finish this. One-two again. Erik and I did it in Athens. Dolan and Erik did it in Sydney. Dolan and Namesnik in Atlanta.
    Let’s get after it, I said.
    Let’s get after it, he said.
    I knew I had to have a good first race, and that was a verygood thing. I can’t emphasize it enough: A good first race sets the tone.
    Laszlo Cseh, the Hungarian who had won the bronze in Athens, was in the first of the three seeded heats. He went 4:09.26. I watched that and thought, I’m going to have to go faster if I want to be in the middle lane in the final. And I definitely wanted to be in the middle in this race.
    Lochte went in the next heat. 4:10.33. At this point, with my heat still to go, five guys had already gone 4:12 or better. I was thinking, okay, get after it.
    At 150 meters, my butterfly leg already over, halfway through the backstroke, I realized I was going fast. I was, in fact, under world-record pace. I thought to myself, not