No Limits Read Free Page A

more.
    When I was younger, he had taught me how to tie a tie. For my first school dance, when I was thirteen, he let me leave practice fifteen minutes early; when I showed up with the tie and went to put it on, he noticed that my shirt was buttoned one button off. So we fixed that together. When I was a teenager, he taught me how to drive. His car was a stick shift, and that’s how I learned. I always had trouble: I remember going to school one day, on a hill at a busy intersection, and of course I stalled the car in the middle of the hill. There were tons of people behind me. We fixed that together, too. I remember getting out of a workout and going to the prom—regular black tux, stretch white Hummer limo—and Bob was there to watch me head off.
    All the little things like that: Bob has always been there for me.
    At the Trials, I told Bob, I’m trying to make sense of this 3:07. What do you think it could be?
    At first, he said he didn’t know.
    The only thing he could think of, he finally said, was that 3:07 somehow related to the 400 individual medley, a race that like the medley relay combines all four strokes. The difference, of course, is that it’s just one person doing all the swimming, not four. Also, the order is different from the medley relay. In the IM, it goes: fly, back, breast, free.
    I had held the world record in the 400 IM since 2002. When I first set the record, at the summer nationals in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, I touched in 4:11.09. Over the years, I had lowered the record a number of other times. At the 2007 world championships in Melbourne, Australia, I had lowered the 400 IM record to 4:06.22.
    3:07, Bob said, had to be a split time, meaning an intermediate time in a given race, in this instance after the breaststroke leg, or three-quarters of the 400 IM, with only the up-and-back freestyle portion to go.
    If you do that, he said, you’re going to finish in 4:03-something.
    That would be at least seven, nearing eight, seconds better than I had gone in first setting the record just six years before.
    More than two seconds better than I had gone in Melbourne.
    4:03? Obviously, some strong part of me believed I could go 4:03.
    If you put a limit on anything, you put a limit on how far you can go. I don’t think anything is too high. The more you use your imagination, the faster you go. If you think about doing the unthinkable, you can. The sky is the limit. That’s one thing I definitely have learned from Bob: Anything is possible. I deliberately set very high goals for myself; I work very hard to get there.
    4:03?
    Then again, why not? No limits.
    â€¢   •   •
    Every year since I have been swimming competitively, I have set goals for myself. In writing.
    The goal sheet was mandatory. I got used to it and it became a habit. When I was younger, I used to scribble my goals out by hand and show the sheet to Bob. Now, I might type them on my laptop and e-mail him a copy. Each year, he would take a look at what I’d given him, or sent him, and that would be that. He wouldn’t challenge me, say this one’s too fast or that one’s not. When I was doing this only on paper, he typically would look at it and give it back to me; now he simply files away the electronic copy I send him.
    I usually kept my original paper version by the side of my bed.
    The two of us are the only ones who have it, who ever got to see it.
    The goal sheet was famously secret for a long time…Until now.
    I didn’t look at the sheet every day. I pretty much memorized it, how fast I wanted to swim and what I had to do to get there.If there was a day when I was down, when I was not swimming well, when I simply felt tired or grouchy, I would look at it. It was definitely a pick-me-up.
    Pretty soon after I made my first goal sheet, I hit every one of the times to a tenth of a second. Precisely. Exactly. It’s like I have an innate body clock. I don’t know