15
	DOWN UNDER AGAIN, MATE

Winter was here and there was nothing like a good snowfall. Near the Meadowbrook complex, there is a huge hill that is perfect for sledding. I was heading out after practice one day with Corey, Matt, and a group of their friends, and I casually told Mom where we were going. Mom, why are you staring at me like that?

“Michael, is it a good idea to go sledding?

“Why can’t I go?”

“I didn’t say you couldn’t.”

“Everybody else is going.”

“Well, let’s see, guys, are you going sledding, too?”

“Yes, Miss Debbie.”

“And are you going to Barcelona next summer for World Championships?”

“No, Miss Debbie.”

“Michael, are you going to Barcelona for World Championships?”

Oh, I know where this is going. I guess if Matt Gribble can tear a shoulder by bowling, I can always sled into a tree. Anyway, compromise is okay when you can still stand at the top of the hill and pelt everyone else with snowballs.

In April, we had a combination of two competitions in Indianapolis: our national championships, held over three days; and a competition called Duel in the Pool against the Australians, held on a single day—Bob’s birthday, April 6. I won three races during Nationals—the 200 free, 200 back and 100 fly—becoming the first U.S. swimmer to win races in three different strokes at a national championship. I was pretty nervous about racing against Lenny for the first time. He was coming back from surgery on his shoulders after being the best backstroker in the world for a couple of years. At the airport in Indy, we compared training notes and he told me: “Dude, the times you’re doing in practice are sick.” Hear that, Coach?

When the Duel was first conceived, there was a real buzz to the Australians’ visit. It was going to be the biggest meet held on U.S. soil since the Atlanta Olympics seven years earlier. Instead, most of the Aussies didn’t show up. Not only Ian Thorpe, but also Ashley Callus, Geoff Huegill, Leisel Jones, and Jodie Henry all stayed home. The word was that many of them were injured, but we weren’t completely convinced. I was especially sorry not to see Ian there. This was essentially a made-for-TV event and it would have been great to promote the sport by showcasing Australia’s best swimmers against our best in one of our pools.

Bob doesn’t always say things to me on the day of a race, but on the morning of the Duel, he came up to me and asked if I was ready. “I’ve been waiting for this day all year long,” I told him. A few years earlier, Bob began using an analogy with me about training that came into play on that day. “When we practice long hours,” he said, “we’re depositing money into the bank. We need to deposit enough so that when we need to make a large withdrawal, we have enough funds to withdraw.”

Until the Duel, I had never had a day this tiring or this rewarding in my career. The long training hours got me through four races in the span of an afternoon. In the first event, I lowered the world record in the 400 IM to 4:10.73. The atmosphere in the stands was electric. Each time I’d come up for air in the breaststroke, the crowd seemed to get louder. About 40 minutes later, I missed the 100-butterfly world record by .03 of a second, losing a chance to be the first male swimmer to set two individual world records in one day. I came back an hour and a half later and rallied from half a bodylength down to touch out Tom and win the 200 fly. Up in the stands, I could see a sign that my Mom had brought to the pool. It wasn’t your typical Go Michael sign. Instead, she wanted me to see something I would recognize as hers because nobody else would know what it meant. The sign contained one of those sayings I used to think about before a big race, the type Bob used to email me once a day before the 2001 Nationals. It said simply: Actions Speak Louder than Words.

In my last race of the day, I swam a 51.61 on the butterfly leg as we beat the Aussies in the medley relay. I had swum multiple events on one day many times in my career, but never against a field like this. It was a great litmus test of how I could come back from one race, get a quick shake in the practice pool and get ready for another race as quickly as possible.

It was especially important for us to monitor my lactate levels in between races, something Bob and I had been doing since before my first Olympics. Think of lactate as a sort of fatigue level that your body builds up when it expends a lot of energy. If you swim a fast race and ask a lot of your muscles in short period of time, the lactate will accumulate in your legs and make it difficult to come back right away and swim fast again. A lactate test measures the amount of lactate in the blood, which indicates how quickly you go into oxygen debt. Coaches use it to determine how efficiently swimmers produce energy. Essentially, someone pricks your ear after each race and places a few drops of blood into a machine, which measures the number of millimoles of blood lactate per liter of blood. The level can rise to 10 or 12 after a hard race, but we try to get it to clear, or reduce, to a manageable level (below two), so that I can swim again without too much fatigue in my body. We try to get the rate down to 1.1 or less by having me swim down slowly after a race. The tests tell me how much I need to swim down afterwards, which is usually about 23 minutes. Hmm, Bob Bowman: Mad Scientist or Raging Genius … you decide.

Afterward, Grant Hackett, Australia’s top distance swimmer, told a group of reporters that he thought I might be spreading myself too thin by swimming so many events. “I think Michael should focus on one or two events,” he said, “because it nearly takes a world record to win an Olympic event.” I was looking forward to having a chance to talk to Grant about that during my upcoming trip to Australia, and I was really looking forward to training with Ian.

Bob had worked on this for six months, trying to coordinate training schedules, pool time, flights, and an appearance at a training clinic. The plan was to train with Ian at his pool in Sutherland for three days and then to the Gold Coast to spend time training with Grant. A week before we were due to go, Ian’s new coach, Tracy Menzies, emailed Bob to tell him they weren’t going to be able to host us, because they had a sponsor commitment and they’d be out of town. I was really upset. I thought of Ian as the best freestyler in my lifetime and I was so eager to learn as much as I could from him. Bob tried to cheer me up, reminding me I’d still be able to train with Grant and see the Australian way of training up close, but I was really disappointed.

The trip was still great even without Ian. After the first day there, I remember saying: “Bob, what’s this about? They swim freestyle every single workout. No wonder they’re all such great freestylers.” Bob arranged some independent time for me to work on the other strokes for the IM and for Jamie Barone, who was also on the trip, to work on the breaststroke.

Grant and I had a blast. We raced each other over 50 meters, both with and without fins, 30 times with a tenth of a second rest. Every time we raced with pulleys of some kind, he just destroyed me. Without them, we were pretty even. Just the adrenaline rush of racing Down Under, with somebody as fast as Grant got me through the workouts. I really think those workouts helped take me to where I am today.

Grant and I hung out away from the pool and kidded each other about a lot of things. Grant played that trick on me where you put a finger in someone’s chest, say, “What’s this?” and wait for the guy to put his head down, so you can pull your hand up and slap his chin. I tried to do the same, but he was too wise to it. It’s hard to get a guy with his own jokes. Every time Grant kidded me about American football players, I just started ripping on Australian rugby players.

“Are you kidding? If Ray Lewis hit any one of those guys, they wouldn’t have a chance.”

“Yeah, well, your football players have to wear all that padding. Our players don’t need it.”

We laughed a lot in that week. It was the first time I ever tried to go surfing, but I wasn’t very good. I went out on the water with Jamie and he managed to get up on his board a few times. I tried, too, but couldn’t make it to a standing position, so I bodysurfed instead.

One night our group went to Benihana restaurant where the chef makes a show out of preparing steak, chicken, and the rest of the meal by juggling his utensils and flipping his food around. Grant was pretty good at catching flying shrimp in his mouth. I caught one eventually, but the first one nailed my chin and landed on the floor. See, every trip has a food story.

Bob and I conducted our clinic at a fitness center on the Gold Coast. We agreed to a request to speak to a “couple” of reporters there, and that couple turned out to be about 40 of them. At the end of the interview, we mentioned in passing to two reporters that our practice the next day would be open to the public. We arrived the next morning and didn’t expect to see anyone, since it was 5:30 a.m. and it was pouring rain. Instead, the deck was lined with people, from end to end, waiting for us. I loved it. This was the way I wanted people to feel about swimming in the U.S. I looked at the people on the deck who were as wet as I was and I remember thinking that whatever I did in my career, whatever times I registered or medals I won, I wanted to do something to make people feel passionate about swimming. Our results are every bit as good as theirs. In fact in Sydney, they had been much better. Maybe the sport won’t ever be as big for spectators at home as it is in Australia, because we have such a huge variety of other sports to do and to talk about, but I really wanted to do something to push it in that direction.

When I got back to Baltimore I had a new housemate. Kevin Clements was an outstanding IMer at Auburn University. He was a teammate of mine on a few national teams and he was looking for a change of training scenery. Bob was excited to have him come to North Baltimore, where he, Jamie and I pushed each other in training and hung out after training. When Kevin first arrived, he also needed a place to stay, so the plan was to have him stay with us for three weeks, while he made arrangements to move in with Jamie. Instead he stayed through the summer. It was good for him that Kevin liked hip-hop and video games, because he would have been dragged into them otherwise. I held my own at Mario Kart, but take away the console, and he beat me pretty badly at the billiard table. I think I helped Kevin rediscover his love for swimming, but he was also like a big brother to me. I had to be careful about Kevin because he and Hilary would synchronize made-up stories to make me think that I was late for something or that somebody had broken or stolen something that belonged to me. Of course, nobody’s perfect. Kevin also listens to country music and I’ve been telling him to seek professional help.

Jamie’s musical tastes were pretty close to mine, but he had more of a range. One day, we were listening to the radio as we were driving to practice and Kelly Osbourne started singing the words to her new single, “Papa Don’t Preach.” I hadn’t heard it before, but Jamie knew the words right away.

“Dude, how do you know the words?” I asked him.

“It’s a remake of a Madonna song. She did it like 15 years ago.”

“She did? Oh.”

Jamie and I teased each other about a lot of things—food, for instance.

“He’ll have one Michael sandwich of deep fried cholesterol.” (For the record, a Michael sandwich is buttered and jellied on both slices of bread and contains two eggs, four slices of bacon and one slice of American cheese.)

“And he’ll have one Jamie sandwich with bread and lettuce, but go easy on the lettuce.” (For the record, a Jamie sandwich sometimes contains extra lettuce. Oooo.)

I’ve always been grateful for my friends. When Matt and Ayo were both on the football team, they used to kid me about swimming being a non-contact sport. I’d offer to trade practices with them and see how long they lasted. We could rip one another at will and nobody would get mad … usually. Ayo is a big guy, about 6-5 and much stockier than I am. One day in junior high, Matt and I were sort of messing around with Ayo and it was getting to him more than we realized. We were walking back home from school and I tossed a stick in his direction. I didn’t intend to conk him on the head, but my aim was off. He rushed at me and body-slammed me against the concrete. Five minutes later, we were all laughing again. It’s a guy thing.

A few years later, I became good friends with a buddy of Matt’s named Corey Fick. The four of us would hang out, shoot hoops and play cards and video games. Those guys always looked after me and didn’t mind setting people straight if they overheard anyone saying negative things about me.

The guys have always been extremely supportive about my swimming, too, making sure we didn’t do anything (apart from body slamming) that could affect my health. Because I’d have to get up for practice, I was an earlier riser than any of them. If I was hanging out at Corey’s house and getting tired, I was always welcome to stay over and Corey always took the couch so I could have the bed.

If we played basketball, the guys would actually call out picks to make sure I didn’t get knocked around:

“Mike, right here.”

“Mike, behind you.”

“Mike, watch out.”

Corey always joked that he didn’t want Tom Brokaw coming to his door asking, “How does it feel to ruin Michael’s career?”

For the most part I’d limit my game to outside shots unless we fell behind and I got restless. Of course, if I airballed a jumper, I got no sympathy from anyone: “Getting tips from Stevie Wonder again, Mike?” It was funny to see the concerned reaction from Corey’s mom after one of our games: “Michael, don’t tell me you’re sweating.”

The three of us have a running joke about an imaginary character named Frank. We’re not sure where he came from, how we met him or why we know him, but every time we have a question, a dispute or a problem, we invoke the name of Frank. I think it started one day when Corey and Matt were trying to fake me into saying I knew who they were talking about.

“Frank’s a nice guy, isn’t he, Mike?”

“Huh? Who’s Frank?”

“C’mon, Mike, you know Frank.”

“Never heard of him.”

“We should call him right now.”

“Yeah, but who is he?”

“Mike, he’s the guy from Spain. Think he’s awake right now?”

“I don’t even know who he is.”

The grins on the faces eventually revealed Frank as somebody’s idea of a prank, but we’ve certainly asked enough people about him over the last year. I still have the hat Matt and Corey gave me that had Frank’s name on the front and Phelps ’04 on the back. You can never replace friends, and I’m sure that wherever he is and whatever he’s doing, even Frank would agree.