The rest of the swimming world has gotten faster, but that isn’t slowing the 27-year-old down.
After the last World Championships in July 2023, I was advised to take one full week off from exercise, no running, no dryland, no weight training, no swimming. My coaches knew this would be a tough pill to swallow. I miss the water after even just one day off.Katie Ledecky can’t stop, won’t stop. If you want to distill 12 years of unparalleled greatness to its essence, that’s it.
What she does is incredibly hard, but why she succeeds is also incredibly simple. She puts in the work, in every facet of her life. And she puts in the work because she loves it., on home soil , in Los Angeles four years from now. That would equal Michael Phelps’s five, and although she’ll never match his 23 gold medals and 28 overall medals, she could do him one better by winning a medal in all five of her Olympics.
So many big moments have already been achieved, with more to come. And yet it’s the smaller, daily moments that create her satisfaction. The extra workouts date back to before anyone knew who Ledecky was, prior to bursting on the scene by winning gold in London at age 15. She started doing a Sunday workout back then with coach Yuri Suguiyama, upping her weekly training distance to about 40 miles. Pain was part of the package, but the pool was her happy place.
“If I’m doing good, it’s like, ‘OK, how far ahead am I of Katie? She might catch me on the last one.’”Ledecky customarily downplays the days when she can beat Finke. “Ninety-nine percent of the time Bobby is killing me,” she says. “I find that one percent every now and then and have a good day where I can sneak ahead of him.”
Case in point: When the two went out for brunch not long ago, Ledecky insisted on picking up the tab to celebrate Stafford’s successful defense of her PhD thesis. Meanwhile, Ledecky had just been “He made me feel like it was O.K. to be a little different, or nerdy, or quirky,” Ledecky wrote. “I found that perspective empowering in my own awkward girlhood years. I followed Michael’s example and didn’t spend much energy on what people thought of my wet hair and off-trend fashion choices as I juggled practices and school.”
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