when i said i wanted to win eight gold medals basically half the people in the swimming world thought i was absolutely crazy and nobody could ever do something like that but for me i was somebody who believed in it and somebody who believed in the process of getting there i knew it wasn't going to happen overnight like i said before but every little small thing that we did was a small stepping stone in order in order to even be able to have that chance and that opportunity to to do what i did in 2008 so
you know when i say from 2002 to 2008 was basically trial and error so for me in 2002 that's really when i started amping up my event schedule where i was swimming four to five individual events and having a couple relays at pam packs world championships major international competitions throughout those that time frame because at that time at the olympic games that's a tough i mean that's where i think the real truth comes out because i think there are a lot of people who are very talented who can make it there there are very few
people who can deal with the pressure and the stress that happens when we're there so that's why i say we had to make sure that we were physically emotionally and mentally ready because i had to be ready to be able to kind of manage my emotions through that week yeah winning a gold medal is absolutely incredible there's nothing better than standing on the podium listening to your national anthem play after you just won a gold medal but for me i'm somebody who i knew that i had seven other events after the first day so i
have to throw that in the back of my head i gotta throw that race out even though if i you know even like you know eight i broke a world record one goal you know won my first gold medal like i was like cool like things are starting really well so i have to put that behind me to then get ready for the next race and on top of that i have to make sure i'm eating the right amount i'm sleeping the right amount my body is as fresh as i can possibly be so that
means sitting in an ice tank getting massages getting stretched all of these small things that end up adding up to the major end result and and that was something that we learned through those through that process so for us we always also tried to compare every day is every day is a new challenge right every day as a child is is is a day that we can prepare ourselves even more so for us it was we would call it putting money into the bank so at the end of the year when we had a major
international competition we could withdraw that money that we had saved throughout the year and look i'll be the first one to tell you there were a lot of days where i did not want to get out of bed and i guarantee you if i ask the question here if everybody is excited to get out of bed every single day if i saw a hand i'm going to blatantly call you a liar because we all know that is far from the truth but if you have those little small goals those little small things that get you
excited when you don't want to it's going to make it even better and even easier at the end when you're getting ready for a presentation or the end of the year or this or that whatever event you're leading up to it's going to make it so much easier and i think if you look at the greats and anything that in any walk of life the greats do things when they don't always want to and that's the separation for me that's what i found because i can sure as hell tell you that there were days where
i hated my coach there were days where we got in fights we got in arguments we couldn't stand what we were doing i would do things purposely to piss him off but that's a different story but you know i think that was that was just really how we worked like he was somebody who was so perfect for me that if if i ever swam for anybody else i would never would have had the chance to do what i did because he challenged me in ways and forced my mind to think differently you know for me
as a kid growing up i was i'm huge into music and music is a big part of my life and i'm a huge biggie smallest fan and and he wrote a song called the sky is the limit and as a kid growing up i believed that i believed that whatever i put my mind to and if i was willing to make sacrifices and i was dedicated that i could achieve absolutely anything you still do i still do
