A CHAMPION'S PURSUIT

Sometimes, when you stop for a moment to look ahead, the pause only keeps that list of things you need to get done from getting shorter, and it does little to shrink the number of people who are depending on you for something, and it certainly doesn't make all the bills that have piled up go away, because, well, the pause might also keep the checks from coming in. And when all this happens, when the twin monsters of Anxiety and Stress start pounding at your door, it's easy to put your hands up and say, "You got me, fellas. You win. I give up."

But on a gorgeous summer night back in 2013, with a setting sun skimming the white sand of the Delaware shoreline and an easy breeze whistling off the Atlantic Ocean, those monsters had no chance of catching me.

How could they? Just weeks earlier I had finished taking a few months off from work and competition and the daily grind. In a sense, I had taken off from life, and I was still feeling the rush. I had needed the break. For the better part of sixteen years, I had let the quadrennial Olympic cycle all but consume me — preparation for one Summer Games (Sydney) turning into preparation for the next (Athens), and that turning into the next (Beijing), and then the next (London). Oh, for sure, I loved the opportunities the Olympics brought me. The travel, the TV appearances, the passing out of Olympic pins in the different villages, the tossing back of the local brews — Foster's in Sydney, Tsingtao in Beijing, Newcastle in London. Great fun that came with enormous rewards.

But to achieve these magnificent moments I had to be willing to expend exceptional amounts of psychic energy. Understand, I'm not complaining. It's the deal with any job — banker, CEO, computer programmer, mother, father — where there are demands and deadlines and you're pursuing excellence while others may be content with "good enough." I knew that that kind of pressure was part of the formula for success: To achieve, and to achieve with distinction, sometimes you need to push harder than you had ever planned.

Now, though, with the next Olympics — Rio 2016 — not that far away, I wasn't yet ready to let Anxiety and Stress get to me, even though I could feel them closing in as the to-do list got longer each day. Instead, I felt inspired by the challenges this cycle would bring me. New athletes to coach, new records to chase. Plus, after having gone through the quadrennial so many times, I knew what to expect and how to deal with just about anything the work brought.

And one more thing: I would be doing all this without the pressure of making the greatest Olympian of all time even greater.

So, as I looked out onto the Atlantic on this August evening, with a couple of teenage kids goofing off on their surfboards, and with some toddlers on the boardwalk smearing ice cream all over their parents' clothes, I realized one thing: That mounting pile of stuff on my desk and in my head had no power to break me.

And then my phone buzzed.

Hmm, I thought, looking down. I wonder what he wants.

"Let's have dinner soon. MP"

Simple, to the point, just like so many other messages he had texted me in the nearly two decades we had known each other, a period during which we had pushed each other to break records, win medals, and achieve greatness — and pushed our friendship to extreme heights and, at points, to severe peril.

But, as I had also come to know over that time, nothing is ever that simple when it involves MP — Michael Phelps.

* * *

A few days later, I met Michael at the Four Seasons Hotel in Baltimore's Inner Harbor. He had made a reservation for the two of us at Wit & Wisdom, one of the finest and priciest restaurants in the city.

"You're paying," I told him as we sat down.

I hadn't seen much of him of late; in fact, our paths had crossed only a few times since the conclusion of the London Olympics the previous summer. At those Games, Michael cemented his stardom for all time by winning the last of his record-setting twenty-two Olympic medals, then told the world he was retiring to go make Subway commercials, travel the world, and play a lot of golf. You know, the typical life of every twenty-seven-year-old. Me? I had a mortgage still to pay, a payroll to meet, and some more athletes who wanted to see if I could coach them to become the next superstar. I was forty-seven years old and in no position to retire. But I also knew that I needed some time away to refresh and assess where I was and where I wanted to go next. So, for nine months or so, I hung out at the racetrack watching the thoroughbreds, I relaxed at the beach, I read a lot of books, I watched too much Food Network, and, most of all, I paused and looked ahead.

During that post-London period, Michael and I called each other now and then and we'd see each other at the occasional Baltimore Ravens football game or at a charity event. But after being together through four Olympics — which meant thousands of hours of preparation at our "office" (our training pools in Baltimore) and crisscrossing the world to compete at swim competitions — we needed a break from each other.

By no means, though, was this a breakup.

We were business partners, and we had plans to open swim schools around the world in the coming years. We were also in talks with a manufacturer to design and develop a new type of racing suit. Big jobs, for sure, but not so deadline-driven that they couldn't wait a bit. Plus, the way I saw things, those jobs had nothing on my previous one: making Michael the greatest Olympian of all time.

While Michael and I waited for the sommelier to arrive, we small-talked. He asked about my latest misadventures in the kitchen; those Food Channel shows had hooked me on trying to become an amateur chef. He told me about his latest trials with his putter. "Bob, I'm driving fine, chipping perfectly," he said. "I just can't read the greens. It's driving me crazy." I knew the feeling. Our last few years of Olympic training had tested our friendship, and my sanity. And the memories were still raw. We wanted to end Michael's Olympic run with a flourish, and we eventually did. Getting there, though, took a physical and mental effort on my part that I couldn't imagine ever repeating.

But tonight, I told myself, I wouldn't dredge up the past. I took a breath and, with my...