How Olympic swimmer Katie Ledecky does what no one else does. Every day.

August 11, 2024

And on the seventh day — Sunday, a swimmer’s traditional day off, so universal and cherished as to be almost sacred, the weekly reward for enduring 10 practices and maybe 70,000 meters of training over the previous six days, the day meant to be set aside for sleeping in and shopping and bingeing Netflix — she still swims.

Katie Ledecky has her own key to the O’Connell Center Pool at the University of Florida, which she needs for her “Sunday swims,” as she calls them, because the place is almost guaranteed to be empty — because no one else, at least no one who trains as long and as hard as Ledecky, the greatest distance freestyler in history, would even think of showing up at the pool on their only day off.

But Ledecky, it should be clear by now — 12 years and seven Olympic gold medals into her international career, on the cusp of a fourth Summer Games beginning later this week — is simply different. And she is different in ways that go beyond her historic accomplishments and singular talents, which will be on display at Paris La Défense Arena, where she will swim three individual events and one relay and could become, by the end of the meet, the most decorated female Olympian in history.

Even if you strip away the hardware and the legacy, she is, constitutionally, an outlier, an aquatic unicorn.

In an era when many Olympic swimmers credit their therapists and sports psychologists as often as they do their coaches, when they describe their mental health routines in as much detail as they do their practice sets, when they discuss with admirable candor the periodic bouts of mental distress inherent in the brutal and soul-baring sport they have chosen — Ledecky speaks almost sheepishly about the lack of darkness in her world.

“My story is unique in that I haven’t dealt with anything major. Nothing groundbreaking [in terms of] depression or abuse, things I know a lot of athletes have encountered,” Ledecky, 27, said during a recent interview. “I get distressed when I hear about that. The sport has always been so much fun, and such a place of joy for me. It’s kind of my happy place.”

While a number of her American teammates, including some of her closest friends, have been forced — by various physical or mental health crises — to take lengthy breaks from the sport, Ledecky has never had a serious injury and never felt compelled to step away for a while. The longest she has ever stayed away from the water? Maybe a week, tops.

Coming out of the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, when Ledecky won two golds and two silvers to push her career total to 10 Olympic medals, she intended to take a month off from swimming — far longer than she had ever given herself. She was 24 at the time and mentally drained from the challenges of training and then competing during a global pandemic. She figured she needed the unprecedented break.

But then she got home to Bethesda, Md., and started tagging along with her mom to the summer pool where she got her start, Palisades Swim and Tennis Club in Cabin John. Summer was in full bloom. The water was warm and shimmering. She could feel herself getting antsy.

“So I just started swimming a little bit,” she said.

It had been a week since she left Japan.

Routine greatness

The Sunday swims began in the spring of 2022, the original idea coming from Anthony Nesty. The coach at the University of Florida, as well as its pro offshoot, the Gator Swim Club, noticed Ledecky — who began training under him soon after the Tokyo Olympics — tended to have her worst practices of the week Monday mornings. He started calling it her “Monday morning blues.”

It wasn’t as if Ledecky had been partying all weekend — she says she has never used drugs or consumed alcohol in her life. The better explanation was that the roughly 48 hours from the end of Saturday’s morning practice to the start of Monday’s morning practice was too long for her to be out of the water.

“Monday mornings, bottom line, she was not very good,” Nesty recalled. “Of course, it’s all relative. You’re talking Katie here. ‘Not good’ for Katie is still pretty good compared to the rest of the world. But I said: ‘Have you ever thought about swimming on Sunday? Why don’t you try it?’ She goes, ‘How far?’ I said: ‘I don’t know. Just go swim.’”

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In a sense, it was absolute madness to ask Ledecky, of all people, to tack on an extra session in the water. A more conventional swimmer might have told Nesty to kick rocks.

Though it would be impossible to prove, it is conceivable no pool swimmer in the world has logged more sheer yardage than her — given the fact that Ledecky has been an elite distance swimmer longer than anyone in history. She has been grinding through up to 10 practices a week, at up to 10,000 yards per session, for the better part of 12 years.

Distance swimming has a way of weeding out those with an aversion to the pain of endless laps and the tedium of staring at the black line at the bottom of the pool for some 20 hours a week. Only Ledecky would say this is, in fact, what makes it worthwhile.

“Mentally, I’ve learned that I’m wired as an aerobic swimmer,” she wrote in her memoir, “Just Add Water,” published this spring by Simon and Schuster. “I embrace routine. I lean into the regularity. The endless laps become a kind of meditation. It’s a bit like walking through those spiraling Zen gardens, a way to calm the noise of the world and let the consistency and predictability of swimming back and forth wash over you.”

Very soon, Ledecky came to look forward to her Sunday swims. Nesty doesn’t watch. He doesn’t draw up practice sets for her to follow. The Sunday swims can be short or long, light intensity or medium (but rarely high). Sometimes Ledecky doesn’t do any freestyle.

The pool is almost always empty, although sometimes one of the Gators coaches stops by to get some laps in. Occasionally, Gator teammate Caeleb Dressel shows up — but only to let his black lab, Jane, swim around and chase a stick in the pool.

“She loves training, because she’s always in a good mood in practice,” Dressel said of Ledecky. “She just welcomes any bit of training — invites it right in and just attacks it. If you watch her in practice, nothing she does in competition is surprising.”

One for the ages

Every great Olympic swimmer has a predecessor, a prototype. Even Michael Phelps, the undisputed greatest swimmer ever, with more than twice as many gold medals (23) as anyone in history, merely took the Mark Spitz model — spinning his worldwide dominance in multiple strokes plus Team USA’s inherent advantage in relays into a historic gold medal haul.

But there is no precedent for what Ledecky is doing.

Distance swimming long has been considered a young woman’s pursuit. While some sprinters remain competitive well into their 30s, or even 40s, no female swimmer older than 26 has won an Olympic gold at a freestyle distance greater than 200 meters. Meanwhile, Ledecky, at 27, will be favored in both the 800- and 1,500-meter freestyles in Paris — having won both at last summer’s world championships — with additional medal chances in the 400 free and the 4x200 free relay.

“When you’ve done what she’s done with such consistency for 12 years — it’s mind-boggling,” said NBC swimming analyst and three-time Olympic gold medalist Rowdy Gaines. “And if you ask why she does it, how she does it — I think it’s because she loves it. She loves the work. That’s not normal.”

When Ledecky came from seemingly out of nowhere to win her first Olympic gold in London in 2012 in the 800, her age at the time — 15 — was actually more in line with historical norms than it is now: The previous winners of that race since its inception in 1968 were 16, 15, 15, 18, 18, 17, 20, 16, 20, 22 and 19.

Twelve years later, every additional Olympic medal for Ledecky will come with its own set of historical ramifications and legacy construction. Should she win the 800 free, for example — a race in which she is expected to be pushed by Australian rival Ariarne Titmus — she would become the first female athlete in history to win the same event in four consecutive Olympics.

Two more golds would vault her past American Jenny Thompson (eight) for the most Olympic golds by a female swimmer. Three medals of any kind would allow her to overtake Thompson (12) in overall medals. A third gold would push her past Soviet gymnast Larisa Latynina (nine) for the most by any female Olympian.

Asked how much meaning she places on such things, Ledecky said: “I don’t keep track of the numbers. Whenever I get sent a bio to review, I have to send it to someone to check it for me.”

She is a meticulous planner, a constant chronicler of personal goals and a faithful keeper of journals — her towering stack of which became the genesis of her book. Last summer, one day after wrapping up her slate of events at the world championships in Fukuoka, Japan — where she won two golds and two silvers, surpassing Phelps’s record with 16 individual golds — she sat down with Nesty and mapped out her next few months of training. She took one week off.

She already is on record as saying she intends to compete at least through the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, when she will be 31. That means another quadrennial of staring at that black line, another world championships next summer, more yardage, more Sunday swims.

But she is thinking of trying something new after Paris: no planning, no schedule, no end date for the post-Olympics break she intends to take.

“Whether it’s one week or one month or four months,” she said, “I have no idea.”

Were it any other swimmer — say, one who might permit herself a day off each week — you might be tempted to take her at her word. With Ledecky, you would be wise to take the under.

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