Click here to Download No Limits The Will to Succeed PDF Book by Michael Phelps Language English having PDF Size 1.7 MB and No of Pages 270.
No matter where Americans were in the world, I’d been told, they were watching and cheering; that was special. Back home, I’d heard, bars were erupting in cheers when I’d won. I’d heard that my races had been shown on jumbo video screens at Major League Baseball and NFL games, on one of those big screens in Times Square.
No Limits The Will to Succeed PDF Book by Michael Phelps
| Name of Book | No Limits The Will to Succeed |
| PDF Size | 1.7 MB |
| No of Pages | 270 |
| Language | English |
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I understood that the drama and anticipation and excitement of some of my races had kept people glued to their television sets into the night. That very first relay. The 200-meter butterfly, when my goggles filled with water and I couldn’t see, literally couldn’t see, and still won. And then the 100-meter butterfly, which I had won by one-hundredth of a second.
I looked into the stands, for my mom, Debbie, and my sisters, Whitney and Hilary. When I found them, I walked through a horde of photographers and climbed into the stands to give each of them a kiss, with the memories of where we’d been and what we’d overcome flooding over me. Mom put her arm around my neck and gave me an extra hug.
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When I was in grade school, I was diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. I had overcome that. When I was in school, a teacher said I’d never be successful. Things like that stick with you and motivate you; I flashed back to that with my family there in the stands. I started crying. My mom started crying. My sisters started crying. I started swimming when I was a little boy.
Both Hilary and Whitney were champion swimmers, and when I was very much the baby brother, it looked like Whitney was the one from our family who was going to make it to the Olympics. That didn’t happen. And here I was. I felt lucky for the talent that I have, the drive that I have, the want, the excitement about the sport, felt lucky for every quality I have, and have worked so hard to have.
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In some sports, you can excel if you have natural talent. Not in swimming. You can have all the talent in the world, be built just the right way, but you can’t be good or get good without hard work. In swimming, there’s a direct connection between what you put into it and what you get out of it. I knew I would find my coach and longtime mentor, Bob Bowman, around the pool deck.
Bob, the only coach I’ve ever had. He had trained me, punished me, motivated me, inspired me, and proven to me the connection between hard work and success. Bob has long been one of the very few people in my life to tell me the unadulterated truth, even when I didn’t want to listen. Perhaps most important, especially when I didn’t want to hear it.
My mother and father were high-school sweethearts in a mill town in western Maryland. Dad played football at Fairmont (West Virginia) State College; Mom followed him there. After they were married, they moved to the Baltimore area. My father moved out of the house when I was seven. As time went on, we spent less and less time together. No Limits The Will to Succeed PDF Book
Eventually, I stopped trying to include him in my activities and he, in turn, stopped trying to involve himself in mine. The last time I saw my father was at Whitney’s wedding, in October 2005. He and I didn’t talk at the wedding; there just hasn’t been anything to say for a while. Maybe there will be later. Having said that, I feel I have everything and everyone that anyone could ever ask for.
I have the greatest people in the world around me and supporting me. My mom is an educator, now a school principal, and her passion in life is changing the lives of children. When she recognized a passion in her children for swimming, she was all in to help each of us. At the same time, things were going to be done in our house, and done a certain way, because that’s the way it was.
Homework was going to get done. Clothes were going to get picked up off the floor. Kids were going to get taken to practice. We were all in it together. Not only that: Our house was always the home where any kid was welcome. If there was a kid who needed to stay over to make swim practice the next morning, we had a sleeping bag and a pillow. No Limits The Will to Succeed PDF Book
That work ethic, and that sense of teamwork, was always in our home. All of that went to the pool with me, from a very early age. It’s why, when I won my first Olympic gold medal, the first people I wanted to see when I had a quiet moment were my mom and my sisters. There’s no point in talking smack, absolutely no need to talk beforehand about what you’re going to do.
It’s not worth it, not worth playing the mind games. Just get in the water and swim. People who talk about what they’re going to do, nine times out of ten don’t back it up. It’s always better, and a whole lot smarter, not to say anything, to simply let the swimming do the talking. There’s a saying that goes precisely to the point, of course: Actions speak louder than words.
That saying is 100 percent true. That saying is one of Bob Bowman’s all-time favorites. I learned that early on. Every summer, the North Baltimore club holds a longcourse meet. It’s one of the major events on the NBAC calendar. The night before the meet—this was when I was maybe twelve, not all that long after Bob and I had started working together—he was overseeing what was, for him, a pretty easy practice. No Limits The Will to Succeed PDF Book
At the end of it, he asked our group to swim four 50s. Give me a little effort, he said. Well, of all the kids in the group, there was only one who was not giving Bob that little effort. One of the girls in the group even said, Michael, you’d better get going or we’re going to have to do this all over. Everybody got out of the pool, and Bob said, okay, everybody, that’ll be it, except, and now he looked right at me, for you.
I uncorked one of the great twelve-year-old tantrums of all time. I screamed, you can’t make me do it! And so on. A huge, horrible, public scene, a direct challenge to Bob’s authority in front of everyone. Bob said to me, you can do what you want, but as of now you’re not a member of NBAC, and until you come back and do the set, you never will be.
I went home in tears. That night, Mom called Bob. He told her, until Michael does the set he can’t be in the meet. So what, she said, can we do? Take a meeting, that’s what. At five-thirty the next morning. The meeting was in the club’s aerobics room. Bob had set up a table and four chairs. Four? I showed up with a baseball hat on my head. Bob made me take it off. No Limits The Will to Succeed PDF Book
Mom and I sat down on two of the chairs, Bob grabbed a third. And in came my father, a Maryland state trooper, in full uniform. My eyes got wide. At that point, my father was still much more involved in my life; even so, for him to show up like that, at that hour of the morning, meant this was no-doubt-about-it serious. Bob said, Michael, there’s a triangle here. There’s your dad. Your mom. Me. Guess who’s in the middle?
In Australia, Ian was a star among stars. A couple of years after the Worlds in Fukuoka, a Sydney newspaper held a contest: Who would you like to invite to your home for Christmas? Russell Crowe finished fourth, Nicole Kidman third, then-Prime Minister John Howard second. Ian won. Like many Aussies, Ian has always had a candor about him.
In January 2008, in Beijing for the formal opening of the Water Cube, Ian was asked there by reporters whether that summer I could win eight gold medals. “I don’t think he will do it but I’d love to see it,” Ian said. “There’s a thing called competition. It won’t just be one athlete that will be competing, and in a lot of events he has a lot of strong competition.” No Limits The Will to Succeed PDF Book Download
Bob, always sleuthing, knew I would be keen to read Ian’s opinion. At the Michigan pool, I had a collection of suits, caps, goggles, towels, and water bottles in my locker, all of it stashed around a big hook hanging from the locker top. After reading the sheet of paper with Ian’s remarks, I took that paper and jammed it right onto that hook.
It stayed there all that winter, all that spring, into the summer, until we went to Omaha and the Trials. Every day when I’d open that locker, it was the first thing I’d see, that article, Ian’s words, dangling there. Every day when I’d close that locker door, that fluttering piece of paper served as a reminder of the many doubters.
It took a while to sink in: I was never going to get the chance, ever again, to race him like we raced in Athens. Just once more with the Aussie in the full-length black bodysuit, the man I considered the world’s greatest freestyler. That’s what I wanted. Head-to-head, he and I, to see what would happen now if he were at his best and me at mine. No Limits The Will to Succeed PDF Book Download
A couple months before the 2007 worlds, I went to Bob and asked him for video of all my swims from Athens. He didn’t push this on me; this was me asking. I took those videos and watched them over and over. When I watched the 200 free from the 2004 Olympics, I understood clearly that I had gone out too slowly and that the third turn had left me at an impossible disadvantage.
It was abundantly clear what I needed to fix. In Melbourne, I would have to swim the race aggressively from the start. Power through the turns, especially the third. The big mistake I could make would be to let van den Hoogenband get ahead early, then have to reel him in, the way I’d tried to do in Athens, when he and Ian went out ahead.
At least I’d have the satisfaction of racing Hoogie, even if Ian was not going to be in this race. And then Don Talbot opened his mouth. Again. “Thorpe is still number one in my opinion, and Phelps doesn’t outdo him yet,” Talbot was quoted in Australian newspapers a few days before the meet got underway. There was more. No Limits The Will to Succeed PDF Book Download
“…The Americans want to claim they invented Jesus Christ before he came, and the same thing with Phelps—they were saying he was the greatest in the world when Thorpey was the thing. “I said he was a great swimmer but he’s not there yet and they got into me about it…Certainly he’s on the right track.
If he wins at this meet what he’s planning to do, then there is no doubt he’ll be the best male swimmer of all time. He will supersede Thorpe. “…He doesn’t want to be one of the greatest, he wants to be the greatest, and regardless of what I think, I think he has to outdo Spitz next year at the Olympics. Whether he can do that, I don’t know.” I said nothing.
The day of the 200 free final, dipping into the warm-up pool, I felt it. My freestyle had never, ever felt that smooth. Right then and there, I thought, something special might happen here. Something really special. No time on the books was even within a half-second of Ian’s world-record 1:44.06, the swim from Fukuoka in 2001. No Limits The Will to Succeed PDF Book Free
The only other person to even break 1:45 had been van den Hoogenband. Hoogie lined up for the finals in Melbourne in Lane 4; he’d had the fastest semifinal swim. I drew Lane 5. I turned first at the first wall, at 24.47, and again at the second, at 51- flat. Hoogie seemed to still be there with me, just off my shoulder, but, as I had planned, I was ahead.
That third leg, I opened it up a bit, and after I turned and finally surfaced, I could hear the crowd noise getting louder and louder. The big video board in Melbourne was showing the race and, through a superimposed red line, it was also showing where I was in relationship to world-record pace. Obviously I was ahead, or at least close. In the water, I had no idea how far ahead. I just knew I had lost sight of Hoogie.