Even without any physical limitations, Dolan’s accomplishments would be remarkable. At 20, he is already world champion and world-record holder in the demanding 400-meter individual medley, which requires 100 meters each of butterfly, backstroke, breast stroke and freestyle. At the 1994 national championships, he won four gold medals; the last man who did that was Mark Spitz, America’s most celebrated swimmer. Spitz, of course, went on to win his four events at the 1972 Munich Olympics along with three relay golds. This week Dolan launches his own Olympic quest at the U.S. Olympic trials in Indianapolis, swimming four events–the 400-meter IM, the 200-meter IM, the 400-meter freestyle and the 200-meter backstroke. “If there’s something I want to accomplish, I bust my ass to do it,” he says.
But his coaches are fearful that Tom may have busted more than that during a ferocious training regimen this past fall. With the Olympic trials looming, Dolan dropped out of college for the fall semester, enabling him to ignore distractions like classes. “I wanted to make sure I’d set myself up to be in the best shape ever,” he says. Left to his own designs, Dolan practically lived in the pool, swimming 18,000 meters–almost 12 miles–a day. “A lot of us are like, “Wow! this kid is nuts’,” says his college roommate and teammate John Piersma. And he may very well have been. Of late, Tom has been battling fatigue, unable to complete practices and even passing out a few times–in and out of the pool–from hyperventilating. “He’s so competitive he pushes himself beyond the limits,” says his University of Michigan coach Jon Urbanchek, who sometimes leans into the water to yank a wheezing Dolan out of the pool.
The sports world is rife with gifted athletes who squander their talents–rarely, though, by overtraining. Elite swimmers try to time their “peaks” to coincide with big meets. Dolan may have peaked early and then driven himself over the edge. His coaches pulled him out of his big events at the recent Big 10 championships, and cut his training back to a more manageable 6,000 meters a day. “He worked so hard for so long we’re hoping he can recover in time,” says Dolan’s dad, Bill. About the only one who doesn’t seem overly worried is Tom. “Sometimes my doctors and parents get mad at me because I work too hard,” says Dolan, whose out-of-pool appearance – reddish goatee, backward baseball cap, gold hoop earring and slouchy adolescent gait–is, ironically, that of a slacker. “But if I stress and worry about it, it’s just going to make my life miserable.”
Dolan’s blase attitude may simply reflect how much he has already overcome. Almost all medications that might help his breathing contain substances that are illegal under swimming’s stringent doping rules. So Dolan is left to rely on his inhaler, which he always keeps poolside. Dolan actually began competing as a breast-stroker at the age of 7. He developed his world-class back-stroke only because he would flip over onto his back whenever he was having trouble breathing – and keep right on swimming.
Nothing has ever come between Dolan and his laps. When Tom broke an ankle at 13, he wrapped his cast with yellow foam to keep it dry and kept stroking. “He’d just drag this huge yellow banana around the pool,” recalls his mother, Jef. Says Dolan: “I put my body through so much stress, anguish and pain every day that I think I have a higher threshold of pain than anyone else in swimming. So when I get to the starting blocks, that’s the easy part.”
Winning is the best part. His father, Bill, recalls that when Tom was 9, he appalled spectators by winning a race, then whipping off his goggles and hurling them across the pool in celebration. Another parent leaned over to Bill and reproached him. “What would you like me to do,” he recalls asking, “kill his spirit?” But now, sometimes, Bill does wish that he’d modified it. “Tom does not have a naturally occurring sense of self-preservation,” his dad says. The question this week is whether he has preserved enough of his spirit so that he can pursue his Olympic dream in Atlanta.
10 sessions a week of 8,000 meters, 2 hours each. About 60% of his work is aerobic endurance, 20% is speed and strength, 20% warm-up, warm-down and technique drills. On Sundays, he rests.
Five times a week he does weight training and a medicine-ball routine.
He consumes about 6,000 calories daily. ..MR0-
