Olympic Swimmer Caeleb Dressel Says the Key to Success Is Making Your Bed

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Caeleb Dressel, a Florida native who might just be the fastest-swimming biped mammal on the planet, believes that if you want to unlock greatness—in the most exalted sense—you have to start with the small, boring things. “Like making your bed,” he says.

Swim races are often decided by fractions of a second, and every detail matters, from how each finger is placed as it enters the water to how pointed each toe is out behind the body. Because he focuses on the small stuff, Dressel, 24, is faster to 15 meters than anyone else in the world.

At 15 years old, he was the youngest male swimmer invited to the 2012 U.S. Olympic Trials. Though he didn’t qualify, four years later he won two golds at the 2016 Rio Olympics, swimming as part of two U.S. relay teams. The aquatic feats he’s accomplished in the five years since read like the CV of someone applying to be Aquaman: In 2017, at his first World Championships, Dressel won seven golds (more than any other country), including three in one night; after four years swimming at the University of Florida, he now owns the nine fastest 50-meter freestyle swims in NCAA history; and just last November, at the International Swimming League final, Dressel set three more world records.

Once he has a lead, he rarely loses it; it doesn’t matter if he’s swimming freestyle, butterfly, or breaststroke. Some people are even speculating that this summer in Tokyo, Dressel might be able to repeat arguably the greatest feat in Olympic history: Michael Phelps’s eight gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Games.

Dressel says that though he understands why people want to measure him against Phelps—because “we’re in a world of comparing”—those judgements are “completely irrelevant” to him. “I'm not saying I'm on LeBron's level at all, but this is just a prime example: You got people comparing MJ and LeBron,” he says. “Look, I'm going to turn on the TV to watch LeBron. I don't care if he's better than Jordan. He's amazing at what he does. Why does it matter if he's better than MJ or not?”

Contrasting two athletes also goes against one of the elements of swimming that most appeal to Dressel: how individual a sport it is. His job is not to beat Phelps, he says, but to beat yesterday’s version of himself. He describes it as the “most primitive form of competition” in the world: going from point A to point B as fast as you can. Dressel notes that he has his own starting block and his own lane, and the outcome is entirely up to him. “I’m in total control, and I can take the blame,” he says.

Which is why he makes the bed (unless his wife sleeps later, in which case, she makes it). He makes sure to get eight and a half hours of sleep every night. (“I would certainly love to be playing Mario Kart up until the wee hours, but sometimes I've just got to call it quits.”) He takes copious notes in two different black-and-white composition books: one that he calls his life journal but admits is “basically a diary,” where he records anything that might be on his mind; and a swim logbook where he takes notes on practices, how he swam, how he was feeling, and who beat him, and gives himself a pass-fail grade every day. (These days it’s about 95% pass to 5% fail.) He limits himself to 15 minutes a day on Instagram. He deleted Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter altogether. He tries to pick up a piece of trash every single day.

“I know this stuff really does sound stupid, but this is one of the reasons why I think I’ve seen some success in this sport—the tiny little habits,” he says. “I really consider being successful in this sport as just dropping pennies in the bank. And that’s what I’m doing every day when I do these stupid, mundane little tasks.”

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A version of this story originally appeared in the June/July 2021 issue with the title "The Dream Team" ahead of the Tokyo Olympics which begin July 23rd on NBC.

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