Saturday afternoon, Katie Ledecky opened the notes app on her phone in her hotel room and typed a one-word subject line: “Believe.” It had to start there, because how else can you accomplish the unbelievable?
Beneath that header, Ledecky plotted out some goal splits for the 800-meter freestyle she would swim a few hours later in the Tyr Pro Series swim meet in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. This was not a vague estimate. She broke the race down by 50-meter increments, and typed out her splits to the tenth of a second. This is something she’s done on occasion dating back to her youth (“doodles,” she calls it), writing out potential split times in various events on the back of a notebook when her childhood friends might have been drawing a rainbow or a puppy.
