Tokyo (AFP)

Under his bed, sleep years of training and life recorded day after day in two separate logbooks.

Since he was a teenager, Caeleb Dressel has painstakingly written down on paper his daily life, in the pools as well as outside.

The American Dressel, who won five Olympic titles in Tokyo (50 and 100 m freestyle, 100 m butterfly, 4x100 m relay, 4x100 m medley relay), explains his approach.

"I must have been around 14 when I started, and I've kept all the notebooks I've written since, so I have a lot of them. They're tucked away under my bed. Makes a great bookcase."

“Usually I identify them by season and give each season a title, how it went. For example, let's say 2015 was a decent year, for 2016-2017, the theme of this journal, this would be what I want to work on, what I started to understand, that I need to be more aggressive or something else… So I give each newspaper a title, I put the date on it, and I write exactly what I do in training every day. "

"I write the date at the top of the page, and after that, everything I have done, the distance, etc. I put a checkmark or a cross, depending on whether it was good or bad. what I did before. It's simple: or I progressed, or not. After, I write down what I did in this training, all the lap times and all the thoughts that cross me: against whom I swam? Who I beat? Against whom I lost? The technical points I thought about, if I got angry with Troy (Gregg Troy, his trainer, editor's note), if Troy got angry against me… I put everything on paper, I turn the page and I move on. It helps a lot. "

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- Write to "move on" -

"I do the same in another journal for things unrelated to swimming. It's also important, I think. I write my + swim journal + after my workouts, and my + life journal + before go to bed."

“I write a lot of negative things. Positive things too of course. I mean: I'm happy in my life, I'm happy with the swimmer that I am, happy with the man that I am. maybe the wrong thoughts, maybe it is anything, but writing them down helps me get them out of my head and move on. "

Does he go back to it sometimes?

"I never did. Never. I close them and it's over. I said to Meghan (his wife): + If I ever die, you can definitely read them to get an idea of ​​how I worked, how I functioned, and things that I had in mind day in and day out. I don't write all negative things there at all, just the things I have in mind, the things I am proud of about me that day, things that I wanted to work on and managed to work on that day, or, on the contrary, not. It's a mixture, a bit of everything. is my life that I write in this journal, and my life as a swimmer in the other. "

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"No one has the right to read them, except Meghan, as I said. Because I as the person who wrote these pages."

Interview by Elodie SOINARD

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