Cam McEvoy | Unfiltered Waters

Cam McEvoy holds the 50 freestyle world record at 20.88 and is the reigning Olympic and world champion in the event. In a normal 50 training block, he swims about 1.5K a week. Fresh off Commonwealth Games gold in Glasgow, the Australian sprinter joins Katie Hoff Anderson to explain the gym-first, low-volume approach he built after Tokyo, why it runs against so much of how swimming has always trained, and why he believes the sport has not even seen its ceiling for strength yet.

Cam walks through the day it started. In October 2022, after more than a year out of the water, his first session back was six parachute sprints of 12 strokes, and it knocked him out for a two-hour nap even though he has never been a napper. Within eight weeks he beat his Tokyo Olympic time in the 50 free, and within nine months he was world champion. He shares the one time his confidence wavered, when he overdid it in May 2023 and his coach Tim Lane told him to stay out of the pool until the meet, and how the 20.88 in China felt like he was ripping air for the first 25 to 30 meters. He also gets into his short course detour into the 100 freestyle, which is about the relay and the fun of something new, and why protecting his 50 free title makes him wary of adding the 4x100 at LA 2028.

The deeper thread is trust. Cam explains why the gains from strength and power work happen outside of conscious experience, why that scares athletes raised on threshold sets they can feel, and why he thinks that fear is holding the sport back. He traces the whole idea to a bouldering gym after Tokyo, where climbers who looked like sticks were repping out front lever holds hanging from one finger on each side, and he lays out how he would approach age group training without pushing kids into either sprinting or high volume too early. He also talks about becoming a dad to his son Hartley, and how being home on the floor playing with him 20 minutes after training has changed how he sees the sport. In his words, "I'm swimming in a hole in the ground full of water."

There is plenty of fun in here too: the hot tub five meters from the pool where his group sits for 15 to 20 minutes between 25s, smelling salts before a rep, why suiting up to rip a 25 feels like being 18 and discovering the bench press with your mates, his pitch for a 25 meter competition with a live band, ideally metal, and a pre-Olympic 25 race in LA that Katie wants hosted by Unfiltered Waters. Katie, who has a five-week-old at home and is chasing an Olympic Trials cut in the 100 breaststroke, also gets some very direct pull-up advice: "Spam them into oblivion, basically."

He closes with the swim that brought him the most joy, a heat in Fukuoka in 2023 that felt like floating down the pool, the messages he gets every week from people who quit swimming 20 years ago and came back to it because of what he has shared, and the one word that motivates him: potential. For coaches, swim parents and anyone curious how the fastest 50 freestyler in history thinks about training, this is the method explained by the person who built it.

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