Katie Ledecky | Unfiltered Waters

In this episode of Unfiltered Waters, Olympic medalist Elizabeth Beisel steps in as guest host alongside Todd Anderson while Katie Hoff Anderson is a week out from giving birth. Together they sit down with Katie Ledecky, Olympic champion, world record holder, and the most decorated female swimmer in history, in the days before she races the 2026 Pan Pacific Championships. It's the first international meet of her career held on home soil, something she's still a little stunned by fourteen years in. What follows isn't a career retrospective. It's a look at the machinery underneath the most consistent career in the sport, and at why the least dramatic answer is usually hers.

Katie breaks down what a full August to August season looks like without a trials meet in the middle of it, and what she's actually expecting out of Pan Pacs across a four day lineup that opens with the 1500. She talks about the shift almost nobody notices. For the first half of her career she trained as a 400 freestyler who went up to the 800 and down to the 200, and it wasn't until the 1500 was added to the Olympic program that her training moved up with it. She still has the journals to prove it, going back past 2014, and she reads them. She's candid about never having taken a real break, the longest was after Paris and she stayed in the water anyway, and about crediting the age group coaches who protected her technique and her shoulders two decades before anyone knew what they were protecting. Todd digs into the recovery side: sleep scores, crowns, HRV in the low 40s, and why a bad night has never once been a reason to back off.

Along the way, the conversation goes places most swim interviews don't: her mom's deep water aerobics class at the Palisades Porpoises, which she joins before the pool opens, alongside the moms of swimmers she grew up racing. The 2014 Pan Pacs in Australia where it rained every day and the whole team had one parka between them. A Sunday Pilates habit that leaves a puddle of sweat on the reformer she says she can see her reflection in. The lowest maintenance coffee order on the entire national team. And, because rapid fire happens, the UFC walkout song of an athlete whose defining quality is that she never looks rattled.

Katie also gets at the thing that's kept her coming back since 2012, which is not the medals. It's the cap. She describes the first taste of representing the country as addicting, walks through leading off the 4x200 in Barcelona in 2013, and lands on the Rio 4x100 free: a final she wasn't expecting to swim, an anchor leg next to an Australian team that beat them, and the feeling of pushing off the turn in a 1:03 at that level. She says she has never felt anything like it since. Ten years later, it's still the swim she reaches for first. It's a conversation two former national teamers are uniquely positioned to have with her.
Whether you're a distance swimmer trying to understand what twenty years of not stopping actually looks like, or you just want to know how the most decorated swimmer alive spends a Sunday, this episode delivers. Watch the episode, then head to the comments and let us know: what should Katie Ledecky's actual walkout song be? .ee/unfilteredwaters) for clips, bonus content, and updates throughout the week.

Note: This conversation was recorded in the week before Pan Pacs and is airing during the meet, so Katie's goals and lineup reflect where things stood going in.

FOLLOW KATIE LEDECKY ON: Instagram: instagram.com/katieledecky

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