From Stillness Comes Swiftness

"I think it's my bed...I mean, my heart."

"Vladimir, what are you talking about?"

In a dormitory room they were sharing a couple of years ago at the high-altitude training center at Tsahkadzor in Soviet Armenia, the swimmer and his psychologist lay in their beds and listened.

"That's what it is," Salnikov insisted.

"It can't be," said Gennady Gorbunov, the psychologist.

It was. So violently was Salnikov's heart beating—a result of the strenuous physical pace he was putting himself through each day—that the legs of his bed had begun to throb, too.

"Sometimes in workouts," says teammate Aleksandr Chayev, "I am unwillingly pulled along with him. It just leads you into a dead end. Your nervous system just can't take it anymore, and he's still going."

At a certain point in long-distance training, the mind asks for permission to leave the room. The swimmer must find a way—without surrendering to hallucination—to keep the pain in his body from flooding his head. Australia's Steve Holland kept going by visualizing a shark at his heels. Goodell pictured his brain casing as the cockpit of a 747. "Everything might be shaking and rumbling in the body of the plane, but up front I couldn't feel any of it," Goodell says. "Everything was smooth."

Salnikov blocks pain two ways: "I play music in my head. Pat Benatar. Supertramp, the Eagles or Electric Light Orchestra. Or I'll picture myself in a motion picture. I'll be Superman and the bad guys are chasing me. I'll be a cowboy and the Indians are chasing me."

Some nights, his muscles twitch involuntarily as he sleeps, and he pummels his wife. "I wake up all worried. 'Is she alive, is she O.K.?' She puts the pillow over her head for protection." Another time, he swam himself into such total depletion that he insisted Marina's blood test was faulty when it revealed no illness. "I yelled at her," he admits sheepishly.