Kaylee McKeown

Kaylee McKeown returns to Unfiltered Waters, and Katie Hoff Anderson catches her in the middle of the hardest year of her career. Kaylee is a five-time Olympic gold medalist, a world record holder and a world champion, and at the time of this conversation she is back to five swim sessions a week at 4K with no intensity and a heart rate monitor tucked into her cap. Glandular fever pulled her out of the Commonwealth Games and the Pan Pacific Championships and left her watching the rest of the world swim fast without her. This is a conversation about what you do with a season that gets taken away from you. She walks Katie through how fast it fell apart. Three weeks out from trials she was swimming as well as she ever had at a camp time trial, then got sick the day before trials and never got it back. She talks about pace hundreds she would normally hold around 1:04 and not being able to break 1:20, a short course 50 back that told her exactly where she stood, and the tracking her coaches now use to stop her doing the thing every elite athlete does by default. She also gets into leaving an old school volume program for one built on quality, why that change rattled her confidence long before it started paying off, and what it is like to watch Cam McEvoy do a week of work that adds up to her warm up. The deeper thread is who she is doing this for. She tells Katie the pressure before Paris got heavy enough that she broke down in tears halfway through a warm up, and that her coach at the time had to pull her aside and remind her nobody was putting that on her but herself. The mantra she has landed on since is doing it because she wants to, not because anyone expects it of her. She is also direct about the endometriosis and PCOS diagnoses that came after Paris, what stage four has actually meant month to month, and how she is weighing LA 2028 against wanting to be a mother, with Brisbane 2032 sitting there as a maybe if the timing works out. Katie, who went through IVF and egg freezing herself, meets her in the middle of it rather than interviewing her about it. There is also Lane Four, the athlete platform she started with her partner after he asked her one night what she planned to do after swimming, now built out with Molly O'Callaghan, Lani Pallister, Jamie Perkins and Hannah Fredericks. She talks about signing with Under Armour, finding out she is more of a leader than she thought, and how much harder it is to keep a group of strong personalities aligned than to swim a hard set. Then there is Millie, the Bernese mountain dog she bought off the Australian version of Marketplace inside an hour, who is five months old, already 24 kilos, and every bit as stubborn as her owner. Rapid fire covers the cleaning habit her teammates would name first, what a crash out looks like for her, the Aussie slang she has to tone down overseas, and the American pool habit she has never understood. If you have watched Kaylee win everything there is to win and wondered what is left to chase, she answers that here in her own words. It is a conversation about a year that did not go to plan, and an athlete working out what she wants the next one to be for. Note: This conversation was recorded while Kaylee was still early in her recovery, so the training she describes reflects where things stood at the time of recording. Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform, and follow us on social media (linktr.ee/unfilteredwaters) for clips, bonus content, and updates throughout the week. FOLLOW KATIE ON: Instagram: instagram.com/kthoff7 SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS  IM8health.com/discount/unfiltered for 10% off  dreamrecovery.io use code UNFILTEREDTHIRTY for 30% off #UnfilteredWaters #KayleeMcKeown #Swimming