LIFE IN THE FAST LANE

As Adam Peaty gears up for his attempt to claim a third back-to-back Olympic title this summer, Sam Rider tries to survive his weekly gym routine

I’m under no illusions: this is going to hurt. You don’t become a triple Olympic champion, obliterate multiple world records and dominate your discipline for the best part of a decade without becoming accustomed to life in the proverbial pain cave. 

Adam Peaty has not just climbed his Everest – securing a debut 100m breaststroke gold at the 2016 Olympics, then becoming the first British swimmer to retain an Olympic title in Tokyo – he’s set up camp at the summit of his sport. Along with a further Olympic gold in the 4x100 mixed medley, he’s also an eight-time World Champion, a 16-time European Champion and a four-time Commonwealth Champion. 

He's broken world records 14 times, becoming the first man to swim sub-26 seconds for the 50m breaststroke, and sub-58 and sub-57 seconds for the 100m breaststroke. At one stage in 2021 he even held the 20 fastest times ever recorded in the event.

He’s a machine – yet he's also fallible. After the highs of 2021, “three years of hell” followed, in which he battled with depression and alcoholism, was left broken mentally and physically by the sport, and defeated in the pool for the first time in a staggering eight years. 

Paris could be his redemption. In April, he secured qualification with his quickest time since retaining Olympic gold in 2021. And now, on the eve of his third Games, the 29-year-old has the chance to complete his comeback arc and join the pantheon of all-time greats, alongside the likes of Mark Spitz, Michael Phelps and Ian Thorpe. 

Natural born swimmer

It begs the question: what does Adam Peaty do in the gym that means he can blow all comers out of the water in the pool? And, perhaps more pertinently for the typical MF reader, what does he lift, what does he eat, and how does he recover to develop a musclebound physique that’s the envy of the entire Olympic village?