Unfiltered Waters

Luka Mijatovic is a newly minted Longhorn, American record holder in the 1000 free, seven-time gold medalist at this year's Junior Pan Pacs and the youngest male to win a national title other than Michael Phelps. The Northern California swimmer joins Katie Hoff Anderson to explain why he committed early to Texas to train under Bob Bowman, why he felt ready to leave his club team now, and how he is setting himself up to make the Olympic team in LA.

Luka walks through the summer that got him here. He had almost no time between Nationals and Junior Pan Pacs, stayed in Irvine to train with a small squad, and went through a double taper for the first time, arriving at Junior Pan Pacs with a blank mindset and one goal: do as best he can for his country. He describes what it feels like to walk out to the USA chants with that black cap on, the team room in the Vancouver dorms with the PB and J station and the card games, and the American record in the 1000 free, where he stopped stressing over the times after a rough couple of days and just swam for fun.

The deeper thread is how hard he is on himself and how he keeps it in check. One bad rep can send him into a spiral, to the point that his coach has to tell him to chill out, and he explains how he turns a bad day into work on the little fundamentals. He shares the set he is proud of, twenty 200's long course, completely alone in a half lane while the high schoolers tapered, with Katie asking if he was in the buffer lane. He also explains why he skipped high school season, how he stays in his own lane when the comparisons start ("comparison is the thief of joy"), why his coaches keep pushing him even on good days, and how he tries to lap the swimmer three lanes over when nobody in the group can go with him.

Then it is all Texas. Luka explains the unofficial visit to see his friends and go to the Texas-Ohio State game, where Texas was down at halftime, some of his group were about to leave, and everything changed once Texas scored that second touchdown and the crowd went electric. After that trip, he told his friends that if he could recommit, he would recommit. He also gets into whose training style he is closest to on the Texas roster, why Bob's program is not a drastic change from his club team, why his one worry is underwaters, and why he thinks college swimming is bigger than yourself.

There is plenty of fun in here too: the Snapchat streak that has Katie doing the math, the 90 up-and-outs his group owes if they are late to the start of practice, the driver's license he is about to get in December right before Austin, how long he would wait at a green light before honking (seven seconds, versus three seconds max for his mom), house music, why he dropped the headphones after Nationals, a pickleball game he ranks at top 24 nationals, and walking his dog at 100 percent instead of 20.

He closes with the swim that brought him the most joy, breaking eight minutes in the 800 free at 2023 Summer Juniors with his team on the sideline, his brother's birth as the happiest moment outside the sport ("he's like my ride or die"), and the word that motivates him: dedication. In his words, "I want to be dedicated to whatever I do." For swimmers, swim parents, coaches and anyone curious how the next Texas Longhorn thinks about training, this is Luka Mijatovic in his own words.

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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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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.

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FOLLOW KATIE ON:
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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.
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In this episode of Unfiltered Waters, Katie Hoff continues her Australian series, three and a half weeks postpartum, sitting down with world champion and Australian record holder Sam Short. He just swept the distance triple, the four hundred, eight hundred, and fifteen hundred free, at both Commonwealth Games and Pan Pacs, and broke Grant Hackett's twenty five year old Australian record in the fifteen hundred along the way. So what does it actually feel like to become the swimmer you grew up idolizing.

Sam breaks down how data driven his training really is: stopwatch splits, heart rate, lactate readings, and a descending set of 400, 500, 400, 300, 200, and 100 he did weeks before Commonwealth Games with barely any rest between reps. He walks through going out in 742 at trials in the 800 free, blowing up, and still going 1442, then analyzes what it would take to close the gap on the current fastest 1500 swimmers in the world. Katie digs into the recovery side too, and how much he actually trusts data there compared to straight performance numbers.

Along the way, the conversation goes places most swim interviews don't: getting disqualified out of an Australian club relay record after a teammate left early, a surf lifesaving background that has him doing beach carnivals every season, a post meet stretch in LA that included a bar owned by a friend of Cody Simpson and, by his own admission, a full week without much sleep, and an ongoing love of homemade spaghetti bolognese he cooks himself three or four times a week. He also admits his first few months living alone came with a washer and no dryer, forcing him to haul laundry home to dry it.

Underneath the racing talk is a real look at resetting after a rough Olympic year. Sam is candid that his home Games did not go to plan, and that the version of himself now, more rested, more recovered, and seeing a sports psychologist regularly, is a deliberate rebuild rather than an accident. It is a comeback mindset conversation that lands especially well with Katie, who is working through her own version of that reset with a newborn at home.

Whether you're a swimmer chasing a record that once felt untouchable or someone who has never touched a pool but loves a good underdog turned favorite story, this episode delivers. Watch the episode, then head to the comments and let us know: what is one belief about your limits that a single result completely rewrote? Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform, and follow us on social media (https://linktr.ee/unfilteredwaters) for clips, bonus content, and updates throughout the week.

Note: this was recorded shortly after Sam's celebration stretch in LA, before he resumed full training for his home short course trials, so his prep timeline may look different by the time this episode airs.

FOLLOW SAM SHORT ON:
Instagram: @_sam_short

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In this episode of Unfiltered Waters, Katie Hoff is back hosting, recording fifteen days postpartum and launching a new run of episodes with Australian swimmers. Her first guest is Olympic champion, world champion, and world record holder Mollie O'Callaghan, who made the gutted call to pull out of the Pan Pacific Championships after stress fractures turned up in her back right before Trials. So how do you walk away from a full season of work and still call that choice smart.

Mollie walks through the process: seeing a back specialist, checking in with him repeatedly between Trials and the Commonwealth Games, and getting cleared to race modified instead of sitting out. She still logged a time Katie calls legendary despite the injury, before referral pain and stalled progress ruled out Pan Pacs. She never watched the actual racing, tracking results instead to support the thirteen teammates who competed, and framing every meet, missed or not, as a stepping stone toward LA 2028. She and Katie also cover the altitude tent she trialed for the first time this season under coach Dean, sleeping through three blocks built around a Flagstaff base, a Darwin camp, and the run into Trials.

Along the way, the conversation goes places most swim interviews don't: dislocating her knee the first week back after her Olympic year break, buying and moving into a new apartment mostly alone while her family was overseas, badly learning to drive a manual car and bunny hopping through it, and choking on candy behind the blocks with a teammate before a final at the 2022 World Championships. She calls herself a workhorse who trains the same way she has since age fourteen, and admits Dean often has to rein her in.

Underneath the racing talk is a real look at what intensity costs her. She now sees a sports psychologist weekly, calls herself a nervous racer whose nerves show, and is candid that the Trials before her home Olympics were the worst meet she has ever experienced mentally, glad in hindsight it happened there and not at the Games. Staying process focused instead of outcome fixated is ongoing work, and it lands differently coming from Katie, relearning her own version of balance with a newborn at home.

Whether you're a swimmer rebuilding a season around an injury or someone who has never touched a pool but loves a good comeback story, this episode delivers. Watch the episode, then head to the comments and let us know: what is one setback you have reframed as a stepping stone instead of a loss? Subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast platform, and follow us on social media (https://linktr.ee/unfilteredwaters) for clips, bonus content, and updates throughout the week.

Note: at the time of this recording, Mollie's return timeline was still open, with Short Course Worlds and the end of September Australian Trials as her key checkpoints, so her comeback status may look different by the time this episode airs.

FOLLOW MOLLIE O'CALLAGHAN ON:
Instagram: @mollie_ocal

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